The Geopolitics of Literature: the Shifting International Theme in the Works of Henry James

Abstract

This article demonstrates how changes in Henry James' handling of the international theme, that is Europeans and Americans compared, can be correlated to alterations in the international position of the United States itself. It argues that, whereas in his novels and stories of the 1870s/early 1880s (Roderick Hudson, Daisy Miller, The American, The Europeans, Portrait of a Lady), it is the Americans who are generally the innocents and victims (albeit sometimes victims of deracinated, cosmopolitan, Europeanized Americans), when James returned to that theme on a major level in the early 1900s (The Ambassadors, Wings of the Dove, Golden Bowl), in many ways one can argue it is now the Europeans or Europeanized Americans who are the victims of the Americans. This change can be correlated with James' own perceptions of the growing international power of the US, as shown in the Venezuela crisis and the Spanish-American War, and his comments on the wealth of Americans, including such wealthy J P Morgan-style collectors as Adam Verver in The Golden Bowl. Although one rarely thinks of James as a political novelist, in reality at this time he commented extensively on the changing international scene, particularly in correspondence with his brother William, the pragmatist philosopher, who was a strong anti-imperialist and spoke out vigorously against American policies. The article ends by commenting on James' final, including his unfinished works, written after he visited the US in 1904-5. It also highlights some resonances with James' own life, particularly in terms of the cosmopolitan American expatriates (some admirable, some quite the reverse) who feature so largely in his novels. Fleeing to Europe was in some ways an escape for him, distancing him from family pressures to settle down and marry, and perhaps from a family and milieu that, however much he loved them, he found stifling and suffocating. Europe, by contrast, gave him not just the artistic material he needed, but also a refuge where he could live a life he found far more congenial. Again, one can argue that, in his later novels, the expatriates are now largely victims rather than the villains they have often rather spectacularly been in earlier works. It is the Americans, armoured in wealth and innocence, who are now by far the more dangerous protagonists.