Culture Clash
American Expatriates in Europe
in
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun and Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady

Schriftliche Hausarbeit
zur
Erlangung des Grades einer Bakkalaurea Artium
in der
Fakultät für Philologie
der
Ruhr-Universität Bochum

eingereicht von

Tonia Fondermann

Bochum, 22. März 2004

Contents

1. Introduction ... 2

2. The Relationship between the Continents ... 4
2.1 The Evolving of the Stereotypes ... 4
2.2 The Europe Reception in the Nineteenth Century ... 5

3. The Literary Methods of James and Hawthorne ... 7
3.1 Romanticism and Realism ... 7
3.2 The Different Approaches to the Topic ... 10

4. Transferring the Topic into a Story ... 14
4.1 Character Constellation ... 14
4.2 Setting up the Conflict ... 16
4.3 Characterization of the Heroines ... 19
4.4 Inferiority and Superiority ... 23
4.5 The Developments of the Characters ... 25
4.6 Developing into Opposite Directions ... 30

5. Conclusion ... 32

6. Works Cited ... 35

1. Introduction

When Henry James first travelled to Europe on his own in 1869, for the purpose of improving his education and his health, he was considerably young. With twenty six years of age he was independent of any family restrictions and could freely enjoy the intellectual life of Europe’s metropolises. Even though he was already determined to become a writer it was in fact the European experience that launched his career and supplied him with ideas throughout his life (Wright 199). Nathaniel Hawthorne, in comparison, was nearly fifty years old when the opportunity to go to Europe was offered to him. In 1853 he left for Liverpool with his family to take over the office as American consul. He was already an established writer back then, having chiefly used New England settings for the composition of his stories.

During the nineteenth century journeys through Europe became increasingly popular with Americans. Travelling the Old World belonged to the educational program for young men of the upper classes. By the 1850s the European experience was also affordable for the middle classes thus giving way to the phenomenon of commercial tourism. Accompanied by this movement was the growing popularity of travel literature by American writers. Among those who returned and wrote fiction or essays inspired by their journeys were Margaret Fuller, James Fenimore Cooper, and Washington Irving, to name but a few. So, both Hawthorne and James followed an American literary tradition.

Europe constituted in these days an inseparable part of the American consciousness. Political independence had long been achieved but the fascination with and the orientation towards the “mother” continent in the east failed to cease. Everything rendered culturally or artistically important was an European import or imitation, no matter if in architecture, painting, or dressing style. This dependence resulted in ambivalent feelings. Great admiration mixed with feelings of inferiority, reverence with repudiation. The cultural density and the historical richness of metropolises like London, Paris, and Rome attracted thousands of American tourists each year. At the same time Americans were shocked by the – at least from an American point of view – obvious moral decadence of the Europeans. These circumstances provoked James and Hawthorne into dealing with themselves as Americans in Europe, with their emotions, opinions, and prejudices, experiences which were fruitful for their creative outpouring. Especially James made excessive use of his experiences, referring in most of his novels and shorter pieces to the international theme (Wright 217). For all their travels through the Old Continent it was Italy that impressed both authors the most. In a letter to his brother William Henry James conveyed how deep his impression with Italy must have been: “If I might talk of these things,” he wrote,“ I would talk of more and tell you in glowing accents how beautiful a thing this month in Italy has been and how my brain swarms with pictures and my bosom aches with memories.” (qtd. in MacDonald 11). Although Hawthorne’s recollections of Italy were far from being this positive – in his Italian Notebooks he speaks of seldom or never having “spent so wretched a time anywhere” (qtd. MacDonald 14) – he nonetheless spent eighteen months with his family in the Italian scene and confessed later that “the intellect finds a home there, more than in any other spot in the world, and wins the heart to stay with it…” (qtd. in Wright 140). It may be that in Italy the authors felt the cultural differences between the Old and the New World most intensely because being in Italy meant to be confronted with the oldest of European cultures, and therefore with the feeling of their country’s own cultural youth. Chiefly Rome turned out to be a source of inspiration for both writers. The Eternal City formed the ideal setting for fiction dealing with the confrontation of European maturity and American youthfulness.

Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun and James’s The Portrait of a Lady deal with the struggles of Americans living in Europe. The major setting is in both cases Rome. Ambivalence towards European culture and life style determines most of the action and descriptions of the settings. Both novels attribute stereotypic behaviour and opinions to their European and American characters. Stereotypes used for the Europeans are moral decadence, filthiness, cultural distinction, and wisdom and knowledge. Those used for the American expatriates are innocence, purity, which leads to a certain moral superiority but also to naiveté, and lack of culture. Inferiority and superiority are recurrent themes which are displayed through the constant battle for superiority of the Americans. Throughout the course of the stories the Americans encounter situations which put their “Americaness” to the test; their convictions and beliefs are challenged. In both novels these conflicts are carried out by a young female American. Despite the common ground on which the novels were written Hawthorne and James maintained different attitudes towards this topic and found different solutions for the culture clash. In The Marble Faun the American characters flee from Europe, in The Portrait of a Lady the American expatriates remain in the Old World.

The aim of this paper will be to illuminate and explain these differences, by means of a comparison of the two female expatriates Hilda and Isabel. The first two introductory chapters are concerned with the stereotypes by which America and Europe have been usually described, and with the American feelings towards Europe in the nineteenth century. The following two chapters deal with the different methods that James and Hawthorne used to approach the America versus Europe topic and with the differences in the representation of the conflict. After introducing in the first half of the middle part the characters and their specific function in the novels, and the ways in which Hawthorne and James played out and interwove the conflict in their stories, the last three chapters of this work will concentrate on the analysis of the significance of inferiority and superiority in the novels and on the different directions the developments of the characters take.

2. The Relationship between the Continents

2.1 The Evolving of the Stereotypes

The stereotypic treatment of America and Europe is rooted in the history that connect the two continents.

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