Anti-Capitalist Plasticity: The Ambassadors and the Biology of Rejuvenation

Abstract

This article explores the idea of rejuvenation—of regaining one’s youth, even to the point of regaining an embryonic state—in Henry James’s The Ambassadors through the development of Lambert Strether as the main character. I show how James’s treatment of Strether’s quest for rejuvenation parallels the movements in science of his time, wherein discoveries were made concerning the possibility of a cell’s returning to an undifferentiated state. Further, I show how the concept of life’s plasticity, shared by James and the scientists of his era, essentially differs from the commercialized plasticity promoted by the late-nineteenth-century capitalist society.