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Reproductions After "the last pure American":

Henry James's Fidelity to Hawthorne's Art

The very concepts of "fidelity" and "reproduction" hold slightly different meanings for Hawthorne and James. As early as 1865, James would write in The North American Review that Balzac's wealth of detail comes across with the "fidelity of the photograph" (Critical 26). James is probably among the first to extend the denotation of "fidelity" metaphorically, from an individual's integrity and conjugal loyalty, to a photograph's resemblance to an original image. ⁽²⁾ Some writers describe the world with photographic detail, James's reviews tell us, while others faintly sketch or paint their impressions. When it comes to Hawthorne, James notes more sketching than photographing, but finds too many details in those sketches. After denigrating the supposed tedium of Hawthorne's European notebooks in an 1872 review for The Nation, James leaves his readers with a striking image: "We seem to see him strolling through the churches and galleries as the last pure American- attesting by his shy responses to dark canvas and cold marble his loyalty to a simpler and less encumbered civilization" ("Hawthorne's Journals" 173). James reconstructs Hawthorne here, much as he would in his 1879 biography, as a provincial rustic who could tap directly into native strains of New England sentiment. Leon Edel explains of this image that James "would never be able to stroll through the churches and galleries of Europe with quite the same purity, the same air of innocence-or of ignorance" (121). James, who had combined his own New England heritage with international influences, seems intimidated by an unalloyed and original, even if a provincial American. Just when photographs promise to reproduce the original image with superb fidelity, James finds he cannot reproduce Hawthorne's "pure" responses. Reproducing just isn't what it used to be.

Fidelity and reproduction, in fact, link James's understanding of the novel with sexuality and race. James's art seldom follows Stowe's or Davis's in depicting African-American interaction with Anglo-Americans, or in presenting slavery or miscegenation directly. But as Sara Blair, Ross Posnock, Kenneth Warren and others have suggested, James's depiction of American, English, and Continental cultural interaction participates in ongoing efforts at national and racial definition. I extend the work of these writers, as well as the more recent contributions of John Carlos Rowe and Thomas Peyser, to trace the gradual development of the cosmopolitan, "restless analyst" pose of The American Scene (1907). ⁽³⁾ Sensing a distinguishing "purity" ebbing away, first from himself and then from America, James repeatedly scrutinizes cultural interaction for the pristine qualities it dilutes, and the eclecticism it enhances, for open-minded observers. Hugh Stevens has recently joined a host of readers exploring sexual identity in James's life and letters, and has concluded that James's "late fiction critiques the aestheticization of sexuality," asking if aesthetic creation and erotic instinct are necessarily mutually exclusive categories, and "discerning both the difficulty, and the risk, of attempting to represent the body, when the terms available for representation are always tainted" (6). Left to choose among varying artistic representations of "pure" originals, James's characters examine these art forms for their taint and fidelity, their mimicry of pure forms and tendencies toward distortion, and their potential to respect or objectify their subjects. Fidelity and reproduction combine with my third key term, "after," which I use in two senses of the word. Living two generations after Hawthorne, James fashions many of his early works after the American romancer, and notes his art's fidelity to that of a supposedly purer time. If all we have left are tainted representations, how can we recognize which artists and which art forms capture an ostensibly pure subject, and which veer toward the grotesque? If the "last pure American" belonged to a previous generation, how can his descendants find beauty in their own heterogeneous works?

Posing such questions will not reveal any consistent trend in James's art from sketchy romances to "photographic realism," but will shed light on two important novels, Roderick Hudson (1875) and The Tragic Muse (1890). The first of these works emerged from an extended Hawthornian apprenticeship, while the second arrived when James was balancing his desire to write novels with a relatively new ambition to write for the London stage. The attempt to write drama famously ended with the spectacular failure of Guy Domville (1895). But in both Roderick Hudson and The Tragic Muse, James dramatizes the production of varied art forms, from sculpture to portraiture to drama to photography, as inspiration and competition for the novelist's art. By the time of the New York Edition of his works (1907 - 1909), James sees photographs vying with verbal arts for the public's attention. In the Preface to The Golden Bowl, James tells us that "any text putting forth illustrative claims" and getting eclipsed by visual illustrations, is thereby "finding itself elbowed, on that ground, by another and a competitive process" (ix). Photographs, which had attracted Hawthorne's curiosity as shadowy daguerreotypes, seem sixty years later to apply pressure to literature itself. For all of the feats that photography's advocates claimed it could perform, why was James much more likely to see painting or sketching as metonymy for fiction? For all of photography's technological advancement between 1850 and 1910, why does Hawthorne conclude his career, in The Marble Faun, and James begin his career, in Roderick Hudson, turning away from photographs and focusing on sculpture? This chapter's opening section attempts to account for the choice to represent the ancient art, and for the influence of a "pure" predecessor, in an age of photographic fidelity and tainted reproductions. . . .

1. For information regarding Hawthorne's silhouettes, paintings, and daguerreotypes, see my first chapter or Gollin, Portraits, 27 - 28. James discusses the daguerreotype Brady took of himself and his father in A Small Boy and Others (1913), p. 86 - 88. Leon Edel discusses the episode in terms of James family history, while Julie Grossman, Edward L Schwarzchild, and others read the episode as an indication of the young James's attitude toward early photography.

2. "Fidelity" had denoted "conjugal faithfulness" or "honesty and truthfulness" in individuals since the seventeenth century, and came in the eighteenth century to mean a translation's truth to the language of the original text. The Oxford English Dictionary records the first usages of the term to mean "the degree to which a sound or picture reproduced or transmitted by any device resembles the original" in the eighteen-seventies (OED vol 5, pp. 876 - 877). James, then, is one of the first to use the term in this relatively new coinage in his 1865 article in the North American Review.

3. Posnock and Peyser stand at either end of a debate over themes of nationalism and integration in James's work. Peyser's recent reading of utopian tendencies in American realist novels suggest that these works show "the emergence of a global culture haunted by nostalgia for secure national identities," which "large numbers of people had talked themselves into believing were the ones guaranteed by their birth in a particular nation" (19). Mobile, international tourists gained a retrospective appreciation for the identities that their national citizenship had once guaranteed them. But Posnock's reading of James's own international affiliations sees the novelist as "necessarily belated rather than aboriginal," and therefore "not drawn to the prelapsarian Eden of solitude and wholeness" but invested instead in "representation, the shifting ground where art and social behavior interact" and in "the primacy of imitation and theatricality" (Posnock 12). To Peyser, James yearns for the secure national identity he sees in Hawthorne's time, but in Posnock's view, James prefers the freedom of representation he gains from his "belated" status.

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