Henry James

Henry James poetically titles the chapter of this book ‘Walking Up and Down China. It is poetic because choosing to symbolizes his feelings in this way is a nod to the colonization that was happening in China at this time with the country being taken over by the British. Colonization drastically changes a country and recreates it in the image of the conqueror. As a result of this a Chinese person might walk around China and not recognize it. Such severe alterations could make them feel as if they no longer belong in their own country. I would venture to argue that he uses this metaphor as a way of sympathizing with the Chinese man’s plight, but he counteracts the possibility of such a gesture by referring to the Chinese as Chinamen, which is a derogatory term. Despite his insensitivity, James still manages to illustrate a well-thought out parallel between his feelings and the political injustice that as occurring simultaneously.

This dissociation goes farther than not belonging to a place, but himself as well. James writes extensively of being out of his body a traveling to the moon and living countless immortalities. This happens so much so that at one particular reentrance into a body he has no memory of it and asks himself “with whose feet is [he] walking.” His inability to remember who he is in his own body illustrates how estranged he feels from it. He is not a Chinese person in his own land, but one in his own body as well. He has lost the last place to be comfortable when everything around you is unfamiliar. His soul, absolute self, what have you is all that he has he, but even that is uneasy since he yearns for an actual place and body to feel whole. Instead, he is subjected to strange “whooshing noises” he has come to know as the reattachment of his body to his soul. I would argue that it is actually the reverse, soul back to body, but James seems to think that his stagnant body is able to reanimate itself in order to rejoin his soul. This is yet another example that shows that he does not see his body as his. It is an organism that has the power to exist on it’s own and in his mind it does. His inability to, at the very least know that he controls his body and understand that it is the shell that houses who he is is the core of his entire dilemma.