Henry James :: American Scence Henry James Essays

Henry James In August of 1904, later on more than twain decades abroad, the sixty-year-old Henry James returned to the United States for a year. While William James had resplendently remarked that his brother was a native of the James family (W James 517), with little else in the way of national affiliation, Henry considered himself as American as perpetually after his twenty years in Europe. The book he wrote almost his American journey was titled The American Scene barely because Jamess original choice had been taken he would have preferred to call it The withdraw of the Native.1 But Jamess sense of himself as a native, as one at home in the United States, was shaken by his alienating run across of the American public, both as readers and as fellow citizens. Today I want to consider ways in which James struggled to preserve a secure sense of himself, the private identity he called my me,2 in the midst of disorienting encounters with the American press and the American people -- encounters, I argue, that package a certain uncanny logic. The American press staged a lively debate over the meaning of Henry James, in reviews of The fortunate Bowl and of the early chapters of The American Scene, accounts of Jamess lecture appearances, cartoons of the elusive Master, and parodies of his ornate youthful style. The name Henry James came to serve as a class of shorthand for a complex nexus of anxieties about ethics, art, and nationhood. Jamess writing and flavor gave rise to debates about morality (was he decadent or nevertheless sophisticated?), manliness (was he effeminate or just responsive?), and modernity (was he an aristocratic anachronism or was he cutting edge?), all entangled with the question of Jamess supposed patriotism or leave out of it. James himself experienced the press attention paid him as an assault, and matt-up a visceral sense of violation at the way that journalists utilise him to define their own posit ions in debates that often meant little to him. He mat like a freak, ogled for the benefit and entertainment of the American crowd only those can understand, he maintained, who have been terrified & paralyzed absentees restored hither after long years & with every one wanting to see (or to deny) the strawberry marks on different parts of their persons.