3 - Lines of Expansion

Summary

To grasp the full authority of Isabel Archer’s story, we must see behind it the force of history as felt in the interplay of two contrastive lines of expansion. The first of these lines carried people from Europe to the New World and its frontiers; the second carried immigrants to its cities and the children of farmers and ranchers back from its frontiers to its cities, or even across the Atlantic to England and Europe. Between 1820 and 1930, more than 62 million people uprooted themselves and resettled in “foreign” lands dwarfing the great Volkerwanderung of the Teutonic tribes during the last centuries of the Roman Empire. Of these, roughly 42 million settled in the United States, Europe’s and then Asia’s main frontier, making it not only the most diverse country in the world but also, as Santayana saw, the home of descendants of the most restless peoples in the world. Interacting with this migration was another – from the soil of farms and footpaths of villages, in Europe as well as the United States, to the sidewalks and streets of cities. If novels like Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) and O. E. Rölvaag’s Giants in the Earth (1924–25 in Norwegian; 1927 in English) trace the first of these lines of expansion, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) traces the second, toward the cities of the upper Midwest and the East – a line that James extended back across the Atlantic to Europe in scores of stories, including Isabel Archer’s. Political and economic as well as cultural, these lines of expansion yielded hundreds of stories in life as well as art: William Dean Howells’s, Mark Twain’s, Hamlin Garland’s, and Edith Wharton’s; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, Jay Gatsby’s, and Nick Carraway’s; Willa Cather’s as well as Jim Burden’s; Theodore Dreiser’s as well as Carrie Meeber’s; Henry James’s as well as Isabel Archer’s and Adam Verver’s.