Henry James :: American Scence Henry James Essays

hydrogen mob In August of 1904, after(prenominal) more than two decades abroad, the sixty-year-old Henry crowd together returned to the United States for a year. small-arm William James had famously remarked that his brother was a native of the James family (W James 517), with diminished else in the way of national affiliation, Henry considered himself as American as ever after his twenty years in Europe. The accommodate he wrote close to his American journey was titled The American mount only because Jamess first choice had been taken he would have favored to call it The Return 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 experience of the American public, both as readers and as familiar 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 America n implore and the American raft -- encounters, I argue, that share a certain uncanny logic. The American press staged a lively debate over the meaning of Henry James, in reviews of The Golden Bowl and of the early chapters of The American Scene, accounts of Jamess lecture appearances, cartoons of the knotty Master, and parodies of his ornate late style. The name Henry James came to serve as a kind of shorthand for a complex nexus of anxieties about ethics, art, and nationhood. Jamess writing and life gave rise to debates about morality (was he decadent or just sophisticated?), manliness (was he effeminate or just sensitive?), and modernity (was he an aristocratic anachronism or was he avant-garde?), all entangled with the question of Jamess supposed nationalism or lack of it. James himself experienced the press attention pay him as an assault, and felt a visceral sense of violation at the way that journalists used him to define their own positions in debates that o ften meant little to him. He felt like a freak, ogled for the benefit and entertainment of the American crowd only those can understand, he maintained, who have been terrified & inactivate absentees restored hither after long years & with every one lacking(p) to see (or to deny) the strawberry marks on different parts of their persons.