American Writers in Europe: 1850 to the Present

Abstract

Ferdâ Asya opens American Writers in Europe with a quotation from “Memories of Bourget Overseas,” where Edith Wharton points out that “it is only in seeing other countries, in studying their customs, reading their books, associating with their inhabitants, that one can situate one's own country in the history of civilization.” The intellectual independence of a transcultural worldview—a central motif in Wharton's oeuvre and a dynamic direction in Wharton scholarship—is also the organizing principle behind Asya's ambitious project that brings together an international group of scholars to discuss American expatriate writers from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.Though American expatriate writing has inspired much exciting scholarship, it has often been limited to a focused, albeit narrow, scope that foregrounds authors who traveled to Europe between the two world wars. Taking Wharton's edict into account, Asya broadens her discussion to create a genealogy of American expatriate writers that attempts connections across different historical moments—such as the fin de siècle and the turn of the twenty-first century—and includes less studied or rarely anthologized authors. In this sense, American Writers is an excellent example of extending the canon of transnational scholarship by enacting the fresh critical insight that is the hallmark of the authors in question. What results is an expatriate literary history that follows the evolution of American “intellectual independence” from “passively observing and merely reporting into actively experiencing and independently criticizing as much as the host as that of the native country's life” (10). As such, the collection is an interesting example of historicizing literary works while keeping the transcultural point of reference that has been prevalent in recent transatlantic scholarship.The ten chapters of the book are organized by historical chronology, starting with the watershed year of 1850, when transatlantic travel increased commercial, cultural, and political exchange between Europe and the United States, and solidified an American national identity built on the distinctions between the Old and the New World. Each chapter fleshes out different aspects of Euro-American exchange—from the complexity of diplomatic relations to the alienation of exile and the development of transatlantic literary networks—analyzed through various critical lenses. Although the diversity of critical approaches might have jeopardized the unity of the collection, it ends up working beautifully to reinforce the interdisciplinary connections at work.In the first chapter, “The Search for Legitimacy in Nathaniel Parker Willis's Paul Fane,” Udo Nattermann offers a Foucauldian reading of the power relations in Willis's romance, and draws on the rhetoric of gossip to stress the role of popularity in transatlantic power struggles. In the second chapter, “‘God permits the tares to grow with the wheat’: E. D. E. N. Southworth in Great Britain, 1859–1862,” Ann Beebe examines the complexity of transatlantic relations during the Civil War to reveal Southworth as a skillful negotiator of her contemporary gender and class structures. Chapter three, “Gertrude Atherton's Europe: Portal or Looking Glass?” is Windy Counsell Petrie's detailed analysis of Wharton's contemporary Gertrude Atherton. Petrie draws important connections between the two authors: despite their different social and literary backgrounds, Atherton and Wharton shared an attraction to social Darwinist ideas that shaped their portrayal of female characters. Yet, unlike most of Wharton's expatriate female characters (such as Undine Spragg), Atherton's expatriate women combine American independence with European experience to achieve self-determination and self-knowledge. The expatriate's self-realization is also central in “The London Making of a Modernist: John Cournos in Babel,” where Marilyn Schwinn Smith revisits the work of John Cournos, a Russian American expatriate in England in the early twentieth century. Drawing on recent reevaluations of modernism as the manipulation of conventional genres rather than radical rupture, Smith interprets Cournos's autobiographical novels as inflections of the bildungsroman and the roman à clef through satire. Thus, she positions Cournos within the modernist critique of nineteenth-century genres, while emphasizing the role of his immigrant experience in the enrichment of Anglo-American literary modernism.The next two essays focus on Wharton, whose work is of primary importance to the collection: her oeuvre supports the significance of intellectual independence, and serves as the chronological and thematic link between modernism and subsequent literary developments, such as the transnationalism of the Spanish Civil War poets and the transatlanticism of the Beat generation that figure in later chapters. In “Toward a Brighter Vision of ‘American Ways and Their Meaning’: Edith Wharton and the Americanization of Europe after the First World War,” Jenny Glennon questions earlier readings of Wharton's late fictions as either defused of originality or devoid of sympathy toward the United States. According to Glennon, The Glimpses of the Moon (1922) and The Children (1927) illustrate Wharton's concern with the emergence of globalization, while The Gods Arrive (1932) and the posthumously published The Buccaneers “celebrate American openness and energy” (98). Glennon is careful to nuance her reading of Wharton's attitude toward her homeland while challenging prominent Wharton scholars—she qualifies Frederick Wegener's reading of Wharton as a fervent imperialist and Shari Benstock's account of “The Marne” as overly sentimental. For Glennon, Wharton's war writings and her late fictions suggest the complexity of a historical moment that was being shaped by the cultural narratives of American exceptionalism and the globalizing tendencies that endangered the nation-state. The chapter does an excellent job of positioning the late Wharton within this changing political landscape and leaves us looking forward to Glennon's book-length study as well.Ferdâ Asya takes up the reflection on Wharton's politics in “American Writers in Paris Exploring the ‘Unknown’ in Their Own Time: Edith Wharton's In Morocco and Diane Johnson's Lulu in Marrakech,” where she reads Wharton's 1920 travelogue alongside Johnson's 2008 novel. After an impressive review of the existing criticism on Wharton's text, Asya examines the factors that shaped Wharton's view of Morocco, namely, her relation to the French general Lyautey, her sympathy for French colonialism, and her fascination with the mystery of the unknown (embodied in the character of Lyautey himself). For Asya, In Morocco proves Wharton's allegiance to her host country, while Summer hints at her true feelings about colonialism through parallels between Lyautey's control of Morocco and Royall's attempt to rape Chastity. Asya moves on to contrasting Wharton's support of French wartime politics with Diane Johnson's critique of post-9/11 American foreign policy. In Lulu in Marrakech, Johnson—who also contributes a foreword to the book—creates an unreliable narrator (Lulu) and an open-ended plot to emphasize the complexity of “the unresolved terrorist crisis in the world” (133). Asya's reading of Lulu's narrative voice is fascinating: she contrasts Lulu's and Wharton's voices, revealing the political subtexts of the former's contrived naïveté and the latter's endorsement of the French colonialist project. By establishing connections between Wharton's account of colonialism and our contemporary views of terrorism, Asya shows the continuing resonance of Wharton's work, and creates avenues for reading Wharton alongside many contemporary authors.Chapters six to nine form a cluster that takes a transnational approach to American expatriate poetry between the 1930s and late 1950s. In “‘Homeland Strangeness’: American Poets in Spain, 1936–1939,” Robin Vogelzang analyzes the role of media discourse in the formation of transnational identities in the war poems of Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, and Edwin Rolfe. In “Fulbright Poems: Locating Europe and America in the Cold War,” Dietrich Oostdijk argues that the expatriate poems of Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, and John Ashbery are more than tourist recollections; rather, they are indispensable in understanding the poets' anxiety about individual and national identities during the Cold War. In the penultimate chapter, “Allen Ginsberg and the Beats in Literary Paris, or Apollinaire through the Door of Ginsberg's Mind,” Richard Swope revisits the merging of European and American literary traditions in Ginsberg's expatriate poetry and reads “At Apollinaire's Grave” as Ginsberg's attempt to inscribe himself in previous avant-garde movements.The final chapter, “Almost French: Food, Class, and Gender in the American Expatriate Memoir” by Malin Lidström Brock, leaps forward to the expatriate writings of late 1990s and early 2000s. Brock uses Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital to analyze three expatriate food memoirs that have received no critical commentary to date. She contends that the authors' references to French cuisine suggest hierarchical gender and class distinctions that contradict American egalitarian values and undermine the writers' attempt to make their experience easily relatable to an American audience. Brock's account of the gender politics in French cuisine offers remarkable food for thought for Wharton scholars: the social pressure that food rituals and culinary practices place on women brings to mind Wharton's view of French women as deeply imbricated in a nexus of enduring sociocultural traditions.By raising further questions, Americans in Europe accomplishes its goal—that is, to invite connections that trespass literary genres, temporal distinctions, and spatial constraints. Some chapters can feel slightly heavy in biographical information, but they compensate with the precision of detail and the breadth of analysis that weaves the authors' personal trajectory with the sociopolitical developments of their historical moments. Asya's collection does a wonderful job of giving us these moments through the eyes of less frequently anthologized writers. If Wharton is among the few “canonical” authors included, she finds herself in great company: straying from usual pairings (such as Henry Adams and Henry James), she becomes part of a delightful ten-course meal that culminates in the constancy of French cuisine, refracted through the lens of American intellectual independence.