What was that but the feminine attitude? - not the actual, current, impeachable, but the old ideal and classic; the air of meeting you everywhere, yet always without conscious defiance, only in mild submission to your doing what you would with it. (19)

Giving the pronoun “she” to a country, city or even a ship, is a common convention in the English language and to see Henry James do so for New York is not at all surprising: … New York, among cities, deeply languishes and palpitates, or vibrates and flourishes (whichever way one may put it) under the breath of her conditions…. (89)

However, what distinguishes Henry James use of the pronoun is that, if one looks at all of these images closely (including the above), they are nearly always positive. This may appear contradictory at first since, if we use the logic of the “tenor” and the “vehicle”, it would dictate that the vehicle (images of New York) would be negative because of Henry James’ prejudices against the tenor (New York). In the above quotation, we can note the words “vibrates” and “flourishes”. Elsewhere in The American Scene various other positive words such as “gentlewoman” (111) are used to describe New York.

So why does Henry James view women in such a positive light? It may be tempting to theorize and relate it to his personal life, although the fact that he was rumored to be homosexual and was not, as far as we know, a “woman’s man” tends to discredit this. The following quote sheds some light: Let me hasten to add that in the light of this opportunity even the most restless analyst can take the hopeful view of her. I fear I am finding too many personal comparisons for her - (109)

It would appear that Henry James uses positive female images as a literary device. This device is for a two-fold purpose. Firstly, it fulfils the role of a pronoun (as in the conventional sense discussed earlier) that makes reading The American Scene much easier. Secondly, and much more importantly, the range of characteristics that James wishes to describe in depicting New York is best done so with feminine images. Feminine characteristics are broad, deep and readily understandable to all readers. The following quotation exemplifies all of this:

2

She has come at last, far up on the West side, into possession of her birthright, into the roused consciousness that some possibility of a river-front may still remain to her; though, obviously, a justified pride in this property has yet to await the birth of a more responsible sense of style in her dealings with it, the dawn of some adequate plan or controlling idea. (106)

If female images in The American Scene are overwhelmingly positive, then male images are overwhelmingly negative. We may note that in the sentence “consummate monotonous commonness, of the pushing male crowd” (65) it is not necessary for James to insert the word “male” unless it has significance. Similar examples of the use of negative male images occur at “his larks” (59); “him” (78) and “patriarchal” (155).

Again, as with the case of explaining James’ use of female images, much is left to speculation. One theory could be that, since James may have been trying to hide his alleged homosexuality and love of young boys in real life, he was claiming the Christian moral high ground in his published works as a cover. A discussion of James’ concept of masculinity as applied to his works (particularly his

images) is beyond the scope of this discussion, but has been covered by some critics. ¹ It is interesting to contrast James’ male images with his female images. Whereas the “enjoyable” Central Park is female, the “terrible” New York skyscrapers are male. Negative human emotions or failings are usually attributed to men too:

When this personage is open to corruption by almost any large view of an intensity of life, his vibrations tend to become a matter difficult even for him to explain. (58)

Perhaps James thought that men were interested only in business and had abandoned women and so this was his way of expressing his anger? As quoted by Martha Banta in They Shall Have Faces, Minds, and (One Day) Flesh: Women in Late Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century American Literature,” “whenever civilization is misused or diverted or ignored in America, the

same fate is being inflicted upon women.” ² Thus, the female images represent the land, history and values of New York; whereas the male images represent the business, commercial, money world.

¹ See, for example, “Whitman, Pater and the Importance of Being Manly in James’ Early Fiction” in John R. Bradley, Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000) 31-74.

² Fowler 12. Martha Banta, in her analysis of The American Scene, argues that the “American male has wed his business,” and that his legal wife is in reality only “his mistress.” See “They Shall Have Faces, Minds, and (One Day) Flesh: Women in Late Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century American Literature,” in What Manner of Woman: Essays on

English and American Life and Letters, ed. Marlene Springer (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 235-270.

3

This idea is explored in Fowler’s Henry James’s American Girl and extended beyond New York to

the other areas that James traveled to. 3

If Henry James’ images represented by females are generally positive, and those by males generally less so, the images that he chooses to represent New York culture are invariably the most dramatically pessimistic of all. In The American Scene, we see the use of a demonic image to represent an aspect of New York culture that James despised (the skyscraper), and in the opening quotation of this paper we see another good example of James equating New York to a monster that “grows and grows”. The use of monstrous images is, of course, a device for James to castigate what he sees as the deficient morality, ethics and human spirit of New York - both the city and its inhabitants.

It is interesting to note that the monster images are applied at a number of levels. First, they are applied at an overall level, where James asks overtly “Had New York, the miscellaneous monster, a heart at all?” (40). Secondly, they are applied at the level of the greedy producer and consumer that James so despises as “monsters of the mere market” (63). Lastly, they are applied at the level of the new immigrants into New York “in their monstrous, presumptuous interest, the aliens, in New York” (67). What these various levels show is the far-reaching range of distrust that James harbored towards all of the various factors undergoing change in New York at that time. James speaks in the following quotation of how the lacking manners and morality in New Yorkers can be connected to, at the same time, both an inanimate object (endless electric coil) as well as an animate one (monster):

Free existence and good manners, in New York, are too much brought down to a bare rigour of marginal relation to the endless electric coil, the monstrous chain that winds round the general neck and body, the general middle and legs, very much as a boa-constrictor winds round the group of the Laocoon. (69)

The Laocoon of myth, where a man and his two sons are crushed to death by two sea serpents, is an interesting image for James to use. Here James is suggesting that New Yorkers economically and, perhaps, politically may be itinerant people belonging to the “land of the free” as touted but socially, particularly morally, they are stifled. James does not expand on what is stifling these people, leaving only vague references to the wave of commercialism “monsters of the mere

³ Fowler 238.

4