Christopher Brown

American Literature
Fr. Robert Maguire
9 December 2008
The Tragedy of the Transatlantic American

The American, The American, and its American all share the common
attribute of naive hope, a post-Calvinistic (via Calvinism as practiced by the
Puritans) sense of potential instilled in every denizen of that great nation, a
grace equatable with their citizenship and inseparable from their colonialism.
This trait thrives until it enters the world at large—until the American leaves
his geographical hemisphere. When our American, Christopher Newman,
confronts the brazen stasis of Europe in American terms, he is thwarted by
powers insurmountable by his American commercial tactics. The clash of two
unbending cultural institutions ends in a stalemate, and the American
returns to America, in what seems a tragic failure of American aspiration.
When Newman’s commerce clashes with French aristocracy, “What has been
a realistic comedy of manners turns into a romantic tragedy of manners”
(Anderson 66). At the end, every one of Newman’s hopes for his European
venture have been dashed; his noble American ideals seem to have met
their demise. However, this is not James’s view; the Bellegardes’ triumph is
not the end of the story, though Newman’s retreat may conclude the plot.
Neither is Newman’s unflinching nobility the comic saving grace of an
otherwise lamentable denouement. The ending is tragic, but the tragedy
only proves the intractable persistence of American hope and the American’s
protean resilience when confronted by the degeneracy of the old world.
Christopher Newman is a tragic hero—too rich, too imperturbable to be
sympathized with perfectly by the reader. Edwin L. Burlingame, in a
contemporary review of The American writes, “It is not necessary that you
should feel when the persons of his story feel—only that you should see that
they are feeling. It is not needful that you should be in rapport with them,—
that when a bundle of nerves is laid bare you should feel each one tingle,
and when a glimpse of a passion is discovered you should be put in keen
enough sympathy with it to know the rest” (39). Newman may not have the
superhuman “tragic flaw” of Oedipus or King Lear, but this is a convention
disposed of in the modern world, as Arthur Miller writes, “The flaw, or crack
in the character, is really nothing–and need be nothing–but his inherent
unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a
challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status” (144). When, for the
sake of art, Noémie Nioche, reveals to Newman that her reproductions are
actually quite distasteful, she tells him so “Because it irritates me to see a
clever man blunder” (James 63). Just as his naivety irritates her, Newman is
sure to make all onlookers squirm with awkward discomfort at his gullibility
and powerlessness in the hands of the French aristocracy. Newman hovers
just on the border of heroic status, but eventually loses sympathy at the end,
as he must for the tragedy to have achieve its catharsis.
Robert Dupree, writing of Aristotle’s “Tragic Bias,” states that “for
Aristotle, the tragic perspective was not one of many possible ways of seeing
reality; it was the only way of seeing it” (“Aristotle” 24). Henry James’s
unmistakeable prosaic style represents his preoccupation with precision and
devoted depiction of reality as it is, unromanticized. A contemporary review
of The American points out that James seems to sit “beside his characters,
observing and delineating their qualities and actions with marvelous skill, yet
apparently untouched by any sympathy with them… Every character is cut
like an intaglio; the outlines are so sharp and clear; and they are never
allowed to blur” (“New York Tribune” 21). Stylistically, James’s concern for an
unromanticized view of the world is clear; it follows that he would choose
tragedy to present an American’s blunder in Europe as realistically as he can.
Comedy has two aspects, however; remedial conclusion and communal
bonding. Obviously, Newman fails the first, and an inspection of comedy will
reveal that The American is not comic in the second sense. Louise Cowan, in
her introduction to The Terrain of Comedy, states “The middle stage of
comedy is…the purgatorial realm. Its mood is pathos: in it the community
hopes and waits, powerless to save itself” (13). In this category she lists a
wide range of authors, from Aristophanes to Jane Austen, Samuel Beckett,
and Henry James. She proceeds to say that in this realm, “people, though
lost and in need of delivery from something outside themselves, are not
really wicked” (13). Yet, in The American, Newman finds no external
delivery; he is crushed in his clash with another culture, and the change, if
one is generous, materializes only in Newman’s slight loss of naivety and
recognition of boundaries. In Dante’s Purgatorio, the souls are upward-bound
—paradisiacally inclined. Austen’s novels culminate with everyone happily
getting married, at least everyone the reader ends up caring about. Yet in
Newman’s case, the marriage fails entirely, and he returns to America as
alone as he left it.
Even if Cowan’s categorization is expanded to extend Henry James over
both purgatorial and infernal comedy, The American still fails as comedy. The
work has many of the traits of infernal comedy: “The community has
accepted its fallen condition and cynically attributes its corruption to ‘the
way of the world,’” which seems to describe Newman’s experience of the
French aristocracy, although France is even more brazen, not admitting to its
own corruption (Cowan 11). Even Claire de Cintré plays a fitting role: “The
pretty girl… is either absent or, if she does enter the boundaries of this dark
region, victimized” (Cowan 11). The setting is wholly hellish, “Yet there is
usually a reckoning, in which the community is reaffirmed, even if in the
sternest possible way; justice is meted out to offenders, and the innocent are
vindicated” (Cowan 12). This “reckoning” is absolutely absent from The
American; Newman returns home without the wife who would be his
vindication, while the Bellegardes remain unpunished, and unpunishable (as
Newman burns the slip of paper) for their murderous crime. In Dante’s
Inferno, the comedy is to be found primarily within Dante the Pilgrim; for all
the suffering souls, hell is beyond tragedy. Perhaps the community of the
demons presents the second sense of comedy, but Newman never achieves
even that sense of camaraderie; indeed, Newman’s only reciprocal friend in
France, Valentin, dies in a duel, leaving Newman utterly alone.
The American must be tragic. Christopher Newman embarks on a
transatlantic odyssey, seeking aestheticism and a wife, complements to his
megalomaniacal wealth, only to be thwarted, exiled to his homeland, having
accomplished none of his original goals. A contemporary article in the British
Quarterly Review proclaims that “Only a passage of [Newman’s] life is
narrated, and that is a tragic failure” (“The American: Strong, Relentless
Realism” 41). Indeed, the entire trip accomplishes next to nothing, as a critic
in the Edinburgh Review states: “The unheralded melodrama of its close is a
commentary on the criticism that, whatever may happen in Mr. James’s
novels, nothing comes of it.” (“The American: Twenty-five Years Later” 42).
Newman is Aristotle’s perfect tragic hero, “one who neither is superior
to us in virtue and justice, nor undergoes a change to misfortune because of
vice or wickedness, but because of some great error, and who is one of those
people with a great reputation and good fortune” (Aristotle 16). Newman is
not a different breed of person, but he is a little luckier than most people.
The plot also subscribes to Aristotle’s paradigm: “[it] involves a change not
from misfortune to good fortune, but conversely, from good fortune to
misfortune, not because of wickedness but because of a great error by a
person like the one mentioned, or by a better person rather than a worse
one.” (16). “Tragedy,” Aristotle continues, “is a representation of people who
are better than we are,” and later notes how tragic characters are “painted”
“finer than they are” (20). A contemporary review makes the link explicit:
“Every paragraph … is clear cut and incisive as a Dutch picture;” the same
review also states, “His characters … are types, with a certain exaggeration,
necessary for impression” (“The American: Strong, Relentless Realism” 41).
James goes a little beyond realistic depiction, using embellishments to bring
his narrative into a state that resembles the slight exaggerations of the old
Greek tragic stage.
The American is the first of Aristotle’s four types of tragedies (all of
which are structured by “complication” and “solution”): it is the complex
tragedy, “the whole of which is reversal and recognition” (23-4). The primary
praxis, or monumental action of The American’s denouement is Newman’s
recognition of his mistake in playing France by American rules. Or in terms of
Arthur Miller’s tragic flaws, the driving force is Newman’s indignation at
France’s superiority, and his righteous American pride. Reading Aristotle,
Dupree declares that the “muthos”—the “plot or story”—of tragedy is “the
most important, since without it the tragedy falls apart” (“Tragic Bias” 30). In
The American, we have the confrontation of different myths in a grand
cultural sense, the aspiring American against the aristocratic French.
The slight disconnect from Newman allows the tragedy to work its
catharsis, which does not arise from his nobility or grace toward the
Bellegardes. This is important because his act of forgiveness is neither
forgiving, selfless, just, loving or anything noble but a businessman’s regard
for efficiency. It is not forgiving, as one reviewer writes, “He did not keep the
secret. He told a gossipy woman that the paper which he burned in her
presence contained something which would ‘damn them if it were known’”
(“From The Catholic World” 408). It is not selfless: “he used her crime only as
a threat for the furtherance of his personal ends, and when he found that this
could do him no good he destroyed the murdered man’s statement” (Ibid.
408). Nor is it just: “If Newman believed Mme. de Bellegarde guilty of the
heinous offence charged, it was his duty to place the fact in the hands of the
police” (Ibid. 407). It is not loving, for love does not give up as quickly as
Newman does. The nobility turns out only to be that “A good American, a
shrewd businessman, does not indulge in waste effort” (Edel 421).
What this leaves us with, Aristotle says, is pity and fear: “Tragedy is a
representation of a serious, complete action… accomplishing by means of
pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions” (7). In reading of Newman’s
failed journey to Europe, the American is justified in his zealous love for his
country and disgusted by the prejudiced, prideful French. Although Henry
James is, in one sense, equivocal, the American citizen reading the book
would curse France, mock Newman for his incorrigible persistence, and
achieve the tragic relief that borders on schadenfreude. Because of
Newman’s distance from the reader, the fear is not overwhelming. Tragedy is
cathartic because of the singularity of the hero’s tragic flaw—i.e. Newman’s
indignation that France is not America—few Americans would be so gullible.
Dupree writes “Mimesis or imitation gives pleasure, even when the thing
imitated would be fearful, disagreeable, or disgusting if experienced in
itself.” (Dupree, “Tragic Bias” 27). In a letter to the editor William Howells,
Henry James wrote that “It was cruelly hard for N. to lose, certainly… I
suspect it is the tragedies in life that say more to my imagination” (qtd. in
Anderson 41-2). James was living in France as he wrote The American
serially, and it is likely the work is partly representative of his own
resentment at France’s unreceptivity, as he did not have even the prodigious
wealth that was Newman’s entrance fee. In this respect of tragedy’s
cathartic effect, the work is an exultation of America’s openness.
The work is not comprehensively tragic. Much hilarity ensues from the
clash between businessman and aristocracy, as Richard Poirier recounts in
The Comic Sense of Henry James. The comedy of The American, he writes, is
“almost entirely social satire,” and “the full force of James’ comedy, his
broadest humour and most emphatic satire, is saved for those people, like
the Bellegardes, who hamper the impulse towards ‘freedom’ of James’s
heroes and heroines” (Poirier 47, 56-7). Yet the humour is sometimes at
Newman’s expense; Poirier uses the fantastic instance of one discussion of
Newman’s family:
‘You have some sisters?’ asked Madame de Bellegarde.
‘Yes, two sisters. Splendid women !’
‘I hope that for them the hardships of life commenced less early.’
‘They married very early, if you call that a hardship, as girls do in our
Western country. One of them is married to the owner of the largest
india-rubber house in the West.’
‘Ah, you make houses also of india-rubber?’ inquired the marquise.
‘You can stretch them as your family increases,’ said young Madame
de Bellegarde, who was muffling herself in a long white shawl.
Newman indulged in a burst of hilarity, and explained that the house in
which his brother-in-law lived was a large wooden structure, but that
he manufactured and sold india-rubber on a colossal scale. (qtd. in
Poirier 75)
But, Poirier interprets, “Newman’s burst of hilarity is not our own”; Newman
laughs at the Bellegardes’ pretended ignorance, while we “laugh at the
sophisticated play of mind, the vaudevillian inventiveness by which the
Bellegardes not unpleasantly make fun of him” (75-6). The comedy is not
superficial, yet even though it reveals “the essential and profound
differences between Newman and the Bellegardes,” the tragic plot is
certainly the more powerful of the two effects, and it is serious: “The
melodrama in The American is not satirized at any point, as it continually is
in [James’s previous novel]” (76, 45).
There is more to tragedy than catharsis, however. In “Alternative
Destinies: The Conundrum of Modern Tragedy,” Robert Dupree writes that in
the late nineteenth century, there was a outburst of activity among
playwrights “to recover the spirit of ancient Greek tragedy,” following the
publication of Nietzsche’s work, The Birth of Tragedy (273). Opera adopted
tragedy and changed it drastically through its overarching control of the
performance arts. In Shakespeare’s time, Dupree writes, there appeared a
“new kind of play” called a “love tragedy” that usurped the communal
aspect of tragedy (278). The change that the “love tragedy” brings is “an
emphasis on the individual and the psychological rather than on the
collective and communal as the source of moral value” (278-9). Dupree
reiterates the divide thus: “Greek tragedy was about the external, public
world of the polis; modern drama, beginning especially with the opera, is
interested in giving us access to the innermost emotions of the individual”
(285). Tragedy has become perverted by music biased toward pleasing the
audience, and a “misconception” concerning true tragedy has arisen: “that
tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism” (Miller 146). In contrast (and in
one of the most uplifting passages of literary criticism ever written), Dupree
concludes that tragedy has lost none of its power, even though it proclaims
hope in the modern world instead of cathartic distraction in the ancient one:
Tragedy is about the unforeseen consequences of a human action that,
though seemingly slight in significance and impact, leads to a
catastrophic outcome, thus revealing the uncertainty of human self-
understanding and inability of man to control his own ultimate end in a
cosmos more complex and more powerful than his mind can grasp or
his ingenuity can address. It has always stood as a sobering reminder
that man can and will go wrong, no matter how hard he tries to avoid
error. I suspect few people today would find such a view of human fate
unreasonable of unrealistic, since past and present have given us too
many instances of such tragic outcomes for us to ignore their
likelihood. Tragedy is the persuasive presentation of such a probable
result of man’s efforts to overcome his acknowledged limitations.
However, the consequence of the tragic vision is–in accord with its own
paradoxical structure–not to persuade us to give up on improving our
lot, as one might expect, but to admire our own persistence in trying to
realize our vision of a better existence for ourselves. Tragedy is not
simply about our failure to learn its lesson of our inevitable failure; it is,
rather, about our awareness that we will probably fail and will
nevertheless still make the attempt… It is this “blind hope,” as
Prometheus called his gift to man, that makes us fully human; and for
this reason, tragedy is our most important imaginative product. (290)
Dupree concludes that the theater’s relatively recent inability to convey this
aspect of tragedy signals a rampant cultural despondency—that this faltering
music “no longer represents the Big Bang but only our whimpers” (291).
Perhaps this is true for modern public entertainment, but The American
seems to aspire to the old (though not Greek) tragic ideal. The title
encompasses a culture instead of a man. The American portrayed in The
American is the tireless explorer, the endeavoring businessman, the
aesthetic appreciator, who, though deterred by a different culture, is
certainly neither destroyed nor discouraged.
That The American is a tragedy renders Newman more of a symbol than
a real person. He is not to be emulated, but pitied. He is not a model of
correct action, though he may be esteemed for his example of the ideals of
naive nobility. The American viewpoint, given its rather grim history of witch
trials, slavery, and bigoted astringency, is not to glorify its past, but to
rejoice in founders that strove for ideals so devotedly, and to move on.
Moses Coit Tyler concludes a chapter on the discussion of the penal habits of
a Massachusetts colony with these words: “Doubtless we shall all be ready to
say with Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Let us thank God for having given us such
ancestors; and let each successive generation thank him not less fervently
for being one step further from them in the march of ages” (118). Our
ancestors, or more necessarily, our cultural predecessors, are rather to be
thankful for than striven after.
For the hopeful American, history is tragic, while the present is comic—a
dichotomy that arises from the Christian cultural foundations, consequent
belief in an afterlife, and the overwhelming concern with eschatology. The
setting in Puritan America is one of extreme necessity. John Winthrop had his
place in creating stringent order, because living colonially required efficient,
community-wide cooperation. But Anne Hutchinson had her place in
controverting his order, tempering the constriction which would otherwise
have begun to choke the Massachusetts Bay Colony. America is driven by
change; Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” showed how America’s
greatness derived from its newness. Christopher Newman’s name is worth
splitting: he is the Christ-bearing “innocent Adamic man,” restlessly,
relentlessly seeking to institute his new capitalistic order wherever he goes
(Maseychik 116). Newman, or the American in general, is like Dupree’s tragic
unlearning hero, unfazed by failure, always eager to get up and try again.
Now that the frontiers have been civilized, America’s “manifest destiny”
lies in unflagging progress. The American must not become like Claire de
Cintré, whose every decision is directed by an overwhelming deference to
her mother. Claire arises out of and exists entirely in the static cultural
traditions of France. Her failure (to escape the grasp of her French status)
has been attributed to “want of backbone,” or, in other words, want of
American clearheadedness (“From The Atheneum” 409). What Americans
fled from when they left England was religious corruption and the
subjugation of religion to political uses by the royalty of England. To
retrospective consternation, however, this only led them from one mire into
another, because the political system of the righteous pioneers of America
was as deeply oligarchic as England’s was monarchical. Yet in this system,
figureheads like Hutchinson, and later, Benjamin Franklin, bent on progress,
kept American changing.
We do not emulate tragedy; we learn from it. American past is a
precautionary tale, something to appreciate as history; but we do not yearn
for its revival. The concept of inevitable progress, to the dismay of skeptics
like Jonathan Swift, has pervaded the world, particularly America. The
toughness of frontiersmen and rectitude of politicians like John Adams are
not signs of an intrinsically golden age, but prototypal models of the
American spirit that are to be reinterpreted and reapplied to our own
American experience.
 Works Cited

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The Early Novels. Ed. James W. Gargano. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1987.
40-41.
“The American: Twenty-five Years Later.” Critical Essays on Henry James:
The Early Novels. Ed. James W. Gargano. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1987.
42.
Anderson, Charles R. “Walls of Separation.” Person, Place, and Thing in
Henry James’s Novels. Durham: Duke U P, 1977. 41-79.
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Maseychik, William J. “Points of Departure from The American.” Henry James:
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Miller, Arthur. “Tragedy and the Common Man.” Death of a Salesman: Text
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“New York Tribune, 8 May 1877 p. 6.” Henry James: The Contemporary
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Poirier, Richard. “The American.” The Comic Sense of Henry James. New
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Tyler, Moses Coit. A History of American Literature: 1607-1765. New York:
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The length of this excerpt may seem excessive, but the content justifies the digression.
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