A curiously framed observation is made about Baroness Eugenia-Camilla-Dolores Münster before The Europeans has managed to make it to its third paragraph. The omniscient third-person narrator relates a conversation between anonymous individuals in which the subject of the conversation is the physical attractiveness of Eugenia. In response to a rhetorical contemplation of the idea that she is a pretty woman, one person asserts that “her features are very bad.” This inspires another to remark “I don’t know about her features, but she carries her head like a pretty woman.” Something about this concluding simile seems to be extremely unsound. The attentive reader cannot help but wonder exactly what it means to carry one’s head like a pretty woman while not actually being a pretty woman. The conflict of the comparison seems irreconcilable. Until that is, one applies it metaphorically to what Eugenia stands for rather than to the woman herself.
Jettison the Camilla-Dolores part of the protagonist’s name and call her just plain Eugenia. It is no mere coincidence the character at the center story has a name that is similar to the book’s title. Nor it is a mere coincidence that the name Eugenia derives from the Greek and means noble or well-born.
Eugenia is one of the characters representing the Europeans of the title. The other is her young brother, Felix, who has accompanied her on her trip to America to “seek her fortune.” The Baroness has been informed by the Baron that a divorce is forthcoming and so Eugenia has crossed the Atlantic to find a wealthy American husband to keep her living in the style to which she has grown accustomed as the titled wife of an actual member of the nobility. The upcoming divorce is entirely related to aristocratic rules and expectations and Eugenia has no recourse to fighting the divorce which will result in her losing everything. This will affect Felix as well, of course, but his situation is different because he was never even an aristocrat-by-marriage, but merely a plain old European of a lesser privileged class.
Unlike his sister who remains standoffish and retains her haughty aristocratic sense of superiority over the coarse Americans, Felix flings himself fully into the less restrictive and more free-spirited American of way life. Recognizing that economic stability means to Americans what title nobility means to Europeans, he immediately sets to work trying to finagle things behind the scenes that will get his sister a rich husband. He finds two potential candidates and becomes almost Mephistophelean in pitting them against each other in a race to be the first to sell their souls to marry a genuine European Baroness.
As for Felix himself, he sets his eyes on his own prize—the young daughter of a wealthy American capitalist. He also engages in some devilish strategizing to win her hand in marriage and ensure his own financial future regardless of whether Eugenia finds the fortune she seeks or not. But—and this is the point at which the meaning of the novel is engineered—the surprise here is that Felix is not manipulating the machinations behind the scenes in order to win young Gertrude Wentworth because her father is rich or even because she is the more beautiful daughter. Felix has discovered something wonderful about America: anyone can marry for love no matter who they love. Of course, this is not literally true, but within the part of America Felix is able to operate within, it seems true enough to him. The point is that if he really just wanted to marry money, he could have set his sights on the older, more physically attractive daughter, Gertrude’s sister, Charlotte. And that would have definitely been the course to take back in Europe.
Ultimately, Felix will marry Gertrude and live happily ever after. Eugenia, on the other hand, winds up marrying neither of the men that her brother has tried to arrange as candidates. One of them finds her an object of pity and absurdity as a result of her aristocratic demeanor. The other—the one she actually cares about—has wound up falling for her, but ultimately decided he can’t marry her because he can’t trust her. And he can’t trust her because Eugenia has been evasive on the subject of whether she has signed an official document required to legally dissolve her marriage to the Baron. More to the point is that she has not. She cannot bring herself to put her signature on paper and instantly make herself available to and worthy of the trust of Robert Action. And so the novel concludes with her brother Felix and his new bride taking off for adventures around the world while Eugenie heads back home alone to Europe to a marriage already over whether she ever signs the document or not.
It is this divergence between the way that Felix treats America and the way that Eugenia treats it that forms the basis for the meaning of the novel. Though published in1878, the story is set during the 1840s. America has not yet suffered the tribulations of the Civil War and is a long way off from becoming anything close to world power. For most Europeans, America is still an upstart and barely worthy of thought. It is a country inhabited by roughnecks, with no culture, and where bloodlines mean nothing. Eugenia is the representative of this perspective of Europe toward America. She fully embodies the meaning of her name as she still fully retains the belief in the meaning of European nobility and the privilege of being a member of the wellborn. Her brother’s name derives from Latin and means both fortunate and happy. Felix is happy to be in America from the moment he steps off the boat. By contrast, Eugenia is so unhappy that holes up alone in their hotel and gives Felix the task of introducing them to their American cousins.
Felix recognizes the freedom that America gives to a family that has enjoyed aristocratic privilege in Europe but is on the verge of losing that privilege and everything that comes with it. America doesn’t care about precisely the thing Europe cares about the most. Felix is very happy throughout the story because he recognizes the fortunate circumstances America offers that will shortly cease to exist back home once his sister is no longer a Baroness. By contrast, Eugenia cannot work up the desire to sign the document dissolving her marriage because she does not recognize her aristocratic privilege as existing on paper only.
European aristocracy was already on its way to crumbling by the time he wrote the novel, but it was still very much in in place and still very powerful and---most importantly—still considered important even by the majority of Europeans who had no claim to aristocratic rights whatever. James was presenting America as a portrait of what Europe could become by dismantling the aristocracy, but it was not a portrait that anyone seriously imagined would exist within the lifetime of anyone alive at the time of publication. James was no more actively predicting that a popular name like Eugenia would one day become almost extinct any more than he was predicting that less than half a century later titles like Baron and Earl and Duke and Marquee and Viscount would no longer impress anybody in Europe but those holding the titles themselves. And yet, that is exactly the world he was describing in his critique of The Europeans.
