The Europeans - Literary Significance and Criticism

Literary Significance and Criticism

The omniscient narrator uses a very fine and cultivated language, sometimes he prefers Latin diction; preferring to introduce very long, detailed descriptions of the setting and of the characters, from both a psychological and a physical point of view. In addition to the contributions of the narrator, dialogue helps the author to introduce his characters and to show their reactions to unfolding events. Critic Robert Gale credited James with a "specifically well-delineated New England" in the book, which he found "charming".

F.R. Leavis, the influential English literary critic, had a high opinion of this brief work, claiming:

"The Europeans, the visiting cousins, are there mainly to provide a foil for the American family, a study of the New England ethos being James's essential purpose.... Nevertheless James's irony is far from being unkind; he sees too much he admires in the ethos he criticizes to condemn it.... James is not condemning or endorsing either New England or Europe.... This small book, written so early in James's career, is a masterpiece of major quality."

Others, most notably the author's brother William James, faulted the novel's "slightness." Henry James replied in a November 14, 1878 letter that he somewhat agreed with the criticism:

"I was much depressed on reading your letter by your painful reflections on The Europeans, but now, an hour having elapsed, I am beginning to hold up my head a little; the more so as I think I myself estimate the book very justly & am aware of its extreme slightness. I think you take these things too rigidly and unimaginatively—too much as if an artistic experiment were a piece of conduct, to which one's life were somehow committed; but I think you're quite right in pronouncing the book 'thin' & empty."

James excluded the novel from the New York Edition of his fiction (1907–09). Among others speculating on the reasons for this exclusion, critic Oscar Cargill commented that "the intimate contemporary judgment and misfortune may have been a lingering decisive factor in James' mind."

It has also been suggested that Felix's rootless Bohemian origin, as well as his "eternal gaiety", were signifiers of his covert homosexuality.