Werbanowska 1

Marta Werbanowska

Dr. Marcus Singer

ENGG 234-01

27 February 2017

European Returns: Reading Henry James, T.S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway against the

American Romantic Tradition

One of the key tenets of American Romanticism was what Virginia Jackson refers to as

Emersons emphasis on American originality and genius and Walt Whitmans iconoclasm that

smashed American poetrys dependence on borrowed conventions (321, 326). Many writers of

that period, in particular those associated with or inspired by the Transcendentalist school of

thought, saw America as the land whose perceived geographical and historical newness offered

the possibility to break with the literary themes and traditions of Europe which they found to be

politically and aesthetically remote from their New World experiences. This quest for new

literary forms and a distinctly American diction was accompanied by the writers focus on the

landscapes and sceneries of the newly-formed republic. Instead of exploring the intellectual,

social, and cultural heritage of the Old World, the American Romantics preferred to celebrate the

Adamic individuals presence in the natural setting of the vast and indigenously American nature.

However, the rapid progress of modernization in all spheres of life that permeated not only

America, but the global West from late nineteenth century onwards, necessitated a shift of

paradigms that governed the writers understanding of the relations between nature, society, and

the individual. In the wake of accelerated industrial developments, large-scale internal and global

military conflicts, and the emergence of the middle class as a distinct layer of society, American

authors after the Romantic period often turned to a more socially-oriented exploration of the
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transatlantic connections between Americans and the sociopolitical realities and cultural legacies

of Europe.
As the prominent literary scholar M. H. Abrams aptly observes, the cataclysm of the

bloody Civil War and the Reconstruction, followed by a burgeoning industrialism and

urbanization in the North, profoundly altered the American sense of itself (207); this ideological

reconfiguration inevitably brought about a shift in the modes of American artistic and literary

expression. Romanticism gave way to Realism as the dominant literary movement, and the

transcendental, individualistic, and nature-oriented idealism of the antebellum era was replaced

by the verisimilar, socially-conscious and seemingly objective descriptions of the quotidian lives

of urbanite middle and upper classes. In the new post-war, post-industrial American landscape,

indigenous nature no longer represented the plantations of God [where] a decorum and sanctity

reign (Emerson 9) in the context of which Americans could seek to define themselves. Instead

of in the previously pristine wilderness and pastoral countryside, the exploration of a national

identity was now conducted either in the rapidly developing urban setting or through the prism of

a journey to Europe. While the cityscape reflected the inevitably social (if only due to the

condensed space that necessitates frequent, if often shallow, interpersonal encounters) nature of

the life of the post-bellum American subject, the transatlantic return to the roots provided the

grounds for an examination of the idea of American social and cultural newness.
Henry Jamess 1878 novella Daisy Miller: A Study is one of the most famous analyses

of the contrast between the American and European social norms of its time in the context of the

newly-emerging tourist industry. The story follows the two encounters between Frederick

Winterbourne, a young yet seasoned American tourist currently residing in Switzerland, and the

family of Annie Daisy Miller, a wealthy young girl from upstate New York on her grand tour

of Europe. Winterbourne, the central narrative consciousness of the story, finds Daisy to look
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extremely innocent yet act deucedly sociable, and characterizes her as unsophisticated; . . .

only a pretty American flirt (17, 18) early into their acquaintance. His Europeanized, upper-

class expectations regarding gender and social norms are confounded by Daisys apparent

disregard for the strict moral and behavioral conventions followed by most American expatriates

in the Old Continent. The essence of Americanness is thus explored through its contrast with the

European tradition, culture, and etiquette. In Daisy Miller, American responses to this heritage

are limited to extremes: one the one hand, there are the morally judgmental, almost Puritan in

their prudishness, high-society women such as Mrs. Costello and Mrs. Walker who, while

residing abroad, make a point . . . of studying European society (61) and, ironically, enforcing

its social norms on one another with strictness exceeding that of any Europeans they meet. On

the other end of the spectrum are the little American girls that are uncultivated in the social

mores of the high-pedigree, Europhile society which sees them as an inscrutable combination of

audacity and innocence (24, 54). Ultimately, James suggests his allegiance with the American

freshness and naivety of Daisy Miller rather than with the stifling conventions of the Eurocentric

Victorian propriety. While it may be an ideological continuation of the Romantic declarations of

the Adamic American exceptionality, this conclusion was no longer reached through interaction

with Americas indigenous nature alone, and a European detour became a necessary path for

James to explore, analyze, and ultimately assert an American identity vis--vis the old customs of

the Old Continent.

The American writers dialogue with the European heritage continued after the Realist

period into the Modernist era; however, early twentieth-century works by authors such as T.S.

Eliot expressed much more indebtedness to the cultural traditions of the Old Continent as a

source of modern identity-formation than James would allow for. In his seminal 1919 manifesto

Tradition and the Individual Talent, Eliot famously states that poetic innovation, while
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laudable, does not constitute a value in itself but only in an informed conversation with the

whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of [the

poets] own country (37). To American Modernists, immersion in the cultural canon of Europe

thus becomes a necessary precondition for ones individual excellence. Eliots own 1915 poem

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock illustrates this search for the modern artistic as well as

personal identity through the involvement with the European tradition in the persona of Prufrock,

a lonely and insecure middle-aged man alienated by the shallowness of social interactions and

the depressing half-deserted streets and sawdust restaurants of the modern city. On the

poems surface, the European artistic tradition seems inadequate and irrelevant to Prufrocks

twentieth-century search for identity, as suggested by the lyrics empty refrain about the socialite

women who come and go / Talking of Michaelangelo and the speakers own assertion that he

is not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. However, particularly in the light of Eliots

theoretical assertions of the primacy of the poets historical sense . . . of the timeless as well as

of the temporal (Tradition 37), the effectiveness of Prufrocks monologue comes from the

poems involvement with the predominantly European artistic and literary legacy, with the many

formal (the very form of dramatic monologue being borrowed from Robert Brownings My Last

Duchess) and textual allusions in the poem providing the reader with guidelines for

understanding Prufrocks modern discontents within a wider historical context. The Modernist

American subject may be fragmented and incomplete, but the awareness of his cultural heritage

offers at least a sense of possibility of restoring the social and moral order unsettled by the rapid

sociopolitical and technological changes that took place at the turn of the centuries.
The unprecedented, global-scale cataclysm of World War I, brought about a shift in the

dominant aesthetic paradigms of the American Modernism. According to Michael Levenson, the

war and its aftermath revived the question of formalism and representation in a paradoxical
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manner: while many authors returned to realist modes of representation to reflect the immense

violence of the war, the aberrant post-war reality often appeared as strange as the shapes of

experimental art (226). This combination of realist verisimilitude and modernist fragmentation

is vividly present in Ernest Hemingways 1925 In Our Time, a collection of short stories whose

American-born characters fluctuate between America and Europe in search of a resolution to the

trauma of war. While the actual horrors of combat take place outside of America it is in the

Turkish city of Smyrna where women held babies dead for six days and the Greek soldiers

dumped [mutilated baggage animals] into the shallow water (11, 12), and in Hungary where

the pro-fascist Horthys men had done some bad things to a young communist activist (81)

the return to homeland does not offer a restoration of the imagined prewar order to American

subjects tainted by the violent experience of war. Nick Adams, the protagonist of the collections

closing story in two parts, The Big Two-Hearted River, attempts to erase the trauma of the

frontline from his memory through an almost obsessive return to the fishing rituals of his youth,

a desire to feel all the old feeling and leave everything behind, the need for thinking, the need

to write, other needs (134). In the spirit of Transcendentalist idealism, Nick seeks the purity and

innocence of his prewar self in the familiar indigenous countryside, an idyllic riverside setting

away from the modern civilization. His thoughts, however, inevitably return to the friends with

whom he had been supposed to go fishing again next summer but whom he lost during the war

(141). Hemingways deceptively simple narrative thus shatters the Romantic illusion of the

Edenic, restorative power of nature and American insularity to the social corruption and political

conflicts that take place in Europe; instead, the author suggests that the postwar American

identity will forever remain marked by the confluence of the forces of history, global power

struggles, and the sometimes horrifying consequences of modern technological progress.

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American Romanticism, often referred to as the American Renaissance and the first

definable literary movement in the countrys history, reflected the new nations confidence and

faith in the bright future that awaited the citizens of the newly-independent Republic. The critical

historical events of first the Civil War and then World War I, the rapid developments in sciences

and technology, and the social and cultural transformations that followed brought about a sense

of disillusionment and a realization of the essentially utopian nature of the Romantic vision of

America as an exceptional land of liberatory individualism, untainted by the evils of the Old

Continent. The increasingly globalized world of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

necessitated new literary responses to the shifting sociocultural realities and Americas role in the

modern world. Authors from the realist and modernist periods responded to the foundational era

of American letters that was Romanticism in various ways, from Jamess continued belief in the

power of the American newness to Eliots rejection of a tradition-less mode of writing and,

eventually, Hemingways disillusionment with both American and European heritage. However,

regardless of their individual attitudes, all these writers realized that the process of developing an

American identity cannot escape a transatlantic conversation with the social conventions, cultural

legacies, and political developments of Europe.

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Works Cited
Abrams, M.H. Periods of American Literature. A Glossary of Literary Terms (7th edition).

Boston: Heinle and Heinle, 1999. 204-10. Print.

Eliot, T.S. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. 1915. Poetry.com. 20 Feb. 2017. Web.
---. Tradition and the Individual Talent. 1919. Perspecta 19 (1982): 36-42. JSTOR. 19 Feb.

2017.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Hollister:

YOGeBooks, 2014. 1-58. YOGeBooks. Web. 20 Feb. 2017.

Hemingway, Ernest. In Our Time. 1925. New York: Scribner, 1996. Print.
Jackson, Virginia. American Romanticism, Again. Studies in Romanticism 55.3 (2016): 319-

346. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Feb. 2017.

James, Henry. Daisy Miller: A Study. 1878. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Librarys

Electronic Text Center, 1999. University of Virginia Library. Web. 20 Feb. 2017.
Levenson, Michael. Modernism. New Haven: Yale UP, 2011. Print.