2 - The Europeans, Washington Square, Daisy Miller

Summary

The betrayal of innocence, then, that central theme of James's major novels, is to be the subject of this book; but we must begin our exploration of it before James himself fully realized and was possessed by his subject-matter, in the early, sunny world of The Europeans. This is almost the last novel in which James was to allow his readers the satisfaction of a happy ending, and, remembering Jane Austen's ‘perfect felicity’, we will not be surprised to find that its hero is called Felix Young. He and his sister Eugenia, the Baroness Münster, are the Europeans of the title: Felix the embodiment of lighthearted youthfulness and his sister, who describes herself as being sometimes a thousand years old, the classic ‘older woman’ of European fiction, worldly, fascinating and mendacious. Neither of them, of course, is really European in origin. They are the children of a couple of expatriate Americans, reared in Europe and steeped in its values but now returning to their native country hard up and on the make. To be European, we see, is a matter not of nationality but of culture, and it is from the encounter between mutually non-comprehending cultures that the comedy in the novel springs.