Louis Bromfield, Age Anxiety, and the End of the American Expatriate

This article examines two early works by Louis Bromfield (1896-1950), a notable member of the American literary community in Paris in the first half of the XX century. The essay “Expatriate—Vintage 1927” testifies of a novelist who, although privileging traditional narrative forms over modernist experimentation, attempts to disenfranchise himself from a fading nineteenth-century transatlantic tradition, at least in ideological terms. Bromfield returns to the old theme of American identity endangered in Europe (which boasted notable commentators like Jefferson and Emerson) to provokingly argue that «there isn’t such thing as American expatriate». To him, notions such as «American expatriate» and «young American girl abroad» (popularized by James’s Daisy Miller) have become superseded, as they reflect an obsolete kind of internationalism that saw Americans in Europe intimidated and overpowered by a largely alien world. In the 1920s, with the fast pace of Americanization, Europe no longer represented a “threat” for American visitors. The same argument is fictionalized in the short story “The Apothecary” (from the collection Awake and Rehearse, 1929), where Bromfield reworks characters and plots of the transatlantic realist tradition. By focusing on two aging women whom he gently satirizes, Bromfield reflects on the disappearance of an old type of expatriate, while also tackling other contemporary discourses such as creative exhaustion and (gendered) age anxiety. The story depicts these women’s unacceptance of aging as deriving from their stubborn belief in an obsolete kind of internationalism, and contrasts their decline with the vitality of young Anne Masterson, who is young and vital because her mindset is. By doing so, the story also implies that youth and age, rather than universal human conditions, can be experienced differently because they are socially constructed.