Reading as Imitation

No man, excepting in burlesque, should impersonate a woman's part. Impersonation is not reading. And no woman should attempt to impersonate a man, if by impersonation, you mean actually striving to get at the real tone and manner of a male, because she only makes coarseness of it.

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF ELOCUTIONISTS (1905)

I'm incapable of writing at length about anyone except an American, so it's not only a question of being out of touch with the native speech but of being out of touch with the native subject matter.

MARY MCCARTHY (1971)

LITERARY IMPERSONATION

"Expatriate writing, a potpourri of the avant-garde and the decadent, has almost faded away." So proclaimed critic and novelist Mary McCarthy in a 1972 essay titled "A Guide to Exiles, Expatriates, and Internal Émigrés," tolling the bell for an international literary tradition that had long captivated late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American reading publics. Considered alongside the imminent terror of the Soviet Union's ascendancy, the rising body count in Vietnam, and her recent stint as a United States Information Agency (USIA) lecturer in Eastern Europe, McCarthy believed that reading the expatriate novels of the past was akin to smelling a bowl of old "potpourri" — sweet but useless. Readers had developed a distaste for the tradition's once attractive and now decaying features: its carefully cultivated cosmopolitanism, its elite discourses of aesthetic autonomy, and worst of all, the self-indulgent figure of the expatriate, whom McCarthy described sarcastically as "an artist or person who thinks he is artistic." The ultimate offense of writing and reading expatriate novels, she posited, was to valorize literary production as the creation of "a work of art" detached from the historical realities of modernity; a work of art preoccupied with the construction of a deeply solipsistic and apolitical interiority at the very moment when literature and its readers needed to look outward, to strengthen their "atrophying power to communicate" with others.

Given her indictment of expatriate writing, it makes sense that McCarthy would name Henry James as the long-dead father of all expatriate fiction. A committed expatriate for more than twenty-five years and a pivotal figure in the shift from nineteenth-century realism to twentieth-century experiments in novelistic interiority, James had "set the themes once and for all." "Everything that followed," McCarthy observed, "was a mere variation, however grotesque," from the poetry of Gertrude Stein and T. S. Eliot to the novels of H.D., F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, and Henry Miller. Presumably, McCarthy counted herself as part of this genealogy. In 1961, she had relocated to Paris with her fourth husband, James R. West, a cultural attaché with the United States Foreign Service, and had published her first and only expatriate novel Birds of America (1971) exactly a decade later. "A Guide to Exiles, Expatriates, and Internal Émigrés," written just one year after Birds of America failed to find an enthusiastic audience among American readers, betrayed her fierce and perplexing irritation with the literary tradition whose life-span she had tried to prolong. Expatriate fiction, McCarthy concluded with her signature snark, evinced "a certain Jackie-and-Ari color-supplement flavor." Characters went abroad "to lead the beautiful life in one form or another" by "impersonating figures in a work of art — something few people dare to do at home."

But how precisely do works of art give rise to studied practices of impersonation? And why is "impersonating figures in a work of art" something "few people" — not characters — would only "dare" to do away from home? McCarthy's oddly contemporaneous invocation of the "Jackie-and-Ari color-supplement flavor" of expatriate fiction suggests that James's influence wasn't limited to the literary characters of the twentieth century but a curiously embodied fact of American public and political life: that his works of art had somehow come to shape the practices, rituals, and lifestyles of the rich and famous over half a century after his death in 1916. Contrary to McCarthy's proclamation of the fading out of expatriate fiction, James's legacy was not dressed down in avant-garde or decadent literature's fading tropes but dolled up in Jackie O's powder-pink Chanel traveling suit and pillbox hat for all the world to see. And although the acerbic quality of McCarthy's tone may suggest Jackie O's ditzy obliviousness to James as her stylistic predecessor, this, too, is misleading. During her time in Washington, DC, Kennedy had pointedly stacked James's novels in the White House library as part of her attempt to bring high culture to Cold War America — one model for how to live the beautiful life amid the ugly glare of Soviet-era geopolitics. Yet even before she was rearranging the first family's textual furniture, Kennedy was McCarthy's near contemporary at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where both women had read James's novels in the classroom and dorm room and concluded that he was their favorite American writer. While these two public figures had pursued wildly incomparable paths after graduation — Jackie to Paris, where she wrote her European travelogue One Special Summer (1974), and Mary to the New Republic in New York — as readers and imitators of James's expatriate fictions, their literary education had shared a common point of departure: the institution of the women's college.

Indeed, it was at institutions like Vassar, as well as Vassar's sister colleges Smith, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Mount Holyoke, that reading Henry James gave rise to enduring practices of what I call literary impersonation: a strategy of fictional mimesis that turned on a series of unconventional assumptions about the relationship between reading subjects and their textual objects. By "literary impersonation," I do not mean the "performance of impersonation" within literature: a formulation that many critics have invoked quite loosely to describe a wide range of fictional tropes, from narrative vocalization to mimicry, imposture, personification, forgery, and fraud. I mean, rather, the uncanny convergence of literary discourse with real speech acts: utterances that have taken place in richly specified and, to a certain extent, historically recoverable contexts. Literary impersonation asserts the portability between textual properties of the novel and formal properties of speech, gesture, and face-to-face interaction — what McCarthy called the "power of communication" in her dismissal of James's novels. As Benjamin Lee and other sociolinguistics have argued, the interplay between literary discourse (i.e., how people talk about literary representations) and the performativity of speech (i.e., how speech instantiates an action or constructs a subject position) offers a unique...