During the second half of the nineteenth century, Europe and America saw, with an unprecedented expansion of the marketplace, the advent of consumerist culture. Late nineteenth-century realist novels represent and react to this historical shift. This essay situates Henry James`s The American (1877) in this context of developing consumerist culture and its interaction with the literary marketplace. James`s The American is an interesting study of the male view that effects the commodification of woman and culture. Preceding Zola`s The Ladies` Paradise by a few years and Dreiser`s Sister Carrie by over a decade, The American is a relatively early representation of the consumerist impulse that was permeating the entire fields of Western culture in the last decades of the nineteenth century. However, unlike The Ladies` Paradise or Sister Carrie, James`s The American does not foreground a female character as a narrative medium that exposes and displays the capitalist social conditions of the time. Instead, The American presents a male character as a prototypical consumer, thus locating the agency of consumption in the male subject rather than the female body. This essay is an attempt to understand some changes in human relations--especially gender positions--during the period when the advent of consumerist society affected the notions of culture, art and aesthetics. At the same time, I study James`s own critical position toward the changing world-views, as represented in his The American. I place his work in comparison with those of other authors of his time, so as to bring to light his rhetorical strategies that textualize his critical stance. James`s use of a masculine gaze as the center of narrative consciousness highlights the gendered topography of commodifying, and commodified, American culture in which every capitalist subject sought to represent him/herself through various acts of consuming things as well as people.