Building Culture: The Two New Yorks of Henry James's The American Scene

Abstract

In The American Scene, Henry James's experiences of Harvard's College Yard and Philadelphia's Independence Hall offer paradigms of his relation to his natal land. I begin with these encounters with architecture to suggest how the New York City he recorded in that travel narrative is overdetermined by his manner of approaching it. John Carlos Rowe is surely correct that James's reflection on the fencing of Harvard Yard contains the central meditation on the bestowal of “margins,” James's own term for his principal aesthetic modus operandi: “The formal enclosing of Harvard Yard is comparable to his own activity of giving shape and dimension to the ‘formless,’ often chaotic world he encounters.” This aesthetic closure protects the scene - of a cultural repository - from corrupting exposure to the world of getting and spending, the ever-changing world beyond the gate. Relating the imposed order at Harvard to James's admonition at Independence Hall that one must “be ready, anywhere, everywhere, to read ‘into’ [the American scene] as much as he reads out” (p. 291), Rowe's elaboration on that counsel is crucial: “This interpenetration of man and his world transforms the social product into a cultural expression, the living record of a civilization.” The participant-observer creates an original, nonreproducible artifact by means of the critical consciousness he brings to bear on what are without this additional, but by no means superfluous, element merely the alienating products of alienated labor in industrialized America.