“‘How a man should meet trouble’: The master’s Mediterranean actors as models of self-possession”

Increasingly towards the end of the century, Henry James seems willing to contaminate Anglo-American bachelorhood and ideals of manly restraint with more expressive and emotional masculine modes of behavior. “Mediterranean” men and actors such as the Italian Tommaso Salvini and the French Benoit Constant Coquelin are presented and promoted as living models to deal with physicality, sexuality, and emotions. As men and actors, Salvini and Coquelin are able to possess their possession, enabling James to keep at bay the attraction for other and closer “primitive” men: “the barbarians of the Roman Empire”: “The Americans.”