America as Europe
Rockland, Michael Aaron
Era of finiteness AMERICA AS EUROPE BECOMING A TRADITIONAL SOCIETY IN THE PREFACE to The Marble Faun, Nathaniel Hawthorne complained that he found it impossible to place his novel in the United...
...Until recently, Europeans regarded the United States as a powerful but untutored nation, a cultural wasteland which imported its ideas and art from Europe...
...Era of finiteness AMERICA AS EUROPE BECOMING A TRADITIONAL SOCIETY IN THE PREFACE to The Marble Faun, Nathaniel Hawthorne complained that he found it impossible to place his novel in the United States, "a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight...
...Were Hawthorne writing today, he might find America, which recently has had its share of shadows and gloomy wrongs, more congenial to his art...
...Europe was Greece...
...America has taken on the characteristics of an older society...
...With the crisis over Afghanistan a possible exception, Americans have become more sophisticated and European in their conduct of foreign affairs...
...Each day there are signs that we are becoming a less dynamic society and, perhaps, a more traditional one...
...Maturity, whether in an individual or a nation, is often thought of as the ability to recognize limitations, and this is what Americans—former Paul Bunyans all—have begun to do...
...Given the complexity of the problems we now face, it may offer some hope...
...The suburban ideal has lost its luster, and in the cities "restoration," long the European way, has replaced "renewal...
...MICHAEL AARON ROCKLAND (Michael Aaron Rockland is professor and chairman of the Department of American Studies at Rutgers University...
...Just as we came to recognize the finite nature of our military and political power in Vietnam, so we have come, in more recent years, to recognize the finite character of our economic possibilities and natural resources...
...Even with detente currently in disarray, its very concept would have been unfathomable to an earlier generation of Americans...
...To reach for accommodation with the Russians, without forgetting that they are our adversaries, suggests a tolerance for ambiguity new to Americans, who have traditionally seen the world in terms of good guys and bad guys...
...Today we seek means to combat stagnation and even demodernization...
...In the 1960s and early 1970s, Americans braced themselves for an onslaught of future shock...
...While there is much about a younger America we will miss, our resemblance to our parental continent need not be a source of concern...
...In the last decade and a half, America has experienced assassinations, ethnic antagonisms, the loss of the Vietnam war, Watergate, and assorted energy, economic, and ecological traumas...
...America has become a more cosmopolitan country...
...Commonweal: 294...
...Instead of Americans ransacking Europe for cultural treasures, Europeans scour the countryside here looking for Americana...
...there has been an enormous improvement in our restaurants, in our wine, and in our taste...
...the United States, Rome...
...What once distinguished Americans from Europeans, our optimistic belief in inevitable progress, has largely disappeared...
...When America was a younger country, struggling with self-definition, it customarily saw itself as a non-Europe...
...The United States and Europe have become more similar culturally as well...
...While Europeans used to complain of American "cocacolonization," it is European investment in and tourism to the United States that have exploded in recent years...
...During this period, the nation has lost much of its youthful exuberance, its innocence—its virginity, if you will...
...But in recent years, distinctions between what is "European" and what is "American" have blurred...
...Like the adolescent who wishes to be as little like his parents as possible, America rejected its European antecedents...
...it has matured...
...The pace of American life has slowed, our mobility become circumscribed...
...Our standard of living and that of Europe have begun to approximate one another...
...But the fact is, New York, not Paris, is now the capital of the world of arts and ideas...
...The Marble Faun was written in 1859 and takes place in Italy...
Vol. 107 • May 1980 • No. 10
