{"id":15275,"date":"2015-03-04T14:42:53","date_gmt":"2015-03-04T18:42:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=15275"},"modified":"2015-03-04T14:42:53","modified_gmt":"2015-03-04T18:42:53","slug":"henry-james-the-pension-beaurepas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2015\/03\/04\/henry-james-the-pension-beaurepas\/","title":{"rendered":"Henry James: “The Pension Beaurepas”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Henry“The Pension Beaurepas” was first published in The Atlantic Monthly<\/em> in 1879. In this story, James satirizes two types of American abroad in the guise of two families staying at the Geneva pension run by the redoubtable Mme Beaurepas: first,\u00a0the Ruck family from New York City, who represent the rich, uncultivated “new money” families like Daisy Miller\u2019s (Trevor wrote about her story here<\/strong><\/a>) who show little enthusiasm for the history, culture, or scenery of Europe, while demonstrating the principles of liberty, innocence and democracy; the other family, polar opposites to the Rucks, is\u00a0the Europeanized American Mrs Church and her daughter Aurora (and, incidentally, our narrator). Mrs Church had brought Aurora to Europe from their American home sixteen years earlier when the girl was only five.<\/p>\n

The young, unnamed American narrator of the story explains at the start why he has come to stay at this pension:<\/p>\n

I was not rich — on the contrary; and I had been told the Pension Beaurepas was cheap. I had, moreover, been told that a boarding-house is a capital place for the study of human nature. I had a fancy for a literary career.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Already we can see the subtle presentation of the familiarly ambiguous James narrator: an ingenuous, studious, slightly pompous young man very like himself, with his own literary-cultural hypersensitivity, and a propensity for close observation of his fellows, while at the same time demonstrating a reluctance to engage fully in the life he so attentively observes — a timidity seen in Winterbourne, the disengaged narrator of Daisy Miller<\/em> — and which culminates in a singularly unflattering (to him) episode at the end of this story to which I\u2019ll return shortly.<\/p>\n

The first strand in the plot reworks the King Lear theme in Balzac\u2019s Le P\u00e8re Goriot<\/em>: Sophy and Mrs Ruck relentlessly spend Mr Ruck\u2019s money, unaware that he has become bankrupt. In “An International Episode,” about which I wrote last time here<\/strong><\/a>, Kitty Westgate, whose husband (a work-obsessed counterpart to \u201ctragic\u201d Mr Ruck) hardly appears in the narrative, so busy is he in his lucrative law business, says this:<\/p>\n

An American woman who respects herself must buy something every day of her life. If she cannot do it herself, she must send out some member of her family for the purpose.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The narrator says of Mrs Ruck and Sophy, near the story\u2019s end:<\/p>\n

\u201cBetween them they are bleeding him to death.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I shall focus here though on the second theme in the story: that of the American Girl. In Daisy Miller<\/em> she\u2019s portrayed, through Daisy, as a charming mix of frankness and spontaneity, brashness and vulgarity, but essentially, like all American girls, according to Winterbourne, \u201cexceedingly innocent,\u201d even when at her most coquettish and immodest.<\/p>\n

Sophy is representative of the Daisy Miller type of feisty American girl. The narrator’s initial impression is that she is \u201ca lively brunette,\u201d and \u201cvery pretty,\u201d \u201cdecisive,\u201d and opinionated (like Daisy). When she learns that Aurora is \u201cdying to go to America\u201d but \u201cher mother won\u2019t let her,\u201d she says indignantly: \u201cIf I were you my mother would have to take me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The narrator is clearly more attracted to Aurora, who is a less dauntingly assertive, more retiring version of the American girl. She and her mother are described by a fellow guest as having \u201ca tournure de princesse<\/em>,” and it is as a kind of democratic princess that James usually portrays young American women.<\/p>\n

Aurora has never been out of the house alone, and sadly describes herself as having been in Europe, with its social constraints for young women, \u201calways.\u201d She is desperately homesick and frustrated by her imperious mother\u2019s control:<\/p>\n

\u201cAmerican girls are so wonderfully frank. I can\u2019t be frank, like that. I am always afraid.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Our narrator perceives, as Sophy does, however, that her native spirit hasn\u2019t been entirely quashed. She tells him, for example, with ingenuous \u201ccoquetry,\u201d that her \u201cfigure was admired\u201d in France:<\/p>\n

But I was an innocent youth, and I only looked back at her, wondering. She was a great deal nicer than Miss Ruck, and yet Miss Ruck would not have said that.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The perceptive Mme Beaurepas tells the narrator that Mrs Church\u2019s restless migration across Europe via its cheap boarding houses is because \u201c[s]he is trying to marry her daughter.\u201d Whereas Daisy Miller and her family lacked the \u201cculture\u201d to catch an aristocratic and wealthy European husband and were \u201cintellectually incapable of that conception,\u201d Aurora simply lacks a \u201cdot,\u201d as she calls her dowry. What adds poignancy to Aurora\u2019s position is that all she really longs for is the freedom she believes her compatriots enjoy. As the narrator says to her mother: \u201c[. . .] in America young girls have an easier lot. They have much more liberty.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mrs Church is not convinced that this is a desirable condition:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are very crude,\u201d she softly observed [. . .]. “There are two classes of minds, you know — those that hold back, and those that push forward. My daughter and I are not pushers, we move with little steps. We like the old, trodden paths; we like the old, old world [. . .] we like Europe, we prefer it.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She calls upon Aurora to endorse her \u201cpoint of view\u201d — a phrase which was to become a key concept in James\u2019s fiction, as we shall see — and the girl dutifully does so “with a sort of inscrutable submissiveness. I wondered at it; it offered so strange a contrast to the mocking freedom of her tone the night before [. . .].”<\/p>\n

This conflict of views comes to a crisis when Aurora and Sophy walk alone in the English Garden in Geneva. The narrator and a fellow boarder encounter them there, and are shocked to see them so \u201cinsufficiently chaperoned.\u201d Aurora\u2019s rebellious spirit flashes out, in a speech very like Daisy\u2019s when found in a similarly compromising situation with her Italian admirer:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhich is most improper — to walk alone or to walk with gentlemen? I wish to do what is most improper.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She explains that she is in a \u201cfalse position,\u201d and here is where she becomes less ingenuous than Daisy:<\/p>\n

\u201cI have to pretend to be a jeune fille<\/em>. I am not a jeune fille<\/em>; no American girl is a jeune fille<\/em>; an American girl is an intelligent, responsible creature. I have to pretend to be very innocent, but I am not very innocent.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t pretend to be very innocent; you pretend to be — what shall I call it? — very wise.”<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s no pretence. I am wise.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou are not an American girl,\u201d I ventured to observe.<\/span><\/p>\n

[. . . .] \u201cThere\u2019s my false position. I want to be an American girl, and I\u2019m not.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDo you want me to tell you?\u201d I went on. \u201cAn American girl wouldn\u2019t talk as you are talking now [. . . .] She wouldn\u2019t reason out her conduct [. . .]\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI see. She would be simpler. To do very simple things that are not at all simple — that is the American girl!\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She tells the young man she anticipates having \u201cthe most lovely time\u201d in New York if the Rucks invite her there — because there at last she would have \u201cabsolute liberty.\u201d Her mother adores \u201cEuropean society,\u201d and Aurora knows she\u2019ll be punished for the liberties she is taking at that moment with him — and her mother duly arrives and whisks her away in a closed cab.<\/p>\n

Later Mrs Church tells the narrator that she disapproves of the Rucks and their uncultivated vulgarity. She intends to remove Aurora from the \u201cpernicious influence\u201d of \u201cthis deplorable family.\u201d<\/p>\n

The story ends with her doing just that. Before she fulfils her promise, however, Aurora has one final, revealing conversation with the narrator, to tell him that she and her mother leave for Dresden the next day. He suspects she has sought him out in the pension\u2019s garden that evening to break this news, and he feels very sorry for her, and finds her \u201cinteresting\u201d and \u201ccharming.\u201d He realizes this \u201cinsidiously mutinous, young creature was looking for a preserver.\u201d For a moment this is a heroic role he finds tempting to play; he tells her he knows she desires the \u201cliberty\u201d taken for granted by other American girls. Her mother, she replies, \u201chas so perverted my mind that when I try to be natural I am necessarily immodest.\u201d<\/p>\n

She has said her piece, and now waits to see what he will do. As she turns to leave he has a momentary impulse to leave with \u201cthis yearning, straining young creature\u201d and pass into \u201cmysterious felicity\u201d. But it doesn\u2019t happen:<\/p>\n

If I were only a hero of romance, I would offer, myself, to take her to America.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like Winterbourne, however, he is unwilling to act decisively when faced with the prospect of a romantic relationship.<\/p>\n

The story is, then, more of an example of what James later called \u201cportraiture\u201d — a sketch rather than a developed, textured story. But it is an interesting example of his developing portrayal of the consequences of the innocence of the American girl coming into contact with the decadence and hierarchical social rigidities and atrophied morality and customs of the Old World. He shows how both worlds have their attractions and charms, but both are flawed in their own ways.<\/p>\n

We meet Aurora again in a story published soon after this one. Its title is the term employed crucially by Mrs Church in The Pension Beaurepas<\/em>, as noted earlier: it\u2019s called The Point of View<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Simon continues to explore the work of Henry James, taking a look at his 1879 story “The Pension Beaurepas.” Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":15279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[88],"tags":[],"coauthors":[675],"class_list":["post-15275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-henry-james"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/Henry-James.jpg?fit=479%2C599&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-3Yn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15275"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15280,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15275\/revisions\/15280"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15275"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=15275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}