Writing in 1880 to his Atlantic editor, the novelist William Dean Howells, Henry James promised that his forthcoming novel, Washington Square, would be "a tale purely American." On a superficial level it is easy enough to see what James meant. His book would lack that bedrock of complex social and cultural forms essential, he felt, to any novelist. What were these elements of a complex society, missing in America but available to any European novelist? James notoriously lists them in his biography Hawthorne:
"No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class--no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life… the effect of which, upon an English or a French imagination, would probably as a general thing be appalling."
Hawthorne, James argued, finessed the problem of our cultural thinness by turning away from the novel of manners in favor of the romance of the single self. American social circumstances, James said, forced him to care for the "deeper psychology" of the individual--those ruminations on sin and guilt, say, in The Scarlet Letter. More interested in the dynamics of social relations than Hawthorne, James finessed the absence of cultural density by developing the international theme, as in Roderick Hudson and The American, where the contrast between the poverty of American culture and the density of the old European order, as they affect character, could be effectively thematized. Washington Square, he thought, would be harder. I think the tale of Catherine Sloper turns out all right, but James didn't reprint it in the New York edition.
On a deeper level Washington Square raises a question about what a pure American novel may be; or, to put it another way, what the American novel purely is. There are of course two parts to this definition. James was fairly sure of what the novel is: He called it that most elastic of literary forms, indeed, a form so flexible that every a priori attempt to define it or to constitute its characterstics was bound to meet with defeat. So much for generic
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