Essay Questions

To what fairy tale is one aspect of the plot often compared?

Much academic scholarship has found in novels of Henry James unexpected aspects of lighter literary fare like fairy tales and fables than is the norm for this author steeped in the mode of realism. One plotline, in particular, is often singled out for creating a tone consistent with fairy tales and their movement to transformation and a happy ending. References abound in the text to the idea of women and prettiness. These references are just as often presented in the negative as they are positive. For instance, Lizzie Acton and Charlotte Wentworth are both situated as unquestionably attractive young women. By contrast, however, both Eugenia and Charlotte’s sister Gertrude are distinctly presented as not conventionally pretty. While Eugenia fails in her mission to “find her fortune” by attracting a wealthy husband and winds up going back to Europe completely disappointed, the story of Gertrude is placed in direct juxtaposition. Despite her sister being notably prettier, Felix is never for a moment interested in her. Almost from the moment they meet, Felix is strangely drawn to Gertrude. He describes her as a “folded flower” who needs but to be plucked from the crowded tree of her family—which also includes her beautiful cousin, Lizzie—in order to fully blossom. The pressure that her family places upon Gertrude to marry the bland Mr. Brand suggests that they see her as the ugly duckling of the family whereas Felix is able to see her as the beautiful swan.

In what ways might the story appropriately be termed subversively Faustian?

The term Faustian refers to one of the most utilized plots in fiction in which a person makes a deal with the devil to trade their soul in exchange for the attainment of a burning desire. In the original legend which is the source of this plot device, a man named Faust is tempted into the contract by a demon named Mephistopheles. That demon has also given rise to an adjective, Mephistophelean, which describes anyone who uses cunning techniques to lure innocent people into wickedness. While the original tale is a tragedy, James introduces elements of the plot in ways that both subvert the tragic implications and the fundamental characterizations. In this interpretation of the novel, Felix is situated as a Mephistophelean character who spends practically the entire novel conniving against the Wentworths and Mr. Brand in order to have Gertrude for himself. The subversive twist is that Felix is also the Faustian character of the story since he is willing to pay any price to make his deal with the devil come to fruition. This willingness extends even to machinations designed to pair his sister Eugenia with the unlikeliest of suitors—the drunken schoolboy son of Mr. Wentworth—for no other purpose than to present his economic circumstances in a more positive light when he finally asks for daughter Gertrude’s hand in marriage. The ultimate subversion of the Faustian plot is that the only tragic figure winds up being Eugenia and her tragedy results from an unwillingness to sell her soul.

For what stylistic technique unusual in the fiction of Henry James has The Europeans often been described as his most “theatrical” novel?

If there is one particular literary technique for which James is famous above all others, it is the ability to create elegantly complex passages of descriptive prose. An evolution exists in the novels of James in which they chronological move toward increasingly greater dependence on conveying the unspoken thoughts of characters rather than portraying the actions stimulated by those thoughts. It is not unusual in a novel written by James to find chunky paragraphs containing just a line or two of dialogue inserted into extended passages of descriptive prose. The Europeans is visually striking within collections of multiple novels by the author for containing pages and pages of very short lines—often just a single sentence or two—comprising extended conversations written as dialogue. It is safe to declare The Europeans is far more dependent upon realistic conversational dialogue to tell its story than is typical of the author. Most of his other novels either introduce dialogue in a less realistic style that is overly formal or whittles dialogue for the purpose of advancing the story down to the barest essentials. In this way, the literary style is closer to feeling like a written play at times than it is a novel.