Cultural Icon: Henry James

Berman, Jessica. "Feminizing the Nation: Woman as Cultural Icon in Late James." The Henry James Review 17.1 (1996) 58-76

I firmly believe that the subject of my dissertation is a female cultural icon -- a famous figure exerting real, measurable influence over many lives. But what are the implications of this? How to I go about demonstrating somebody is a cultural icon? This paper on Henry James' later speeches, essays and fiction on the role of women in America offers some helpful first steps.

Elements of a Cultural Icon 1: Power over Language.

"In fact, James did not believe that American speech should exactly mirror English, sharing in Howells's opinion that a mature American culture needed its own mature language. The point is rather that any mature American language demanded certain subtleties which he found lacking in the speech around him. In terms of his linguistic position, then, James straddles the line between nativism and cosmopolitanism." We can imagine that James understood America as an entity, a large set of people, all sharing a general national character. As agents through the domestic sphere, women had power over this national character in certain ways, including language. James called "upon American women to become able to discriminate among the various forms and tones of speech and thereby to advance American culture." I'm thinking of how my own mother taught me not to use swear words, to love reading -- and the themes of reading, like responsibility and a pastoral aesthetic (a Little House on the Prairie aesthetic). This indicates the potential power women might have as shapers of language over the general character. "James felt 'American civilization itself was at stake in the behavior and attitude of the American woman'" (Berman is quoting James himself here).

Elements of a Cultural Icon 2: Power over Attitudes to Other Cultures.

"Precisely in casting the nation as a feminized participant in an international community, James's late writings resist the pull of simple nativism. But the cultural icon of America that James creates is a woman who is both cosmopolitan and loyal native at once, both a powerful Progressive woman and a well-spoken, community-minded, ethical presence. Within her figure and her voice, the tension between a complexly differentiated twentieth-century America and the ongoing [End Page 73] narrative prescriptions for an assimilative national identity will long persist. The paradox is inescapable, both in James's late writings and in the modernist discourses of gender, race, and nation that they illuminate." This conclusion to the paper is not difficult to adapt to the case of Yang Jiang and China; Yang Jiang is a cultural icon of China. She too is both cosmopolitan and loyal native (this is easy to show; passages to come). She too is both progressive and a well-spoken ethical presence. And the tension between receiving a tradition of Chineseness whole-heartedly while also welcoming the influence, the artistic sensibilities, the domestic living standards of other cultures -- especially the bourgeois, meritocratic, pedigree-based standards of America, Great Britain, France and other European traditions -- this tension is fundamental to her iconicity as well.