SOURCE: Tintner, Adeline R. “James's ‘The Patagonia’: A Critique of Trollope's ‘The Journey of Panama.’” Studies in Short Fiction 32, no. 1 (winter 1995): 59-67.

[In the following essay, Tintner treats Henry James's short story “The Patagonia” as an attempt to improve the characterization and plot of English realist Anthony Trollope's story “The Journey to Panama.”]

Five years before Henry James wrote “The Patagonia” (1888), James published his long essay on Trollope in which he noted that, although many of Trollope's short stories were “charming,” the presentation of his “British maiden” had not “a touch of the morbid.” James concluded that Trollope had “a wholesome mistrust of morbid analysis” (Partial Portraits 102). It is this deficiency, as James considered it, that he “corrected” in his version of Trollope's “The Journey to Panama” (1861). By introducing the actual suicide of James's heroine, Grace Mavis, presented as a “mysterious tragic act” (“Patagonia” 347), with all its unsaid deeper psychology into the framework of “The Journey to Panama,” James offers his critique of Trollope's tale when he remodels it as “The Patagonia.”

The publication in the nineteen-eighties of the complete collected tales of Anthony Trollope has given the scholar an opportunity to see some startling connections between one of the 40 tales by Trollope and the talc of Henry James. Some of these Trollope tales had been republished in 1867 in a volume called Lotte Schmidt and Other Stories, which James probably saw and read, although the volume does not appear in his library and in his famous essay on Trollope of 1884 he does not mention in detail any of the short stories.

The early tale by Trollope seems to have interested James enough to improve on it in his tale written during a very productive year, 1888, a kind of annus mirabilis, along with such fine stories as “The Lesson of the Master,” “A London Life,” “The Modern Warning,” “The Aspern Papers” and “The Liar.” William Dean Howells spoke of this series as “one masterpiece” following the other, all revealing “depths under depths” of characterizations and showing James's “clutch upon the unconscious motives” of his people. This is as true of “The Patagonia” as it is of the other well-known tales.

The “germ” given by James in his Notebooks was suggested to me by Mrs. Kemble's anecdote of Barry St. Leger and the lady (married and with her husband awaiting her in England) with whom he sails from India. She was young and pretty and had been placed under the captain's care. At a certain stage in the voyage, the captain was notified that the passengers were scandalized by the way she was flirting and carrying on with B. St. L. This came to her knowledge and during the night she jumped overboard. Admirable dismal little subject. (Complete Notebooks 43)

That same day James receives from Theodore Child the idea for “The Lesson of the Master” (Complete Notebooks 43). These two stories are typical of those written during the 1887-88 period, in which James uses the basic plot suggested by a few words from a friend's anecdote. However, these tales get their further impetus, not only from the anecdote in life, but also from some specific literary model. Although “A London Life” was suggested by Paul Boutget, lames uses Hogarth's literary illustrations to create the main parallel or analogue and for the “The Lesson of the Master” he resorts to the life of St. George from The Lives of the Saints. So also in “The Patagonia” James uses “The Journey to Panama” to fortify Mrs. Kemble's “germ.”

The Trollope story and the James story both concern the sea voyage taken by a young woman who is going out to meet her fiance to get married after “a long engagement, of ten years” (Trollope 356; James, “Patagonia” 295). There is no love in either case as far as the young women are concerned and both take up with an attractive young man on shipboard. A tentative shipboard romance develops in each case between them, but their being seen together leads to gossip, which in turn leads to the breakup of the romance. Unlike Mrs. Kemble's “germ,” the women are unmarried and have contracted their engagements to avoid poverty and social isolation. It is in the denouement that James parts company with Trollope. His heroine, Grace Mavis, actually commits suicide, whereas Trollope's Emily Viner only occasionally thinks of killing herself and, in the end, she is saved from a loveless marriage by the unexpected death of her fiance.

The plots therefore are very close. In spite of the changes James has made in some details of the Trollope story, the resemblances reveal Trollope's tale as an important source for James's story. It is in certain details that his tribute to Trollope becomes clear and factual. Although Donald D. Stone had indicated that James also used certain themes first suggested in Trollope's novels, Stone judged the echoes from the earlier novelist to be simply “wandering” (Stone, “James, Trollope … ” 101). Not so in the case of “The Journey to Panama” and “The Patagonia.”¹ James parts company with Trollope at that point where he imports a greater tragic force to the basic plot invented by Trollope. It is the tragic element, the suicide, in Mrs. Kemble's anecdote that creates for James's imagination an “admirable little dismal subject.” Although Emily Viner, the British heroine of “The Journey to Panama,” does not kill herself, she rejects the loving proposal of marriage made by her shipboard friend. James's heroine, Grace Mavis, whose romance with Jasper Nettlepoint is a serious matter only for her, takes the tragic exit because she does not love her fiance the plodding architect, Mr. Butterfield, whom she is to meet at the end of her journey, and Jasper has not taken her love for him seriously. Both heroines are “nearly thirty” (Trollope 352), both engagements were “long” and had lasted 10 years. Emily's “was a long engagement, of ten years' standing” (Trollope 356); Grace Mavis equally was “the victim of a long engagement” (“Patagonia” 294). The heroine of “The Patagonia” had met her fiance in Paris “ten years” before and he had never returned to see his fiancee during that period.

What elements in James's tale can only have come from Trollope's tale? The exotic journey from England to Panama taken on Trollope's ship, called the Serrapiqui (after a South American river) involved entering a very hot zone in Central America. One speculates that James also named his ship the Patagonia after a South American area, mainly in Argentina, to convey the same sense of an exotic place also in the Western hemisphere, but now situated in the most southernmost part of South America. In fact, attention is called to the name “Patagonia” because it is supposed to mean “big foot” and at the end of the story we see how the older gentleman narrator has put his “big foot” into the situation and has precipitated the death of the heroine (“big feet” is the name that Magellan is traditionally said to have given to Patagonian inhabitants because of their great size [Encyclopaedia Britannica 17: 303]).

In James's tale, Grace Mavis, who is going out to meet her fiance of 10 years, and Jasper Nettlepoint, the irresponsible young man who has nothing to lose by engaging in a mild flirtation with her on shipboard, create a scandal by disappearing together during the 10-day voyage. The slow ship they are taking has been substituted for the one they were supposed to take, “The Scandinavia,” which was a faster vessel (“Patagonia” 286). The name “Patagonia” further suggests a concentration on the southern aspects as opposed to the northern aspects of the discarded name of the ship through the association of its title. Trollope, in his tale, points out that, on such a long route from England to Central America, romances were possible. James has changed and renamed his ship not only to suggest a South American Western hemisphere geographical site, but also to make the trip from Boston to England take longer than the usual route in order to accommodate the period of romantic gestation.

Trollope tells us that among the women on board some are going to “find a husband” and are “generally consigned to some prudent elder” (Trollope 350). James follows Trollope in this and devotes all of his first chapter to the machinery of Grace Mavis's introduction to the older Mrs. Nettlepoint, who is asked to be her chaperon. And, in that chapter, by focusing on the extreme heat of Boston in August, James claims for his own tale some of the heat of Trollope's voyage once it gets to Panama. Outside of the last scenes in The Golden Bowl, in which the torrid August in England is part of James's recourse to Orientalism in order to extend that novel's desert analogies, James never again spends so much space on summoning up the discomfort of a heat spell. He employs this device of uncomfortable weather to allow Jasper Nettlepoint and Grace Mavis to disappear temporarily when they sit on the balcony of the young man's mother's house in Boston in order to get a breeze. Thus it is that they begin their withdrawal into secret encounters even on land, encounters that subsequently will cause so much gossip on shipboard.

This element of gossip is derived directly from Trollope's tale. His gossiping and ill-natured family by the name of Grumpy, who watch Emily Viner and Ralph Forrest, establishes the mode of symbolic and satirical names James also used, although he surely had used such devices before. But, in this case, James not only follows the example of Trollope, but he also creates variations on the nastiness of these upper-class (as well as lower-class) women in his own characters, drawn from the Boston area on the Patagonia. The names of Nettlepoint and Peck belong to the women who cast aspersions on each other's class status, the first belonging to the upper-class and the second to the lower. Grace Mavis and her mother occupy Mrs. Peck's home location in a barely respectable area in Boston where the girls are an “improvement on their mothers” (“Patagonia” 291). As in the case of the friendship between Emily Viner and Ralph Forrest on board the Serrapiqui, which would not have been noticed “had it not been for the prudish caution of some of the ladies” (Trollope 357), so the flirtation between Jasper Nettlepoint and Grace Mavis would also not have been noticed. Had it not been for the pushing curiosity of Mrs. Peck, who had been snubbed by Grace, Grace's reputation would not have been in question.

As Miss Viner admits to not loving her elder, rich fiance (“No, certainly not, I shall never know anything of that love” [Trollope 356]), so Grace Mavis, although more reserved than Miss Viner, gives indications that she is not looking forward to her marriage with Mr. Porterfield, the plodding architect, as she indicates she wants the boat trip never to end: “I could go on for ever, for ever and ever” (“Patagonia” 320).

In both tales, suicide by jumping overboard is mentioned in conversation (but without serious intent) two times. Miss Viner states “Where should I be … if I were to) throw myself forward into the sea? I often long to do it” (Trollope 356). But since she is afraid “of the bourne beyond … that fear will keep me from it” (Trollope 356). When her new friend, Ralph, offers her money to go back and reject the man she does not love, she is again tempted to throw herself into the sea and, although she is afraid “of that bourne,” she would rather “face that than act as you suggest” (Trollope 358). In the same way in James's story, suicide is mentioned twice before the actual suicide takes place. It is mentioned once by the narrator who says, “If I have outraged her in thought, I will jump overboard” (“Patagonia” 307) in the sense of a rhetorical exaggeration. The second time it is mentioned by another passenger, who claims that if Grace tells her fiance about her flirtation, “He'll jump overboard” (“Patagonia” 326). “‘Jump overboard?’ cried Mrs. Gotch, as if she hoped then that Mr. Porterfield would be told” (“Patagonia” 326). These are humorous remarks, whereas the real event does take place when Grace Mavis throws herself into the sea just before they land. Although Miss Viner had been serious in her figure of speech, she did not have to put it to the proof, but the precedent for even considering suicide takes place first in Trollope's tale in connection with the possible action of his heroine.

In an 1867 letter, Trollope identifies the tale's origin as having occurred when he had the job of telling a lady “going out to be married that her intended husband was dead …. She at once asked to have a large trunk brought to her. In the course of an hour I found her packing and unpacking the trunk, putting the new wedding clothes at the bottom and bringing the old things, now suitable for her use, to the top. And so she employed herself during the entire day” (Thompson 347-48). In the stow, Trollope expresses this detail by having Miss Viner tell the reader that all the contents of her “big box” had been paid for by her fiance so that, when she is told he is dead, she is found by Ralph in a room whose “floor was strewed with clothes,” in preparation for her return (Trollope 363). James follows this pattern also. Just before Grace disappears, she tells her stewardess that she cannot receive Mrs. Nettlepoint in her cabin because “she was packing a trunk over,” a detail clearly suggested by Miss Viner's getting rid of the wedding clothes which had been on the top of her box (“Patagonia” 343). After this detail, the narrator meets Grace, who looks pale and, as we find at the end, has now decided to end her life. At this point she asks the narrator whether he would “know” her fiance, whom he had met before in Paris, “when you see him?” indicating to him, as he later realizes, that he should be the bearer of the news of her death (“Patagonia” 344).

There is another detail that James seems to have found in Trollope's story. Ralph, in “The Journey to Panama,” is confronted by the problem of breaking the news of the fiance's death to Emily Viner, just as James's narrator is burdened with the fact that he must break the news of Grace's death to her fiance. Ralph considers, “Who should tell her? And how would she bear it?” (Trollope 361) “And above all would this sudden death of one who was to have been so near her, strike her to the heart?” (Trollope 361). He continued to feel that “it was incumbent on him that Miss Viner should not hear the tidings in a sudden manner and from a stranger's mouth” (Trollope 362). James follows this procedure, but changes it. And it is in this change that we see another divergence from Trollope's treatment. Having recognized that, by Grace's preliminary questions, she had “delegated to me mentally a certain pleasant office,” that of breaking the news of her death to her fiance (“Patagonia” 348), the narrator approached the fiance who remained speechless. “I had to speak first …. I told him first that she was ill. It was an odious moment” (“Patagonia” 349). This silence about his actual execution of his unpleasant task indicates a correction that lames has made of the talkativeness of Trollope's characters and the obviousness of their remarks. James, in a contrary fashion, uses silence as opposed to Trollope's garrulousness. His tale ends in silence as to the details of the revelation of the tragedy, much in contrast to the way Trollope had managed it and had built it up into a big scene.

But this silence on James's part is part of his criticism of Trollope's story. He makes his heroine the opposite of Miss Viner, who was a “talkative lady,” telling her plight to Mr. Forrest, her shipboard friend. “Am I to lie for heaven's sake, and say nothing during these last hours that are allowed to me for speaking?. … and why should you begrudge me the speech?” (Trollope 358). She is always clear-sighted in regard to her position and clear-headed as to what the final action will be, now that she is free of her fiance and the heiress of a moderate sum of money. James, on the contrary, represents his heroine, Grace, as essentially sealed in silence, for she is clearly depressed and unwilling to talk about her impending marriage. From her very first meeting in Mrs. Nettlepoint's Boston house, she impresses her hostess as putting on “an affectation of silence” (“Patagonia” 301) and silence is her essence. When she retreats with Jasper to the balcony, we never hear what they say nor do we overhear their conversation when they meet frequently in the hidden quarters of the Patagonia. After the narrator chides Jasper for having let Grace fall in love with him, since he is not at all serious about her, we never hear how Grace responds, although we learn from her behavior that she has become unhappy once more. That emotional response, plus the captain's awareness of the “scandalous behavior,” leads to her hiding in her cabin. Since she does not talk much, it is only from her actions that we can infer her wretchedness. She thinks herself caught in a trap of a socially inferior milieu; she is talked about as a flirt, engaging with a young man who does not take her seriously and with the dreary prospect of her future marriage ahead of her. Hers is a case of serious depression experienced by someone with a morbid temperament and she takes the only way out. The “big-footed” narrator has created this climate and has brought it to a climax by telling lasper to stop his attentions to the young woman. It is the young man's removal from her that leads her to a self-inflicted death. As the narrator muses only too late, he wonders, “Why I could not have kept my hands off” (“Patagonia” 345). His talkativeness has proven to be the precipitating factor in contrast to her silence.

So James has turned Trollope's rather chatty tale about the plight of a young girl going to marry a man she does not love into the tale of the tragic trap a young woman of sensibility finds herself in. The trap consists of the loss of her reputation among the ship's society, the possibility of the ensuing scandal reaching her fiance (a point from Mrs. Kemble's anecdote) and the ultimate unhappiness of a loveless marriage. Unlike Emily Viner, Trollope's practical heroine, is James's unusual and neurotic young woman whose depression and consequent silent refusal to accept her unfortunate life lead her to only one possible action - suicide at sea. Miss Viner was saved from that fate by the death of her unwanted fiance and by the modest legacy he has left her and so, released from her trap, she refuses the offer of a young man who loves her since she has no need of him. In James's shipboard world, the only release is through self-destruction. James's ship, the Patagonia, is the theater of a real human tragedy where a young woman's ineluctable fate is consummated.

One can visualize James's creative processes as having occurred in two steps: one dependent on the intensive accumulated reading he engaged in all his life and the other on the “germs,” the anecdotes he heard from the conversations of his friends in his clubs or at the many dinner parties he attended. It is that his reading, that mass of material ingested from early days by James that becomes the submerged material from which the story grows. Perhaps the most important clement in the whole case is that James's imagination transforms the tale from the submerged Trollope tale and in itself becomes a criticism of that tale. The imaginative act thus is seen as a complicated but synchronized one, an act that is the result of accumulated remembered reading, rendered remarkably powerful by the fact that another occurrence analogous to it, the anecdote told by Mrs. Kemble, has taken place in real life. James follows the details from Trollope's story to show how the equivalent situation could be viewed tragically once removed from the chatty, garrulous atmosphere of his predecessor's tale.

James's repossession of themes by other writers is not an act of plagiarism; it is part of a conscious, critical act, as he often tells us. “Whenever a story really interests one, he is very fond of paying it the compliment of imagining it otherwise constructed, and of capping it with a different termination” (Essays on Literature 950). James wrote this in 1868 when he was 25 years old.

“If a work of imagination, of fiction, interests me at all … I always want to write it over in my own way, handle the subject from my own sense of it. That I always find a pleasure in ….” James wrote this in 1902, 34 years later. This was his permanent “tic”; he knew it, and he communicated this fact to others over and over again. He added to this general principle in a letter to Mrs. Humphry Ward: “I can't ‘criticize’ … though I could re-write” (Tintner xix-xx).

So we see that James's rewriting of “The Journey to Panama” is chiefly a criticism of it, for although the reader is referred to that tale by the close resemblance of so many of its elements, he is shown by the tragic end of a repressed and silent young woman's life that James considered Trollope's version inadequate to the tragic possibilities.

Note

1. In his earlier general article on Trollope's short fiction, Donald D. Stone noted a few similarities between the two stories, preferring the Trollope version (“Trollope…” 38).

Works Cited

The Encyclopedia Britannica. 11th Ed. 1910.

James, Henry. The Complete Notebooks. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers, New York: Oxford, 1987.

———. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel. 12 vols. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962-65.

———. Essays on Literature. American Writers. English Writers. Ed. Leon Edel et al. New York: Library of America, 1984. Vol. 1 of Literary Criticism. 2 vols. 1984.

———. Partial Portraits. [1888] Intro. Leon Edel. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1970.

———. “The Patagonia.” Complete Tales 7: 285-349.

Stone, Donald D. “James, Trollope, and ‘The Vulgar Materials of Tragedy.’” The Henry James Review, 10.2 (Spring, 1989): 100-03.

———. “Trollope as a Short Story Writer.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 31 (1976): 26-47.

Thompson, Julian, ed. Anthony Trollope: The Complete Shorter Fiction. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992.

Tintner, Adeline R. The Book World of Henry James: Appropriating the Classics. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1989.

Trollope, Anthony. “The Journey to Panama.” Thompson 347-63.