The Return of the Alien: Henry James in New York, 1904

When Henry James returned to America after his absence of two decades he found to his surprise that he did not return as a native but as an alien. He had expected to feel that he was coming home, and when he got home, he found that there was unexpected company. During his visit and afterwards while he was composing The American Scene, he began a process of redefining his conception of national identity in a way that bears careful consideration for what it suggests about how ethnic and racial identities are formed and transformed over time and under changing circumstances. ¹ He suggests a theory of how cultural transformation normally takes place and offers an analysis of how the business culture of America deforms that process. James’s sense of cultural dispossession becomes for him, not a cause for nostalgic bitterness or xenophobia as some have claimed, but a critical resource by means of which he creates a bond of solidarity with all those who have been dispossessed of their heritage, including the people whom we now call Native Americans. Wondering at the process of creating national identity, he asks:

Who and what is an alien, when it comes to that, in a country peopled from the first under the jealous eye of history? . . . Which is the American, by these scant measures?—which is not the alien, over a large part of the country at least, and where does one put a finger on the dividing line, or, for that matter, “spot” and identify any particular phase of the conversion, any one of its successive moments?

(AS 124)

James rejects the idea that there is a “dividing line” between the native and the alien and that an absolute conversion can take place. He theorizes instead that a kind of hyphenation of cultures is not only possible but highly desirable. James’s greatest fear is not that the already hyphenated Anglo-Saxon cultural dominance would end but that the “‘ethnic’ synthesis” of the new America would not tolerate increasing complexity (139). One consequence of this simplification would be to leave him (as a writer) dispossessed of his native language, just as the “beautiful red man” had been dispossessed of his native land (464). I wonder if we can say that this fear was exaggerated.

The work of rethinking his own relation to his national origins, his “supreme relation, . . . one’s relation to one’s country—a conception made up so largely of one’s countrymen and one’s countrywomen,” is provoked, of course, by his being confronted with an enormous change in the population of New York, the city of his birth and his youth (85). In 1904 more than a million immigrants arrived at Ellis Island, and the composition of the population of New York had been under radical revision since James was last in America in the 1880s. James writes that for the native to witness “the visible act of ingurgitation on the part of our body politic and social” performed by Ellis Island is deeply disturbing, as unnerving as seeing “a ghost in his supposedly safe old house” (a metaphor developed in “The Jolly Corner” as the hero of that 1908 story undergoes an identity crisis) (AS 84–5).

The native also notices, however, that he is not the only one who feels alienated from his past identity. The alien is also transformed in peculiar ways by the New World, and James is puzzled by the loss of the national characteristics that distinguished, for example, the Italians as he had known them in Italy. Is it possible that the ethnic characteristics that have taken centuries to develop “may really be thus extinguished in an hour. And if they are not extinguished, into what pathless tracts of the native atmosphere do they virtually, do they provisionally, and so all undiscoverably, melt? Do they burrow underground, to await their day again?—or in what strange secret places are they held in deposit and in trust?” (129).

This abrupt loss of character in America is not, however, as James sees it, a natural process...