Engendering Culture in The American Scene

Abstract

Engendering Culture in The American Scene Sheila Teahan As a number of critics have observed, The American Scene is structured around a series of gendered binaries that are broadly aligned with feminine interior and masculine exterior spaces: with an opposition between privacy and publicity, between the social and the business sphere, between a feminized aesthetic, and a masculine commercial, spirit. The American Scene’s gendered antithesis between what may loosely be termed civilization and materialism has tended to be read sociologically, notably from feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, or Foucauldian perspectives. Against the background of the primarily sociological commentary The American Scene has recently attracted, this paper investigates its gendered figuration from the standpoint of rhetorical theory. I argue that James’s encounter with the “virgin” text of America, an encounter recurrently figured in gendered linguistic and textual metaphors, is readable as dramatizing the problem of the allegorical sign. Allegory has traditionally been understood as an artificial and mechanical representation of an abstract truth. In the Romantic critique of allegory exemplified by Coleridge’s remarks in the Biographia Literaria and The Statesmen’s Manual, allegory is a system of signification in which the relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary and conventional, as opposed to symbol, which claims a natural or organic connection between the two. For Paul de Man, this problem of non-coincidence between the idea and its representation, or between meaning and sign, far from being confined to what Coleridge terms allegory, is symptomatic of the structure of the linguistic sign per se, which is necessarily and significantly non-coincident or discontinuous with itself. 1 The American Scene’s gendered representation of the relation between [End Page 52] nature and culture articulates an implicit theory of the sign. One of its central rhetorical structures is a recurring chiastic substitution between nature and culture by which nature is personified and culture naturalized. This chiastic exchange is emphatically gendered: traditionally enough, James tropes nature as female, but he simultaneously personifies and aestheticizes what he calls the “feminine attitude” of the American landscape. He valorizes this feminized, personified nature for its resistance to the decreative, even deadly synecdochic fragmentation—“the mere chill of contiguity, like the breath of the sepulchre” (49)—which he imputes to the commercial sphere. 2 But he also aligns this feminized nature with history and art, with “the old ideal and classic” as against “the hungry, triumphant actual” associated with American commercialism and its perceived repudiation or erasure of the past (20, 53). James imputes to nature the formalism he finds absent from the city’s conspicuous failure of “composition and picture,” a failure exemplified for James by the New York skyline (140). Conversely, the agricultural failures he witnesses in New England are rather perversely read as affirming the nobility of nature’s rejection of mere use- or exchange-value, its renunciation of “greasy greenbacks” (21) in favor of the superior claims of the aesthetic. James thus swerves from the Romantic feminization of nature by denaturalizing nature, as in the early passage where he reads a New Hampshire forest as a drawing room, its “bosky ring” forming “symmetrical doors,” its “sweet old stones” mimicking grey velvet, and (in a privileged Jamesian trope) its “scattered wild apples . . . like figures in the carpet” (16). James’s feminized personification of nature is positively valorized, aligned with culture rather than antithetical to it. This feminized, acculturated nature embodies a unified and totalizing organic “mass” (20) that successfully resists the decreative synecdochic fragmentation exemplified by the city. James thus opposes nature’s “production and . . . imposition of forms” (26) to the absence or vacancy confessed to by American manners and artifacts. Nature instantiates for James the authentic American “aristocracy,” under “assault” by commercial values (412). He further complicates the traditional antithesis between feminized nature and masculine culture by identifying Nature with History, itself personified as female (“It was History in person that hovered, just long enough for me to recognize her and to read, in her strange deep eyes, her intelligence at least of everything” [310]). In the rhetorical alignments of The American Scene, then, female is to culture as male is to urban commercialism, or to a fallen, formless pseudo-nature. Conflating the...