"Oh, the land's all right!": Landscape in James's American Scene

In most of James's fiction and travel writing, landscape is a setting for human activity, a stage set for a particularly important action or revelation or an aesthetic phenomenon. In The American Scene, James comes closer to an integrated environmental vision, incorporating nature, geography, history, social dynamics, and visual qualities in his view of the land. In the process he relates land and femininity, not as a pretext for male domination of either, but as a way of suggesting that the land be treated with the dignity due to the independent women in his later fiction.