American Writers in Europe

1850 to the Present

F. Asya

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137340023
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

These essays explore the impartial critical outlook American writers acquired through their experiences in Europe since 1850. Collectively, contributors reveal how the American writer's intuitive sense of freedom, coupled with their feeling of liberation from European influences, led to intellectual independence in the literary works they produced.

1

THE SEARCH FOR LEGITIMACY IN NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS’S PAUL FANE

Udo Nattermann

In 1856, the New England poet, editor, and travel writer Nathaniel Parker Willis published Paul Fane; or, Parts of a Life Else Untold, a slightly autobiographical romance about the adventures of an American artist in Florence. Willis hoped that his first and, as it turned out, only novel would be a success, but neither in his own time nor thereafter has the book enjoyed much appreciation; in fact, it has been almost forgotten. This is quite unfortunate because Willis’s text significantly departs from the many other international novels of the nineteenth century. Most are decidedly pro-American tracts, like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s somewhat moralistic The Marble Faun (1860) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-Catholic Agnes of Sorrento (1962); some, like Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1869) and William Dean Howells’s A Foregone Conclusion (1875), strike a more tolerant and sympathetic note about the Old World; and Henry James’s works often tip the value scales toward European societies. Paul Fane follows a different trajectory because the narrative’s ambiguity and inconclusiveness call into question the very search for legitimacy—of self and country—and thus undermine the nationalistic ambitions of transatlantic fiction.

American narratives about Europe were cultural expressions of nationalistic rivalries, literary exercises in justifying the existence of the young republic and in convincing audiences on both sides of the Atlantic of America’s superiority. This is why international fiction emerged at the end of the Napoleonic Wars when the Old World became safe and accessible to American travelers, why it peaked when transatlantic tourism exploded after the Civil War, and why it lost momentum after the Second World War when the United States achieved superpower status. To be sure, postwar American authors, from the late John Hersey to the contemporary Ward Just, have continued to deal with the transatlantic relationship, but it no longer occupies a central place in cultural debates. America and Europe have moved closer to each other. Nowadays, disagreements usually concern particular policy issues, but they rarely rise to the level of sharp differences in principles. In the context of these historical developments, Willis’s Paul Fane holds an exceptional position because it offers an early, radically skeptical assessment of the international theme.

Critical views of the novel have hitherto failed to notice this radicalism of Paul Fane. Half a century ago, in “The Rise of the International Novel,” Christof Wegelin defined the subgenre as consisting of realistic fictional narratives depicting social conflicts based on the differences between Europe and America. The international stories of Howells, James, and Wharton typify the subgenre, Wegelin argued, and he pointed out that Paul Fane is informed by “the social concern of later international fiction” and that the text “contains minor motifs anticipating the early James” (309). Especially important for Wegelin is the theme of international marriage—indeed crucial to Paul Fane—because it foregrounds “social involvement” (307). As a result of these genre considerations, Wegelin is willing to regard Paul Fane as worthy of attention, but then he puts Willis clearly in his place when comparing his novel with James’s The American (1877):

In James, nobility lies in moral character; Willis, less radical and less consistent, seems to accept birth or “blood” as one criterion of worth even while condemning snobbery. Add to this the difference between the points of view from which the stories are told and you have a measure of the authors’ comparative sophistications, social as well as artistic. James is detached from his American; Willis projects a good deal of himself into his. Hence, though an idealization of the American type, Newman is recognizable as a rounded character; Fane has something of the puppet who makes the motions while his master speaks. (309)

Wegelin observes in James’s work a consistency and well-roundedness of character, a distant point of view, and an overall subtlety. In contrast, he looks upon Paul Fane’s self-contradictions and rough edges of character as evidence of Willis’s artistic weaknesses, not as part and parcel of a perhaps radically different perspective on the international theme.

A little over a decade ago, in Sentiment and Celebrity: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Literary Fame, Thomas Baker devoted a few paragraphs of his book-length study of Willis’s career to Paul Fane, and acknowledged that its author was quite daring because “he—like other early merchandisers of so-called private experience—inevitably walked a fine line between arousing interest and provoking scandal” (45). Baker is correct in recognizing Willis’s gossipy writing style and appeal to popular taste, but then reads the novel’s ending as a conventional endorsement of American nationalism. Commenting on the hero’s return to the United States at the end of the romance, Baker points out that Paul Fane

affirmed his democratic impulses and essential Americanism. . . . That is, as Willis now saw it, the possibility of being judged by “simple individual opinion, without class condescension, class servility, or class prejudice,” appeared to be “American only.” Doubtless this was special pleading, but coming from one who had long aspired to be numbered among the better sort (at home and abroad), it was at least a start on the road to Damascus. (185)

Baker concedes that Willis was doing some “special pleading” for Paul Fane, who is elitist and egalitarian at the same time, but this contradiction does not prevent Baker from considering the narrative’s closure as nationalistic. His unambiguous understanding of the ending of the novel disregards the fact that Paul Fane himself admits that “it has not turned out to be as much of a ‘romance’ as was expected” (Willis 402). Baker overlooks the ending’s somber tone, which is an aspect of the novel’s critical edge and radical quality.

Recently, in “Self-Abasement and Republican Insecurity: Paul Fane in Its Political Context,” David Grant has offered the first in-depth analysis of Paul Fane, a very instructive New Historicist interpretation that places Willis’s romance within the debates over slavery in antebellum America. Grant reads the novel as homology: the American’s encounter with the Old World reflects the relationship between Northern Republicans and Southern aristocrats before the Civil War. Paul Fane wants to marry the beautiful Sybil Paleford, but when he paints an attractive portrait of his rival, the British Arthur Ashly, Sybil decides to reject Paul Fane and to become the wife of the wealthy Englishman instead. Thus, the American is complicit in his own romantic failure by making the English gentleman appear genuine in the eyes of Sybil. This, Grant argues, mirrors the behavior of Northern Republicans, who were complicit in increasing the power of the Southern aristocracy, for example, by returning slaves who had escaped to the North to their owners in the South. Grant concludes that Willis provides in his novel a “debunking of aristocratic power” that was “driving home to Northerners their contribution to a system that they had long seen as separate from their own sociopolitical responses” (463). Thus, Grant emphasizes the politically controversial nature of Paul Fane, though he also admits that the peculiar institution is not mentioned in the text by a single word. As he puts it, Willis is “evading the slavery issue altogether” (466).

None of these critical appraisals focuses on the central theme of Paul Fane, the concept of natural aristocracy, that is, the hero’s attempt at justifying the basis of his own identity and that of his nation-state vis-à-vis other forms of legitimization. Wegelin is interested in the book not in its own right but primarily because it meets his gold standard for the transatlantic novel and reinforces his admiration for Henry James. Baker concentrates not on the text of Paul Fane but on Willis’s life. Grant reads the narrative not so much as international fiction but rather as a kind of national allegory. Wegelin sees Willis as less radical than James because he uses presumably higher standards of moral character, Baker regards Willis as provocative in style but conventional in message, and Grant views Willis as preoccupied with American domestic politics.

Yet Paul Fane is also an international novel in which the hero searches for legitimacy at home and abroad, thereby offering an intriguing fictional meditation on the struggles for power. It is Willis’s reflection on different forms of power, whose respective claims to legitimacy clash in the text’s fictional unfolding of character, rhetoric, and plot. Negotiating various notions of legitimate power, which cannot be reconciled with each other, the narrative ends inconclusively when the hero finds himself in the same situation as at the beginning of his sojourn. This circularity of the romance is the inevitable result of the skepticism inscribed in the tale: the transatlantic rivalry cannot be resolved in favor of either America or Europe since not only the idea of natural aristocracy, but also all other attempts at justifying power remain contradictory and therefore problematic. Herein resides the radicalism of Paul Fane.

Willis’s narrative reflects the intricacy of power relationships as analyzed by Michel Foucault in his oeuvre, especially in his short piece “The Subject and Power” (1982). Less sociological study than broad historical essay, the text deals with the significance of the topic of power, its concrete manifestations in society, and the challenges it poses for the scholar. Departing from traditional approaches, Foucault proposes “taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point” (128), and sets up a basic distinction:

Generally, it can be said that there are three types of struggles: against forms of domination (ethnic, social, and religious); against forms of exploitation that separate individuals from what they produce; or against that which ties the individual to himself and submits him to others in this way (struggles against subjection [assujettissement], against forms of subjectivity and submission). (130)

Now, Foucault emphasizes that these theoretically distinguishable power struggles form in reality “complex and circular relations” (131), that in a way “power as such does not exist” (134), and that it “designates relationships between ‘partners’” (135). He describes such conflicts not as simple dualistic battles between powerful victimizers and powerless victims, but as “a set of actions upon other actions” or “a management of possibilities” (138). Foucault then concludes that power struggles occur between free participants whose relationship should not be conceived of as “an essential antagonism” but as “a permanent provocation” (139). This unique conceptualization of power struggles as the “complicated interplay” (139) of actions among free subjects well describes Willis’s international novel, whose characters—in personality, language, and behavior—find themselves entangled in a mesh of ambiguities and contradictions.

The titular hero of Willis’s narrative is a young painter from a pious Bostonian family. At a party in his hometown, he meets a very wealthy English lady by the name of Mildred Ashly who, by looking at him in a supercilious manner, insults his republican self-esteem and seems to intimate that he is of inferior human rank. To find his true identity, Paul Fane defies the will of his authoritarian father and moves to Florence, Italy, where he begins his painting career in order to assess his artistic capabilities, and to find out whether he is a refined person worthy of society’s respect. In addition to three members of the Ashly family, Paul Fane socializes with the retired English Colonel Paleford, his wife, and their beautiful daughter, Sybil, with whom he falls in love. Sybil, however, marries the arrogant Arthur Ashly, Mildred’s brother. Although Paul Fane becomes romantically involved with other attractive women, among them the eccentric Italian Princess C—, and enjoys the close friendship of other men, especially his artist-colleague Bosh Blivins and the Englishman Tetherly, he eventually decides to return to the United States. Disgusted with the European class system, he settles back into American life and marries his old sweetheart, Mary Evenden.

Throughout the romance, the hero maintains a belief in power based on natural aristocracy. Early in the narrative, the reader learns that for Paul Fane “the thirst to know his relative rank of nature—to gauge his comparative human claim to respect and affection—to measure himself by his own jealous standard, with those whom he should find first in the world’s most established appreciation—was . . . like a fever in his blood” (20). He wants to find out his position among what he calls “Nature’s best” (22) and to determine the quality of his “clay” (22, 20, 179, 182, 192, 379)—the naturalistic metaphor repeatedly used in the narrative. Paul Fane subscribes to the idea that, notwithstanding men’s essential equality, human beings differ significantly with respect to their innate faculties, which result in varying levels of abilities: people are more or less talented, virtuous, intelligent, graceful, and free. He believes that he belongs to the well-endowed part of mankind, that the future of America depends on natural aristocrats like him, and that his sojourn in Europe will prove this. Historically, he reflects the fears of the patrician class in the wake of the 1828 presidential election—the very period, the early 1830s, in which the events of the novel take place—when the new Jacksonian Democracy weakened the political power of property holders and led to a democratization of American society. In short, Paul Fane’s social standing is at risk.

The principal challenge to legitimate power based on natural aristocracy comes from Paul Fane’s encounter with the members of the English Ashly family, who embody the prerogatives of high social class. In the United States, as Grant correctly points out, this class consisted of the Southern slaveholders. When Paul Fane meets Mildred Ashly, she looks at him with such a “cold grey eye” (17) that he is stunned, and her demeanor bespeaks “no recognition of him as an equal” (19). This injury to his republican sensibilities prompts Paul Fane to leave America and to assess his rank among the people of Europe. He finds himself in conflicts that Foucault, in “The Subject and Power,” describes as “struggles that question the status of the individual. On the one hand, they assert the right to be different and underline everything that makes individuals truly individual. On the other hand, they attack everything that separates the individual, breaks his links with others, splits up community life, forces the individual back on himself, and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way” (129). Paul Fane believes in a superiority rooted in his nature even as he objects to the Ashly family’s class-based sense of entitlement that, he feels, isolates and denigrates him. He also resents the privileges that come with their wealth and give them a comparative advantage over other people, including artists like himself, who depend on the financial patronage of affluent members of society. Thus, his personal transatlantic experience turns into a kind of test of the legitimacy of the American Revolution, which was fought in part to abolish primogeniture, that is, power rooted in heredity. Paul Fane encounters the ambiguous power relations that Foucault calls “domination” and “exploitation,” from which the American painter wants to escape yet also benefit.

Paul Fane’s status anxiety and doubts about political legitimacy are compounded by his authoritarian father, who personifies a transcendent foundation of power and who entangles his son in what Foucault designates as a “religious” form of domination. The elder Fane is a “stern and orthodox hardware merchant [to whom] the profession of an artist was . . . learned by studies verging on immorality” (Willis 11). The father wants his son to become a preacher or businessman, and he is so opposed to his son’s artistic ambitions that he cannot even calmly discuss them with him. Paul Fane hides his painting practice from his father and, supported by his mother, eventually leaves the United States for Europe. Here, the father disappears from the story about his estranged son; the elder Fane is a representative of a bygone era, the old pious America whose raison d’être was the transcendent Heavenly Father of the Christian faith. In sharp contrast, Paul Fane belongs to a rationalistic postrevolutionary America that has broken with the past in crucial ways.

Apart from conventional notions of legitimization such as nature, class, and transcendence, Willis also considers the principle of popular appeal, which is woven into Paul Fane through the rhetoric of gossip. Willis showed some courage, since no writer before him had employed a gossipy style to deal with the international theme. Some mid-nineteenth-century readers, though familiar with tales of wild adventure, were not yet used to the liberties Willis took, and a few reviewers heavily criticized him for his treatment of presumably indecent private matters, calling him “that most assiduous of flatterers and least delicate of gossips” and charging him with “conceited vulgarity” (qtd. in Beers 133, 186). But time was on his side, and we now know with hindsight that audiences became relatively permissive and the popular demand for frivolous reading material increased. Moreover, the tourism industry started to flourish after the Civil War, travel accounts about the Old World proliferated, and readers developed a special taste for news about and insight into the lives of celebrities and European aristocrats. Pau...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 The Search for Legitimacy in Nathaniel Parker Willis’s Paul Fane
• 2 “God permits the tares to grow with the wheat”: E. D. E. N. Southworth in Great Britain, 1859–1862
• 3 Gertrude Atherton’s Europe: Portal or Looking Glass?
• 4 The London Making of a Modernist: John Cournos in Babel
• 5 Toward a Brighter Vision of “American Ways and Their Meaning”: Edith Wharton and the Americanization of Europe After the First World War
• 6 American Writers in Paris Exploring the “Unknown” in Their Own Time: Edith Wharton’s In Morocco and Diane Johnson’s Lulu in Marrakech
• 7 “Homeland strangeness”: American Poets in Spain, 1936–1939
• 8 Fulbright Poems: Locating Europe and America in the Cold War
• 9 Allen Ginsberg and the Beats in Literary Paris, or Apollinaire through the Door of Ginsberg’s Mind
• 10 Almost French: Food, Class, and Gender in the American Expatriate Memoir
• Notes on Contributors
• Index