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258 the Innocent American Girl in Henry James's DOI: 10.2478/v10320-012-0044-3 THE INNOCENT AMERICAN GIRL IN HENRY JAMES’S INTERNATIONAL NOVEL DIANA- GABRIELA LUPU “Al. I. Cuza” University, 11, Carol I Blvd., Iași, Romania [email protected] Abstract: In his international novels, Henry James used the idea of innocence and loss of innocence in connection to his American characters, especially American girls, as opposed to the personality of the Europeans. He explored the differences between the two civilizations and the effect that these have on the identity of the innocent coming from the New World. Being presented by the author as childlike, unaware human beings, Henry James’s heroines come to Europe to learn something of ‘life’, but they can’t preserve their innocence as they are forced to recognize that the world is ambiguous, divided. Their drama is a result of their resistance to acknowledging the foreignness of the Other. Key Words: American girl, innocence, New World, Other, Self Henry James represents a key figure for the beginnings of modernist literature. One of his main concerns was the international theme, the European experience of young Americans, who came to the Old World to enrich their knowledge, but who found themselves placed against a space of difference. One important aspect related to the New World is its innocence, and whether or not the American can preserve this quality in an area of vice and complexity. The contrast between Americans and Europeans is remarkably used by James with the purpose of emphasizing the American’s innocence. Henry James noted in The American Scene his impression that America reflected “the incoherence and volatility of childhood” (James 1968:171) which made Americans “unaware” and innocent by treating Europe while visiting it “as a vast painted and gilded 258 holiday toy.” (James 1962:189) The seriousness with which he treats the theme of the innocent, unaware American arriving in Europe varies from novel to novel. Innocence is obviously connected to childhood. For a better psychological understanding of James’s innocent characters, the theory of the Freudian revisionist Jacques Lacan offers major solutions. (Wilden 1968:191) Like Freud, he says that the primary experiences of childhood represent the paradigms that will dictate the subsequent experiences of the adult. The most important of these early experiences is the children’s discovery of the distinction between themselves and the rest of the world, the Other, and this enables the child to progress to the subjectivity of ‘I.’ This happens only by periodic absences of the mother and the experience of a divided reality. That is why it is an uncomfortable, perturbing experience as the human has to accept the ambivalence and ambiguity of a divided reality and the impossibility of a unified ‘self’. The reaction is that of resistance, and this is done through identification with the Other. In Henry James’s international fiction, the American character has to deal with the challenge of becoming a subjective ‘I’, accepting the uncertainty and ambivalence of this state. The Americans are presented by the author as childlike, unaware human beings, coming to Europe to learn something of ‘life’. Their drama is the result of their resistance to acknowledging the foreignness of the Other. They are forced to recognize the world as ambiguous and divided for the first time. Henry James himself was a promoter of the fictional American girl. The idea of the American girl was a popular one and it appeared in the context of the Victorian ideology of the feminine which was similar on both sides of the Atlantic. Idealization of women became domestic in the nineteenth century with a strong emphasis on marriage and women’s moral influence on men. Marriage was the highest expectation both in England and America. The difference was that they were more indulgent and their role of social connector was more important in America, as American society was still an unstable one. They also played another major role, that of representing America to Europe, as many European travelers met with, talked to or even married American girls in the nineteenth century. As representative, the American female was both a recognized and civilized woman (‘we are as good as the English’) and a provocatively youthful and egalitarian girl (‘and we are superior in our 259 differences’). It was the American girl who really produced the effect, though it was a surprisingly long time before she became a stock character of fiction. When she did, however, the American girl contained her own paradox in a new and vivid fashion. (Allen 1984:17) The independence of women was lost within the bonds of matrimony. “The young, unmarried girls had a freedom greater in America than in Europe; they went out by themselves, had ‘gentleman friends’ and enjoyed themselves generally at their own leisure. Often given greater education than their European counterparts, and certainly greater freedom of knowledge” (Allen 1984:22) they could talk and think. The American girls showed the superiority of freedom but also moral purity, being both bold and innocent. They gradually gained the right to self-education and development of ‘self’, but their freedom was for others and not for themselves. Feminine innocence depended on its existence in a rigid society. James’s novels often deal with the fundamental conflict between individual women and social structures. Innocence and openness were part of the idealist illusion of an untouched material waiting to be shaped by the external subject and this aspect was tacklede by Henry James in The Reverberator: Don’t you see that she’s really of the softest, finest material that breathes, that she’s a perfect flower of plasticity, that everything you may have an apprehension about will drop away from her like the dead leaves from a rose and that you may make of her any perfect and enchanting thing you yourself may have the wit to conceive. (James 1908-9: vol.XIII, 206) For James, she symbolizes America itself, being grown in an atmosphere where the European dangers did not exist, yet at the same time unable to face the assault of life. Inherent in James’s perception of the American heroine is the central paradox that though in her innocence, spontaneity, and purity she offers an alternative to the old corruption of Europe and the rampant materialism of America. (Fowler 1948:8) The American female is presented by James as independent, free, innocent, moral with an asexual attractiveness. Her self-consciousness developed out of her absorption by 260 Europe or her destruction by it. Henry James’s main American girls were Isabel Archer, Milly Theale, and Maggie Verver. They encounter an Other who they in some ways long to be, as Isabel meets Madame Merle, Milly meets Kate Croy, Maggie meets Charlotte Stant. Their drama is a consequence of the encounter with Europe, the land of experience. They are unequipped for withstanding the assault of life, even if their reaction is different: Isabel endures it, Milly dies from it and Maggie triumphs over it. Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is about a spirited young American woman, Isabel Archer, “a female counterpart of Newman” (James 1920:179), who “affronts her destiny” and finds it overwhelming. She inherits a large amount of money and subsequently becomes the victim of Machiavellian scheming by two American expatriates. The narrative is set mainly in Europe, especially in England and Italy. Isabel’s portrait is a complex one, full of contradictory qualities. She has an American past, as she is actually “an Americana, with more established traditions and more intellectual values than the ingenuous Daisy Miller: she is independent and imaginative, high-minded to the point of moral austerity, ignorant of evil, and avid for self-improvement. In all the tergiversations of her life, her choices and decisions will be complicated by a shaping, provincial heritage that will itself be reshaped by the actualities of an older, less innocent world.” (Gargano 1993:124) The reader encounters her at a turning point in her existence, when the dreams of youth must end and she must enter life, being “an eager, imaginative creature, singularly well equipped for an intense, eventful career, as, in fact, hers turns out.” (Liljegren 1920:17) The most captivating aspect of Isabel is revealed at the beginning of the novel, in her appearance at Gardencourt. Ralph Touchett, her cousin, and Lord Warburton are fascinated by her spontaneity and enthusiastic responsiveness to the surroundings. Her idea of happiness is a “swift carriage, of a dark night rattling with four horses over a road that one can’t see.” (James 1947:144) She wants to see people, to look about her, to imbibe knowledge by daily intercourse and conversation. Isabel’s hunger for knowledge could only be overcome by European civilization. 261 On the other hand she doesn’t have enough courage to taste from the “cup of experience” as a “poisoned drink”. (James 1947:130) The centre of James’s drama is in Isabel Archer’s consciousness. She is the right character to represent a real superiority for American values. James is very much confident that she has all the chances to attain a ‘completed consciousness’, so that he doesn’t make any effort to hide her deficiencies: Altogether, with her meager knowledge, her inflated ideals, her confidence at once innocent and dogmatic, her temper at once exacting and indulgent, her mixture of curiosity and fastidiousness, of vivacity and indifference, her desire to look very well and to be if possible even better, her determination to see, to cry, to know, her combination of the delicate, desultory, flame-like spirit and the eager and personal creature of conditions; she would be an easy victim of scientific criticism if she were not intended to awaken on the reader’s part an impulse more tender and more purely expectant.
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