Universal White: Discrimination and Selection in James’s American Scene

Abstract

Chapter 4 reads James’s 1898 essays on American Letters, The American Scene, ‘The Question of Our Speech’, and ‘Charles Eliot Norton’, alongside writing by Charles Eliot Norton and Charles William Eliot, among others. During the early years of the twentieth century, Harvard thinkers address questions about the political responsibilities and powers of the 'college-bred'; this chapter argues that James responds to this discussion about the cultivated elite (or what Matthew Arnold calls 'the remnant') by directing attention to that elite's private pleasures rather than its public responsibilities. Tracing across multiple texts James's articulation of an aesthetic that prizes difference, discrimination, delimitation, and exclusion, the chapter shows that he, like Edith Wharton, associates these desirable qualities with the social hierarchies of the Old World. Although his celebration of intricately shaded heterogeneity has been hailed as anti-nativist or progressive, his critical portrayal of white homogeneity can function to criticise not racism or nativism but rather the egalitarian democracy with which such whiteness was closely associated. In contrasting his own practice of culture against that of Norton's 'Puritan' type, James distances himself from that type's commitments to asceticism and moralizing, and also its lingering associations with radicalism, antislavery sentiment, and democracy.