"Adina": Henry James's Roman Allegory of Power and the Representation of the Foreign

Leonardo Buonomo, in his study of pre-1870 American representations of Italy, argues that American writers of the period were, for many reasons, hard pressed to write about Italy as it really was: "the impression is, at times, that what is depicted by certain American writers is not a country inhabited by real people, with concrete . . . problems and needs. It is rather a gigantic picture, or a stage where a performance is continually held for the sake of a foreign audience" (15). In other words, what these writers represent is not something real but something literary.

As part of his far-ranging study of nineteenth-century tourism and travel writing, James Buzard argues (173-77) that guidebooks presented only one side of Continental Europe and therefore excluded any representation of the more prosaic--but certainly very real--parts of everyday European life. Naturally, tourists traveling great distances had no special wish to visit "'butchers' stalls, grocers' shops, [and] pedlars' booths,'" but at the same time any attempt to experience and represent authentic foreign life would be doomed if it excluded "such mundane presences" (174).

The problem of representing the foreign other, then, becomes complex and problematic, and it is because of this, according to Buzard, that so much of Henry James's writing "describing the desired American behaviour towards Europe . . . would be ambivalent to the core" (223). On the one hand, "'Europe' hovers . . . before James as a 'poetic or fairy precinct'" (196), but on the other, his early travel writing "registered a conflict of perspectives between a 'visitor's' or 'tourist's' viewpoint that gives priority to aesthetic (picturesque, poetical) appearance and an 'engaged' perspective that puts a premium on local, pragmatic (prosaic) interests" (197). Buzard is not arguing that James did represent Continental Europe as it really was, but that James "grasped, and harboured in his own texts, the critic's or satirist's suspicion that picturesqueness had the effect of turning a real Continent into mere pictures" (192). James's texts betray a certain self-awareness of the artifice inherent in contemporary English and American travel writing's representation of the foreign (192-212) and contain an "attempt" to break the generic limitations of English-language travel prose, to "smash . . . his own picturesque fancies" and "to enable . . . the 'Other'--the operatic Italian, the stereotyped image of the foreigner--[to] speak in the discourse that constructs it" (210). Similarly, Buonomo ascribes to James the partial capability "of looking at the Italian scene from a different perspective--of going, as it were, to the other end of the traveler's gaze" (97).

Buzard suggests that the ambivalence--"the instance of tension" (198)--he finds in the texts he examines exists too in much of James's fiction, including the subject of this essay: the 1874 story "Adina" (211-12, 225, 259). Buzard's cue is worth taking, since "Adina," one of James's more neglected and obscure stories, ¹ provides a means of exploring precisely what are the limits of James's ability to represent, to use Buonomo's phrase, "the other end of the traveler's gaze" (97). And since little is ever simple in James, exploring how "Adina" addresses the problem of representing the foreign other requires considering how the story invokes other, overlapping issues: the story's political content and its reference to a more famous contemporary intertext that represents an analogous conflict: Richard Wagner's operatic tetralogy, The Ring of the Nibelungs.

Although James "had made himself the acknowledged master of the international theme in fiction" (Buzard 223), fully developed European characters are few and far between in his representations of European life. In fact, the "Europeans" in James's "international" fiction are almost always expatriated Americans. In the major novels set in France, Marie de Vionnet of The Ambassadors stands alone as a significant, fully developed Continental European character...