The Politics of the Uncanny: Newman's Fate in The American

The Politics of the Uncanny: Newman's Fate in The American by John Carlos Rowe, University of California, Irvine Everything was over, and he too at last could rest. . . . The most unpleasant thing that had ever happened to him had reached its formal conclusion, as it were; he could close the book and put it away. He leaned his head for a long time on the chair in front of him; when he took it up he felt that he was himself again. Somewhere in his mind, a tight knot seemed to have loosened. He thought of the Bellegardes; he had almost forgotten them. —-Henry James, The American, 111 My epigraph comes from the penultimate scene in the novel, just before Newman meets Mrs. Tristram for their final interview. It is in that closing scene that Newman burns the note given him by Mrs. Bread and purported to have been written by the dying Marquis, in which he incriminates his wife for his murder. As the note burns, Mrs. Tristram thinks aloud about what Newman has told her of his abortive revenge against the Bellegardes and their cool defiance of him: "My impression would be that since, as you say, they defied you, it was because they believed that, after all, you would never really come to the point. Their confidence . . . was not in their innocence, nor in their talent for bluffing things off; it was in your remarkable good nature! You see they were right" (TA 309).* Newman's "remarkable good nature" is directly proportionate to his ability to repress "the most unpleasant" things, and the strange relation between his moral self-righteousness and his repression has much to do with the romantic melodrama that organizes the last half of The American. For some critics, it is easy to account for these matters; Newman is an incorrigibly good fellow who "forgives and forgets." In their view, his refusal to revenge himself either on his business associate in New York or the Bellegardes in Paris is the perfect measure of his moral tone. I have a more perverse view. Somehow, every time Newman does the "right thing," the world becomes strange and unfamiliar to him. Every time he follows his conscience, he has to get out of town. Newman's boundless "good nature," then, is connected for me with strangeness and repression, the two most important elements in the literary and psychological fantastic. The American is generally treated as a formally divided work, which begins realistically enough and ends in a flurry of events drawn from the popular romance and supernatural thriller: a duel, a gloomy chateau (the Bellegardes' country-estate, Fleurières), arranged marriages (Claire's marriage to M. de Cintré; her engagement to Newman), murder in the family, secret messages , a double agent (Mrs. Bread), and the like. Critics are fond of lining the realistic features up on the side of Newman, America, and our notoriously practical character; the melodrama and intrigue get associated with the snobbish and protective Bellegardes, the "Old World," aristocratic decadence, and the deviousness of "polite" society. But like most of the other apparently clear oppositions between good and evil in The American, this crucial distinction between America and Europe does not hold up under close examination. Volume 8 79 Number 2 The Henry James Review Winter, 1987 Newman's past is as murky and curious as the Bellegardes'. We know nothing of his parents, the place of his birth, the real source or extent of his fortune, or much else about his experience in America. He admits to telling "tall tales," having learned the style from cowboys out west. He can be as patronizing to Valentin, Tom Tristram, the Nioches, the young Marquise (Urbain's wife) as the Bellegardes are toward him. He is appalled that Claire's mother and older brother might "use" their "authority" to convince Claire to break off her engagement with him, and he generally relates the Bellegardes' aristocratic pretensions to their lust for power and control. Variously, however, he promises to take Claire, Valentin, and Mrs. Bread to America with him (not one of them will ever go), and he promises to remake the fortune of the Nioches...