“I found myself,” James recalled,

considering…the situation, in another country and an aristocratic society, of some robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed, some cruelly wronged, compatriot: the point being in especial that he should suffer at the hands of persons pretending to represent the highest possible civilization and to be of an order in every way superior to his own. What would he “do” in that predicament?…He would hold his revenge and cherish it and feel its sweetness, and then in the very act of forcing it home would sacrifice it in disgust,…and he would obey, in doing so, one of the large and easy impulses generally characteristic of his type.

The idea does seem altogether American, an evocation of America’s perennial love-hate relation with Europe and all its attendant feelings of cultural inferiority and moral superiority, of parricidal guilt and newborn innocence, of nostalgia for the old home and the urge to destroy it.

The question cannot be answered quite so easily, however. James may have set out to celebrate “the large and easy impulses” that are “generally characteristic” of Americans, but the characters and the action he devised to express this idea have led many of his readers to wonder whether Newman’s type, far from being celebrated in the novel, is not in fact satirized or even morally condemned. Certainly, there is something a little foolish in Newman’s social gaucherie, his sublime and largely ungrounded self-confidence; something ill-natured in his inability to sympathize with Claire’s feelings of familial obligation; and something downright vicious in his influence upon the lives of Noémie and Valentin. James’s attitudes toward his characters are by no means easy to sort out. As a sturdy republican who yet admired the European way of ordering society, who resented the steep condescensions of pretentiously superior Europeans and yet lamented the commercial vulgarization of his “sweet old Anglo-Saxon” America, James found his sympathies sharply divided between the sustaining traditions of the Old World and the unfettered dynamism of the New. From an American point of view, Newman’s assumption that he is at the very least the Bellegardes’ equal seems perfectly justified. But when the Bellegardes reject him, they do so on ancient, anticommercial principles of the very sort that James missed in America and hoped to recover by moving to Europe. Looked at this way, there is no great mystery in the fact that the silliness of Lord Deepmere and the fat Duchess, and even the crimes of the Bellegardes, are treated far less harshly in the novel than are the social ambitions of Noémie, Stanislas Kapp, and even the American hero himself.

Is The American, then, an American novel by virtue of its genre, as has sometimes been asserted? That, of course, depends first of all on the sort of novel one considers characteristically American and, second, on the sort of novel one takes The American to be. Have Americans typically written realistic novels, while their European colleagues have wallowed in romanticism, as some theorists have maintained? Or is the realistic novel of manners, rather, an English tradition and the American novel a romance, as we have so often been advised? Whichever line of argument we take, The American will both support and refute it. Newman is at once a more or less plausible type of the self-made American millionaire and a knight of chivalric romance in quest of his feminine ideal. The other characters are drawn both from James’s own acquaintances in Paris and from books: legends, medieval romances, novels, and plays. The action in which these characters are engaged is both timelessly literary and historically topical. While almost everyone in the novel finds some occasion to remark upon the resemblance of the action to that of a play, a romance, or a poem, the story also reflects the rapidly changing conditions of political and social life in Europe: the deposing of the hereditary landed nobility by the new aristocracy of industrial wealth; the increased social mobility of petites bourgeoises like Noémie and commerçants like Stanislas Kapp and Christopher Newman; the movement of Parisian life from the medieval city on the Left Bank across the Seine to the new boulevards, the new commercial districts, and the Colonie Américaine near the Arc de Triomphe; and, most importantly, the much larger shift, of which these others are only symptoms, of the center of Western civilization from the Old World to the New.

The setting of the novel is replete with verifiably accurate detail. Almost every building, street, and park that Newman visits can be found either in a copy of the guide book that lies by his side on the divan of the Salon Carré or in the travel sketches James wrote for the New York Tribune during his stay in France. But in those moments when James manages to get inside the skin of his hero and see the world through his eyes, Paris becomes the landscape of Newman’s evolving consciousness. These moments occur more and more frequently as the novel progresses and Newman begins to see in his surroundings not just an alien way of life but a projection of his own deepest desires and fears. And when the tone of the novel darkens with the frustration of his hopes, the open, luminous city of his original ambitions becomes a crepuscular gothic dungeon, the dark place in his own soul to which his attention is directed by the seemingly diabolical bafflement of his once boundless and unreflective self-confidence. In thus confounding the supposedly distinct realms of life and literature, the novel is neither simply realistic nor romantic but a “neutral territory,” as Hawthorne said, “where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.”

Not even the theme of The American—the collision of disruptive American energy with repressive European tradition—can be called distinctively American. In the first place, the novel seems to be as interested in the differences between the Anglo-Saxon and Gallic “races” or between British moralism and French aestheticism as it. is in the relative values of American and European culture and character. But even more importantly, the same thematic contest between energy and form that is enacted in The American can be found in nearly every literary work of consequence written in English in the nineteenth century. On this level of abstraction, the conflict between Newman’s revolutionary ambitions and the Bellegardes’ conservative formality is not fundamentally different from the contests between Blake’s Orc and Urizen, Scott’s Highlanders and Englishmen, Keats’s Lamia and Appolonius, Hawthorne’s Hester and Dimmesdale, Dickens’s Dombey and Floy, Henry Adams’s Dynamo and Virgin, and countless other literary versions of the great nineteenth-century debate concerning the relative value of permanence and change. Indeed, there are reasons to believe that James was more concerned with this fundamental conflict than he was with the particular metaphors in which it is expressed in The American. At the time that he wrote the novel, America stood in his mind not as a realm of possibility but as the locus of his constrained and dependent youth. Europe was the open field, the land of opportunity where he hoped to achieve his own personal and artistic identity. In The Europeans, written only a year after The American, it is the English visitors who are easygoing and morally elastic, while their American hosts are locked in the rigidities of New England tradition. Even in The American itself, the debate between energy and form has a way of detaching itself from its transatlantic geography and settling wherever James directs his attention. To Newman, Valentin’s duel seems an image of European life in general: both barbarous and corrupt, a blend of brutal, mindless passions and heartless social forms.

As an American novel that is not immediately distinguishable, on the basis of subject, style, argument, genre, or theme, from many of its European counterparts, The American calls into question the very idea of American literature. Although that idea has assumed various shapes over the years since Americans first decided tha they should have their own literature as well as their own politics, it has always been an idea of difference.