Translating le vrai americain: Multilingualism in Henry James’s The Ambassadors and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room

Drawing upon work from translation studies that posits the precariousness of living between languages, this article explores how the French–English bilingualism in Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1909) and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) foregrounds the identity fissures that arise in their American protagonists when they arrive in Europe. In both novels, language plays a key role in mining the inner worlds of protagonists preoccupied with lives they fear they haven’t lived; these preoccupations intersect with race, nationality, sexuality, and class. Although other scholars have previously used these four identity markers as entry points into exploring these novels, this article includes multilingualism in the nexus to argue that language offers a visible and textual platform through which the mediation of identity can take place.