"Eugenia’s spirits rose. She surrendered herself to a certain tranquil gaiety. If she had come to seek her fortune, it seemed to her that her fortune would be easy to find. There was a promise of it in the gorgeous purity of the western sky; there was an intimation in the mild, unimpertinent gaze of the passers of a certain natural facility in things."
A distillation of the plot of The Europeans down to its most essential quality would accurately summarize the story as being about a European Baroness coming to America to seek her fortune, by finding a wealthy man to marry. That phrase “come to seek her fortune” reoccurs more than once in one form or another over the course of the narrative. The novel gets barely more than a few pages into the story, in fact, before the first two occurrences arrive almost back-to-back. Of course, in the phrase itself lies the implication of having come to one specific place to seek that fortune from another specific place in which fortune is apparently not to be found. It is within this implication that the meaning of the title is also located. Baroness Eugenia-Camilla-Dolores Münster has left Europe to visit her cousins in America for the first time. And also, of course, to seek her fortune in the promise of the wide-open frontier which stretches out beneath that pure western sky.
"Eugenia herself, as we know, had plenty of leisure to enumerate her uses. As I have had the honor of intimating, she had come four thousand miles to seek her fortune; and it is not to be supposed that after this great effort she could neglect any apparent aid to advancement. It is my misfortune that in attempting to describe in a short compass the deportment of this remarkable woman I am obliged to express things rather brutally."
In addition to being an example of how that phrase about seeking her fortune reoccurs to the point of becoming a mantra, or at least a motif, this quote is fascinating. The interesting thing about this passage is how it illustrates the idiosyncratic narrative voice used to tell the story. Note that this bit of descriptive prose self-identifies the narrator using personal pronouns. Under normal circumstances, a narrator describing himself using words like “I” and “my” would not be worthy of mention. Those normal circumstances, however, are when the story is being told from a first-person perspective by definitively identified character. Even when a first-person narrator is nameless or unidentified, it remains clear that the story is being told from a specific viewpoint. That is not the case here. The conversational tone is adopted by a typical omniscient and objective third-person narrator. What makes this introduction of a first-person tone to a third-person narration is that this example is the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, the narrative style adheres to standard third-person form. Actually, the paragraph from which this quote is excerpted is very close to being a completely unique occurrence.
"There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something, between the two, that was neither. It is probable that, in the last analysis, what she meant was that Felix should spare her the necessity of stating the case more exactly and should hold himself commissioned to assist her by all honorable means to marry the best fellow in the world. But in all this it was never discovered what Felix understood."
The tone adopted by that idiosyncratic narrator in this passage is indicative of an unusual lightness in a work by Henry James. That is not to suggest that the novels of the author are melodramatic or depressing, but they do contain a certain type of realism. The narrator’s commentary on the manner in which a sense of understanding between two people who are close can be a very complicated affair verges very close to the edge of being satirical. And this is far from the only example in the novel where an almost satirical sense of playfulness is flirted with. Many critiques of the novel have proposed that there is to be found in its essentially realistic story elements approaching that of a fable or even a fairytale. One can certainly read that last sentence in this quote and understand the comparison.
