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'Celebrities of the Future'
Fame and Notability in Henry James's Roderick Hudson and The American
in Critical Survey
Author:
Páraic Finnerty
Páraic Finnerty
University of Portsmouth paraic.finnerty@port.ac.uk
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This article examines Henry James's deployment of imagery of statuary, performance, and display to foreground conflicts between emergent forms of notability and older ideas of aristocratic renown, and his use of the figure of the American in Europe to draw attention to the complex intersections of nationality and gender in constructions of public recognition. Roderick Hudson (1875) positions the eponymous American sculptor as a lion in Europe, but reveals his fatal attempts to transcend the objectification and commodification accompanying fame. In The American (1877) Christopher Newman is briefly lionized by a French aristocratic family, but afterwards publicly spurned. Both novels contrast the fate of American men with the successful use of mechanisms of fame by women. Roderick Hudson's Christina Light successfully markets her beauty, becoming through marriage a figure of aristocratic renown, while The American's Noémie Nioche negotiates her rise in the world through self-promotion, finally passing as a noblewoman.