Listening to New York in The American Scene

This essay examines the ways in which Henry James recreated, and made use of, the sound of New York City in the The American Scene (1907). In the numerous studies that over the years have been devoted to this fascinating and challenging work a great deal of emphasis has been placed on the visual quality of James’s response to the overwhelming modernity of early twenty-first century America. Largely neglected, by contrast, has been James’s treatment of sound which his very telling of his troubled reading of modernity. Indeed, the analysis of the many references to sound and auditory metaphors James disseminated in the New York section of The American Scene can give us a better understanding of such prominent topics in the book as the connection between financial power and architecture, and the transformation of American society as a result of massive immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe.