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Al Șaptelea Simpozion Internaţional Limbi, Culturi

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Al Șaptelea Simpozion Internaţional Limbi, Culturi MINISTERUL EDUCAțIEI, CERCETĂRII, TINERETULUI ȘI SPORTULUI UNIVERSITATEA “VALAHIA” DIN TÂRGOVIŞTE FACULTATEA DE ŞTIINŢE UMANISTE DEPARTAMENTUL DE ISTORIE-LITERE PERSPECTIVE ISTORICE ŞI CONTEMPORANE ISTORICE PERSPECTIVE AL ȘAPTELEA SIMPOZION INTERNAŢIONAL LIMBI, CULTURI ŞI CIVILIZAŢII EUROPENE ÎN CONTACT PERSPECTIVE ISTORICE ŞI CONTEMPORANE LIMBI,ŞI ÎN EUROPENE CONTACT. CIVILIZAŢII CULTURI Valahia University Press 12 Târgovişte 2012 20 Târgovişte EDITURA VALAHIA UNIVERSITY PRESS ISBN 978-606-603-053-3 MINISTERUL EDUCAțIEI, CERCETĂRII, TINERETULUI ȘI SPORTULUI UNIVERSITATEA “VALAHIA” DIN TÂRGOVIŞTE FACULTATEA DE ŞTIINŢE UMANISTE DEPARTAMENTUL DE ISTORIE-LITERE AL ȘAPTELEA SIMPOZION INTERNAŢIONAL LIMBI, CULTURI ŞI CIVILIZAŢII EUROPENE ÎN CONTACT PERSPECTIVE ISTORICE ŞI CONTEMPORANE Valahia University Press Târgovişte 2012 EDITURA VALAHIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Referenţi ştiinţifici: Prof. univ. dr. Lucian CHIŞU Prof. univ. dr. Petre Gheorghe BÂRLEA Conf. univ. dr. Tatiana-Ana FLUIERARU Conf. univ. dr. Ileana TĂNASE Lect. univ. dr. Angela STĂNESCU Lect. univ. dr. Raluca Felicia TOMA Tehnoredactare şi culegere computerizată: Oana VOICHICI LIMBI, CULTURI ŞI CIVILIZAŢII EUROPENE ÎN CONTACT PERSPECTIVE ISTORICE ŞI CONTEMPORANE Valahia University Press Târgovişte 2012 În acest volum sunt reunite lucrările ştiinţifice prezentate la a șaptea ediţie a simpozionului internaţional LIMBI, CULTURI ŞI CIVILIZAŢII EUROPENE ÎN CONTACT. PERSPECTIVE ISTORICE ŞI CONTEMPORANE, desfășurat în perioada 25-26 martie 2011. Desire for knowledge, erotic desire and misrepresentation in Henry James’ Daisy Miller Nicoleta POPESCU, Gabriela POPA Valahia University of Targoviste Abstract: In this essay we will analyze the mechanisms of desire at work, and also the failure occasioned by the clash of different cultural misrepresentations of the other, taking into account the desires that animate Winterbourne and also the reader, and the misrepresentation of the other that only serves to deepen the mystery and increase desire. Key words: narrative, cultural construct, misrepresentation, knowledge, desire If in The Europeans we have a reenactment of the old difference between the Roundhead and the swearing Chevalier – everything polarized around the two great categories and cultural constructs: Europe and America – with Daisy Miller James goes beyond the simple distinction the new country versus old country (so, in a sense he is ahead his time, going even beyond Said, who saw only a simple center-margin, orient-occident distinction). There emerges now a hybrid race, Americans that have lived long enough in Europe to be infected by its mores, and to be flirting with what their compatriots, influenced by their puritanical forefathers, considered “the way of Europe – Hell” (Eliade, Paradise and Utopia, 97). As we shall see, this leads to all sorts of new misrepresentations and the final failure of Winterbourne to understand Daisy. His search for inner illumination is only half successful. On the other hand, the “prime mover” (Brooks 46) that keeps alive the energetic field of the narrative is not at all Winterbourne, who is but a hypocritical character (explanation a few pages below), but an ever new desire for knowledge coupled with erotic desire sparked by Daisy’s mystifying, seemingly nonsensical, chatter and by her natural, spontaneous direct manners. The narrative, according to Brooks is subtended by the desire for the end, for its death. Like the human body, the narrative avoids any short-circuited ends that are lurking along its development but only in order to die in its own way. Peter Brooks, quoting Freud, tells us that “what operates in the text through repetition is the death instinct, the drive towards the end… and the repetition can take us both backward and forward because these terms have become reversible: the end is a time before the beginning” (Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot 102-104). The unfolding of the narrative shows that the tension is maintained as an ever more complicated postponement or detour - Daisy’s behavior spurs on the narrative by demanding interpretation and almost always eluding the other’s grasp when he believed that he solved it – leading back to the goal of quiescence (the novel starts with the same picture that we find at its end, that is, “the rumour that Winterbourne is sojourning in Geneva because of “a lady — a foreign lady — a person older than himself”). The death of the narrative desire (“consuming itself as it projects itself forward, retracting as it extends, calling for its end from its beginning” [Brooks, Reading for the Plot 52]) in our situation coincides with Daisy’s death, implying actually that Daisy is also to a certain extent the erotic engine of the narrative “more powerful than all phallic engines, capable of leveraging the world”(Brooks, Reading for the Plot 47). She is “the fresh, piquant, impulsive, unconventional child of Nature, impatient of restraint, ignorant of forms, charmingly doing wrong and as charmingly repenting of it” (Sarah A. Wadsworth 108) always perplexing Winterbourne and the others. The girl’s behavior is rather too frank for the sophisticated, hypocritical and façade observant Europeans (the American cliché). They always tend to misinterpret her behavior, projecting upon her their own intentions and ideas so that she becomes almost a mirror in which each can reflect his ugliness, selfishness or desires. James is masterful in displaying this gliding by each other without real communication of the two different societies. For the Americans “Europe’s culture, luxury, and manners were the devil’s creation” (Eliade, Paradise and Utopia 96) and this we can see clearly in Daisy’s defiance of Europe’s conventionalities. We should not forget that the puritans that went in America and populated it were driven by the pursuit of a millenarist dream “the first pioneers did not doubt that the final drama of moral regeneration and universal salvation would begin with them …..US was the product of the Protestant Reformation seeking an earthly Paradise in which the reform 7 of the church was to be perfected. The pioneers considered themselves in the situation of the Israelites after crossing the Red Sea …their condition in England and Europe has been a sort of Egyptian bondage ” (Eliade, Paradise and Utopia 94-5). From Europe’s point of view however, this break with the new country is seen in the tendency to consider the Americans as ignorant bigots, that have riches without lineage or manners; or they are clumsy uncultured saints. Americans saw in the Catholic Europe a fallen world, teeming with people that were slaves to their passions and tyrants (Eliade, Paradise and Utopia 96). Perhaps this was a way of alleviating the trauma of separation. These psychic coordinates continue to smolder in Daisy Miller in all the intercourse between Americans and Europeans, or Americans corrupted by Europe, sending occasional sparks and keeping the narrative going. The new element here is that Europe is an almost inescapable corruption, those who resist it morally, do not survive it physically. Perhaps ironically, James places the greatest part of the story in Rome, the old center of Europe, and also the center of the Roman-Catholic Church from where the popes wielded their rather too political and worldly scepter. He portrays the Anglo-American society in Rome as one of great restrictions, imposed mostly by pharisaical considerations. Be it Geneva, Vevey or Rome, Europe is swarming with visiting Americans. What draws the Americans towards Europe? Probably a nostalgia for the (m)other country/continent, both abhorred but also fascinating, because the puritanical doctrine of the American forefathers had cut rather too much even into the innocent pleasures; in their attempt to reach heaven all at once they tended to demonize whatever was not connected with their sound doctrine, putting into the waste bin beautiful aspects of life also (see in The Europeans how fascinated is Gertrude by Eugenia’s draperies, whereas for the old Wentworth they are an unnecessary, almost sinful expenditure). We can see this diffuse, capillary threading of the interplay between nostalgia and abhorrence through the warp of the everyday lives of the Americans and of their intercourse with the Europeans. Going into the beautiful Swiss mountains is for them also a journey back towards origins (a time before the trauma of separation). Daisy and her fellow Americans are interested in the old castles. We have the situation that we found in the Europeans, but this time reversed. There it was the Wentworths that were permanently on heir guard lest some of Europe’s corrupt ways should creep into their lives, a thing that put a certain strain on their relationships, here, it is the Europeans (actually more the Americans infected by Europe) that try to fend off Daisy lest they lose their newly acquired respectability in the European circles, lest they be contaminated by lowly and independent mores. The American boy, Daisy’s brother, with his alpenstock thrusting everything around can very well be interpreted as a symbol of the American that wishes to know, to explore its origins, the stock signifying the phallic thrust driven by the erotic desire which is also desire for knowledge (Brooks, Body Work 5). Ironically Randolph is blaming the climate for the fact that his teeth are erupting, meaning at a deeper level that European society is a climate wherein one loses the patriarchal innocence and grows into a misanthropic aggressive being, cultured but snobbish and unfeeling. The boy is small, but at the same time gives the impression of age; standing for America, it points to the fact that the new continent is not, so new, actually is built upon old foundations and structures. The new cannot escape the old; it is historically determined by the old one and defined in terms of comparison with the old one. Winterbourne has had his vaccination early in his school days, but he felt some kind of loss “He felt that he had lived at Geneva so long that he had lost a good deal; he had become dishabituated to the American tone.” (James, Daisy Miller).
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