The Princess Casamassima and the Theatrical Cosmopolis

For skepticism … always develops when races or classes that have long been separated are crossed suddenly and decisively. In the new generation that, as it were, has inherited in its blood diverse standards and values, everything is unrest, disturbance, doubt, attempt.

Friedrich Nietzsche¹

For Nietzsche, the accelerating pace of globalization in the last decades of the nineteenth century, along with the transcultural condition it brought in its wake, added its mite to the skepticism that, by his lights, the West was inevitably booked for in any case. The old parochialism that had kept regions narrow-minded had also shielded them from doubt, as ignorance of the wider world, or at least a lack of insistent, day-to-day reminders of it, kept alternative ways of doing or thinking about things at a distance. But in the new world order, culture was no longer so much a clearly defined home as it was a menu or a museum in which any number of possible lives or traditions offered themselves for view or adoption. Nietzsche noted with alarm the "cosmopolitanism in foods, literatures, newspapers, forms, tastes, even landscapes." The result of "this flood of impressions" was a "Profound weakening of spontaneity."² In the new supermarket of culture, authentic or instinctive spontaneous action gave way to a merely reactive paralysis, or, perhaps worse, to the officially sanctioned production of an "artificial nationalism" ("künstliche[n] Nationalismus") meant to counter, for cynical reasons of policy, the culture-blending effects of "trade and industry, the post and the book-trade, the possession in common of all higher culture, rapid changing of home and scene."³

A less obvious but perhaps more pervasive symptom of a growing sense of inauthenticity in experience was a pronounced emphasis on the theatricality of everyday life, an emphasis which, as I hope to show, becomes a dominant theme in Henry James' The Princess Casamassima (1886), a novel that even by Jamesian standards wears its cosmopolitanism on its sleeve. As the sense of sharing in an organic community faded, and as sociologists like Ferdinand Tönnies started positing distinctions like that between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to account for such disturbances, a new importance attached to participation in social displays contrived to offer the appearance of a social totality, spurring a subtle process that increasingly turned the public sphere into an ongoing spectacle, where seeing and being seen could function, in however attenuated a fashion, as a sign of shared concern or communal mutuality. The Crystal Palace and Baron Haussmann's tactical transformation of Paris into a more open, broad-avenued city of light are only the most glamorous examples of the rising tide of visibility. But even extreme poverty could become a "sight" on a tourist's itinerary. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, liked to tramp with Jacob Riis through the areas documented so famously in his How the Other Half Lives.⁴

A suggestive shift in sensibility is thus evident in the contrasting openings of two widely circulated essays on how the other half lived in London, the setting of The Princess Casamassima. Thomas Archer's The Pauper, the Thief, and the Convict (1865) opens with the assertion that in the British capital "there is little of the picturesque in poverty, still less of the romantic in crime." Whereas the imagination of a Dickens could of course invest these scenes with sensational emotional power, the facts themselves required a far more dispassionate view. Thus the records of poverty "are but monotonous recitals of sordid misery and destitution, which soon fail to interest the sentimentalist." In addition, Archer feels compelled to point out that the criminal "has about him nothing that is heroic" and that "his life is for the most part a wretched mistake, full of poor shifts and expedients."⁵ Revealingly, Archer's serious social purpose requires that he try to separate his project from the popular genres that had most memorably depicted the squalor of London. The modes of popular discourse are seen as merely an obstacle to the appreciation of an all-too-evident reality.

In George R. Sims' How the Poor Live (1889...