Pandora

Pandora is a short story by Henry James, first published serially in the New York Sun in June 1884 and collected in The Author of Beltraffio the following year. It is one of his middle period American international stories and one of the funniest things he wrote in the 1880s.

The story opens on a transatlantic steamer where a young German diplomat named Count Otto Vogelstein is traveling to take up a post at the German embassy in Washington. On the boat he meets a young American woman named Pandora Day, who is traveling alone in a way that the count finds difficult to place in his European categories of respectable young women. He is told by an American fellow passenger that Pandora is what is called in America the self made girl, who has risen by her own efforts from a modest background into a kind of celebrity. The count is fascinated and decides he must learn more about this American phenomenon for his official reports to his government.

The rest of the story follows Count Vogelstein in Washington over the following months. He keeps encountering Pandora at various social events and is amazed at the speed with which she is rising through American society on the strength of her own personality and intelligence. The climax of the story comes at a White House reception where Pandora speaks directly to the president on behalf of a young man she wants appointed to a diplomatic post. The count finally understands what the self made girl actually is and what powers she actually wields in the American system.

The story is a comic counterpoint to Daisy Miller. Where Daisy was destroyed by European misreading of American freedom, Pandora is triumphantly at home in her American world and uses her energy to remake the world around her. The story is about forty pages long and is one of the most enjoyable of the middle period pieces. It pairs naturally with The Reverberator and with Lady Barberina, two other comic studies of the same international subject.