Is There Such a Thing as the American Character? Or, Is It American Caricature? A Roundup
Ca. 1863. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Terry Eagleton, "No Self-Mockery, Please, We're American," Chronicle of Higher Ed , July 1, 2013 Can one even speak of Americans and Europeans in this grandly generalizing way? Is this not the sin of stereotyping, which all high-minded liberals have learned to abhor? Nobody falls into a general category. Everyone is his or her own elite. As a character in one of James's novels proudly puts it, In The American Scene, [Henry] James writes of the country's disastrous disregard for appearances. For the Calvinist, a delight in anything for its own sake is sinful. Pleasure must be instrumental to some more worthy goal, such as procreation, rather as play on children's television in America must be tied to some grimly didactic purpose. It can rarely be an end in itself. The fact that there is no social reality without its admixture of artifice, that truth works in terms of masks and conventions, is fatally overlooked. ...