Foelln Spaces: Rome as Global 

   City The Henry James Review 24.3 (Fall 2003): 291-97.

“Henry James's Cosmopolitan Spaces: Rome as Global City.”

Foeller-Pituch, Elzbieta. “Henry James's Cosmopolitan Spaces: Rome as Global City.”

The Henry James Review 24.3 (Fall 2003): 291-97.

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“Rome’s inexhaustible,” states the consummate expatriate Gilbert Osmond (PL 401). And indeed Henry James’s Rome is a global space where past and present, Old World and New come together. The Eternal City—replete with monuments, art, and people, representing classical antiquity, the Renaissance, the Catholic Church, European social hierarchy, and European political upheavals—provides a quintessential cosmopolitan experience for his American travelers and expatriates. Although in the second half of the nineteenth century London emerged as the modern imperial metropolis where James finally felt most at home, Rome’s aesthetic and historical eminence made it an ideal setting for his exploration of Americans’ confrontations with the world and inspired the beginnings of his “anatomy of cosmopolitan culture […] to trace the emerging outline of the global future” (Peyser 5). I would like to concentrate here on three earlier works—“The Last of the Valerii” (1874), Roderick Hudson (1878), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881)—and key scenes involving classical statues that echo and resonate against each other, in order to view James’s engagement with the Eternal City as the crossroads of transatlantic alliances, cultural politics, and literary and artistic influences. For James Rome was a city in which “your sensation rarely begins and ends with itself; it reverberates—recalls, commemorates, resuscitates something else,” which may have suggested to him the technique of introducing key repetitions and echoes in these works (IH 149). ( P 291)

In Roderick Hudson Christina Light is used by her mother as an object, fully aware of her own ornamental function and the voyeuristic pleasures her mother’s guests derive from gazing at her, while Roderick’s sculpture prolongs and increases that pleasure for American tourists and cosmopolitan Roman socialites. Isabel Archer of The Portrait of a Lady is unaware of herself as object, since she considers herself a free agent, abetted by several admirers who treat her as such; it is deeply ironic that she marries the one who does think of her as an ornament and financial aid rolled in one, prompting her later bitter reflections on “the dry staring fact that she had been an applied hung-up tool, as senseless and convenient as mere shaped wood and iron” (459). At this moment she sees herself not even as an ornamental object, but a purely utilitarian one. (P 294)

Much earlier in the novel James sets his heroine in the Capitol gallery in the company of the ancient marbles,resting her eyes on their beautiful blank faces; listening, as it were, to their eternal silence. It is impossible, in Rome at least, to look long at a company of Greek sculptures without feeling the effect of their noble quietude; which, as with a high door closed for the ceremony, slowly drops on the spirit the large white mantle of peace. I say in Rome especially, because the Roman air is an exquisite medium for such impression. The golden sunshine mingles with them, the deep stillness of the past, so vivid yet, though it is nothing but a void full of

names, seems to throw a solemn spell over them. The blinds were partly closed in the windows of the capitol, and a clear, warm shadow rested on the figures and made them more mildly human. Isabel sat there a long time, under the charm of their motionless grace, wondering to what, of their experience, their absent eyes were open, and how, to our ears, their alien lips would sound. The dark red walls of the room threw them into relief: the polished marble floor reflected their beauty. She had seen them all before, but her enjoyment repeated itself, and it was all the greater because she was glad again, for the time, to be alone. (257-58) ( P 294)

This scene is obviously an important one in the novel, occurring as it does just after Isabel bids her rejected suitor Lord Warburton goodbye again and before she welcomes Gilbert Osmond to her side. I would even contend that it functions as a counterbalance to Isabel’s famous musings on the failure of her marriage in chapter 42, both scenes outwardly static but important for the protagonist’s internal development. Here the classical statues in the golden light of Rome offer the heroine a panorama of myth, history,and high art, the possibilities of esoteric knowledge and universal human truths. The contemplation of the statues is both soothing and a challenge. Isabel calls them the best company, and Osmond reveals his snobbery when he shows surprise that she should consider them “better company than an English peer,” one of many instances when she ignores or gives a positive spin to a warning signal about Osmond’s true character (258). Her puzzling over the statues’ eyes echoes Count Valerio’s words. Unlike the Roman, Isabel does not feel that the statues can speak directly to her about the past. As she is unable to fathom the experiences to which their “absent eyes were open” and how “their alien lips” would sound, so is she incapable of penetrating the character of the two Europeanized Americans who will use her—Osmond and Mme Merle, as impressive and as alien to her as the ancient Greek marbles.( P 295)

The male statues she views—the Dying Gladiator, the Antinous, the Marble Fauen (a clear gesture towards Hawthorne)—parallel the female goddesses that fascinate James’s male protagonists but are much less effective in stirring her emotions. These quiet marble sculptures may even be considered substitutes for and an escape from the all too active suitors she has been trying to avoid. The scene stresses her freedom before the definitive choice of marriage. she admires these famous sights of Rome as a tourist and visitor, but her feeling for them reveals her unique sensibilities, again contrasting the “sterile dilettante” Osmond’s conventional fascination with “good things” and her own felt experience of the best company, foreshadowing her later expatriate married state with Osmond when they are settled in Rome (292). The ancient Greek “expatriate” statues for whom Rome is a mellow and golden site are also far from their homeland. Their grouping in the Capitoline museum, indicative of their “captive” state, parallels Isabel’s later incarceration in the gloomy and glamorously decorated Palazzo Roccanera as one of the chief ornaments of her husband’s house, to be gazed at by curious visitors. Isabel, as much as the other furnishings, makes Gilbert Osmond an envied leader of Roman cosmopolitan society, which flocks to the Palazzo Roccanera just as tourists come to Rome to see the historic marbles. ( P 296)

The Palazzo Roccanera is powerfully associated with the courtly intrigues and cruelties of the Renaissance. Daniel Mark Fogel has pointed out the parallels to Browning’s dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess,” while James explicitly describes Isabel’s Roman home as a “kind of domestic fortress, a pile which bore a stern old Roman name, which smelt of historic deeds, of crime and craft and violence, which was mentioned in ‘Murray’ [a popular guidebook] and visited by tourists […]” (Fogel 91-92; PL 307). This habitation, symbolic of Osmond’s mental “house of darkness, […] house of dumbness, […] house of suffocation,” unites different historic periods of Italian art and architecture to form for James a microcosm of the dark and stifling side of Rome—no golden sunlight here (360). Isabel finds respite by welcoming the burden of Rome’s history and taking old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruin the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective […]. She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it interfused and moderated her passion. But she had grown to think of it chiefly as the place where people had suffered. (430)

Whereas contemplation of the Greek statues before her marriage marks for Isabel the potentialities and possibilities offered by Rome, here the burden of its history mitigates the effects of enclosure and claustrophobia. Rome, home of inexhaustible possibility and stultifying convention, is both the scene of Isabel’s triumph and of her entrapment. ( P 296)