Feminizing the Nation: Woman as Cultural Icon in Late James

Winner of the Don Holliday Prize, 1995

We really approach [the American woman] nearest in studying her full-blown ubiquity as that of the most confidently “grown” and most freely encouraged plant in our democratic garden. The conditions of American life in general, and our great scheme of social equality in particular, have done many things for her, and left many others undone; but they have above all secured her this primary benefit that she is the woman in the world who is least “afraid.”

—Henry James, The Speech and Manners of American Women

In June of 1905 Henry James, in the United States on the journey that would later be chronicled in The American Scene, spoke to the graduating class of Bryn Mawr College on “The Question of Our Speech.” To those New Women, emerging from their training ground with more formal education than the Master himself possessed, James vociferated about their ignorance of how to speak. “All life . . . comes back to the question of our speech,” he told them (10). And “there is no such thing as a voice pure and simple: . . . the voice plus the way it is employed [makes] not only the history of the voice, but positively the history of the national character, almost the history of the people” (34). The “vox Americana,” he went on to say, is “unsettled” and “inferior,” (35) and represents one of the final areas in which “our civilization remains strikingly unachieved . . .” (12). No attempt at culture can be complete without attention to the forms and tones of proper speech; even the women of Bryn Mawr must consider themselves uncivilized in this regard because they remain untutored in this discipline.

In the following year James published a series of articles in Harper’s Bazar that treated the speech and manners of American women. In these articles he expanded the theme of his Bryn Mawr address, chronicling the inadequacies of American speech and calling upon American women to become able to discriminate among the various forms and tones of speech and thereby to advance American culture. “The voice of the American woman, enjoying immense exercise, is lifted in many causes, but the last it anywhere pleads is that of its own casual interest or charm. It pleads in a thousand places the cause of culture . . . [yet it simply dispenses] with that attribute which is accounted in other civilizations the sovereign stamp of the well-conditioned woman” (25). In both articles James insists upon the connection between the speech and the status of a civilization, implying that for America to take its place among the fully mature national cultures it must conquer the indiscriminate qualities of its national habits of speech.

Both the Harper’s articles and The American Scene make clear that James believes a standard American idiom must stand as the bedrock of the national culture. For James, as for his friend, William Dean Howells, the nation itself is at stake in the question of language. The America James evokes in these articles is a nation that is literally always in the process of being created and perpetuated by the utterances of its people. By this I imply that we take Homi Bhabha at his word when he says that nations come into being and sustain themselves in narrative, in the tension between the historical pedagogy of the people and their continuing, present day enunciations. If American nationality exists somewhere in the intersection of its historical narrative and contemporary performative utterances of its identity, then women, as James constructs them, are the site of this intersection. For James women represent the only voices of the modern incarnation of America which have the potential to reconcile the tension between these two poles of national self-creation. If they improve the character of their discourse, they will become the means by which the history of American national culture engages with twentieth-century enunciations of the nation.

Although the health and status of all American culture rests on civilized speech, James confines himself to the speech of American women and addresses his...