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Jamesian Institutions

2015; Oxford University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/alh/ajv010

1468-4365

M. Emre,

Media, Communication, and Education

In what social contexts can literary representations of human behavior give rise to lived practices of self-cultivation? This essay takes Henry James's notorious 1905 lecture at Bryn Mawr College, “The Question of Our Speech,” as an especially instructive case study to answer this question. The lecture provoked widespread public outcry across the US for its unflattering comparison between the speaking habits of its “young ladies,” which James described as indistinct from “the grunting, the squealing, the barking or the roaring of animals” (Two Lectures 46), and their European counterparts'. By 1924, the lecture's reception history had inspired the formation of various programs of speech pedagogy for young ladies, most notably, the Junior Year Abroad programs originating within the women's college network and codifying the remedial aesthetic education James had imagined. Indeed, in a memorable scene in “The Question of Our Speech,” James describes the speech of American women as “our transported maiden, our unrescued Andromeda” adrift in the “international concert of culture,” a “poor dear distracted organ” waiting to be saved from aesthetic ruin by one who had mastered the distinctions between “form and the absence of form” (53). While it is dangerous to read anything James writes without a sense of humor, this essay shows how his audiences were primed to take him at his word as the savior of American speech—an international damsel in distress. More than just a cosmopolitan patriot, to borrow Jessica Berman's term, James presented himself as a chivalric hero who could use his finely honed mastery of speech as a literary-aesthetic construction to secure his pedagogical authority over the speech of real women, thereby reforming the widespread European impression of the US's “vocal barbarism” as a failing of “national sentiment” (“The Case of Spoken English”). Once James was installed in his new role as a teacher of young ladies within an array of institutions of learning—women's colleges, reading societies, and speech training programs—his fiction emerged as a crucial point of convergence for modernist aesthetics, women's education, and US internationalism in the early twentieth century.