Reunion of the United States and Europe: Henry James Earlier Novels

Abstract

James life-long concern with the dialectic between the qualities of Europe and those of the United States is quite clearly discernable in his earlier works. As a point of departure to understand James, and through him the American cultural and intellectual milieu at the time, this paper examines James four novels which deal with the transatlantic situation: Roderick Hudson (1876), The American (1877), The Europeans (1878), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). It argues that James conceives the relationship between Europe and the United States in a complicated and ambiguous way, and that the theme of fortunate fall, as suggested by his father Henry James, Sr., helps explain the dialectic between so-called American innocence and European sophistication.