ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the hotel through Henry James and etiquette manuals as a place of transatlantic encounters, and provides a significant setting for the interplay of manners, gender, class, "race"/ethnicity, and nationality in the dramatic performance of self. For James, the luxury hotel of Progressive America encapsulated American civilization: its manners, its technology, its democratic social arrangements, and especially the "gregariousness" of US society. Tendencies toward informality and flirtation at summer resort hotels, in particular, were seen as potentially injurious to young women, as their vulnerability to gossip in the confined space of the piazza could not be overestimated. Class hierarchies had to be negotiated in a putative democracy, which meant that hotels were sites of tension between those who felt they had a right to a certain level of respect and privacy and those who embraced a more open, more informal manner of interaction as a means of self-promotion and gregarious heterosociability.
