Innocence Abroad: Henry James and the Re-Invention of the American Woman

O my country, may you not be judged by your travelling children!

--Ella W. Thompson, Beaten Paths (1874)

In December 1875, at the start of a publishing season that would witness keen interest in the already popular genres of travel writing, women's fiction, and internationally themed literature, the Chicago house of Jansen, McClurg & Company released a new novella by a young author who was just beginning to explore the relationships among nationality, setting, and character that would become career-long interests. Described by the American Bookseller as "an extremely lively story of an extremely lively American girl living in Rome" ("New Books" 52), the narrative tells of a vivacious young woman who sparks first the affections and then the suspicions of a well-heeled American youth who observes with puzzlement and dismay her unbecoming conduct toward an unsuitable Italian rival. Conscious that the nouvelle's racy portrayal of the American girl abroad might vex its domestic audience, the American Bookseller cautioned that "[m]ost readers will call her [the eponymous protagonist] 'fast'" but went on to reassure the trade that "her desperate flirtations will interest a large class of novel-readers" ("New Books" 52). Two years later, when Henry James's "Daisy Miller: A Study" sallied onto the scene, most readers and reviewers had likely forgotten Mae Madden: A Story ¹ by Mary Murdoch Mason, ² the "extremely lively" tale that prefigured James's famous "invention" of the flighty American belle who runs afoul of the conventions and mores of her staid compatriots in Rome. ³

The existence of a narrative that so closely parallels the setting, characterization, plot, and theme of "Daisy Miller" points up the fact that in writing "Daisy Miller," James situated his work at the epicenter of a popular literary mode of the 1870s: the narrative of the American woman abroad. Indeed, the motif of the American woman abroad provided James a point of entry into a distinct niche market comprising a predominantly female middle-class readership. The juxtaposition of Mae Madden and "Daisy Miller" illustrates how James, like Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Dean Howells, located his work at the intersection of two highly fashionable spheres of literary activity--travel writing and polite fiction--effectively "colonizing" a fictional form pioneered by European women such as Madame de Stäel and Anna Jameson and subsequently adapted by three generations of American women writers, from Lydia Sigourney to Edith Wharton. ⁴ A close reading of Mae Madden within the context of contemporary accounts of American women in Europe illustrates how, and to what end, James artfully--and artistically--rewrote this earlier version of the naïve and feckless American girl running amok in Rome.

Critics and literary historians have long credited Henry James with the invention of the fictional motif of the American girl abroad. In 1903, Howells formally attributed to his friend this distinction when he asserted:

Mr. James is not quite the inventor of the international novel [ . . . ] but he is the inventor, beyond question, of the international American girl. He recognized and portrayed the innocently adventuring, unconsciously periculant American maiden, who hastened to efface herself almost as soon as she saw herself in that still flattering if a little mocking mirror, so that between two sojourns in Europe, a decade apart, she had time to fade from the vision of the friendly spectator. In 1860-70, you saw her and heard her everywhere on the European continent; in 1870-80, you sought her in vain amidst the monuments of art, or on the misty mountain-tops, or at the tables d'hôte. (165-66) ⁵

Howells's claim has long gone unchallenged; ⁶ nevertheless, a glimpse into the popular fiction of the decade preceding the appearance of "Daisy Miller" reveals a bevy of "international American girls" who share with Daisy the very qualities...