“The ‘good American’: Henry James, U.S. American studies and the frontiers of national identity”

This essay is a substantial expansion of the paper delivered at an International Seminar on Henry James organized by Donatella Izzo at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” in 2007. John Carlos Rowe argued in 2006 that the recovery of Henry James (a Modernist cosmopolitan author) and other literary expatriates into the U.S. canon because they are more American for their rebellion, well reflects the new American Exceptionalism and the international ambitions of a neo-nationalistic turn in U.S. American studies. Dismissing an either/or approach, the essay tries to demonstrate that the discourse of nation had instead a problematic and still neglected weight in James’s life, writings, and critical history, and that it is not reducible to an oppositional paradigm. In line with the “conscious and cultivated credulity” in fictional reality advocated in the 1908 preface to “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), James’s U.S. identity can be defined, with a similar oxymoron, as a distanced belonging to ‘America.’ Far from being the denationalized author of New Critical forging, James contributed to a problematic redefinition of U.S. identity at the turn between the nineteenth and twentieth century. His transformation into a writer representative of the best national values and in possession of an ‘international’ range started immediately after his death and went on, notwithstanding the influence of the New Critical Master, through the 1930s, reaching a peak in the ’50s. Such a metamorphosis – based on the older issue of James’s difficult and intense relation with the motherland – was central to the developing of the early phases of American studies and complicates the facile exceptionalism of the official discipline, institutionalized during the Cold War. While a cosmopolitan James is today a necessary critical response to the neo-nationalism of a substantial part of U.S. American Studies, such a post-national imperative runs the risk of bringing back a subtler, de-territorialized form of nationalism that acknowledges neither James’s contradictory belief in the fiction of U.S. identity, nor the still conspicuous power of nation states, national identity, and identifications. James created his connections to the United States through distance and the capable tool of an ideal U.S. identity, transforming “America”’s Manifest Destiny into the “complex fate” of the “good American” in “Europe.” Redefining U.S. identity as a powerful but dangerous frontier whose counterpart is a centre – a continuously shifting “domestic” anchorage (New York, Paris, Rome, London, Rye) – James believed in its potentialities and feared the main reason of its power: as an undefined form constantly in progress, U.S. identity is in fact condemned to perform a double destiny, to possess or be possessed, to expand or to contract, into a finite variety of roles. In such a theatrical role-playing disclosing the fictional reality of ‘nation,’ the shift between English and American identity is complicated by an undervalued and significant presence, both in life and fiction, a third dark party, ‘Italy.’ As the only dark hue admitted in James’s world, ‘Italy’ disrupts a binary, white Anglo-American contrast and reveals the national limit of the international theme. The Master’s aesthetic initiation, the origin of his chiaroscuro, contrasting art – his fastidious sense of discrimination – are inextricably linked to the reluctant abolitionism of his family and to the racist construction of whiteness and blackness in pre-Civil War New York minstrelsy and blackface. Black, as a racial color, is almost absent in James, and when it passes the color line, it does so only if purified through a significant ethnic or racial shifting: Italians are the only “dark race” in James but they bear the great responsibility of throwing a shadow on the Rooseveltian ideal of white, heterosexual and jingoistic U.S. masculinity.