Speech in "The Ambassadors:" Woollett and Paris as Linguistic Communities

Abstract

Lambert Strether, the protagonist of The Ambassadors, moves between two societies in dialectical opposition: Woollett, embodying an austere business ethic which subordinates personal and esthetic experience to work and moneymaking; and Paris, promoting a cultivation of art and life that allows greater individual autonomy. Although women are the dominant figures in both places, in terms of conventional stereotypes Woollett is a masculine or daylight world-presided over by the Queen Elizabeth-like Mrs. Newsome-and Paris is a feminine world, introduced to Strether by Maria Gostrey, who reminds him of that archromantic Mary Stuart, and later personified by the quintessential charming woman, Marie de Vionnet. As a fable of identity The Ambassadors is like a Shakespearean romantic comedy; it demonstrates that men must at least temporarily abandon the workaday to acquire the feminine capacity for personal relations and esthetic appreciation. Like a pastoral interlude, such an experience changes and completes the male sensibility; yet it cannot be an end in itself but must ultimately be assimilated into the necessarily corrupting and coarsening masculine of endeavor and reward represented by the rather provincial, the somewhat contracted world of Woollett.1 James is not interested in this intolerant and unimaginative world, which Strether compares to a reformatory for juvenile offenders-that is, those not fully mature or civilized-but he knows that most people must live in it, including, finally, Chad Newsome. Paris as some huge iridescent object, the locale and facilitator of individual development, is-we should keep in mind-an American tourist's or expatriate's Paris, self-indulgently imagined and incomplete. The Paris of French society, as Christopher Newman learned and Jeanne de Vionnet's arranged marriage illustrates, can be just as hardheaded and coercive as Woollett. In fact, by the standards of French society Woollett can be accused of sentimentality, for it does not regard affection and personal worth as irrelevant in proposing Mamie Pocock for Chad.2 Physically, the of The Ambassadors is Paris, but socially it is a tertium quid in which a momentary suspension of the ordinary dynamic of the individual's relation to society has a liberating and enlarging effect.