Henry James’ Last Romance: Making Sense of the Past and the American Scene

In this 1998 study of Henry James’s classic text of cultural criticism, The American Scene, Beverly Haviland shows how James confronted the vexing problem of making sense of the past so that he could make culture work. In this record of James’s 1904-5 return to America and in his unfinished novels, The Sense of the Past and The Ivory Tower, he interpreted the social conflicts that seemed to be paralysing relations between men and women, between black and white Americans, between ‘natives’ and ‘aliens’, between defenders of taste and censors of waste. Although James has been represented as conservative by liberal critics, it is just such simplifying oppositions that his method of interpretation works to transform. Haviland’s own metonymical method follows James’s interpretative practice by bringing historical and theoretical readings of these texts into conversation with each other.