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Building Culture: The Two New Yorks of Henry James's The American Scene
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
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In The American Scene, Henry James's experiences of Harvard's College Yard and Philadelphia's Independence Hall offer paradigms of his relation to his natal land. I begin with these encounters with architecture to suggest how the New York City he recorded in that travel narrative is overdetermined by his manner of approaching it. John Carlos Rowe is surely correct that James's reflection on the fencing of Harvard Yard contains the central meditation on the bestowal of “margins,” James's own term for his principal aesthetic modus operandi: “The formal enclosing of Harvard Yard is comparable to his own activity of giving shape and dimension to the ‘formless,’ often chaotic world he encounters.” This aesthetic closure protects the scene - of a cultural repository - from corrupting exposure to the world of getting and spending, the ever-changing world beyond the gate. Relating the imposed order at Harvard to James's admonition at Independence Hall that one must “be ready, anywhere, everywhere, to read ‘into’ [the American scene] as much as he reads out” (p. 291), Rowe's elaboration on that counsel is crucial: “This interpenetration of man and his world transforms the social product into a cultural expression, the living record of a civilization.” The participant-observer creates an original, nonreproducible artifact by means of the critical consciousness he brings to bear on what are without this additional, but by no means superfluous, element merely the alienating products of alienated labor in industrialized America.
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1. James, Henry, The American Scene (1907; rept. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), pp. 62–63Google Scholar (all further references are made parenthetically in the text); and Rowe, John Carlos, Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of a Modern Consciousness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), p. 158.Google Scholar My epigraph is taken from Conrad, Peter, The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 300.Google Scholar My approach to James's art of representing the city owes a specific debt to de Certeau, Michel's essays on “Spatial Practices” in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Rendall, Steven F. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 91–130Google Scholar.
James amplified the cultural politics of the margin in his American notebook (Notebooks, ed. Matthiessen, F. O. and Murdock, Kenneth B. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1947], p. 316)Google Scholar, where he associated the newfound character bestowed on Harvard by the fence with the medieval air of Oxford and Cambridge. In The American Scene, he implied the connection with a comment that the enclosure is “sovereign” (p. 62).Google Scholar
2. James's critique of hotel society's pecuniary “short-cut” (p. 11) of collecting styles rests on debatable assumptions of a more authentic American self whose development is suppressed by an economic culture and an organic relationship of European art objects to their cultures. In truth, styles have frequently crossed national or period boundaries; Americans followed Europeans in developing tastes for the exotic along with an imperialist foreign policy. The logic of the shortcut was already in the system, only the traces were fresher here.
I want to thank Richard Dellamora for suggesting the designation “Angloethnic” as a correction to the received notion that all North Americans except those of British ancestry are ethnics.
3. Buitenhuis, Peter, The Grasping Imagination: The American Writings of Henry James (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), p. 206.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPosnock, Ross (“Henry James, Veblen and Adorno: The Crisis of the Modern Self,” Journal of American Studies 21 [1987])CrossRefGoogle Scholar suggests (pp. 34–35) that the homogeneity of New England echoes in James's description of the Emersonian self, whose connection to “the ‘great grey wash’ of the American Scene of 1904” Posnock explores. On the shared rhetoric of the trusts and transcendentalism, see Horwitz, Howard, “The Standard Oil Trust as Emersonian Hero,” Raritan 6 (Spring 1987): 97–119.Google Scholar
A similar point to Posnock's is made by Johnson, Stuart (“American Marginalia: James's The American Scene,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 24 [1982]: 94)Google Scholar with regard to James's reaction to the “monotony” he detected in hotels: “the American ideal is not James's, and he does not envy the conditions of the hotel world, only the happiness it produces. The conditions could only be attractive for [one who has] … a strong self as a unity, exempt from difference as a mode of definition.”
4. Seltzer, Mark, “Advertising America: The American Scene,” in Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 106, 142, 131Google Scholar; and Posnock, , “James, Veblen and Adorno,” pp. 32, 33, 53.Google Scholar Posnock returns to the decentered Jamesian consciousness in “William and Henry James,” Raritan 8 (Winter 1989): 1–26.Google Scholar
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6. James returned at the height of immigration; over one million people entered the country during his stay. While the immigrants' percentage of the total population remained fairly constant from 1870 to 1900, the origin of that population shifted markedly to Southern and Eastern Europe. On issues of prejudice and assimilation, I have relied primarily on Higham, John, Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).Google Scholar
Johnson, Stuart (“American Marginalia”)Google Scholar suggests that the restless analyst's problem was that if he “was to discover America, there had to be something for him to discover.… But in America he found aliens everywhere” (p. 86).
7. Mabie, Hamilton Wright, “The Genius of the Cosmopolitan City,”Google Scholar quoted in Stern, Robert A. M., Gilmartin, Gregory, and Massengale, John Montague, New York 1900: Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism, 1890–1915 (New York: Rizzoli, 1983), p. 19.Google Scholar
8. Croly, Herbert, “What is Civic Art?”Google Scholar, quoted in Stern, et al. , New York 1900, p. 31.Google Scholar On the City Beautiful, see Manieri-Elia, Mario, “Toward an ‘Imperial City’: Daniel H. Burnham and the City Beautiful Movement,”Google Scholar in Ciucci, Giorgio, Dal Co, Francesco, Manieri-Elia, Mario, and Tafuri, Manfredo, The American City: From the Civil War to the New Deal, trans. La Penta, Barbara Luigia (1979; rept. London: Granada, 1980)Google Scholar, particularly pages 76–89 and 119. I find his carefully historicized evaluation of the movement's ideology, political uses, and benefits a useful counter both to ideology critiques that concentrate on certain contemporary justifications of the approach to the exclusion of reading the built results, and to a “progressive” strain of American Studies criticism that takes a moralizing stand against such planning when there is poverty in the cities. Manieri-Elia leaves the City Beautiful enmeshed in its contradictions, reading it as potentially a tool of reaction, certainly not a utopia, but as providing clear advantages over the status quo of the 1870s and 1880s.
9. Stevens, Wallace, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” in Collected Poems (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1982), p. 470.Google Scholar
10. Stern, et al. , New York 1900, pp. 310, 18, 21Google Scholar; and Schuyler, Montgomery, “New New York Houses, East Side,”Google Scholar quoted in Stern, et al. , New York 1900, p. 22.Google Scholar The description of stages of metropolitanism is taken from pages 12–24.
11. Croly, , “Rich Men and their Houses,”Google Scholar quoted in Stern, et al. , New York 1900, p. 321.Google Scholar
12. Veblen, Thorstein, Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899; rept. New York: Mentor- New American Library, 1953), pp. 229–31.Google Scholar The American woman is a “convenience” in a line that includes “stoves, refrigerators, sewing-machines, type-writers, [and] cash-registers” (p. 347).Google Scholar James's irony is aimed at the the ingenious Yankee male who abandoned the social and sexual fields, and reduced himself to a machine, but Posnock, (“Henry James, Veblen and Adorno,” p. 40)Google Scholar is surely correct that her unexampled triumph becomes a triumph for him, since “a cultural division of labor produces and packages the American woman's unfettered individualism as an advertisement for ‘the American name,’ an advertisement of only a ‘slightly different order’ than the ‘ingenious mechanical appliances.’”
13. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Woman,” in MiscellaniesGoogle Scholar, vol. 11 of The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 14 vols. (Boston: Riverside, 1882), p. 340Google Scholar; and James, Henry, “The Speech of American Women,” in The Speech and Manners of Ameri can Women, ed. Riggs, E. S. (Lancaster, Penn: Lancaster House, 1973), pp. 28, 44.Google Scholar These essays, which grew out of his American tour and were published as articles in 1906–7, expand his criticism of the American social indistinctions and their relation to the absence of the complexity of forces that shaped European society.
Jane Austen's novels offer exemplary instances of the power of conversation. On the other hand, the oft-divorced Nancy Headway in “The Siege of London,” whose New Mexico back-piazza manners ill-prepare her for her quest to become accepted in Society, exemplifies two of James's preoccupations in those essays on the American woman's speech and manners: the lack of established hierarchies that enables her to occupy the social field without first exhibiting the discriminations he valued and the prevalence of easy divorces that disrupt the home.
14. Emerson, , “Woman,” p. 353Google Scholar; and James, Henry, “The Question of Our Speech,” in The Question of Our Speech; The Lesson of Balzac; Two Lectures (Boston: Houghton, 1905), pp. 52, 45.Google Scholar
15. Erenberg, Lewis A., Steppin' Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)Google Scholar, notes that since “social position was not fixed, ‘activities which are known as social functions’ came to dominate society. To be a member of society, one had to act as society decreed and attend events that defined society.… To select the elect, these functions had an elaborate set of rules to fix proper behavior and define the minor hierarchies in social life. Such questions as places at dinners and balls, the proper subjects of conversation, who led the cotillion, and the proper decorum for young ladies gave a form to one's actions and empowered the group to make choices over one's behavior” (pp. 12–13).
16. The first country club was from its inception structured around the family (see Curtiss, Frederic and Heard, John, The Country Club, 1882–1932 [Privately printed, 1932], pp. 6–7).Google Scholar
17. Curtiss, and Heard, , Country Club, pp. 4, 139.Google Scholar The token resolution of the recent conflict over playing the P.G.A. Tournament at an all-white country club was, perhaps, less a victory over racism than an affirmation of the centrality of class in American society.
18. van Rensselaer, Marianna Griswold, “People in New York,”Google Scholar quoted in Stern, et al. , New York 1900, p. 20Google Scholar; and Stewart, Robert, “Hotels of New York,”Google Scholar quoted in Stern, et al. , New York 1900, pp. 257–61.Google Scholar
19. Foucault, Michel, “Space/Knowledge/Power,”Google Scholar trans. Hubert, Christian, Skyline (03 1982): 16Google Scholar; Foucault, , Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York: Vintage, 1977), pp. 203, 208Google Scholar; and Morris, Lloyd, Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life of the Last Hundred Years (New York: Random House, 1951), pp. 238, 244.Google Scholar On Bunau-Varilla and Komura, see McCarthy, James Remington, with Rutherford, John, Peacock Alley: The Romance of the Waldorf-Astoria (New York: Harper, 1931), pp. 143–56.Google Scholar
20. Seltzer, , “Advertising America,” p. 143 n. 51Google Scholar; McCarthy, , Peacock Alley, pp. 59, 61.Google ScholarPosnock, (“Henry James, Veblen and Adorno,” p. 43 n. 31)Google Scholar criticizes Seltzer for failing to recognize that “the bourgeois norm is not discipline but rather antinomy.” Seltzer's revised model of power suggests such a recognition, but it comes at the end of the chapter and does not undo what comes before it.
The twin incarnations of the “hotel-spirit,” the Waldorf's first director, George C. Boldt, and its first maître d'hôtel, Oscar Tschirky, insisted, “We do not regulate the public taste. Public taste does and should regulate us” (quoted in McCarthy, , Peacock Alley, p. 11).Google Scholar This self-depreciation omits what James justly called the management's trendsetting “genius,” but it is more than a fiction of consumer power; many have tried and failed to produce and regulate the circuit of consumer desire.
21. Koolhaas, Rem, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 124Google Scholar; Hungerford, Edward, The Story of the Waldorf-Astoria (New York: Knickerbocker-Putnam, 1925), p. 60Google Scholar; “The New Astoria Hotel,” quoted in Stern, et al. , New York 1900, p. 257Google Scholar; Mc-Carthy, , Peacock Alley, pp. 79–80Google Scholar; and King, Moses, Moses King's New YorkGoogle Scholar, quoted in Erenberg, , Steppin' Out, p. 35.Google Scholar Empire was the persistent theme not only in architecture, but also at costume parties among New York's elite, suggesting a shared ideological function.
22. Marin, Louis, “Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia,” Glyph 1 (1977): 54, 65.Google Scholar My analysis of the Waldorf-Astoria is influenced by his critique of the amusement from the consumer's perspective.
23. Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 291.Google Scholar
24. Stern, et al. , New York 1900, p. 88.Google Scholar
25. Buitenhuis, , Grasping Imagination, p. 189.Google Scholar Conrad (Art of the City), pp. discusses the cultural politics of literary impressionism and realism as they affect representations of urban poverty (pp. 65–85).
26. Posnock, , “Henry James, Veblen and Adorno,” pp. 35, 46, 45.Google Scholar
27. Wright, Gwendolyn, Building the American Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (New York: Pantheon, 1981), pp. 118–23.Google ScholarHenderson, Charles Richmond, Proceedings of the Lake Placid Conference on Home EconomicsGoogle Scholar, and Charles P. Neill, address to the New York School of Philanthropy, are quoted in Wright, , pp. 126–27.Google Scholar “Dumbbell tenements,” built according to the winning design of an 1879 competition, had, on each floor, two apartments on either side of a central stairway, and community toilets, like their predecessor, the “railroad tenement.” The legal minimum space allotment per occupant was four-hundred cubic feet, a space five feet by ten feet by eight feet high. The newer design's “improvement” was a twenty-eight-inch indentation running the length of the three bedrooms, in theory bringing light and air to those rooms on each of the building's five or six stories; railroad tenements ran parallel to each other for the length of the building.
In 1910, the Immigration Commission found that, “in connection with the prevailing opinion about filth, which is supposed to be the natural element of the immigrant, it is an interesting fact that while perhaps five-sixths of the blocks studied justified this belief, so far as the appearance of the street went, five-sixths of the interiors of the home were found to be fairly clean, and two out of every five were immaculate. When this is considered in connection with the frequent inadequate water supply, the dark halls and the large number of families living in close proximity, the responsibility for uncleanliness and unsanitary conditions is largely shifted from the immigrants to the landlords, and to the municipal authorities” (Goldenweiser, E. A., quoted in Barnes, Mary Clark and Barnes, Lemuel Call, The New America: A Study in Immigration [New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1913], pp. 89–90).Google Scholar
28. Foucault, , “Space/Knowledge/Power,” pp. 18, 17–18.Google Scholar
29. Wardley, Lynn, “Woman's Voice, Democracy's Body, and The Bostonians,” ELH 56 (1989): 654.CrossRefGoogle ScholarEdel, Leon, Henry James: The Master, 1901–1916, vol. 5 of The Life of Henry James, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972)Google Scholar, writes that James called Central Park “an actress destitute of talent” (p. 293).Google Scholar He in fact likened it to “an actress in a company destitute, through an epidemic or some other stress, of all other feminine talent.… [Her] valor by itself wins the public and brings down the house - it being really a marvel that she should in no part fail of a hit” (p. 176).
On the evolution of parks, see Olmsted, 's article, “Park,” in The New American Cyclopaedia (1858–1863)Google Scholar, reprinted in Creating Central Park, 1857–1861, ed. Beveridge, Charles E. and Schuyler, David, vol. 3Google Scholar of The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, 4 vols. to date, ed. McLaughlin, Charles Capen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 346–67.Google Scholar
30. Boyer, M. Christine, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), p. 37Google Scholar; Miller, Ross L., “The Landscaper's Utopia Versus the City: A Mismatch,” New England Quarterly 49 (1976): 179–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Trachtenberg, Alan, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), pp. 112–21Google Scholar; and Foucault, Michel, “The Subject and Power,” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Wallis, Brian (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art-Godine, 1984), pp. 427, 429, 427.Google Scholar
The disciplinary argument hinges on three items: Olmsted's marginalizing of competitive sports, references to the park's “tranquilizing” effect, and Bentham's theory of the benefits derived from “innocent amusement.” Olmsted made reference to Bentham, in “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” in Civilizing American Cities: A Selection from Frederick Law Olmstead's Writings on City Landscape, ed. Sutton, S. B. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 95–96.Google Scholar Had Olmsted refused to allot space for athletics in his Greensward Plan and not advocated a system of local recreational fields, the argument for his desire to create a docile population would be stronger. The references to riots and unrest that Trachtenberg finds in the rhetoric of tranquilization are secondary to a medical and psychological discourse when Olmsted, , in “The Structure of Cities”Google Scholar (in Sutton, , Civilizing American Cities, p. 40)Google Scholar, referred to the utility of a tranquil field for those who participate in “the more intense intellectual activity which prevails equally in the library, the work shop, and the counting room.”
Olmsted undertook steps he thought necessary to educate the park's users in the means of preserving a fragile environment as a place of recreation and a respite from crowded streets; the “Regulations for the Use of Central Park” that Olmsted wrote in 1860 will appear unremarkable to users of parks or wilderness areas today. On recreation, see Creating Central Park, pp. 127, 130–31, 214, 355Google Scholar; and “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” pp. 73–74.Google Scholar On park rules, see “Regulations for the Use of Central Park,” in Creating Central Park, p. 279Google Scholar; and “Instructions to the Keepers of the Central Park, 1873,” in Central Park as a Work of Art and a Great Municipal Enterprise, 1853–1895, vol. 2 of Frederick Law Olmsted: Landscape Architect, 1822–1903, 2 vols., ed. Olmsted, Frederick Law Jr., and Kimball, Theodora (1928; rept. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1970), particularly pp. 454–65.Google Scholar
31. Olmsted, , “Public Parks,” p. 78Google Scholar (emphasis added); and Trachtenberg, , Incorporation of America, pp. 110–11.Google Scholar Trachtenberg's argument about the park attends too much to Olmsted and not enough to the actual park. Zetzel, Suzanna S. (“The Garden in the Machine: The Construction of Nature in Central Park,” Prospects 14 [1989]: 291–340)CrossRefGoogle Scholar offers an argument similar to mine in response to a different set of critics.
32. Trachtenberg, , Incorporation of America, p. 109Google Scholar; and Dal Co, Francesco, “From Parks to the Region: Progressive Ideology and the Reform of the American City,”Google Scholar in Ciucci, et al. , American City, p. 164.Google Scholar
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