Imagining Italians: The Clash of Romance and Race in American Perceptions, 1880-1910

3. HENRY JAMES’S PICTURESQUE PEASANTS: HEROES OF ROMANCE OR MODERN MEN?

Chapter 3 HENRY JAMES’S PICTURESQUE PEASANTS: HEROES OF ROMANCE OR MODERN MEN? The fellow’s a bankrupt orange-monger, but he’s a treasure. —Henry James, “The Real Thing,” 1892 There is generally a rabble of infantile beggars at the door, pretty enough in their dusty rags, with their fine eyes and intense Italian smile, to make you forget your individual best to make these people, whom you like so much, unlearn their old vices. —Henry James, Italian Hours, 1909 Young Italy, preoccupied with its economical and political future, must be heartily tired of being admired for its eyelashes and its pose. —Henry James, Italian Hours, 1909 In 1904, Henry James returned to the United States from Europe, after a twenty-one-year absence, for an extended visit to his native land. The trip produced a series of seismic shocks for the sixty-one-year-old James. Big ugly factories, a society grasping for dollars and goods, and swarms of urban immigrants assaulted his senses. He encountered much in American society that was strikingly alien, in particular the Italian and Jewish immigrants he 87 88 IMAGINING ITALIANS saw (and often sought out) in New York City and other places in the Northeast . James’s reaction to the industrial growth, rampant materialism, and “new immigration” was a complex, subtly shaded one, as recorded in the highly idiosyncratic account of his homecoming, The American Scene (1907). At least one overriding theme stands out: Henry James as a stranger in a strange land, the prodigal son returned home to a country from which he has been dispossessed. In many cases, the dispossessors are the foreigners with whom James finds little possibility of communication. James often recoils from the American scene. He frets about the foreign element—what he calls the “alien”—and wonders what effect it will have on the country and on American national character. He speculates about America’s ability to assimilate these new immigrants. Many of the aliens that James encounters are Italians, immigrants from a land that James knew and loved so well. James had been acquainted with and written about Italians for decades, but these Italian immigrants were, for James, something quite different, something entirely alien, from the picturesque contadino of the Roman Campagna. James’s encounters with Italians in America are unsettling for him, characterized by a lack of any communication with them. That these Italians should appear as alien as the much less familiar—or more truly alien—Jews, Russians, and Slavs, whom James had not known in their native lands, speaks volumes about James’s complex relationship to Italian immigrants. James’s encounters with Italians in America raise fundamental questions about his relationships to Italy, Italians, and Italian Americans, and how those relationships ultimately help to shape and illuminate James’s relationships to America and Americans. Prior to The American Scene, the subjects of Italy, Americans in Italy, and Italians in Italy played varying roles in a significant portion of James’s fiction and travel sketches.1 In his fiction James almost always places his Italians in an imagined Italy. However, on at least two occasions James creates an Italian character that has ventured forth from his native land, in each case ending up in James’s own adopted home, England. The first Italian in England is Oronte, the young Italian model in James’s curious tale, “The Real Thing” (1892). He is followed by James’s most elaborated Italian character , Prince Amerigo of The Golden Bowl, published just a couple months after James arrived in the United States for his American scene tour. The Italian in America, then, was an entirely new theme for James, one that, coming as it did late in life, can be read against his earlier depictions of things and people Italian. One significant question is whether James saw the Italian in America as fundamentally different from the Italian in Italy. Had the Italian immigrant lost his color, as James suggests in The American Scene, or had this Italian simply taken on another less colorful color in the New World? To some extent, the colors of romance, so evident 89 HENRY JAMES’S PICTURESQUE PEASANTS in the travel essays of James’s Italian Hours and some of his fictional works, have been replaced by the grimy black and white of reality in The American Scene. However, were the Italians themselves so much changed, or was...