Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Portraits of Polygenism: The Scientific Explorations of Louis Agassiz and Henry James's 'A Landscape-Painter'"
Kendall Johnson
English Department, University of Pennsylvania
kajohnso@dept.english.upenn.edu
Henry James's decision to become a writer entailed the construction of a literary voice that could contend with the scientific authority of Louis Agassiz. Agassiz was a world-renowned Swiss naturalist and the first major scientist to relocate to the United States from Europe. For a time, Agassiz was also the mentor of William James at Harvard. In the midst of the Civil War, Agassiz afforded the United States a symbol of national continuity that could be published to the world. In review of Contributions to the Natural History of the United States (1857-1862), the Atlantic Monthly placed Agassiz in the register of Lord Bacon and Linnaeus. (January 1858: 331). Henry James's first stories were published in the same periodicals as Agassiz's articles on the natural world of America.
Agassiz also became the leading proponent of what was known as the American anthropology of polygenism , which argued that the racial difference in human beings was accountable only through the recognition of a difference in species. His validation of polygenism offered citizens and politicians a scientific rhetoric for the explanation of not only slavery and the Indian Wars but for the social class hierarchies that would develop in the aftermath of the Civil War.
In 1865, William James accompanied Louis Agassiz on the Thayer Expedition to the Brazilian Amazon. The Thayer exhibition was recognized nationally as a point of enlightenment around which to assemble the country's warring halves; and, Oliver Wendell Holmes even published a tributary poem to the Exhibition in the Atlantic Monthly. At stake in Agassiz s trip is more than a vast collection of "faunae" or photographs but the conceptual frameworks of race, culture and human potential through which American citizenship would be imagined after the Civil War.
In "A Landscape-Painter," James parodies Louis Agassiz' 1867 travelogue of the Thayer Expedition, A Journey in Brazil. James manipulates the picturesque to agitate a central ambiguity regarding the racial identity of the woman whom the romantic hero's aesthetic and marital projects are poised to capture. By interrogating the function of masculine authority, James destabilizes both the practice of scientific method and the role of conventional romantic formula in synthesizing a national American culture.
Kendall Johnson
English Department
The University of Pennsylvania
kajohnso@dept.english.upenn.edu
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