The American: A Reinterpretation

Extract

Apart from the fact that Henry James may not have wished to create such a black and white situation—the innocent American lamb thrown to the continental wolves of Paris—in his novel The American it is possible that the author himself may have expected a less simple interpretation of his novel than that which such scholars and critics as Joseph W. Beach, Constance Rourke, and even F. O. Mathiessen have afforded it. To accept the popular interpretation of the work as a rather transparent story of the victimization of a “good na-tured” American by a Borgia-like Parisian family seems to involve an oversight of much explicit and implicit information in the novel, which suggests that Mrs. Bread, the true mother of Claire de Cintre, was a blackmailer claiming both Newman and the Marquise de Bellegarde as victims; that Newman, by dint of his characteristic American naïveté and his opacity as a judge of character, was completely “taken in” by her ruse; and that Claire's refusal to accept Newman in marriage came as a direct result of her having been informed by the Bellegardes of her true parents—the old Marquis and his “meanest of mistresses,” Catherine Bread.