One can regret that Henry James – undoubtedly one of the most important writers ever – never became a crowd favorite, but it can be explained. For he was a man of cold, penetrating gaze, and everything Comfortable understanding Intimate lay him away. Although he has the heroes, especially the female who populate his immense Roman world, well loved, but he also can not overlook their weaknesses, their vanities and entanglements. He wanted to go to the plight of the people on the ground, wanted to brighten the dark mystery of their endeavors, and he came to be as wide or deep as no one before him.
Verena Auffermann cited in its concise and beautiful fine biography letter from a friend, who probably only ones really close to him, and asked him plaintively: “Why do you not even describe a female person, for which we can women find true love? you do not have to be happy indeed. ”
For the description of happiness writers are not responsible, because happiness self-evident. The question of how and why it forfeited to was the endless theme of man researcher Henry James. In his own life he went as Auffermann noted tragedies out of the way. He remained the distanced observer, and the further he progressed in his letter, the more subtle he entered into relationships of people. He saw it woven from love and jealousy, shame and greed, of innocence and lust for power.
Daisy Miller , one of his most famous novels, the subtitle A Study , a study. The 27-year-old American Winterbourne visited his aunt on Lake Geneva, where he met the young, naive beauty daisy know. Right at the beginning he noticed that the girl is quite uneducated and has no sense of the finer forms of social intercourse. The aunt, a rich lady who impute to the New England Geldadel, has for the technology Rende at the same hotel family – nothing left – Daisy, her mother and little brother: “They are usually atrocious.” In fact, the Millers, who are doing the obligatory trip to Europe, a lot of money, but also nothing.
But Daisy is not only exceptionally beautiful, but it shines out precisely because of their amorphousness, an original freshness, of Winterbourne can not escape. He falls in love and travels after her, to Rome. There, in the illustrious company of cultured Americans to Daisy compromised completely by himself – left alone by their inexperienced mother – gets involved with a shady, melodramatic caparisoned Italians and even drags him to a fine soiree. Man is aghast, and the troubled Winterbourne attempts to reduce them to the paths of decency – in vain, for the girl who just begins to savor the wonder of her female attractiveness is too ignorant in her childish egotism, to recognize the misstep.
This is the experimental design, the Henry James presents here: What happens when social convention and juveniles windfall conflict with each other, girlish innocence with callous greed? Easy to guess that the story ends not good, and yet one is shocked with what heartless suddenness Henry James dismisses the just been masterfully blazoned drama. He leaves Daisy die on Roman fever – and final.
Daisy Miller is really a study, an experimental field, as well as the novel Washington Square (1881), where the hearted, a bit obtuse Catherine is crushed between a cold father and a shameless fortune hunter, and as the novel the Europeans (1878), which shows us how the wise, but unhübsche Gertrude their wealthy Puritan family is alienated and abducted by a fun-loving dreamer in a delicate marriage.
Again, as in the mirror image Roman The American (1875), it comes to the ideal type of confrontation of European sophistication with American efficiency. For the American Henry James, who was at the end of English, one of them that the old continent he has traveled extensively, has shown some signs of decline and moral decay, while the new, of a Protestant ethic, including rudeness and Engstirnigkeiten is marked. However, it is indicative of the variety of intonations that James has ruled that the novel The Europeans in spite of his serious theoretical foundation also has a lighter side. In his afterword to the successful translation by Andrea Ott Gustav Seibt begins with the conclusion of his reflections: “Four Weddings and a departure, that is the balance of these feathery, profound Roman comedy.”
So it is, and yet Henry James was primarily a cold-blooded performer of such cultural conflicts. He often shows up as the radical experimentalist, and sometimes it looks like he torturing his characters on the stretching bed of Comments until they finally fit into their circumstances. Of course it is not James, who is here cruel. Cruel are the social constraints. But it is not the poverty or even of misery, because almost all the stories take place in a well-off environment where hardly anyone pursues a serious day job. You either have money in abundance there, or it came, whether through debauchery, whether by miscalculation, lost and now has to be imported, the best. By a favorable marriage
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