Ethics between two worlds: The moral significance of Italian places in Henry James’s literature

Florence and Rome: The past that never passes and the fatal beauty

We shall start by reading the beginning of Henry James’Diary of a Man of Fifty. Returning to Florence after 25 years of military service, an English army General of 52 finds himself immersed in memories of a thwarted love that occurred on the banks of the River Arno during his youth:

They told me I should find Italy greatly changed; and in seven-and-twenty years there is room for changes. But to me everything is so perfectly the same that I seem to be living my youth over again; all the forgotten impressions of that enchanting time come back to me. At the moment they were powerful enough; but they afterwards faded away. What in the world became of them? What ever becomes of such things, in the long intervals of consciousness? Where do they hide themselves away? […] They are like the lines of a letter written in sympathetic ink; hold the letter to the fire for a while and the grateful warmth brings out the invisible words.

‘Via Ghibellina’, Strozzi Palace, Boboli Gardens, all these places in the historic centre of Florence become the setting for a story of the past that returns and, like all literature of return, is painted in the melancholy and submissive colours of memory. The protagonist's fifties represent the old age of a life interrupted 25 years earlier, with the regrets and sorrows but also the joys dormant under the blanket of things lost.

The General had been in love with the beautiful Countess and now he meets and becomes friends with young Stanmer who, ironically, is enchanted by his equally charming daughter, who has the same name: Bianca. The General had felt betrayed by the Countess when he decided to marry her rival, and he fears that Stanmer may suffer the same fate from the very young Bianca, so he tries hard to warn him. However, Stanmer realizes that the analogy between Bianca and her mother becomes an obsession for the General, so he resists the attempts to persuade him of the existence of danger. In the end, Stanmer marries Bianca and is happy, according to his own account, which is a bit of a surprise given the precedent of Bianca's mother's marital instability with three husbands. The General's fears turn out to be merely ghosts of the past, and his character comes across as a man who is so stuck in his own past experience that he cannot properly interpret the world in which he lives.

In the background of this inability is Florence, with the weight of its history. He should have found Italy much changed in 25 years, we read at the beginning of the story, but in the General's eyes Italy is the same, because those streets, those squares and monuments, those corners of antiquity have remained the same, and this at first makes him feel young again, as if those years had not passed. In James's descriptions, the customs and habits of the locals also seem to have remained the same, as well as the same opportunities to meet, the daily life of the upper classes, the habits of the servants and shopkeepers, all that fervour of the Tuscan city that brings the General back to a lightness, sometimes even a frivolity, that by now he had abandoned: ‘I have led too serious a life’ (James, 1923: 3).

The fact that everything remained the same becomes the soft cradle of a memory that delights in being all-encompassing in its explanation of reality. In this tale, which figures among James's early literature, there are already many themes that we will find again later on: a beautiful but always dusky Italy, ancient and tired in its never truly past; difficult romantic relationships, an unstable marriage and the restlessness of protagonists poised between two worlds and their disappointed memories.

Another James character is poised in his moral reputation: Daisy Miller, who has long represented the stereotype of the American woman travelling abroad in the era when the turbine engine had shortened the time it took to cross the Atlantic, enabling many more Americans to embark on a rediscovery of Europe. Low ticket costs and European exchange rates made travel affordable even for a young, unmarried, independent New England schoolteacher with an idea of Europe and Italy like Caroline Spencer in another of James'stories, Four Meetings. Daisy Miller's story is a sad one, but in a different way: the light-hearted, carefree euphoria of travel turns into the tragedy of a misunderstanding between two worlds.

Daisy's meeting in Switzerland with the American Winterbourne begins a journey of observation and evaluation of her behaviour: she is so free, sociable, easy-going and unprejudiced about people and relationships between men and women, and she naively finds herself to be a danger and a perversion in the Italian society she so enthusiastically immerses herself in. Daisy's naturalness clashes with all the conventions of that society, in which certain customs are not allowed to decent young women. But, deep down, she finds little welcome even in Mrs Costello, Winterbourne's aunt, who does not like the idea of her nephew falling in love with that young American. Daisy is seen through Winterbourne's eyes, she is heard through him, but she does not realize it, out of a spontaneous curiosity that leads her to immerse herself in the world she experiences without too many questions. Uses and customs are not neutral but are the means by which a society articulates its values or identifies what threatens them, and it is within this ethical horizon that we understand Daisy's story (Gooder, 1985: vii–xxi).

Once again, places provide the image of what James means:

‘I’m going to go it on the Pincio’ Daisy peaceably smiled, while the way that she ‘condoned’ these things almost melted Winterbourne's heart. ‘Alone, my dear, at this hour?’ Mrs Walker asked. The afternoon was drawing to a close – it was the hour for the throng of carriages and of contemplative pedestrians. ‘I don’t consider it's safe, Daisy’, her hostess firmly asserted. […] ‘I’m not going alone; I’m going to meet a friend’. ‘Your friend won’t keep you from catching the fever even if it is his own second nature’, Mrs Miller observed. ‘Is it Mr Giovannelli that's the dangerous attraction’ Mrs Walker asked without mercy. […] Then, while she glanced and smiled, she brought out all affirmatively and without a shade of hesitation: ‘Mr Giovannelli –the beautiful Giovannelli’. ‘My dear young friend – and taking her hand, Mrs Walker turned to pleading – don’t prowl off to the Pincio at this hour to meet a beautiful Italian’. (James, 1985: Ch. III)

The splendid description of the carriage's passage from the Pincio to the park, among the ‘great flat-topped pines of Villa Borghese’, is the setting in which the determination of Daisy's gestures is realized, as she does not want to change her moral views by adjusting them to those of Italian women: Daisy acts with a brazen freedom, too new, that almost profanes the trees and statues of that ancient and immutable Roman aristocratic villa.

Rome does not forgive such desecrations and retaliates against her beauty. And so Miss Miller's moonlit night walk to the Colosseum with Mr Giovannelli, described in all its romantic aspect of the light shining on the marbles and mosses, turns into the fatality of Daisy's death from malaria.

This fate is anticipated by the reflections of Winterbourne, who happens to be passing by late that night after dining at a villa on the Caelian Hill:

The evening was perfect and he promised himself the satisfaction of walking home beneath the Arch of Constantine and past the vaguely-lighted monuments of the Forum. Above was a moon half-developed, whose radiance was not brilliant but veiled in a thin cloud-curtain that seemed to diffuse and equalise it. When on his return from the villa at eleven o’clock he approached the dusky circle of the Colosseum, the sense of the romantic in him easily suggested that the interior, in such an atmosphere, would well repay a glance. He turned aside and walked to one of the empty arches, near which, as he observed, an open carriage − one of the little Roman street cabs − was stationed. The he passed in among the cavernous shadows of the great structure and emerged upon the clear and silent arena. The place had never seemed to him more impressive. One half of the gigantic circus was in deep shade while the other slept in the luminous dusk. As he stood there he began to murmur Byron's famous lines out of ‘Manfred’; but before he had finished his quotation he remembered that if nocturnal meditation thereabouts was the fruit of a rich literary culture it was none the less deprecated by medical science. The air of other ages surrounded one; but the air of other ages, coldly analysed, was no better than a villainous miasma. (James, 1985: Ch. IV)

‘The air of other ages surrounded one; but the air of other ages, coldly analysed, was no better than a villainous miasma’: the beauty of the lunar Colosseum can be fatal, for that air laden with the past is an unhealthy air. Winterbourne knows this, and instead Daisy, because of a heedless Giovannelli, does not even imagine it. Her innocence is thus compromised and worn down by the sick beauty of Rome, the city where she had settled so eagerly, far from her America:

Over the Rome of the last century – Italo Calvino writes − fall in the evening the deadly fumes of the surrounding marshes: here is the ‘danger’, allegory of every possible danger, the pernicious fever ready to seize the girls who go out in the evening alone or badly accompanied. (Calvino, 2007: 867–870) ¹

Exceptionalism and awareness of reality

The descriptions of an Italy so different from the USA serve to make clear the profound ethical differences to which James has always been attentive, far beyond the simple narrative contrast between the vitality and drive for action of the American tradition and the immobile, when not decadent, aesthetics of the Old World.

Henry James, brother of the philosopher William James, gave us extraordinary plots centred on human relationships, the power and domination that can be exercised within these personal relationships, the moral issue of the self and the ethical questions of freedom and responsibility, straddling two worlds, with the ocean in between.

We do not in any way wish to construct a philosophical link between two authors and two brothers who had different cultural interests and each their own questions about life (although many have referred almost to an exchange of roles over time, precisely because of some of the issues addressed), but if we think about William's approach to ancient philosophical debates, such as the question of free will, we cannot fail to see connections in what we are going to highlight about the conduct of Henry's characters: in his ‘pragmatism’, all action is reaction to the external world, and intermediate states, such as thought, are only a transitory place and moment that direct towards an action. Truth does not define position; rather, position defines truth. William proves this point with his answer to the question about free will, saying that the first act of free will is to believe in it (James, 2014). Acts of the will and the genesis of intentions are located in attention, and attention is based on embodied actions: perceptual attention goes along with movements of the body; even pure intellectual attention involves embodiment, because ‘we learn all our possibilities by the way of experience’ (James, 1950: 1099).

James lived always on the edge, not feeling integrated into either of the societies he experienced, the American society of his birth or the English society of his adoption (Tóibín, 2005). The psychology of his characters is almost always built precisely on this clash between the Old World, the artistically refined but corrupt Europe (and Italy as part of it), and the New World, the outspoken, self-confident but puritanical America of social conventions. That is why it is not just characters, but ages, cultures, ethics.

The situation of Henry James leaving the USA to settle in Europe is transposed in his novels (think of The American or The Golden Bowl), with all the fatigue, disappointments and misunderstandings he experienced. The Master is the fictional biography dedicated to Henry James by Irish writer Colm Tóibín, the book that has established him as one of the most highly regarded writers of recent years. Tóibín describes precisely the story of the loneliness, desires and despair of a mysterious man who never came to terms with the world around him.

But was it possible for an American to come to terms with Europe? And through what lens could he read the differences between the two traditions? Later, when we discuss the complex character of Isabel Archer, we will go on to examine James's critique of American exceptionalism: a critique handled entirely in moral, not political, terms.

Proponents of American exceptionalism are based on the belief that the USA is distinctive, unique or exemplary compared to other nations; that the values, history and political system of the USA are unique in human history and that it is ultimately destined to play a distinct and leading role on the world stage. French political scientist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to describe the country as ‘exceptional’ after his travels in 1831.

Americans shaped the doctrine of exceptionalism by comparing the USA to Europe, but the views of Europeans themselves were also influential. Indeed, the many travellers and foreign immigrants who came to the USA, as well as later social theorists, contributed to this view with their impressions of the country (Hodgson, 2009). The idea that American identity could be exceptional emerged from the belief that the nascent Early Republic was not simply a postcolonial state but a genuinely new experiment in an imperialist world dominated by Britain. Before the Civil War, American exceptionalism favoured declarations of cultural, economic and spatial independence. As the country grew in population and size, becoming a major player in the global order, its exceptionalist beliefs came increasingly into focus and into question. Sometimes the substance of this exceptionalism was political, sometimes religious and sometimes it was based on the country's natural and material abundance, even on its being the first consumer society. In the beginning, however, when the country was neither rich nor powerful, exceptionalism was nevertheless a strongly rooted ‘free and popular sentiment’: everyone felt part of a great political innovation, destined to be a model for others (Tyrrell, 2021: Introduction, 12).

Before this exceptionalism takes on the negative characteristics of all ‘isms’, becoming a divisive and defining concept, Henry James seems to disapprove of Americans’ inclination to emphasize only exceptionalism, and he does so not only by choosing to describe Isabel Archer's existential failure but also by constructing the complex characters of other novels, such as Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima and Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors: ‘The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement’, he writes in The Art of the Novel (James, 2007: 149).

Consideration and understanding of reality and circumstances is the only ground where different cultures can meet and enrich each other. Literature is moral and political imagination and as such makes its valuable contribution (Pippin, 2001; Otten, 2006).

Whether it is Hyacinth's existential journey in London or Strether's in Paris, in both cases the dangerous and sophisticated Europe figures as a space of life and confrontation. Hyacinth is the illegitimate son of an English aristocrat and a Parisian seamstress, is raised in London by the very poor Miss Pysent, becomes a member of a revolutionary organization and meets Princess Casamassima. And while the Princess follows her revolutionary fervour, Hyacinth first indulges in a taste for beauty, for all that is precious and refined, and gradually loses faith and interest in the people and their struggles.

Once again it is Italy, with Venice, that amazes Hyacinth with its powerful aesthetics (the same Venice that returns in the descriptions of Italian Hours in 1909):

The novel shows to us clearly, recommends to us as an important social insight, that thinking, imagining, and even desiring are very much affected by the material circumstances of life − by nutrition, by the squalor or spaciousnes, the beauty or ugliness, of one's surroundings, by education, by the stability and quality of one's family ties. The worst things about poverty and squalor, as this book presents them, is that they corrupt the capabilities of thinking, feeling, and desiring. Hyacinth tells the Princess that ‘centuries of poverty, of ill-paid toil, of bad insufficient food and wretched housing hadn’t a favourable effect on the higher faculties … In his own low walk of life, people had really not the faculty of thought; their minds had been simplified, reduced to two or three elements. (Nussbaum, 1990: 201)

The novel The Ambassadors, on the other hand, tells of the metamorphosis of a man sent on a sort of ‘rescue mission’ to vicious Europe from a quiet American province. Strether ends up falling in love with the Old World and, all things considered, sharing the countercultural choice of the good family boy he is supposed to ‘catch up’ and bring back to American moral upbringing, the ‘American way of life’. this is a clear sign that for James's characters, the real exceptionalism is not that of their origin but that of the circumstances in which their moral choices take place.

Ethical awareness in The Portrait of a Lady

As we read earlier, in the Diary of a Man of Fifty, Henry James writes that ‘the warmth of this yellow sun of Florence’ allows his General to restore the memory of the past. Returning to Italy, however, means experiencing again contradictory emotions, regrets, remorse. This is similar to the fate of another great protagonist, Isabel Archer. The Portrait of a Lady has been of great significance in the journey of women's awareness and emancipation, as shown in the 1996 film version by Australian director Jane Campion. The film makes this story a symbol of feminism. It is a story made of the true passions of human beings but also of their most challenging moral demands: freedom, desire, a sense of self, decision, responsibility.

The main character is Isabel Archer, a young American woman, full of life, intelligence and curiosity about the world. It is precisely this intellectual vivacity and curiosity that James gives the reader, even before telling us whether she is tall, short, beautiful or not so beautiful. Isabel is a woman of mind: the beauty and charm she exerts on the other protagonists, starting with her cousin Ralph, are those of ideas, of the strong personality of someone with a strong will. She used to live in America, orphaned by her parents, until her unconventional aunt Lidia, the British aristocrat Mr Touchett's wife, proposes a break with her previous life and takes her to Europe, first to the UK, then to Paris and finally to Italy. Isabel is American on the inside but wishes to change: James (1881): Ch. IV writes that ‘her disposition of mind gave value to every change’.

Desire and disposition are two words close to the language of ethics. Lucretius, in Book IV of De rerum natura on love, writes pages on this relationship between perception and desire, explaining how the mutual support of these two elements determines the dynamics of freedom, even in love. The lover thinks that their desire originates from the beloved, while Lucretius invites us to understand that the perception of the beloved is influenced by desire. We know that the ‘effluvia’ or ‘simulacra’ are in the air around us; we select those that respond to the desires and dispositions we already have. Perception functions as a kind of ‘attention to’, constrained, however, by desire. At the same time, desire is reinforced in perception (Lucretius, 2011).

This strong interconnection between desire and perception will allow us to understand how Isabel's love choices act on her destiny. Isabel has a desire for absolute freedom. She comes to the old Europe to explore it and explore herself, to see what she will make of herself and what life will make of her. It is the thirst for experience, with a mixture of desire for knowledge and imagination, that moves her. The innocence–experience antinomy is typical of Jamesian literature and is resolved in many characters in the antithesis between imagination and knowledge: imagination drives Isabel to leave Albany to conquer ‘pure truth’, where experience ‘will teach her to recognize only evil’ (Marroni, 1983: 67–80).

She is so different from the ordinary women of the time, who think of the future only in terms of marriage, children and domesticity. She is American, and her friends who come to visit her from the USA are also women engaged in a profession, journalists active in society, while European women are still tied to the marriage, dowry and inheritance. This willingness to self-determine her own destiny becomes the character's defining feature. James writes:

She was intelligent and generous; it was a fine free nature; but what was she going to do with herself? This question was irregular, for with most women one had no occasion to ask it. Most women did with themselves nothing at all; they waited, in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come that way and furnish them with a destiny. Isabel's originality was that she gave one an impression of having intentions of her own. (James, 1881: Ch. VII)

In this absolute independence, Isabel lives her stay in England with enthusiasm, and with extreme levity she refuses the marriage proposal of two distinguished gentlemen, who are in love, respectable and, above all, well off. Both speak to Isabel of a world behind them, a belonging to social configurations that are a part of themselves. To accept one of them is to become part of a defined socio-political world. But this is precisely the step that Isabel cannot and will not take.

Why? Because she does not want to stop, she does not want to shelter herself in those rest areas in a stream of life that has just begun and which she does not want to give up even if it will be painful. ‘I can never be happy in any extraordinary way – Isabel tells Lord Warburton − Not by turning away, by separating myself […] from life, from the usual chances and dangers, from what most people know and suffer’ (James, 1881: Ch. XIV).

If the first word in Isabel's ethical language is desire and the second is disposition, the third is freedom, understood as the ability to throw oneself into circumstances, to face the risks and dangers of existence and to be able to choose among them. This is not an abstract freedom but a concrete one, and just as concrete and embodied is her desire, which is the result of a disposition: her human history gave birth to it and gave it substance:

She spent half of her time in thinking of beauty and bravery and magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistibile action: she held it must be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She had an infinite hope that she should never do anything wrong […]. On the whole, reflectively, she was in no uncertainty about the things that were wrong. She had no love of their look, but when she fixed them hard she recognised them. It was wrong to be mean, to be jealous, to be false, to be cruel; she had seen very little of the evil of the world, but she had seen women who lied and who tried to hurt each other. Seeing such things had quickened her high spirit; it seemed indecent not to scorn them […]. Her life should always be in harmony with the most pleasing impression she should produce; she would be what she appeared, and she would appear what she was. Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she might find herself some day in a difficult position, so that she should have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded. (James, 1881: Ch. VI)

Isabel's happiness is a journey, and it is achieved in the ‘fragility of goodness’, to use an expression offered by Martha Nussbaum: the constitutive fragility of our existence, revealed by all our emotions, fear, compassion and love:

You want to see life, you’ll be hanged if you don’t […] – cousin Ralph says – You want to drain the cup of experience’. ‘No, I don’t wish to touch the cup of experience. It's a poisoned drink! I only want to see for myself’ – Isabel answers. (James, 1881: Ch. XV).

This ‘seeing with her own eyes’ is the beginning of an aesthetic experience, of a burning carnality, an attraction that will lead her into the arms of Gilbert Osmond, the uneasy and charming profiteer whom she meets in his beautiful and old-fashioned Florentine villa full of antiques, taste and decadence.

We know the end of the story: all the intelligence, the desire for experience, ends up in a funnel of ambiguous situations, secrets, lies; in short, they result in failure and unhappiness. Osmond turns out to be very different from what she had imagined. He presented himself as a free man, capable of non-conformist choices; he kept telling her that he did not need wealth, that he wanted to live away from worldliness, that he wanted to be self-sufficient in his mansion and his world of art and beauty. All of this had attracted Isabel: she had finally found someone who could love her not for her social status as a beautiful and brilliant American woman, and would not try to make her a perfect wife. This was, instead, the biggest mistake: thinking that Osmond was a free person like her, and that by him she would be understood and loved in her freedom.

Osmond turns out to be a perfect manipulator, an ungenerous conformist seeking money to promote the aesthetic representation of himself as an elegant connoisseur of beauty and art. Italian literary critic Pietro Citati wrote that Gilbert Osmond and his accomplice, the old mistress Madame Merle, belong to the realm of evil. Osmond marries Isabel for her inheritance. Madame Merle imprisons her young friend Isabel in this marriage to secure a future for the daughter she secretly had with Osmond. More than evil, their actions are mediocre and vulgar. However, Henry James teaches us that ‘evil is not expressed only, or especially, in evil actions: it is an essence, a feeling, an atmosphere, something inexpressible, which no human act can fully realize’ (Citati, 2000: 236–250).

James takes the archetypal form of the circle as a metaphor for human consciousness and its relationship to reality, and so the psychological and ethical insight of Isabel's character gradually grows and is realized in the latter part of the novel, when Isabel makes her moral choice and stays in the Old World. ² In the novel's ending, James makes her go to England, away from that Roman prison in which Osmond has locked her up, but then seems to suggest a return to her duties as a wife, to the responsibility of a destiny she had chosen. Campion, however, chooses another ending: Isabel Archer (Nicole Kidman in the movie) closes a door behind her, and gives us hope that she will never return to the cynical Gilbert Osmond (the actor John Malkovich).

The character of Isabel is the emblem of this precariousness, this ‘adaptive’ failure, but in the view of many scholars of his work she is also the symbol of an American innocence that is corrupted by European customs and mentality.

Isabel's all-positive and naive attributes clash with the customs of a Europe consumed in vice, and James chooses the very beauty of two ancient Italian cities, Florence and Rome, to provide the setting for Osmond's decadent corruption and Isabel's fall of ideals. In fact:

behind the Europe-America relationship lies a more or less conscious examination of the historical process marking the final collapse of the European aristocracy and the emergence of a vigorous entrepreneurial bourgeoisie of which the American continent was producing the most powerful and dynamic representatives. (Marroni, 1983: 46) ³

We found support for our reflections in the reading of James offered by Michael Gorra's text, although a political interpretation seems to prevail. Gorra places at the centre of the novel that ‘critique of American exceptionalism’ (Gorra, 2013: Part One, Ch. I) we discussed above, in the sense that James seems to disapprove of Americans’ inclination to emphasize only the exceptional: Isabel is always described as a young woman called to an exceptional destiny of will and freedom; she believes in happiness to be pursued independently, in her self-determination. Instead, the European experience will change for her precisely this DNA made up of conviction for the new, a new world, a fresh start. In Europe, Isabel learns that her life is already ‘determined’.

The basic political difference between the two continents becomes evident: on one side of the ocean a society with the myth of creating history and the future, believing in republican egalitarianism and freedom to pursue individual happiness through competition; on the other side a Europe rooted in the strength of ‘tradition’ and the legacy of the concept of ‘class’.

In short, Europe shows an awareness that circumstances determine choices, a far more realistic vision than the American Dream. It is interesting to point out another change in James's characters: at first, as soon as they arrive from America, they see themselves as similar to Europeans and get excited about finding things in common. But then, the more time passes, the more they discover themselves to be different and tend to reaffirm their identity, just as happens to Isabel (Yeazell, 1980).

Through Isabel's story we have a good understanding of how desires are not neutral but are determined by context and dispositions. How many women still ‘prefer’ to tolerate abuse and violence because they are used to this normality? A preference-based system cannot counter this culture of remission and abuse, which is all adaptive. Instead, a system based on the protection of capabilities would work precisely on the education of these preferences, and give the guarantee of entitlement and, more importantly, awareness of that entitlement, even before the choice to exercise it or not (Nussbaum, 2000).

In recent years, some thought Isabel should be given a second chance for her own moral redemption. At the end of the novel, we are left with the same question we have had all along, the question asked also by Ralph Touchett, and indeed by James himself as he began to write the novel: what will Isabel Archer do? It is, today as then, a fascinating ethical question.

Irish writer John Banville sought to answer the question that James had only partially answered, and he dared a risky sequel to The Portrait of a Lady. His goal with the novel Mrs Osmond was not to actualize the story, bringing it up to date or making it contemporary, but to re-enter the plot to find out what really happened to Isabel Archer Osmond, whose future had been left hanging at the end of James's novel (Banville, 2017).

But we do not want to follow his answers and plot, because we rather want to stop on the threshold where James leaves Isabel and where Campion also shows her to us in the last scene of the film. There is a long way to go for Isabel: to leave Italy, the still memory of a past that has numbed her soul, and to start over elsewhere? Where? In England, in America? How heavy is her marital responsibility? To go, to return, to be bound by responsibilities and loosed from desires: therein lies all of James’ literature, full of life.