Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 263only to the eruptions of civil conflict but to his exemplary encounter with European
culture. There is a residue of “American” romanticism, as James would see it, in these
novels of the first period: stories of young American pilgrims, dark family secrets,
oppressive villains. But this is overlaid by habits of realism, empirical rigor, and
attention to mannerly detail that James, at least, felt he owed to his European mas-
ters: to Flaubert or Turgenev, say, rather than to Hawthorne. More seriously and
centrally, James was of the passionate belief that, as he put it in his account of
Hawthorne, “it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature” – and that,
despite the Civil War, history “had left in the United States but so thin and impalpa-
ble a deposit that we very soon touch the hard substratum of nature.” What America
lacked was what, precisely, Europe had: “an accumulation of history and custom,”
“a complexity of manners and types,” all that could “form a fund of suggestion for
a novelist.” James even went so far as to enumerate “the absent things in American
life,” the “items of high civilisation” which, he felt, were nowhere to be found in his
place of birth. He was less specific about what was present, apart from insisting that
“a good deal remains.” What was clear, however, and could be succinctly stated is
that he felt compelled, as a novelist, to live in Europe and, as an American novelist,
to dwell on this contrast. As a result, he offered a series of increasingly sophisticated
fictional negotiations between European culture and American nature, European
society and the American individual, European experience and American inno-
cence. To an extent, he was transplanting a contrast embedded in American thought,
and especially that of the nineteenth century, to the international arena: a contrast
articulated in the fundamental divisions of the clearing and the wilderness. But
what distinguished this fiction was not merely the transplantation of content but
also the transformation of form. “A novel is a living thing,” James insisted in “The
Art of Fiction,” “all one and continuous, like any other organism and in proportion
as it lives will it be found ... that in each of its parts there is something of each of
the other parts.” That belief vividly informed his own practice as a novelist. It
stimulated fictions in which, at best, the medium is the message, the “moral” of the
narrative springs from a “doing” that is subtly intricate and mutually restrained,
balanced and brilliantly nuanced.
In The American, James explores the contrasts between Europe and America
through the story of a protagonist whose name betrays his origins and missions.
Christopher Newman is an American who reverses the voyage of his namesake
Christopher Columbus and travels from his own, New World to the Old World of
France during the Bourbon period. There, he finds his love for a Frenchwoman of
the nobility frustrated by her family. James draws a series of sly contrasts between
Newman’s innocence, candor, and ignorance (especially about matters of art and
social convention) and the sophistication and cunning of his European hosts. The
Europeans reverses this voyage, in turn, by bringing Europeans to New England. The
transatlantic contrasts multiply and are more complex here, but the fundamental
distinctions remain the same. In response to the news, for instance, that one of the
European visitors is “the wife of a Prince,” an older American character simply
responds, “We are all princes here.” Daisy Miller focuses the international contrastGGray_c03.indd 263ray_c 03 .indd 263 8 8/1/2011 7:54:20 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 20 AM