The 'cosmopolite' in strange places: provincial cosmopolitanism and a sense of the past in the writings of George Eliot, Henry James, and William Archer's Henrik Ibsen
Keywords: fin-de-siècle
Victorian
cosmopolitanism
provincialism
modernism
cosmopolite
historical novel
pragmatism
provincial
empiricism
idealism

‘Cosmopolitan’ is a disputed term, one of praise and occasionally of abuse. The etymology (kosmopolitês; Greek, ‘citizen of the world’) carries an inbuilt tension between world (kosmos) and citizen or inhabitant of a city (politês). I argue in my thesis that this tension, as played out in the texts I have chosen to study, is not merely between the world and the citizen, but more specifically between the accident of circumstances and the personal instinct to conform and survive. To be a cosmopolite, then, can be an accident that is part of the inscrutable cosmos; yet it can also be a choice enacted by the urbane inhabitant of the polis.
Cosmopolitanism, I argue, appears in various ‘strange places’ in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature: it appears in provincial settings (Henrik Ibsen’s prose dramas in William Archer’s translations); it manifests itself in naïve or inexperienced characters (Henry James’s fiction); and it surfaces at particular, remote historical moments (George Eliot’s novel, Romola, set in Florence in the 1490s). What I call the ‘cosmopolitan dilemma’ in the literature of the period – the problem of how to reconcile accidental circumstances with the pressure to conform in an increasingly competitive and polymorphous modern world – is resolved, I argue, by what James calls the ‘historic sense’. I have chosen to focus on Eliot, James, and Ibsen as three writers who explore this dilemma in subtle and thought-provoking ways, portraying characters whose cosmopolitanism is implicit rather than explicit.
Bruce Robbins notes that in contemporary debates around cosmopolitanism, ‘many blooming, fleshed out particulars’ (or ‘cosmopolitanisms’) have replaced the ‘unhealthily skinny ethical abstraction’ traditionally attached to the idea. But these ‘particulars’ inevitably rest on the original ‘abstraction’, and in the long nineteenth century, cosmopolitanism was still a liberal ideal, a vision of life that appealed to a certain kind of political progressive. This ideal was not confined to the urban rich, however. As James noted of Anthony Trollope’s novels, ‘the emotions of a nursery-governess in Australia’ could be just as interesting in regard to cosmopolitanism as ‘the adventures of a depraved femme du monde in Paris or London.’ I apply the same understanding to Eliot, James himself, and Ibsen. My project engages with Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophers of history (Kant and Hegel), Romantic and post-Romantic cultural critics (Hazlitt and Arnold), and contemporary thinkers (Helen Small, Bruce Robbins, and Amanda Anderson).
Henry James thought Romola (1863) Eliot’s best novel; given his preference for the not-too-distant, ‘visitable past’, and the remoteness of Eliot’s fictional setting, this is at first surprising. But Eliot’s understanding of history in the novel chimes closely with James’s. For both writers, the historian’s primary aim is to access, as far as possible, individual experience. Following James’s reading of Eliot, I argue that Romola is a novel about the plural cosmopolitanisms at the heart of provincial life. Critics such as Hardy and Barrett have emphasized the importance of the female point of view in Eliot’s fiction and its relation to history; I argue that cosmopolitanism better explains Eliot’s understanding of the relationship between fiction and history. Cosmopolitanism and history function as means by which the ‘historical novel’ gains a new, ethically serious purpose, going beyond mere romance on the one hand, and the regurgitation of facts on the other.
Jessica Berman and Tanya Agathocleous have studied the New Woman and the male aesthete as character archetypes through which James construes the ‘cosmopolite’ condition in his fiction. Equally important, I argue, are those characters whose cosmopolitanism is disguised by a superficial provincialism, by juvenility and inexperience, or by a complex relationship to history. I read What Maisie Knew (1897), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and the unfinished The Sense of the Past (1917) in the context of James’s complex understanding of cosmopolitanism. Maisie is a novel about the localization of history as a way of giving meaning to the seemingly ‘modern’ but in fact historically far-reaching force of cosmopolitanism. In Wings, history and the cosmopolitan are shown to exist, like the scheming Kate Croy and Merton Densher, in intimate and sometimes surreptitious relation. Cosmopolitanism finds a playful but prophetic manifestation in The Sense of the Past. In all three texts, it is history which offers the Jamesian protagonist the best means of resolving the cosmopolitan dilemma. Cosmopolitanism gives credence to the moral problems faced by James’s protagonists; the ‘historic sense’ both warrants the geographical reach of the cosmopolite and excuses the negative aspects of cosmopolitanism (a perceived absence of roots and allegiances).
In private correspondence, playing on their shared first name, James praised Ibsen, ambiguously, as ‘Our Northern Henry’. I argue that the artistic example of Ibsen, as translated by William Archer, caused James to reconsider his own identity as a ‘cosmopolite’ from the 1890s onwards. In uniting apparently contradictory impulses, such as cosmopolitanism and provincialism, or naturalism and symbolism, Ibsen in effect cosmopolitanizes both the characters within his plays and his audience. Ibsen’s idea of history in the twelve plays beginning with The Pillars of Society (1877) is inextricable from a covert cosmopolitanism, thereby countering what critics have often perceived to be his provincialism. Ironically, Ibsen rehabilitates cosmopolitanism in the English-speaking world by taking it out of its usually modish, urbane settings. I further argue that in William Archer’s neglected polemical text, The Great Analysis, a philosophy of purposely provincialized cosmopolitanism makes explicit, in non-fictional form, the ‘provincial cosmopolitanism’ of Ibsen’s dramas.
I conclude that cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth century is, paradoxically, detachable from ideas of urbanity and metropolitanism. Eliot, James, and Ibsen all show that cosmopolitanism can exist in provincial as well as metropolitan settings, and that much of its power derives from its intervention, as an historical, aesthetic, and ethical force, in the lives of provincial or inexperienced characters. By reading cosmopolitanism through these (counterintuitive) modes, I detach both the ‘cosmopolite’ and the ‘provincial’ character from the moorings of their immediate surroundings. I also show that history is singularly important to this, by giving narrator, character, and reader a new and necessary temporal perspective.