Critics have not generally given serious critical attention to Henry James's 1878 short novel The Europeans, either suggesting that James did not intend anything more than a “light ironic comedy” when he wrote it,Footnote ¹ or, in more recent years, that it can be viewed simply as a statement about outdated Puritanism, or a tracking of “the effects of commercial and industrial activity” in mid-nineteenth century America.Footnote ² James's own concession to his brother, William, that it was “thin and empty” encourages such thin readings.Footnote ³ James's 1877 letter to W.D. Howells, containing the promise that his next novel would be a “very joyous little romance” suggests that he might have been willing to right the perceived wrong of having ended The Americans so “trag”[ically] by supplying The Europeans with a “prettier ending.”Footnote ⁴ James goes on to describe his premise for the novel as indeed light and playful (“I shall play havoc with the New England background of 1830!”Footnote ⁵), perhaps suggesting that he would be returning not only to the historical setting but to other technical strategies of the early nineteenth century. For instance, if we read the work as a political allegory, rather than as the “superficially historical novel” as which it has been largely dismissed, and assume that it was written with a “sympathetic understanding of Hawthorne,”Footnote ⁶ we see more than an innocuous, fairy-tale plot and ostensibly underdeveloped characters. An allegorical reading of The Europeans certainly fits with the fact that James was working on his critical study of Hawthorne at about the same time period as he was writing The Europeans,Footnote ⁷ which aptly features “a Sketch” as part of its original title – imitating the kinds of subtext implied in many of Hawthorne's titles.Footnote ⁸ Furthermore, such a reading matches James's primary critique of American consciousness underlined in his biography of Hawthorne: America's parochialism in the context of world affairs, for, as he wrote, Americans understand themselves to be on “the circumference of the circle of civilization, rather than at the centre.”Footnote ⁹ In spite of America's limitations, James wrote to Julian Hawthorne that his father “was the greatest imaginative writer we had [for the era],”Footnote ¹⁰ admitting to the son before he wrote his biography on Hawthorne that “it will not be an easy matter to give an account of your father's life and genius.”Footnote ¹¹ Finally, reading the novel as political allegory allows us to see America's efforts (represented by Robert Acton) to compete with a “European family,”Footnote ¹² and to understand James's caustic comment on imperialistic ventures – most notably as he pits the pernicious nature of European exploits against the more humanistic pursuit of art for art's sake.Footnote ¹³

As critics such as Tony Tanner and Richard Poirier have pointed out, James tended to view the era of Hawthorne and Emerson as innocent and pure.Footnote ¹⁴ If the Wentworths – the novel's archetype for puritan American culture – can be criticized, it is for their “excessive” restraint, overly meticulous moral scrupulousness, and exacting propriety, not their capitalistic drive for acquisition. Eugenia, however, has come to America “to seek her fortune,”Footnote ¹⁵ and to acquire new territory. Eugenia should be read as James's modification of our standard expectations involved with empire; that is, Western powers exploiting Eastern colonies. Far from being the “contested terrain” of American imperial exploits,Footnote ¹⁶ Eugenia is in fact the figure of the powerful [transplanted] European sovereign – having begun as an American, her life abroad has transformed her into a French empress in search of a new terrain over which she seeks proprietary rule. It is worth noting that the word “empire” is related to imperare, to command, which implies both an ordering and a preparing.Footnote ¹⁷ Eugenia does indeed command others, particularly her brother Felix, whom she treats like a galley slave, and the whole novel is her attempt to prepare the territory (property and people alike) for passive acquiescence to her domination. Her name itself may be a derivative of Eugenia, a “genus of tropical trees, mostly found in America and the West Indies of which the most important is the Allspice tree.”Footnote ¹⁸ The basic idea is to suggest an exotic product associated with colonization, but also indigenous to America. Her name may just as likely be a reference to the Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, a historical fact with which James would have been familiar. She and her son the prince imperial (Felix acts much like her imperial son), vanished after the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. In the same vein of keeping Eugenia's name associated with French historical events, James may have borrowed it from the actual location Eugénie-les-Bains, in the Landes countryside, north of Pau, France, which has been “a fashionable watering hole since the mid-nineteenth century.”Footnote ¹⁹ In fact, Napoleon III and his Empress Eugénie (for whom the local spring and town are named) “patronized the resort”Footnote ²⁰. The location would therefore be associated with the kind of retreat from civilization which Eugenie halfheartedly welcomes at the Wentworth estate in The Europeans. More to the point, both the historical empress and the fictional baroness maintain a proprietary relationship with their respective locations, especially if we trace the derivation of her name to “eugenic,” which means “well-born.”Footnote ²¹

In the spirit of such an allegorical reading, Robert Acton stands for nineteenth-century American diplomacy, simultaneously seeking political alliance and trading negotiations with prospective parties – a version of colonialism modeled after the British Empire. Though not exactly an exploiting entity, he does gain through colonial relationships – as represented by his collection of imported artifacts. In the shadow still of other world powers in the 1840s, and as an agent of developing America, he seeks clout, prestige, and power in his international aspirations. Such movement is tied especially to aesthetic acquisitions and to his very identity as connoisseur of aesthetic ornaments. Daniel Hannah, in his article “Ornamental Pleasure: James and the British Soldier,” discusses James's placement of the British soldier in “Owen Wingrave” as the unstable locus for contesting moments of national militarism, subversive eroticized play and self-reflexive re-imaginings of the artist's relation to “violence.”Footnote ²² Robert Acton plays a similar role, this time as the American military man, emasculated in two ways. He is unwilling to marry (he cannot “act on” his initial inclination), nor do we know if his impulse is to wed himself for love or by dint of object desire. In either case, he does not fully embrace the tenets of the institution. Further, through his privileging of “‘ornamental’ pleasures” over a “militaristic masculinity,”Footnote ²³ he intuitively (though perhaps not cognitively) recognizes as the machinery of Empire, he consequently rejects the institutions upheld and propagated by that machinery.

If we view Robert Acton as James's loose political allegory of a complicated and sometimes contradictory American Empire in the nineteenth century, what the Wentworths perceive as the “man of the world of the family” – having “quintupled a fortune already considerable” with his collection of Chinese “curiosities” (98), he is also a kind of stabilizing force; a diplomatic world[ly] power. At first glance he seems willing to relinquish his commodities and assets to a more powerful sovereign: it was “taken for granted” that he would presently place his “advantages at the disposal of some well-regulated young woman of his own ‘set’” (98). But he will come to understand, at least subconsciously, that his joint venture may not involve a competing world power. Enlarging that circle to include a divorced Europeanized baroness does not coincide with the basic regulatory principle of colonization. She is not an agent of the British Empire, nor is she a colony of that empire. As historians have noted, the British and French colonized very different parts of the world. For example, between “1863 and 1893 Cambodia, Laos, and the Vietnamese territories – Annam, Tonkin and Cochin China – came under French rule, forming French Indo-China [whereas the] British had no special interest in Indo-China – there was no British equivalent of Lyons silk manufacturers in pursuit of raw silk.”Footnote ²⁴ James makes specific reference to “India shawls” and “pink silk blinds” (79), which decorate Eugenia's cottage. We know, too, that James was reading political treatises on democracy and empire in the early 1870s. He recommends, in a February letter to Charles Eliot Norton, Taine's “Notes sur l'Angleterre & Renan's Reforme Morale,”Footnote ²⁵ which came out in 1871 and was an “attempt to come to terms with democracy, in the aftermath of defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.”Footnote ²⁶ James goes on to call Renan's work “curiously fallacious in many ways, but a most interesting picture of a deeply conservative soul.”Footnote ²⁷ James would write to Grace Norton, in June of 1879, the “British mind is so totally unironical in relation to itself that it is a perpetual temptation.”Footnote ²⁸ Perhaps he was thinking that writing The Europeans was the act in which he had been tempted to indulge.

Certainly, national impetus for French and British colonization was very different in the mid- to late nineteenth century. In Britain, the “driving force” primarily “sprang from opposition to doctrinaire Manchesterism and the Little Englanders, while in France it was due to the efforts for the ‘rehabilitation de la France vaincue’ as compensation for her reduced European influence following the lost war of 1870–71.”Footnote ²⁹ Gollwitzer's historical analysis parallels James's literary situation. Eugenia's fortune-seeking is compensatory, for she has lost, like France, her European influence, and can only hope to reclaim a portion of it through capitalizing on her original American relations. James would have been aware that extreme nationalism was building in France in the mid-nineteenth century, and would have known that Louis Napoleon “was elected president of the Second Republic” in December 1848, and that his “coup d'état of December 1851, which led to the Second Empire, met with little resistance.”Footnote ³⁰ Of course, it was Napoleon III whose wife was the Empress Eugénie, a likely source for James's fictional name, imbued with political connotations.

If we apply Mansergh's use of the term “imperialism” – that is, “the extension of the rule or influence of a state beyond its national frontiers”Footnote ³¹ – to James's portrayal of Eugenia, we gain additional insights into the nature of her power play. Eugenia seeks to extend her influence beyond her national frontiers, though if we remember that she was initially American, those frontiers become inverted, and we must consider that she first went east (to France) to seek her fortune, and is now coming back west. But James plays with our conception of such directional markers as well, for, as Felix points out shortly after their arrival in Boston, “Instead of coming to the West we seem to have come to the East” (41), suggesting that the “sign-boards” remind one of “Mahometan decoration” (41) and the convergence of the sky with the housetops reminds one of Cairo (41), alluding first to Islamic customs and then to Africa – and therefore expanding the colonizing field of influence. Felix's comment reflects his artistic view of the landscape, but the fact that he and his sister have been to Cairo implicates her, at least, in imperial exploitation. Felix merely seeks material for his art. Eugenia seeks exploitation of the capital various territories afford her. It has been suggested by at least one historian that imperialism might be understood as the “highest stage of capitalism,”Footnote ³² and if we apply the theory to Eugenia, she, like a good capitalist, targets only the most promising frontiers: “Do you suppose if I had not known they were rich I would ever have come?” (40), she demands of her brother. James depicts the Wentworths as a prospective colonial field for Eugenia to exploit – much as France was immersed in a similar kind of campaign for new acquisitions in the 1870s. Jules Ferry, the architect of the empire of the Third Republic, widely claimed that colonies “are for rich countries one of the most lucrative methods of investing capital.”Footnote ³³ Eugenia indeed embodies that spirit.

Acton, as the well-regulated overseer of domestic capital, might view Eugenia's exoticized Eastern self as a crowning touch for his already remarkable collection, but the problem becomes the competition such relational colonizing implies. Furthermore, he was already “tacitly felt to be an ornament to his circle” (98). In other words, he himself participates in the privileged ornamental pleasures which might be seen as a dividend to his role both as demilitarized, aestheticized soldier and as collector/colonizer of aesthetic goods. Still, his initial attraction to Eugenia consists largely of her absolute uniqueness: a combination of aggressive (masculine) single-mindedness and exoticized physical (Asian) charm. Acton is “obliged to admit that he had never yet seen a woman just like this – not even in China” (100). Most historians agree that the period starting about 1840 and ending about 1914 can be viewed as the “Augustan Age of European Empire in Asia,”Footnote ³⁴ and Acton certainly has contributed to the exploitation of “chinoiseries” from the “Celestial Empire” (107).

Acton's “trophies” from exploits in China and perhaps East India include,

To Eugenia, the ornamental pleasures of a “domiciliary” (107) showing suggest the kind of productive and fiscally lucrative efficiency of a “well-kept dairy” (108), a point which highlights Eugenia's aspiration for the role of proprietor in Acton's house. The “large, unused rooms” suggest to her the space of “museum” (107–8), an appropriate venue in which to showcase Acton's “porcelain and bric-a-brac” (108), though also a likely domain for the empress role which James not so subtly suggests Eugenia seeks to play. Historically, facts bear the theory out. France was part of a group of Western powers trying to establish treaty negotiations with Beijing, which occurred in and around 1854. Diplomats from Britain, the United States and France initially tried for a peaceful renegotiation of earlier trade relations, but eventually the “government of Napoleon III found [in a case where a French missionary was tortured and killed in Gwangxi] a basis for French cooperation with Britain to coerce the Chinese empire.”Footnote ³⁵ The conflicts, eventually resulting in the 1860 Anglo-French war with China (along with various treaty settlements and trade negotiations), “had the general effect of opening the whole Chinese empire to Western contact.”Footnote ³⁶

Acton, portrayed as an American diplomatic entity not quite willing to exert the full force of his influence, is overshadowed by the stronger mother country – in literal historical terms that is England, and in fictional terms that is Mrs. Acton, who rules like a proper benevolent despot over her “well-wooded corner of the Western world” (166). Knowing that Mrs. Acton will soon die, and pass on her material goods to Robert, Eugenia finds the prospect of ‘inheriting’ her estate alluring, especially as the items within further indicate Western expansion (even ownership) of the East. The “large, solid, irreproachable basis of existence the place seemed to her to indicate” (168) reflects the colonizer's desire for a solid base of power – Eugenia, on a moral level, does not seem to understand that the kinds of “curiosities within, dimly gleaming” (168) also represent her willingness to exploit others for her own gain. Eugenia reflects that Mrs. Acton is “soon to withdraw from” her claim over a mansion filled with all the entities which make this “just such a house” for which Eugenia had initially come to America; from its “large oriental rug” to the “old pots of blue China-ware” to the row of “big Eastern vases” (168), the East has been looted, transported to America, and reassembled whole.

Of course, Eugenia counts on Acton relinquishing his little preassembled empire to her, though she does not anticipate being found out for the false person James paints her to be. The way to “understand” Eugenia is to note that “there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither” (156). With her curtains and drapes and fans hiding, cloaking, subverting her true identity, it is no new idea to say that Eugenia is, at base, a false woman – a fact which Acton intuits from catching her in a compromising situation with Clifford Wentworth, and then confirms when he guesses that she has not officially yet signed her divorce papers. Like a true expansionist, Eugenia will only relinquish one negotiable contract once she has the other in hand. Perhaps Acton senses that she sees him as her next colonial enterprise because he is so familiar with the ground rules himself.

His almost obsessive referencing of all things Chinese, from artifacts to women – and the inevitable comparison that ensues – reinforces the dichotomy of his function in the story: colonizer and commodity. When the baroness declares that she has come to America in order to seek out “natural relations” rather than “artificial relations” (102) she underlines what Jean Baudrillard argues is the paradox of negotiation in a “consumer society” whereby the commodities of consumption become “displaced” by the “sacred pillars of authenticity.”Footnote ³⁷ The very idea of commodity is elusive because it is based on mere subjective interpretation. Commodities' “artifice” – that which is consumed – turns out to be the parties themselves involved in said negotiations. Acton acknowledges that if he wishes to be involved with the baroness, he will participate in just such an exchange: his sacred objects will be repossessed by her, and she will be consumed: “I suppose I am an artificial relation” (102), he says, using his seductive discourse both to extract new meaning and to avoid the truth. Said otherwise, he may be kept from proposing by dint of an impulse “which acts upon the underlying prohibition (conscious or unconscious) in order to nullify it and to substitute for it the charms and traps of appearances.”Footnote ³⁸ Indeed, Acton senses a trap when he returns early from his Newport trip and discovers Eugenia in a compromising situation, for he sees that her authentic (moral) self is subject to question. He cannot trust her integrity: “She is not honest, she is not honest” (171), a fact which underscores Eugenia's in authentic self: “self” defined here both in terms of moral person and commodified artifact (appearance).

The other way to interpret their playful conversation, of course, is to assume that “natural” implies a heterosexual intimacy, and when Acton suggests that “there is one way in which the relation of a lady and a gentleman may always become natural (103), Eugenia objects, “That may be natural or not” (103). Even if they are “not there yet” (103) – “there” implying at that stage of intimacy – Eugenia seems to intuit that she and Acton may not be compatible. More specifically, while Eugenia seeks to extend her frontiers and therefore her power base, Acton seems more concerned with the “consolidation [and] protection” of what has already “been acquired” – in other words, the “maintenance of the status quo.”Footnote ³⁹ What is clear is that Eugenia senses that Acton would “do a great many things that she might ask him” (103), by virtue of her charming, exotic, not quite conventional beauty, or by virtue of her higher status in the power play implied when we read her allegorically as French Empire. Eugenia knows Acton is easily influenced by feminine (at least aesthetic) charms, having deduced that he would “put his hand into his pocket every day of the week” (78) for his sister, and finally concluded that the men in America “are evidently very obliging” (78). The fact that, in the end, she must deem her “enterprise” with “American institutions” a resounding “failure” (152) has as much to do with her having overestimated her own abilities in adaptability. Metaphorically speaking, American soil proves hostile to the crops she seeks to plant and then export. James's language justifies the imperialistic analogy. Eugenia, he writes, realizes that the “vague continent” of North America is “somehow not adapted” to growing the “species of vegetation for which she carried a collection of seedlings, as we may say, in her pocket” (152). She also overestimates the value which Acton will end up attributing to her “attributes” (152).

While it is true that Eugenia initially embodies for Acton valuable exotic commodities on the open market, her “stock” eventually loses a good deal of its value. “[M]onopolizing” Eugenia's time (the phrase itself indicates the type of proprietary interest he has in her) proves “the greatest pleasure he had known at least since he had come from China” (103). The baroness does indeed come packaged, at least in her physical attributes, as a foreign “Other,” as other critics have already remarked.Footnote ⁴⁰ Our first description of her vaguely resembles the physiognomy of a person of African, Creole, or perhaps Asian descent. Her complexion is describes as “fatigued” (35), indicating a puttylike, nonwhite hue. She has overly full lips, a “thick nose” and “crisp, dark hair, finely frizzled, which was always braided in a manner that suggested some Southern or Eastern, some remotely foreign, woman” (35). Historically speaking, the “vogue of chinoiserie had, by the third quarter of the eighteenth century, found “wide expression in European art and architecture” and frequently “Chinese objets d'art graced the mansions of the well-to-do.”Footnote ⁴¹ Eugenia appropriately decorates her cottage after such style, suspending “India shawls” in her parlour, “curious fabrics,” and “pink silk blinds” (79), all making Eugenia “a little more comfortable (79) – again indicating that she is familiar with East Asian exports. James “felt the impact” of the Orientalist movement throughout the 1870s, and as Adeline Tintner points out, by 1876, when he made his permanent residence in London, “he seemed to have reached the saturation point for pictorial Orientalism” (124), having regularly written letters for the New York Tribune on the movement and reviewed artists influenced by the Orient, such as Delacroix and Gobineau.Footnote ⁴²

Eventually, though, Eugenia's value diminishes, partly because the mystery of her exotic charms is replaced by tangible proof of her exploitative nature. Acton finally understands that she is an agent of empire (put another way, she seeks to expand her kingdom) when he risks becoming a consumable commodity himself. Though Eugenia, upon her initial introduction to Acton, “felt that he was, intrinsically, the most important person present” (68), power relations by nature comprise relative qualities, shifting in relation to like entities within the same environment. As Tony Ballantyne says about the “disruptive power” (4) and “inherently relational nature” (15) of empire, “information and identities across” the “imperial systems of circulation” (16) become at risk, partly due to the hierarchical and interdependent nature of imperial powers. Eugenia proves too powerful for Acton – he risks losing his own status as the most “important person” within his sphere of appropriation. Moreover, James's repeated insistence on Eugenia's physical ugliness reveals his emblematic depiction of her moral unsavoriness.

Felix, as allegorical antithesis to empire, is James's minister to aesthetic principal, quelling and partially countering Eugenia's inherently destructive colonizing force. For instance, he halts her, albeit inadvertently, from potentially ravaging the ordered museum world of the Wentworth “estate” – a self-contained colony of moral and aesthetic purity. James had explored the nature of the artist and experimented with the artist's ability to commingle the ideal of art and the actuality of living several years earlier in Roderick Hudson – where such a marriage proved fruitless. Felix might be seen as an early version of James's later, somewhat more fully developed, painter Nick Dormer in his 1890 work The Tragic Muse – though the name Dormer implies that Nick's talent is more dormant than active. Felix likewise claims that Gertrude requires a “touchstone” like himself to awaken her from her “dormant” state (162). In any case, one is likely to read all three artists as representations of an ideal more than they qualify as fully fleshed out examples of humanity. James's choice for his artist's name, in the case of The Europeans (Felix), reinforces an allegorical reading, as his name means “happy.”Footnote ⁴³

James frames even the décor of the estate as representative of the tension between empire and art:

The United Sates map embodies the spirit of discovery and Manifest Destiny. The Madonna paintings, in marked contrast, represent a high point in artistic productivity of the Western world.Footnote ⁴⁴ That other “very pretty” portrait in the Wentworth house, of course, is of the Empress Josephine (66), symbolic of a different kind of “rebirth”: nation building, expansionism, and an attempt by France to match forces with other major powers of the Western world (especially Britain), though she may also have been associated with sterility.Footnote ⁴⁵ Beyond the fact that collecting butterflies and beetles was a popular hobby in the nineteenth century, the case in which such specimens are framed (one may note in their lifeless state) and then showcased becomes reminiscent of other “collections” on the estate – an aggregate of “imperialist expropriation.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Catalogues of such collections of material goods, expropriated from the East, reinforce the notion that James's allegory derides the excesses of empire. Depictions of the artist figure, contesting – in his absolute dedication to the aesthetic – all crass pursuits of the material, suggest to the careful reader that James may have been disappointed by the majority of his readers accepting the novel as merely “comic” or “entertaining.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In fact, in reference to a review of the novel appearing in the North American Review in January 1879, which claimed that a “lack of individuality and vital force in their personages is the great defect of all Mr. James's novels,”Footnote ⁴⁸ James writes that the “review in the N.A.R. was stupid. The human mind, generally speaking, is dull.”Footnote ⁴⁹ If he fears the dull mind of the reading population, which may discount The Europeans as shallow romance, he also reminds us that the writer – even of romances – may occasionally strike a more serious note. He writes, “the art of the romancer is, ‘for the fun of it,’ insidiously to cut the cable, to cut it without our detecting him.”Footnote ⁵⁰ James also confessed in a letter to Charles Norton in March 1873,

Whether we read The Europeans as a satire on political machinery, or simply as a “sketch” which tries to capture a glimpse of the progress of that machinery, we may certainly view it as one of James's many remarkable experiments – with his audience as much as his scenery.