In the Company of Books: Literature and Its "Classes" in Nineteenth-Century America

5. Innocence Abroad

134 Chapter Five Innocence Abroad O my country, may you not be judged by your travelling children! —Ella W. Thompson, Beaten Paths (1874) In December 1875, at the start of a publishing season that would witness keen interest in the already popular genres of travel writing, women’s fiction, and internationally themed literature, the Chicago house of Jansen, McClurg & Company released a new novella by a young author who was just beginning to explore the relationships among nationality,setting , and character that would become career-long interests. Described by the American Bookseller as “an extremely lively story of an extremely lively American girl living in Rome,”the narrative tells of a vivacious young woman who sparks first the affections and then the suspicions of a wellheeled American youth, who observes with puzzlement and dismay her unbecoming conduct toward an unsuitable Italian rival.Conscious that the nouvelle’s racy portrayal of the American girl abroad might vex its domestic audience, the American Bookseller cautioned that “most readers will call her [the eponymous protagonist] ‘fast”’ but went on to reassure the trade that the heroine’s “desperate flirtations will interest a large class of novel readers” (“New Books” 52). Two years later, when Henry James’s Daisy Miller: A Study sallied onto the scene, most readers and reviewers had likely forgotten Mae Madden: A Story1 by Mary Murdoch Mason, the “extremely lively” tale that prefigured James’s famous “invention” of the flighty American belle who runs afoul of the conventions and mores of her staid compatriots in Rome.2 The existence of a narrative that so closely parallels the setting, characterization ,plot,and theme of Daisy Miller points up the fact that in writing Daisy Miller, James situated his work at the epicenter of a popular literary mode of the 1870s: the narrative of the American woman abroad. For more than a generation, female readers and writers had exerted a powerful influence in the literary marketplace.3 Indeed,by 1850,the female audience had become the largest segment of the market for belles letters (Baym, Shape innocence abroad 135 17–18), and by the early 1870s women were producing nearly three-fourths of all the novels published in the United States (Coultrap-McQuin 2).Consequently , authors and publishers alike became increasingly attuned to the tastes and reading preferences of women readers,so that what had been,in the 1850s and earlier, a distinctly demarcated niche emerged as the dominant fictional mode.4 It was one that some male writers firmly embraced (Papashvily 50; Baym, Shape 13), with travel writing and polite fiction forming two of their most highly favored genres.5 The juxtaposition of Mae Madden and Daisy Miller illustrates how James, like Hawthorne and Howells, located his work at the intersection of those two highly fashionable spheres of literary activity, travel writing and women’s fiction—effectively “colonizing” a fictional form pioneered by European women such as Madame de Staël and Anna Jameson and subsequently adapted and incorporated by generations of American women writers.6 Indeed, fictional narratives of American women abroad constituted a subset of women’s fiction that men could participate in more easily than the traditional domestic novel, since they moved women out of the domestic sphere and into the broader world. Keenly aware of “the competition of the ‘lady-writers’” (The Bostonians 118), Henry James, as Alfred Habegger has shown, engaged throughout his career in “an appropriation, masterly and distorting, of American women’s fiction” (4). I argue that the motif of the American woman abroad afforded James a point of entry into a distinct niche market comprising a predominantly female, middle-class readership. A close reading of Mae Madden, within the context of contemporary accounts of American women in Europe, illustrates how, and to what end, James artfully—and artistically—rewrote this earlier version of the naive and feckless American girl running amok in Rome.7 s s s Critics and literary historians have long credited Henry James with the “invention”of the fictional motif of the American girl abroad.In 1903 Howells formally attributed to his friend this distinction when he asserted: Mr. James is not quite the inventor of the international novel, . . . but he is the inventor, beyond question, of the international American girl. He recognized and portrayed the innocently adventuring, unconsciously periculant American maiden, who hastened to efface herself almost as soon as she saw herself in that still flattering if a little mocking mirror, so that between two sojourns in Europe...