The Fall as Conversion: Catholicism and the American Girl in James's "Travelling Companions"

Early in James’s apprentice story, “Travelling Companions” (1870), the narrator, Mr. Brooke, and his new acquaintance, the American Charlotte Evans, observe a number of picturesque locals in the Cathedral of Milan. Mr. Brooke feels that “with these pale penitents and postulants my companion had a lingering sisterly sympathy,” and then asks Miss Evans, rather pruriently, “‘Don’t you wish you were a Catholic. . . ?’” She replies that while the mantillas worn by the women in the church “‘are certainly becoming . . . who knows what horrible old-world sorrows and fears and remorses they cover?’” After this she declares, “‘I’m glad I’m not a Catholic’” (182). Towards the middle of the story, however, Mr. Brooke comes upon his new acquaintance kneeling before the mosaic of Christ in Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice. While she admits only to “‘half-prayers,’” and affirms that “‘half-prayers are no prayers,’” she sounds less sure of herself when she goes on to add that “‘I’m not a Catholic, yet’” (193). Still later, in the church of St. Anthony in Padua, the question arises a third time. Overcome by the “palpable, material sanctity” of the central shrine, Mr. Brooke exclaims, “‘What a real pity . . . that we are not Catholics; that that dazzling monument is not something more to us than a mere splendid show!’” This time Miss Evans demurs and, indicating a couple near the shrine, sententiously remarks, “‘Poor girl! She believes; he doubts’” (208). Within the context of the story the words might be taken to apply to herself and Mr. Brooke.

“Travelling Companions” is the first story in which James attempts the portrait of the American girl, the figure who was to become the central symbol in his work. In this first portrait James conspicuously depicts the American girl’s impressive yet troublesome autonomy as the product of a cultural ethos broadly defined as Protestant, in contrast to an antithetical, and historically prior, Catholic ethos. At the same time the movement of the story is towards synthesis: in James’s view, a Protestant phase of history does not just supersede a Catholic one, but absorbs it. While there is hardly a question of Charlotte Evans converting to Catholicism, “Travelling Companions” establishes “becoming more Catholic” as a metaphor for the sort of career James typically imagines for the American girl in his subsequent fiction. ¹ In this essay, then, I propose to explore what “becoming more Catholic” means in “Travelling Companions” in order to shed new light on James’s attitudes towards the American girl in such important late novels as The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1904).

We might describe the general story of the American girl’s education in James’s fiction, from Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer to Milly Theale and Maggie Verver, as a “suspended fall.” James’s immediate source for this story, wherein the heroine achieves experience without losing her innocence (not incidentally allowing the author to tell the story of her initiation without impropriety), was Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860). We know from the study he wrote of his American precursor in 1879 that the element in Hawthorne’s last completed romance which drew James’s highest admiration was the portrayal of the American girl, Hilda, who “falls” when she witnesses a sort of primal scene of murder fraught with overtones of sex and even incest:

It needed a man of genius and of Hawthorne’s imaginative delicacy, to feel the propriety of such a figure as Hilda’s and to perceive the relief it would both give and borrow. This pure and somewhat rigid New England girl, following the vocation of a copyist of pictures in Rome, unacquainted with evil and untouched by impurity, has been accidentally the witness, unknown and unsuspected, of the dark deed by which her friends, Miriam and Donatello, are knit together. This is her revelation of evil, her loss of perfect innocence. She has done no wrong, and yet wrong-doing has become part of her experience. . . .

(HT 446)

James contrasts the American girl’s “revelation...