The American Scene—I

Abstract

Sailing on the Kaiser Wilhelm II, James left Southampton on 24 August 1904, “emerging from the comparatively assured order of the great berth of the ship” (The American Scene, 1.1.5)1 at Hoboken, New Jersey, 30 August. Met by his nephew, he crossed to New York to look at Washington Square, Union Square, and Gramercy Park (the earliest moments of The American Scene), and stayed at New Jersey, with George Harvey, publisher of North American Review and Harper’s Weekly, which would take some of James’s essays. He traveled to Cambridge and Boston by train and up to Chocorua, to see William James. During this New England period he spent ten days with Edith Wharton at The Mount, at Lenox, her “exquisite French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond,”2 —which she had designed, accompanying her co-authorship with Ogden Codman of The Decoration of Houses (1897).3A movement through various unsatisfactory house interiors has often been noticed to structure Wharton’s New York novel The House of Mirth (1905); as the title implies, houses and interiors, rather than the exterior space of the street give her representation of the city. There is a feminine investment in the notion of the house. In her short story, “The Fullness of Life” (1892), one character says she has sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone.”4