Henry James and the US South in The American Scene

James’s criticism of the South and the American scene culminates in his description of Southern hotels and of the general American hotel-spirit they embody. He stays at hotels in Richmond and Charleston and finds the institution similar everywhere: the American hotel is great, shiny, and empty, as if the individual specimens were signposts of universal values from the North scattered about the South. In Florida the hotel life takes on a sudden intensity, as hotels dominate the holiday resorts, and in the clean Florida air the effect of hotels is quite spectacular. James compares this impression to the one he had had of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City not long before. The effect consist in the impression of the “perfect, the exquisite adjustability of the “national” life to the sublime hotel-spirit.” (439) Analyzing the relation of national life and the hotel spirit, James is content to make the hotel-spirit the stronger in the sense that it is full-blown and expert, and thus the national life can rely on it to assist its own undeveloped and passive social organization. The problem with the hotel-sprit for James is not only that it is unifying but also that while it predends to meet the need of American ideals, it in fact creates new American ideals. It is not only educative but also prescriptive. The great national ignorance is taken advantage of artfully by the hotel-spirit that will define relations. This is the revelation James encounters instead of a fulfilling meal at his Florida hotel.
He finds this revelation troubling from the perspective of “the individual” or “the informed few” looking at “the crowd” or the “uninformed” (441) masses:

I seemed to see again … the whole housed populace move as in mild and consenting suspicion of its captured and governed state, its having to consent to inordinate fusion as the price of what it seemed pleased to regard as inordinate luxury. Beguiled and caged, positively thankful, in its vast vacancy, for the sense and the definite horizon of a cage, were there yet not moments,,, in which it still dimly made out that its condition was the result of a compromise into the detail of which there might some day be an alarm in entering? (441)

It is James’s notion of individuality existing in differentiations, taste, manners that is captured by the hotel-spirit in America. The cumulative sum, the golden-mean as the universal ideal of the hotel-spirit oppresses him as the quality that has no need for his kind of individual sensibility at all.