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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Washington, D.C., was unusual, unique. It was the one place in the America Henry James visited in 1904–5 where “men existed.” And to James, “that rich little fact became the key to everything.” Everywhere else men were at work, were in business, and had left “society”—“but a rough name,” he says, “for all the other so numerous relations with the world he lives in that are imputable to the civilized being”—had left all that to women. It was a “windfall” and she was quick to take advantage, but it was also, James knew, a trap. Predator she may seem, clutching here, “pouncing” elsewhere in the passage, but “her situation, under this retrospect, may affect the inner fibre of the critic himself as one of the most touching on record … she was to have been after all but the sport of fate.” The American Man goes off, off to work or into silence, may feign sleep or, as James also has it, sulk like Achilles, and women may have “turned away with so light a heart after watching the Man, the deep American Man, retire into his tent and let down the flap,” but they do not win: “The abdication of the Man proves ever (after the first flush of their triumph) as bad really for their function as for his.”
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68. I am grateful to Sacvan Bercovitch, Pat Klein, Bob May, Bill McFeely, Barry O'Connell, Jack Salzman, Kate Stimpson, Liz Bruss, and Dona Wheeler for helping me in my thinking on these matters.