SOURCE: Newman, Judie. “Paleface into Redskin: Cultural Transformations in Alison Lurie's Foreign Affairs.” In Forked Tongues? Comparing Twentieth-Century British and American Literature, edited by Ann Massa and Alistair Stead, pp. 188-205. London and New York: Longman, 1994.

[In the following essay, Newman examines the use of intertextual literary themes and cultural slippages in Foreign Affairs, contending that, rather than reinforcing the fictional stereotypes of Henry James, Frances Hodges Burnett, or John Gay, Lurie subverts traditional clashes between Americans and Europeans and nature and culture to reveal the generative possibilities inherent in such interacting oppositions.]

A critic once divided American writers into two camps, the Palefaces and the Redskins. The Redskins looked west, toward the frontier, responded to the more physical and natural aspects of life, and often wrote in a style which expressed raw experience rather than literary form. The Palefaces looked east, wrote of those peculiarly elusive areas in American life, society and manners, and were preoccupied with craft and formal brilliance.¹

With these words, Malcolm Bradbury opens his review of Alison Lurie's Foreign Affairs. Following in the footsteps of Philip Rahv, the critic in question,² Bradbury designates Lurie as a Paleface, noting the enthusiastic reception of her work by the British (Palefaces to a man) as indicative of her true forte as a novelist of manners in the mould of Henry James and Edith Wharton. Rahv's paradigm of the schizophrenic nature of the American literary artist is also, of course, a close approximation to the conventional opposition between America and Europe, and between nature and culture, as it is commonly expressed in American fiction in the ‘International Theme,’ the encounter in one novel between representatives of the two cultures, which is coincidentally also the plot of Foreign Affairs.

Since ideas of what is characteristically American or European, definitions of a national culture, stem as much from literature as from life, the notion of intertextuality is relevant here. In the purely literary sense intertextuality depends upon the idea that ‘every text builds itself upon a mosaic of quotations, every text is absorption and transformation of another text’.³ The relation is not between individual texts but to a totality, creating the sense of a work of art which interacts with an entire tradition. If we define ‘text’ as a system of signs, a text may extend to include folklore, movies, the language of dress, symbolic systems, and the constructions of cultural—or even, if we accept Lacanian notions of the primacy of language—individual identity. The ‘International Theme’ may be defined as itself an intertext, a set of plots, characters, images and conventions to which a particular novel refers. Moreover, its central situation, in which characters are physically translated and transformed as a result of crossing from one culture, one set of signs, to another, itself thematises intertextuality.

Transposition from one intertext to another necessarily brings into question the autonomy of the individual. In interview Lurie described the germ of the novel as an idea which ‘came to me at the Opera. I noticed that when the scene changed behind someone they looked different.’⁴ The theatrical context is appropriate. If individuals are passive to change, altered by a different cultural scene, they may be considered as acting within a social fiction, a text which is socially evolved, playing a role in a story which is directed elsewhere. The term ‘intertextuality’ can suggest this negative sense of life as repeating a previously heard story, of life predestined by the notions that shape our consciousness. In this sense, human experience may generate literature but such experience has already been filtered through forms of artistic organisation which may militate against—or even taboo—certain forms of experience. As Lurie's own collection of feminist folktales suggested,⁵ too many women have waited around for a handsome prince, to the detriment of creative experience. Fifty-four-year-old Vinnie Miner (the major heroine of Foreign Affairs) risks the opposite fate, giving up all hope of an erotic existence because ‘in English literature, to which in early childhood Vinnie had given her deepest trust—and which for half a century has suggested to her what she might do, think, feel, desire, and become—women of her age seldom have any sexual or romantic life’.⁶

Conversely the notion of life as imitating art opens the way for a dramaturgical concept of the self, continually creating itself through role-play. Vinnie Miner's alter ego, Rosemary Radley, a British actress, escapes from typecasting only to undergo a series of rapid transformations which pass well beyond the bounds of creative adaptivity and into the realm of madness. Where Vinnie is more attentive to a past script than to present reality, Rosemary risks the collapse of a self which is already shifting and permeable at the boundaries. In translating characters from one cultural frame (America) to another (London) Lurie investigates whether the result is the regeneration of an ossified individual in a creative rewriting of the scripted self, or merely a chameleon adaptation to different defining norms. By employing the International Theme, Lurie exposes her characters to a variety of intertextual frames, creating comic, ironic or even tragic effects, as characters who have scripted themselves in accordance with one acculturated model undergo slippage into less exalted or more challenging roles.

The International Theme has been a staple of the American novel from Hawthorne's Dr Grimshawe's Secret to Twain's Innocents Abroad and Edith Wharton's Roman Fever. Broadly defined, the situation involves the encounter between the moral consciousness of an American and the rich cultural atmosphere of Europe, with the ensuing clash of values demonstrating either the provincialism of the American, at sea in a European world of established customs and sophisticated manners, or the precarious moral footing of the experienced European. The American innocent abroad may feature (positively) as democratic, spontaneous, natural and sincere, or (less attractively) as crude, vulgar and ignorant, while the European sophisticate is alternatively representative of all that is aesthetic and civilised in culture, or conversely of a decadent world of deceit, artifice and aristocratic corruption. Henry James, past master of the theme, gives it classic expression in The American (1877) in which Christopher Newman, thwarted in his love for Claire de Cintré by the machinations of the corrupt Bellegardes (who include a murderer within their aristocratic ranks), nobly eschews revenge, out of the American generosity of his spirit, thus revealing a natural nobility of worth rather than birth, which is opposed to the false nobility of the Bellegardes. It is something of a fixed fight, as highly idealised American virtue does battle with stereotypical European villainy.⁷ In less clear-cut fashion, in Daisy Miller (1878) the eponymous heroine falls foul of her fellow American expatriates in Rome, her innocence recognisable only to a young Italian. This shift towards the Europeanised American as villain is also marked in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) where Isabel Archer becomes the prey of the self-centred expatriate Gilbert Osmond. By The Ambassadors (1903) the American himself is culpable. Chad Newsome pursues a love affair with Madame de Vionnet only as a temporary diversion from his business interests. His countryman, Lambert Strether, despatched to fetch Chad home to America, ultimately crosses to the lady's side, transferring his allegiance to the ostensibly corrupting European mistress, whose love for Chad is real. James therefore offers a range of possibilities, from the stereotypical American innocent, corrupted by sinister Europeans, to the vulnerable European, exploited and about to be betrayed by the New World.

Americans do not, however, feature very effectively in James as redemptive of Old World corruption. Ironically, for that particular variation the reader must turn to a less exalted version of the International Theme, by a British writer, Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886). A bestseller in its day, when the distinctions between adult and children's fiction were elastic, the novel was much admired by Gladstone who told its author that ‘the book would have great effect in bringing about added good feeling between the two nations and making them understand each other’.⁸ Despite addressing her as ‘noblest of neighbors and most heavenly of women’⁹ James was somewhat jealous of Burnett's success,¹⁰ unsurprisingly perhaps, given that in Pilgrimage Dorothy Richardson's heroine recommends that one should read ‘as Anglo-American history, first Little Lord Fauntleroy and then The Ambassadors’.¹¹

Although the novel involves a persistent criticism of adult values from the child's standpoint, Burnett is relatively even-handed in her treatment of the two cultures, depicting illness and unemployment among the New York working poor as well as poverty and squalor in Britain. Cedric Errol, a child living in straitened circumstances with his widowed mother, is suddenly transplanted to the home of his rich grandfather, the Earl of Dorincourt, a thoroughly selfish English aristocrat, whose heir he becomes. Little Lord Fauntleroy (as he now is) promptly humanises his grandfather by the force of love, bringing out the good in him simply by assuming that he is good, and scripting him into that role. In the comic plot, a false claimant to the title is bested with the help of Mr Hobbs, an American grocer of pronounced democratic views, initially scathing about the aristocracy, who finally becomes ancestor-mad and settles in England. As Alison Lurie notes,¹² the appeal of the book depended upon its combination of the ‘long lost heir’ plot with the International Theme, and a form of secular conversion story, involving the regeneration of an older person through the influence of an affectionate and attractive child. Cedric is also the embodiment of republican virtue, whereas his grandfather represents England, the past, age, rank and selfish pride. Lurie herself draws the analogy with The Portrait of a Lady ‘which also features the confrontation between a charming, eager, natural young American and representatives of an older and more devious civilization’¹³—though Burnett, unlike James, provides a happy ending.

NATURE'S NOBLEMAN: THE AMERICAN AS FROG PRINCE

The reader who turns from nineteenth-century fiction to Foreign Affairs will discover the intertext of the International Theme firmly in place, as might be expected from a writer whose second (unpublished) novel despatched its heroine, Chloe Newcome, to discover crime, poverty and disillusion in postwar Europe.¹⁴ In Foreign Affairs two American academics, on sabbatical in London, provide the focus for an exploration of the special relationship, as it obtains in the present, as created by past literary models and, by extension, as an example of the fashion in which literary models may function for good or ill. When Vinnie Miner, sceptical and worldly wise rather than innocent, and in her devout Anglophilia a close approximation to one of James's Europeanised Americans, encounters Chuck Mumpson, an Oklahoma ‘cowboy,’ she learns a lesson in morals. In the more mannered companion plot, Fred Turner, an all-American hero, has an affair with an English aristocratic lady of a certain age and experience, and feels as if he has got into the pages of a James novel, though whether The American or The Ambassadors is a moot point. Any easy binary oppositions of American innocence to European experience are subject to revision in a novel which interrogates the nature of the relationship by setting it within a variety of intertextual frames. Paradigms of innocence are thematised by Vinnie's research topic (children's play-rhymes) and undergo radical transformation in the interplay of dramaturgical and folk motifs, literary texts and intertexts, as the four main characters move from American to British intertexts, from Alcott and James to Burnett, Gay and Dickens, and from literature to folktale.

The characteristic note is struck from the beginning. Vinnie Miner is explicitly signalled as the creation of fiction by a series of authorial asides. The reader is informed, for example, that ‘In less time than it takes to read this paragraph’ (p. 2) she has installed herself comfortably on the flight to London, an experienced transatlantic traveller. The image of a character creating her own cultural reality, enhanced by the capsule effect of air travel which suspends her between two worlds, also reflects Vinnie's Anglophilia. Her dearest fantasy is that she may one day live permanently in London and become an Englishwoman. In advance of her first visit, England had been ‘slowly and lovingly shaped and furnished out of her favourite books’ (p. 15) so that when she eventually reached ‘the country of her mind’ (p. 15) she found it almost akin to entering the pages of English literature. The opening chapter recapitulates the process of approaching England through framing fictions. Entry into a different world is also entry into a series of texts. Vinnie can hardly wait to get away from the aptly named Atlantic in which a slighting reference to her research from a critic (Leonard Zimmern) has filled her with fantasies of revenge. Instead she takes refuge in the ‘cosily confiding’ (p. 8) pages of British Vogue, and is calmed by The Times, compared here to the ‘voice of an English nanny’ (p. 11). Finally ‘the shadows of war darken over Singapore’ (p. 15) as she flies on, engrossed in The Singapore Grip. Briskly classifying her seat-mate, Chuck Mumpson, from the semiotic indicators of his tan suit and rawhide tie as ‘a Southern Plains States businessman of no particular education or distinction’ (p. 11), she fends off his conversational overtures by lending him Little Lord Fauntleroy, mentally casting him as the democratic grocer, Mr Hobbs, whom he slightly resembles.

Vinnie's casual dismissal of Chuck rebounds upon her, however. While she is haunted in the London Library by ‘the portly, well-dressed spirit of Henry James’ (p. 59), and entertains erotic fantasies about writers and critics (starring roles go to Lionel Trilling, M. H. Abrams and John Cheever, inter alia), Chuck allows the fantasy of the long-lost heir to take hold. Predictably his quest ends in apparent disillusion when he discovers that his ancestor, the Hermit of South Leigh (a legendary troglodyte clad in animal skins), was in fact an illiterate pauper acting in someone else's fantasy: Old Mumpson was hired to impersonate a hermit in an eighteenth-century aristocrat's decorative grotto. Later, however, Chuck realises that illiteracy need not preclude wisdom: ‘There's a hell of a lot of learning that isn't in books’ (p. 167). It is a lesson which Vinnie is about to learn. Unwillingly she begins to detect an uncomfortable resemblance between Chuck's fantasy of being an English lord and her own of becoming an English lady. She is slower, however, to recognise that she is as unable as Leonard Zimmern to see the relevance of her field of research—oral folklore—to her own life. While she casts Chuck as Mr Hobbs, he is actually functioning within a very different intertextual frame. With his ancestry, his leathery tan and his garb of animal skins (a cowboy hat trimmed with feathers, a fleecy sheepskin coat and a leather jacket) Chuck figures as the ‘animal groom’ of folktale. Typically such tales centre on the shock of recognition when what seemed vulgar, coarse or ‘beastly’ reveals itself as the source of human happiness.¹⁵ (Beauty and the Beast is a representative example.) Originally Vinnie had found sexual activity embarrassing (one relationship foundered on the excessively hirsute nature of her lover) and is now poised to abandon ‘the foamy backwash and weed-choked turbulence of passion’ (p. 76).

The metaphor is subconsciously revelatory. Chuck's greenish waterproof outer layer (a semi-transparent plastic raincoat of repellent design), his pearl studs and habit of slow blinking, identify him as the Frog Prince.¹⁶ Even his occupation—as a sanitary engineer conversant with drains and wells—fits the bill, though he has now been ‘flushed out’ (p. 123) by his company's redundancy scheme. Vinnie, like the princess in the story, fails to spot his potential, even when he covers her with green slime (avocado and watercress soup). Eventually, however, she admits him to her table and her bed, and discovers that nature has its points over culture. With the destruction of the loathed outer skin (in favour of a Burberry) Chuck is transformed from frog to prince, revealed as ‘One of nature's noblemen’ (p. 276). The phrase, used by James in The American,¹⁷ and something of a cliché of American literature, is given a fresh resonance by the folklore motif. As a Frog Prince, Chuck does come into his own in Europe, in Vinnie's arms, rather than as heir to a fortune. He also negotiates a more objective and productive relation with the past, using his engineering expertise to drain a sunken archaeological site.

Vinnie had read Little Lord Fauntleroy without absorbing its message, that it is never too late for change and regeneration. Through Chuck she too is transformed, realising that she has allowed the defining voices of English literature to overdetermine her existence. Now, ‘English literature … has suddenly fallen silent … because she is just too old’ (p. 199). In the world of classic British fiction, Vinnie sees, almost the entire population is under fifty, as may have been true of the real world when the novel was invented, and the few older women are cast in minor parts as comic, pathetic or disagreeable. It is assumed that nothing interesting can happen to them. Influenced by Chuck's transformation Vinnie refuses now to become a minor character in her own life. For years, she has accustomed herself to the idea that the rest of her life would be ‘a mere epilogue to what was never, it has to be admitted, a very exciting novel’ (p. 199). Now, however, she realises that beyond the frame of fiction life has its own horizons: ‘this world … is not English literature. It is full of people over fifty who will be around and in fairly good shape for the next quarter-century: plenty of time for adventure and change, even for heroism and transformation’ (p. 199). Vinnie, whose research into children's rhymes is largely a product of her own nostalgia for childhood, has also to learn that age and experience have their merits. In a particularly unpleasant encounter with a grasping child, who regales her with obscene verses, she realises that innocence is not the preserve of youth, and that her thesis—that British rhymes are more lyrical and literary than their cruder American counterparts—is untenable.

If the child in question has come a long way from Little Lord Fauntleroy, Chuck, however unprepossessing his initial impression, fulfils the role to a tee. Although he, too, is no stereotypical innocent (driving while intoxicated, he was responsible for a boy's death), Chuck's persistent vision of self-centred Vinnie as ‘a good woman’ (p. 174) eventually scripts her into the role. Much as the Earl lived up to Cedric's expectations, so Vinnie fulfils Chuck's. Like Christopher Newman, when the opportunity for revenge on the hated Zimmern occurs (by proxy through his daughter) Vinnie allows her better impulses to triumph, attentive to the inner voice of Chuck. Appealed to by Ruth (née Zimmern) to deliver a message to Fred Turner which will reunite these star-crossed lovers, Vinnie hesitates. Fred is on Hampstead Heath observing the solstice: ‘most people Vinnie knows certainly wouldn't expect her to go to Hampstead Heath. But one person would … Chuck Mumpson’ (p. 244). At the end of the novel, heroically braving the muggers, Vinnie does bear the message to Fred. Rejecting a false model in classic British fiction, she adopts a better one, the product of the interaction of folklore and children's literature. More importantly she recognises the idiosyncratic, individual nature of human existence, and the potentially coercive nature of literary models. At a symposium on ‘Literature and the Child,’ the lecturer declares that ‘The Child's moral awareness’ must be awakened by ‘responsible literature’ (p. 235). Vinnie is now in no mood to look to literature for guidance. ‘Vinnie yawns angrily. There is no Child, she wants to shout … there are only children, each one different, unique’ (p. 235). The realisation cuts two ways. Though Vinnie has shed her passivity to the discourses of literature which previously wrote her, it is in fact to children's literature that she owes that transformation. Moreover, if the stereotypes of age and youth have been comprehensively revised, the novel none the less appears to conform to the paradigms provided by Burnett and James, as a Europeanised American is redeemed by love, and American virtue triumphs with nature over the rigid forms of European culture. Under Chuck's influence, Vinnie concludes that doing things for others may have caused most of the trouble of her life, ‘but it has also caused most of the surprise and interest and even in the end joy’ (p. 270).

THE REAL THING: THE CHAR WOMAN IN THE BASEMENT

The novel does not end, however, on such a potentially schmaltzy note as Little Lord Fauntleroy. Although Vinnie finally wakes up to the fact that Chuck loves her and she him, it is very much a case of too little, too late. Because of her dogged attachment to her image as English lady, Vinnie fears cultural redefinition by proximity to Chuck. When she is juxtaposed with him, her British friends are likely to equate them as each ‘rather simple, vulgar, and amusing—a typical American’ (p. 206). As a result she fails to join him in Wiltshire, where he dies of a heart attack. Vinnie's story is also only part of the novel, doubled, and its implications to some extent reversed, by that of her fellow expatriate, Fred Turner. Lurie's novel practises what it preaches, offering a choice of outcomes to the International Theme, weaving a plot in one direction and then, Penelope-like, unpicking the threads in the companion plot, so that Foreign Affairs resists reinforcing any one literary model.

Even more than Vinnie, Fred sees himself within a literary frame, thinking of John Gay's Trivia as he walks the streets of London (Gay is his research topic) and imagining himself as a character in a Henry James novel (p. 87).¹⁸ Others, however, envisage him in a variety of less prestigious roles, as the hero of a Gothic romance, as an actor in Love's Labour's Lost, a character in an American detective series, or ‘the guy who fought the giant man-eating extraterrestrial cabbage in The Thing from Beyond’ (p. 25). Nobody connects him with light comedy or game shows; his brooding good looks militate against certain parts. Quite the reverse of Chuck, Ivy League Fred, an American aristocratic in terms of ‘entitlement psychology’ (p. 51), is recognised as her handsome prince by his wife Roo (Ruth Zimmern). The latter, now surnamed March in homage to ‘tomboy’ Jo in Alcott's Little Women, whom she closely resembles physically (a long chestnut braid) and in character, unwittingly follows the fate of her chosen model, forfeiting her trip to Europe, like Jo, as the result of independence and frankness. Very much a female version of Chuck, Roo is at home in nature and initiates her relationship with Fred outdoors, following a riding excursion. Just as Vinnie found her world transformed by Chuck, so Fred under Roo's influence sees it as ‘naked, beautiful, full of meaning’ (p. 44). Fred's story, however, is a replay in reverse of Vinnie's, from frankness, sincerity and natural sexuality in America to the constricting European world of manners and culture. Appropriately, as an artist, Roo draws her effects from the juxtaposition of nature and culture, often with satiric results. Her exhibition, ‘Natural Forms,’ includes a shot of two overweight politicians next to a pair of beef cattle, for example.¹⁹ Fred, however, is discomfited by a photograph of his own penis in juxtaposition with a large and beautiful mushroom, and even less delighted by the presence of two unidentified others—even if one is juxtaposed with an asparagus stalk, and the other with a rusty bolt. In the ensuing marital fracas, Fred concludes that Roo ‘was not a lady’ (p. 49) and exits sharply for Europe.

In Rosemary Radley, however, he appears to have found the real thing. Herself the daughter of an earl, Rosemary specialises in acting high-born ladies, particularly in Tallyho Castle, a television series of snobbish appeal, which paints a fake picture of upper-class country life. The contrast between the two cultures is expressed for Fred by his two women. Where Ruth flung herself into his arms, Fred has to court Rosemary in traditional fashion. She is sophisticated where Roo is naive, graceful where Roo is coarse, reticent where Roo is outspoken, ‘Just as, compared with England, America is large, naive, noisy, crude, etc.’ (p. 81). Fred's revision of his mental image of Roo is a pompously textual operation, an example in his mind of ‘retrospective influence. Just as Wordsworth forever altered our reading of Milton, so Rosemary Radley has altered his reading of Ruth March’ (p. 81). Roo's previous natural, free behaviour, her rapid sexual surrender, now seem less a warranty of passion and sincerity than ‘hardly civilized’ (p. 82). Significantly, where he and Roo came together out of doors, he and Rosemary meet at the theatre, in a world of artifice and illusion. Fred, the expert on Gay, ascribes his conquest of Rosemary to eighteenth-century virtues of civility and boldness. By politely remaining at Vinnie's party he was able to meet Rosemary, a congenital latecomer, and he subsequently pursues her as a challenge ‘undertaken in the same spirit that makes other Americans expend energy and ingenuity to view some art collection or local ceremony that is out of bounds to most tourists’ (p. 79).

In Rosemary's world—specifically, spending a weekend in an English country house—Fred revels in the sensation that ‘by some supernatural slippage between life and art, he has got into a Henry James novel like the one he watched on television’ (p. 87). In cold fact the televisual metaphor is more apt. Rosemary is not just typecast on celluloid as an English lady, but also in life. Although she complains to Fred that she longs to play the classic parts (‘I know what it is to feel murderous, coarse, full of hate,’ pp. 88-9) he pooh-poohs her, refusing to envisage her in any character other than that of cultured aristocrat. When, however, the assembled house guests play charades, the childish game reveals raw experience beneath its formal surface. Presumably inspired by Dorothy Parker's dictum that ‘You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her think,’ Rosemary's team chooses to dramatise the word ‘horticulture,’ breaking it down into three component parts, to reveal a coarse subtext beneath the surface cultivation. In the first, to Fred's horror, Rosemary appears as ‘whore’. Since her costume is the identical nightgown in which she has just slept with Fred, the distinction between art and life almost dissolves. In the second (‘Tit’) she is part of a cow, and in the third a sulky schoolchild (reminiscent of Vinnie's ghastly informant) resisting the efforts of a schoolmaster to lead her to culture. The emphasis on language is also significant. Vinnie had previously described Rosemary's conversation as mere musical noise: ‘Words don't matter to actors as they do to a literary person. For them, meaning is mainly in expression and gesture; the text is just the libretto’ (p. 64). Gleefully Rosemary acts on this assumption, transforming her text in order to act out the parts denied her in life. In the charades, her homosexual friend Edwin actually seems ‘more natural as a fortyish matron’ (p. 94) than in real life. Role-play reveals the multifaceted nature of the self in creative ways. The arrival of the hostess's husband, however, reveals even more, as her lover has to be whisked into hiding. Faced with the visible evidence of upper-class corruption, Fred's Jamesian frame of reference wavers:

only an hour ago he thought it was all beautiful, the real thing. James again, Fred thinks: a Jamesian phrase, a Jamesian situation. But in the novels the scandals and secrets of high life are portrayed as more elegant; the people are better mannered. Maybe because it was a century earlier; or maybe only because the mannered elegance of James' prose obfuscates the crude subtext. Maybe, in fact, it was just like now.

(p. 101)

Briskly excluding Rosemary from these speculations, Fred readjusts his James, determined to rescue his innocent beloved from these evil influences, and electing himself as ‘the sterling young American champion James himself would have provided. For the second time that day Fred has the giddy sense of having got into a novel’ (p. 101).

Ironically, however, Fred has once more got into the wrong fiction. To become Rosemary's true champion, he should have been less intent on stereotyping her as a lady, and paid more attention to the subtext, as the reference to ‘the real thing’ indicates. In James's story of that title a well-bred couple offer themselves as an artist's models on the grounds that it would be good for him to use ‘the real thing; a gentleman … or a lady’.²⁰ When, however, the painter employs the lady he finds her so lacking in adaptive plasticity and expression that she is inferior as a model to his servants: ‘She was always a lady, certainly, and into the bargain was always the same lady. She was the real thing, but always the same thing.’²¹ As a result, the real thing turns out to be less valuable for artistic purposes than the fake; art depends upon the transformation of reality rather than reflecting the thing itself. Ultimately the real thing is the product of the creative imagination of the artist, just as, paradoxically, Rosemary is more herself when she demonstrates the power of her creative adaptation of words to role.

Where Vinnie finds a new role by accepting a ‘lower’ subtext, in vulgar Chuck, Fred is determined to expunge it in favour of genteel forms, editing out any aspects of Rosemary's behaviour which he considers out of character. He even insists that she set an appropriate scene for their affair, badgering her to engage a charlady to clean up her grubby house. Meeting the pair at the Opera, Vinnie reflects that ‘The dusty chaos of Rosemary's house would surely seem to him a most unsuitable backdrop for their love duet’ (p. 116), a duet in which, in operatic metaphor, Fred is ‘singing the basso part’ (p. 116). Indeed, in the outcome it appears that Fred's arguments have carried the day. Rosemary hires Mrs Harris, a cockney char, and as a result creates ‘a scene that resembles a commercial for some luxury product: the perfectly elegant party’ (p. 137). Surveying his surroundings, Fred congratulates himself that his rush of moral indignation during the country weekend was merely ‘priggish and provincial’ (p. 131), misled by ‘a too-vivid memory of the novels of Henry James into condemning an entire society’ (p. 131). Although Roo has now contacted him, and convinced him that she is innocent of adultery and guilty only of bad taste, his standards are now those of European manners rather than American morals: ‘in Rosemary's world bad taste is not nothing: it is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual flaw’ (p. 134). Unsurprisingly, when Fred meets Chuck at the party he assumes that someone so inappropriate to the elegant occasion cannot be real but must be one of Rosemary's actor friends trying out a role. Commenting on Chuck's origins, he quips that he has never been to Oklahoma, ‘but I saw the movie’ (p. 138). In contrast, although he has yet to meet her, Mrs Harris ‘sounds like the genuine article’ (p. 140). With his taste for Gay, Fred welcomes the crudity of Mrs Harris's manners (as reported by Rosemary) as if she were ‘a character out of eighteenth-century literature: a figure from the subplot of some robust comedy illustrated by Hogarth or Rowlandson’ (p. 142). As the alert reader may already recognise, the joke is very much on Fred, who finds himself starring in a rather different fictional role in the outcome, scripted in part by the character of Mrs Harris.

The party ends in disaster when Fred's friend Joe Vogeler inadvertently reveals Fred's intention to return to America, on schedule, to teach summer school. Rosemary draws the conclusion that ‘it was only an act with you’ (p. 149) and breaks off the relationship. Fred is less a Christopher Newman or a Lambert Strether than a Chad Newsome. He has encouraged Rosemary to love him unconditionally while intending to love her only as long as it was convenient. Although Fred pleads poverty as his motive for returning, he refuses Rosemary's offer of a loan, on the Victorian moral principle that a man cannot take money from a woman. Although the offer is made on the set of a television historical drama, with Rosemary in full make-up, it is Fred, in her opinion, who is caught in a rigid role: ‘You think you're in some historical drama; it's you who ought to be in costume’ (p. 181). Accordingly, despite his American accent, Rosemary offers him a film role: ‘you could be a silent brooding undergardener or gypsy tramp’ (p. 181). Fred, however, can accept nothing less than heroic status. Instead, he swiftly reclaims the moral high ground by redefining Rosemary. The idea that he has fallen into a Henry James novel recurs, ‘but now he casts Rosemary in a different role, as one of James's beautiful, worldly, corrupt European villainesses’ (p. 194). Like his Australian friends, who describe their convict ancestors as adventurous and risk-taking, ‘Moll Flanders not Oliver Twist’ (p. 187), Fred is quick to cite chapter and verse of a supportive literary model, making an opportunistic choice of literary frame.

Where Vinnie learned the need to escape from overly constricting models, Fred has gone to the other extreme, and gets his come-uppance as a result of his belief that he can pick and choose freely between them. Rosemary also operates intertextually, with tragic results, breaking out of her role as English lady and shifting the frame of reference once more, from America to Britain and from James to Dickens. Once again truth comes into being through role-play. Sharing a taxi with Vinnie, Rosemary takes the opportunity to complain about Fred; her speech alternates between her own upper-class drawl and an accent so vulgar and coarse that ‘if they hadn't been alone Vinnie would have looked round to see who else was speaking’ (p. 209). She goes on alternating between being pathetically ladylike and a low comedy voice, slips into tenor to imitate a male friend, and concludes—to Vinnie's horror—by insulting the latter in a caricature of her own intonation and accent. On one level, of course, the scene appears to confirm Fred's estimation of Rosemary's fundamental falsity. Yet, crying over Fred, Rosemary's face is ‘distorted in a way it never becomes when she weeps on camera’ (p. 211). Rosemary believed that Fred loved her for herself alone, as the real thing: ‘He'd never even heard of Tallyho Castle. … He never even saw the show, he loved me anyhow’ (p. 211). Where Vinnie had been chary of introducing Chuck to her British friends, afraid of being redefined as of similarly American character, Rosemary actively sought role revision by contact with Fred. She has been over-defined, as an English lady, and the cultural definition has constricted her life. Ironically, the fate which Vinnie so feared is actually visited upon her by her association with Fred. Gesturing at souvenir shops and hamburger joints, Rosemary accuses: ‘I've had it with all you fuckin’ Americans. Why don't you stay home where you belong? Nobody wants you comin' over here, messin' up our country' (p. 212). Uneasily Vinnie recognises the low comedy stage character as that of Mrs Harris, whom Rosemary has taken to imitating. For Vinnie the episode reveals that there is ‘something unnatural, really, in the ability of certain persons to assume at will a completely alien voice and manner’ (p. 213); the practice ‘overturns our belief in the uniqueness of the individual’ (p. 213). The comment extends also to Vinnie, who has been acting the alien role of English lady and sacrificing her own uniqueness to the scripts of British fiction. When Rosemary uses her histrionic talents to become Vinnie Miner, she indicates that the two have more in common than Vinnie would care to concede.

If Vinnie's encounter with ‘Mrs Harris’ leaves her shaken, Fred's has even more bruising consequences. Entering Rosemary's house in search of his Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, Fred finds Mrs Harris, a drunken slut, in the darkened basement drinking Rosemary's gin. Upstairs he recoils in horror at the dirt and disorder. Rosemary's bathroom is ‘littered and foul—the toilet, for instance, is full of turds’ (p. 226). When Mrs Harris makes a pass at him in a drunken imitation of Rosemary's voice, he calls her a ‘dirty old cow’ (p. 228) and shoves her forcibly aside. Giving an edited account of the scene later to his friends, Fred converts it into comedy, ‘a scene from Smollett … a cartoon by Rowlandson’ (p. 229). But as the alert reader may have guessed,²² Mrs Harris is not so much an eighteenth- as a nineteenth-century character. In a moment of dreadful revelation Fred recalls the charlady's telltale birthmark, identical to Rosemary's: Mrs Harris and Rosemary are one and the same. While Fred wandered the pages of James, Rosemary has adopted a character from another novel of transatlantic encounter, Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit, in which Mrs Harris features as Sairey Gamp's imaginary friend. ‘A fearful mystery surrounded this lady of the name of Harris, whom no one in the circle of Mrs Gamp's acquaintance had ever seen. … There were conflicting rumours on the subject; but the prevalent opinion was that she was a phantom of Mrs Gamp's brain.’²³ Thwarted by typecasting, Rosemary has created in life the part denied her on stage. Fred had allowed the idea of her as cultivated, refined and aristocratically English to become so fixed in his mind that anyone who did not conform to the model could not be Rosemary. Although her role-play has now tipped her over into Gothic delusion—her repressed self finally emerging, if not as the madwoman in the attic, at least as the charwoman in the basement—Fred does little to save her, though he nobly offers to see her once more in the twenty minutes which he can spare before his flight departs.

Cultural transformations can work both ways. Where Vinnie, the stereotypical sexless crone of British fiction, is transformed by love, Rosemary evolves from beauty to hag, in the ‘loathly lady’ motif of folklore.²⁴ Chuck transforms himself from beast to prince, Fred from prince to brute. The parallels are emphasised in the action. In a reprise of the folklore motif, Fred is seen walking by Regent's canal with the Vogelers. The latter equate his passion for Rosemary with their infant's desire for an old rubber ball, its cracked surface patterned with a dirty Union Jack. (They have been discussing Rosemary's advanced age.) As the ball bounces into the ‘frog-green water’ (p. 189) ‘surrounded by waterlogged crap’ (p. 190), the image is associated with the foulness of Rosemary's house and takes the reader back to the starting point of The Frog Prince, when the princess's ball is lost and rescued by the frog. Earlier Vinnie had reminisced about her husband, who had married her when, on the rebound from another woman, he had ‘like a waterlogged tennis ball … rolled into the nearest hole’ only to regain his elasticity, ‘bounce about’ at parties, and ‘hop’ into the arms of another (p. 74). The ball metaphor (with its connections to an even cruder subtext) suggests that Fred is unable to reconcile the ‘beastly’ elements of Rosemary's character with his ideal, or to love anyone who is not young and beautiful. It dawns upon him—too late—that his chosen role of Jamesian hero is altogether less convincing than that of a British rogue—Macheath in Gay's The Beggar's Opera. If his academic work now appears as a mere patching together of ideas from other people's books, ‘his love life is no better. Like Macheath's, it follows one of the classic literary patterns of the eighteenth century, in which a man meets and seduces an innocent woman, then abandons her’ (p. 255).

Lurie, however, like Gay, is merciful. At the end the two plots unite on Hampstead Heath. Clad in a romantically draped coat, a gift from Chuck, Vinnie looks like one of the ‘Druids’ celebrating the solstice, derided by Fred as examples of mummery and phoniness.

Yes, Fred thinks as the foolish figure drifts nearer, this is what England, with her great history and traditions—political, social, cultural—has become; this is what Britannia, that vigorous, ancient, and noble goddess, has shrunk to: a nervous elderly little imitation Druid.

(p. 252)

Yet it is Fred, the American champion, who is rescued by Vinnie, braving ‘drifters and tramps and thieves’ (p. 248) to deliver the vital message which will reunite him with Roo. As the dramatic mummery of the Druids indicates, Fred's rescue and Vinnie's regeneration both depend to some extent on contacts with an artificial world in which a new self can be fashioned. Neither Vinnie nor Fred has survived with their illusions about England intact. Vinnie sees a different, potentially violent, London on her way to the Heath; Fred decides that ‘London in Gay's time was filthy, violent, corrupt—and it hasn't changed all that much’ (p. 249). In a last, ironic turn of the plot, however, the cycle of illusion reopens, as the Vogelers declare their enthusiasm for the country: ‘It's like being in the nineteenth century, really. Everybody in the village is so friendly … and they're all such perfect characters’ (p. 250).

This essay began from a consideration of Lurie as a ‘paleface’ writer. Whereas the relation to James may appear to confirm Malcolm Bradbury's hypothesis, it is worth noting that in this novel Chuck and Roo—the cowboy and the Alcott girl—come up trumps, while Jamesian Fred and Vinnie are led intertextually astray. Moreover the robustness of the folklore plot, the directness of its crude subtext, impose different conclusions. Teasingly, Lurie includes as the climax to the romantic plot a scene in which Vinnie (pale but not very interesting as the result of a heavy cold) is contrasted with Chuck in the role of redskin. The latter, minus his clothes on which he has spilled soup, is transformed by a fringed, homespun bedspread into ‘a comic oversized pink-faced Red Indian’ (p. 172), who promptly seduces Vinnie against the backdrop of a singularly inappropriate watercolour of New College, Oxford. Although paleface and redskin—the two halves of the American character—come together for once, the national stereotype does not remain fixed. Confusingly, the couple consume a (British) Indian takeaway, and reference is made to Gandhi.

As these examples of cultural slippage indicate, there can be no real return to nature, nor to some primary state of childlike innocence of language or culture. Culture is textuality. Even Roo is an artist, and in her chosen surname as consciously intertextual as Rosemary. Each of us is always to some extent a role-player; only Fred is so naive as to consider Roo sincere, Rosemary false. Yet although cultural models cannot be ignored, Lurie indicates that wiser choices may be made between them. When Chuck is informed that he is descended from the aristocratic De Mompesson family—of which Mumpson is a contraction—he wisely discards the idea as irrelevant, a sensible contrast to Tess Durbeyfield's papa. Little Lord Fauntleroy turns out to be more productive of happiness for Chuck and Vinnie than Dickens and Gay are for Rosemary and Fred. The fact that he is an expert on The Beggar's Opera does not prevent Rosemary from beggaring Fred. On the other hand ignorance is never bliss, as Fred's inability to recognise Mrs Harris, and Vinnie's to spot her Frog Prince, amply demonstrate. Although Roo features, like Daisy Miller, as the American Girl, Chuck's daughter Barbie, introduced at the close, acts as a corrective to any anti-intellectual glorification of a state of nature. Barbie commits every from of vulgar Americanism, from describing her father's ‘cremains’ while shovelling down a cream tea, to subsequently wishing Vinnie ‘Have a nice day’ (p. 270). So much for the Jamesian heiress of all the ages.

While the novel demonstrates the dangers of looking to literature for guidance, it therefore also indicates the very real advantages of a sophisticated knowledge thereof. Both British and American heroines, for all their differences, are almost equally victimised by literary and cultural stereotypes. Rosemary's English lady reveals depths of feeling, while Chuck, emblematic of ‘Oklahoma crude,’ proves a sensitive lover who enables Vinnie to grow and change. Chuck may be said to civilise Vinnie, whereas Fred comes close to ruining Rosemary altogether. The deconstruction of the fiction of The Child and the stereotype of The Lady is part and parcel of the deconstruction of the stereotypes of national and literary character. As the novel indicates, works of literature are flexibly bound to each other despite national divisions. As a result Foreign Affairs is not merely a novel about two cultures clashing, but about all culture as intertextual, changing and created by individuals, and continually undergoing slippage, reversals and revision. Just as its meaning is constructed and revised, built up or shifted by slippage between intertextual frames, the novel's overall structure allows one plot to form a paradigm, a guide through the labyrinth, which the other is simultaneously unravelling. Even as culture is revealed as a continual process of creative transformation, so Foreign Affairs is careful to preclude the possibility of establishing a single, normative voice. In its imaginative transformations, it may therefore be characterised as in itself very much the real thing.

Notes

1. Malcolm Bradbury, ‘The Paleface Professor’, The Times (19 January 1985): 6.

2. Philip Rahv, ‘Paleface and Redskin’ in Literature and the Sixth Sense (London, 1970), pp. 1-6.

3. Julia Kristeva, Séméiôtiké, recherches pour une sémananalyse (Paris, 1969), p. 146 (my translation). I have discussed the importance of intertextuality in relation to Lurie's Imaginary Friends in ‘The Revenge of the Trance Maiden: Alison Lurie and Intertextuality’ in Linda Anderson (ed.), Plotting Change: Contemporary Women's Fiction (London, 1990), pp. 113-27.

4. Christopher Tookey, ‘The Witch Guide to Literary London’, Books and Bookmen 352 (January 1985): 25.

5. Alison Lurie, Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folktales (London, 1980).

6. Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs (London, 1986), p. 75. Subsequent page references follow citations in parentheses.

7. For a comprehensive and accessible discussion of the International Theme in James see Christof Wegelin, The Image of Europe in Henry James (Dallas, 1958) and Tony Tanner, Henry James: The Writer and His Work (Amherst, 1985). I draw upon both writers extensively here.

8. Ann Thwaite, Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett (London, 1974), pp. 107-8.

9. Ibid., p. xi.

10. Juliet Dusinberre, Alice to the Lighthouse: Children's Books and Radical Experiments in Art (London, 1987), p. 30.

11. Ibid., p. 30.

12. Alison Lurie, ‘Happy Endings: Frances Hodgson Burnett’ in Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children's Literature (London, 1990), pp. 136-43.

13. Ibid., p. 140.

14. Private interview with Alison Lurie, Key West, Florida, 19 February 1991. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the British Academy and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne for assistance with travel expenses.

15. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Harmondsworth, 1978), pp. 277-310.

16. Maureen Corrigan is the one reviewer who drew attention to this motif, reviewing the novel in Village Voice Literary Supplement, October 1984: 5.

17. Christof Wegelin notes that James used the phrase in the New York edition of The American (p. 91) as a revision of ‘a noble fellow’ (Rinehart edn, p. 63). Emerson wrote in his Journal of ‘Nature's Gentlemen, who need no discipline, but grow straight up into shape and grace and can match the proudest in dignified demeanour and the gentlest in courtesy’. Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Howells and Melville all make conspicuous reference to the concept of natural nobility (The Image of Europe in Henry James, op. cit., p. 178).

18. Readers familiar with Lurie's work will note a further irony. Fred is already a character in a novel—Lurie's first, Love and Friendship—a scene from which is referred to in Foreign Affairs, p. 43, to establish Fred's obtuseness.

19. Similar juxtapositions were a feature of the British magazine Lilliput. See Kaye Webb (ed.), Lilliput Goes to War (London, 1985).

20. Henry James, ‘The Real Thing’ (1892) in Christof Wegelin (ed.), Tales of Henry James (New York, 1984), p. 246.

21. Ibid., p. 249.

22. Some of the most alert were Ferdinand Mount, ‘The Lonely American,’ Spectator, 26 January 1985: 24; Walter Clemons, ‘Lovers and Other Strangers,’ Newsweek 104 (24 September 1984): 80; Lorna Sage, ‘Adventures in the Old World,’ Times Literary Supplement (1 February 1985): 109; Marilyn Butler, ‘Amor Vincit Vinnie’, London Review of Books (21 February 1985): 5-6.

23. Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (London, 1858), p. 423

24. In which either a hag turns into a lovely lady, or vice versa. See Chaucer's ‘Wife of Bath's Tale’, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Spenser's Faerie Queen, Book One.

The author is grateful for an award from the British Academy which allowed the first delivery of the paper on which this essay is based, at the American Literature Association Conference, San Diego, May 1992.

Further Reading

Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy (London, 1981).

Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (London, 1858).

John Gay, The Beggar's Opera (London, 1968).

Henry James, The American, The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, ‘New York Edition’ (New York, 1907-9).

Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs (New York, 1984 and London, 1985).