Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Marta Werbanowska
ENGG 234-01
27 February 2017
European Returns: Reading Henry James, T.S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway against the
One of the key tenets of American Romanticism was what Virginia Jackson refers to as
Emersons emphasis on American originality and genius and Walt Whitmans iconoclasm that
smashed American poetrys dependence on borrowed conventions (321, 326). Many writers of
that period, in particular those associated with or inspired by the Transcendentalist school of
thought, saw America as the land whose perceived geographical and historical newness offered
the possibility to break with the literary themes and traditions of Europe which they found to be
politically and aesthetically remote from their New World experiences. This quest for new
literary forms and a distinctly American diction was accompanied by the writers focus on the
landscapes and sceneries of the newly-formed republic. Instead of exploring the intellectual,
social, and cultural heritage of the Old World, the American Romantics preferred to celebrate the
Adamic individuals presence in the natural setting of the vast and indigenously American nature.
However, the rapid progress of modernization in all spheres of life that permeated not only
America, but the global West from late nineteenth century onwards, necessitated a shift of
paradigms that governed the writers understanding of the relations between nature, society, and
the individual. In the wake of accelerated industrial developments, large-scale internal and global
military conflicts, and the emergence of the middle class as a distinct layer of society, American
authors after the Romantic period often turned to a more socially-oriented exploration of the
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transatlantic connections between Americans and the sociopolitical realities and cultural legacies
of Europe.
As the prominent literary scholar M. H. Abrams aptly observes, the cataclysm of the
bloody Civil War and the Reconstruction, followed by a burgeoning industrialism and
urbanization in the North, profoundly altered the American sense of itself (207); this ideological
reconfiguration inevitably brought about a shift in the modes of American artistic and literary
expression. Romanticism gave way to Realism as the dominant literary movement, and the
transcendental, individualistic, and nature-oriented idealism of the antebellum era was replaced
by the verisimilar, socially-conscious and seemingly objective descriptions of the quotidian lives
of urbanite middle and upper classes. In the new post-war, post-industrial American landscape,
indigenous nature no longer represented the plantations of God [where] a decorum and sanctity
reign (Emerson 9) in the context of which Americans could seek to define themselves. Instead
of in the previously pristine wilderness and pastoral countryside, the exploration of a national
identity was now conducted either in the rapidly developing urban setting or through the prism of
a journey to Europe. While the cityscape reflected the inevitably social (if only due to the
condensed space that necessitates frequent, if often shallow, interpersonal encounters) nature of
the life of the post-bellum American subject, the transatlantic return to the roots provided the
grounds for an examination of the idea of American social and cultural newness.
Henry Jamess 1878 novella Daisy Miller: A Study is one of the most famous analyses
of the contrast between the American and European social norms of its time in the context of the
newly-emerging tourist industry. The story follows the two encounters between Frederick
Winterbourne, a young yet seasoned American tourist currently residing in Switzerland, and the
family of Annie Daisy Miller, a wealthy young girl from upstate New York on her grand tour
of Europe. Winterbourne, the central narrative consciousness of the story, finds Daisy to look
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extremely innocent yet act deucedly sociable, and characterizes her as unsophisticated; . . .
only a pretty American flirt (17, 18) early into their acquaintance. His Europeanized, upper-
class expectations regarding gender and social norms are confounded by Daisys apparent
disregard for the strict moral and behavioral conventions followed by most American expatriates
in the Old Continent. The essence of Americanness is thus explored through its contrast with the
European tradition, culture, and etiquette. In Daisy Miller, American responses to this heritage
are limited to extremes: one the one hand, there are the morally judgmental, almost Puritan in
their prudishness, high-society women such as Mrs. Costello and Mrs. Walker who, while
residing abroad, make a point . . . of studying European society (61) and, ironically, enforcing
its social norms on one another with strictness exceeding that of any Europeans they meet. On
the other end of the spectrum are the little American girls that are uncultivated in the social
mores of the high-pedigree, Europhile society which sees them as an inscrutable combination of
audacity and innocence (24, 54). Ultimately, James suggests his allegiance with the American
freshness and naivety of Daisy Miller rather than with the stifling conventions of the Eurocentric
the Adamic American exceptionality, this conclusion was no longer reached through interaction
with Americas indigenous nature alone, and a European detour became a necessary path for
James to explore, analyze, and ultimately assert an American identity vis--vis the old customs of
period into the Modernist era; however, early twentieth-century works by authors such as T.S.
Eliot expressed much more indebtedness to the cultural traditions of the Old Continent as a
source of modern identity-formation than James would allow for. In his seminal 1919 manifesto
Tradition and the Individual Talent, Eliot famously states that poetic innovation, while
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laudable, does not constitute a value in itself but only in an informed conversation with the
whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of [the
poets] own country (37). To American Modernists, immersion in the cultural canon of Europe
thus becomes a necessary precondition for ones individual excellence. Eliots own 1915 poem
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock illustrates this search for the modern artistic as well as
personal identity through the involvement with the European tradition in the persona of Prufrock,
a lonely and insecure middle-aged man alienated by the shallowness of social interactions and
the depressing half-deserted streets and sawdust restaurants of the modern city. On the
poems surface, the European artistic tradition seems inadequate and irrelevant to Prufrocks
twentieth-century search for identity, as suggested by the lyrics empty refrain about the socialite
women who come and go / Talking of Michaelangelo and the speakers own assertion that he
is not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. However, particularly in the light of Eliots
theoretical assertions of the primacy of the poets historical sense . . . of the timeless as well as
of the temporal (Tradition 37), the effectiveness of Prufrocks monologue comes from the
poems involvement with the predominantly European artistic and literary legacy, with the many
formal (the very form of dramatic monologue being borrowed from Robert Brownings My Last
Duchess) and textual allusions in the poem providing the reader with guidelines for
understanding Prufrocks modern discontents within a wider historical context. The Modernist
American subject may be fragmented and incomplete, but the awareness of his cultural heritage
offers at least a sense of possibility of restoring the social and moral order unsettled by the rapid
sociopolitical and technological changes that took place at the turn of the centuries.
The unprecedented, global-scale cataclysm of World War I, brought about a shift in the
dominant aesthetic paradigms of the American Modernism. According to Michael Levenson, the
war and its aftermath revived the question of formalism and representation in a paradoxical
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manner: while many authors returned to realist modes of representation to reflect the immense
violence of the war, the aberrant post-war reality often appeared as strange as the shapes of
experimental art (226). This combination of realist verisimilitude and modernist fragmentation
is vividly present in Ernest Hemingways 1925 In Our Time, a collection of short stories whose
American-born characters fluctuate between America and Europe in search of a resolution to the
trauma of war. While the actual horrors of combat take place outside of America it is in the
Turkish city of Smyrna where women held babies dead for six days and the Greek soldiers
dumped [mutilated baggage animals] into the shallow water (11, 12), and in Hungary where
the pro-fascist Horthys men had done some bad things to a young communist activist (81)
the return to homeland does not offer a restoration of the imagined prewar order to American
subjects tainted by the violent experience of war. Nick Adams, the protagonist of the collections
closing story in two parts, The Big Two-Hearted River, attempts to erase the trauma of the
frontline from his memory through an almost obsessive return to the fishing rituals of his youth,
a desire to feel all the old feeling and leave everything behind, the need for thinking, the need
to write, other needs (134). In the spirit of Transcendentalist idealism, Nick seeks the purity and
innocence of his prewar self in the familiar indigenous countryside, an idyllic riverside setting
away from the modern civilization. His thoughts, however, inevitably return to the friends with
whom he had been supposed to go fishing again next summer but whom he lost during the war
(141). Hemingways deceptively simple narrative thus shatters the Romantic illusion of the
Edenic, restorative power of nature and American insularity to the social corruption and political
conflicts that take place in Europe; instead, the author suggests that the postwar American
identity will forever remain marked by the confluence of the forces of history, global power
American Romanticism, often referred to as the American Renaissance and the first
definable literary movement in the countrys history, reflected the new nations confidence and
faith in the bright future that awaited the citizens of the newly-independent Republic. The critical
historical events of first the Civil War and then World War I, the rapid developments in sciences
and technology, and the social and cultural transformations that followed brought about a sense
of disillusionment and a realization of the essentially utopian nature of the Romantic vision of
America as an exceptional land of liberatory individualism, untainted by the evils of the Old
Continent. The increasingly globalized world of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
necessitated new literary responses to the shifting sociocultural realities and Americas role in the
modern world. Authors from the realist and modernist periods responded to the foundational era
of American letters that was Romanticism in various ways, from Jamess continued belief in the
power of the American newness to Eliots rejection of a tradition-less mode of writing and,
eventually, Hemingways disillusionment with both American and European heritage. However,
regardless of their individual attitudes, all these writers realized that the process of developing an
American identity cannot escape a transatlantic conversation with the social conventions, cultural
Works Cited
Abrams, M.H. Periods of American Literature. A Glossary of Literary Terms (7th edition).
2017.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Hollister:
Electronic Text Center, 1999. University of Virginia Library. Web. 20 Feb. 2017.
Levenson, Michael. Modernism. New Haven: Yale UP, 2011. Print.