The Portrait of A Real Live Man: Individuality, Moral Determination and Historical Myth in the Light of Henry James’s The American

Abstract

This paper sets forth the development of the logical link among the concepts mentioned in the title and the subtitle thereof through the analysis of James’s novel. Resorting to the image of the carrying out of a likeness of the protagonist of the work, in the first section we shall explain the import of the expression “real live man” and we shall show why it agrees with the modern approach to the individual existence in its two main aspects, the search for a material welfare and the search for a conscious liberty, which we shall respectively call the “Epicurean one” and the “Stoic one” (without major reference to the import of these terms through the history of philosophy). In the second section we shall deal with the differences between America and Europe, considered as two paradigms of how history and culture furnishes the background of the individuality, whether emphasizing the sheer willpower or the transcendence of tradition. In the third section, we shall figure out the dramatic development both of history and individual life toward the would-be overcoming of the mentioned differences, which will explain the odd importance of myth in modernity. Finally, in a brief coda we shall dwell upon the general import of all this in James’s work and beyond it.