"Lurking Ghosts": Metaphor, The Ambassadors, and Henry James's Population of the American Scene

Abstract

In The American Scene, James reconstructs the land of his birth as a "fine blank space" into which he inserts a population of ghosts and ethereal personifications that illuminate his own apprehension of bewildered alienation. By way of an extended deconstructive reading of James's use of metaphor in The Ambassadors, the article shows James, in The American Scene, to be reasserting the hard-won lesson, learnt during a lifelong professional struggle, that signification is untamable and that teleological striving must be suspended. Rather than simply reversing traditional hierarchies, James embraces the necessarily tenuous and vulnerable nature of any account of America-as-text.