America and Europe: A Love Affair

A new icon by kathyh, based on one of the beautiful pics shezan posted, and a new lj layout. Also, some thoughts.

Following the late Edward Said, dissections of "orientalism", equating it with imperialism, often complain about the steroetype of "the East" being cast as mystical/sexual/submissive/female and/or oldwisemale, and "the West" as rational/domineering/youngmale. The play M. Butterfly revolves around this very point, turning it upside down as the French male character fulfills his Madame Butterfly fantasies of the loving, faithful mistress and the great white man only to find he's been played the entire time, that his mistress is not just a spy but a man, and in the end he's the one who becomes Butterfly. Leaving aside the gender stereotypes for a moment, reading the ljs this morning made me wonder whether one couldn't make some similar observations about "Europeanism" or "Americanism" in literature and other media, complete with an intensely sexual connotation. Because both Europe and America clearly work as projections of something.

And quite often, it reads like a love affair, complete with attraction/repulsion/longing/breakup, etc. Everyone is aware of the America-as-the-land-of-opportunity trope, but how about America the desired other? There is a grand tradition from John Donne, in Elegie: to his mistress going to bed :

Licence my roving hands, and let them goe
Behind, before, above, between, below.
Oh my America, my new found land,
My kingdome, safeliest when with one man mand,
My myne of precious stones, my Empiree,
How blest am I in this discovering thee.
To enter in these bonds is to be free,
Then where my hand is set my seal shall be.

to Ted Hughes, centuries later, who in Birthday Letters really emphasizes Sylvia Plath's American-ness, much more than she ever did, seeing her as America:

I cannot remember
How I smuggled myself, wrapped in you,
Into the hotel. There we were.
You were slim and lithe and smooth as a fish.
You were a new world. My new world.
So this is America, I marvelled.
Beautiful, beautiful America!


Whereas he casts himself as drab, post-war England. Hughes' descriptions when combined with national adjectives don't always play on the America/England dichotomy, and there is something of Europe in his imago of Plath as well: ....your eyes' peculiar brightness, their oddness,/ Two little brown people, hooded, Prussian... But mostly, she's America, and America is colourful, very alien, desired and loved but with scars and inner turnmoiil threatening to break out at any moment.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the scale, you've got the Henry James narrative of the innocent American venturing abroad falling for seductive Europe, which usually ends badly for the American in question. Europe in this scenario comes across as beautiful but ultimately hollow, or rife with disease, or vitality-sucking. Comedies like A Foreign Affair, or One, Two, Three by Billy Wilder (himself an emigrant, adapting the script from a comedy by Hungarian Ferenc Molnar) offer yet another twist in both directions. It's not so much a fatal doomed passion which is going on as it is a practical business arrangment with great sexual attraction and benefits from both sides. (Ah, Wilder and his gigolo-in-Berlin past.) Though admittedly America is usually presented as male, as opposed to the Jamesian model.

You can quite easily read the bitter and furious comments from both sides of the Atlantic in recent years as fallouts from people who have absorbed Americanism/Europeanism somehow, and don't know quite where this affair and narrative is going anymore. There is a lot of "what happened to you?" and "who needs you anyway!", so much so that you expect people to burst out in "I will survive" at any moment, imitating Gloria Gaynor. Which isn't to say the polticial issues today aren't real. But projections are a powerful thing.

Whoever wins the elections will be (or continue to be) a massive case of projections, too, but just for a relatively short while. Americanism and Europeanism is stronger than that. In another four years, we'll still get America as utopia, America as dystopia, Americans abroad (and Europe, that broad) motifs wandering through the media and the public consciousness. Especially if there continues to be less travelling. For decades, German kids got their first impression of America via novels by Karl May, who had never been there when he wrote them but used the idea of America to write himself out of Wilhelminian social misery and into bestselling success. These days they probably get it from TV shows, but in either case: it's a fabricated reality. TV America isn't exactly the genuine article, either. It presents the continuing lure of the great affair, though.

And let's face it: no matter the state of the relationship, we do have shared custody for the kids...

ETA: A new treasure from the Londothon is here!