Lambert Strether Research Articles

“Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself”: James’s Mediators

Abstract: This essay traces its author’s changing understanding, over forty-five years of critical engagement, of the many James protagonists who, like Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors , fail, often deliberately, to “get anything for themselves” out of the affairs in which they are enmeshed. With reference to developments in James studies since the 1980s, the essay describes its author’s own shift away from once-standard narratives of renunciation to his present re-casting of these characters as “mediators”—James’s representatives in his radical, even utopian effort to imagine alternative, less violent and appropriative, forms of intimacy, relation, and community.

Henry James and the Opposite of Innocence

Abstract: The word "innocence" is ubiquitous in James scholarship, especially in studies of his late novels. But the word operates in two semantic realms: an epistemological one (where its counterpart is knowledge) and a moral one (where its counterpart is guilt). Even as critics recognize the importance of "innocence" to James, however, the tension between these two meanings of the word has not been seriously explored. I argue that James increasingly exploits the polysemy of "innocence," drawing the two meanings together as characters like Lambert Strether and Fanny Assingham try to prevent immorality by keeping themselves ignorant of it.

Miejsce i psychogeografia w Ambasadorach Henry’ego Jamesa

Following the recent spatial turn in literary criticism and the shift of focus on place, the present paper examines the special significance of place in Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors (1903) and explores the relationship between geography and psychology through the main character, Lambert Strether. Analysing the latter’s outer and inner observations draws on a close reading of the novel and the instrumentation of such theories as psychogeography and psychoanalytical criticism. Strether’s trip is an introspective voyage as much as an exploratory expedition, allowing insight into his subconsciousness through the tropes of the places he traverses. His mental visions of spaces in the novel can be surmised in terms of a psychogeography of his movements, a sort of landscape of the mind which is a reflection of the Freudian perception of the human psyche.

Missing the Boat: Narrative Artistry in Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and James’s The Ambassadors

Might the pre-revolutionary setting of Boston, as depicted in Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” relate to high-society Paris in James’s The Ambassadors? What do the nepotistic outlooks of Robin Molineux and Lambert Strether have in common? How does the narrative technique of Hawthorne’s tale anticipate the artistry of one of James’s most complex narratives, and in what manner does James go beyond his predecessor in refining the reflector-narrator technique? The magnitude and significance of such concerns—although in Hawthorne’s tale, historically momentous; in James’s narrative, highly personal—stand to enhance understanding of how James enhanced the narrative technique of “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” in dramatic renderings of apperceptive consciousness and post-factum narrative speculation.

‘Virtuous Attachment’ and three dramatizations of James’s The Ambassadors

Henry James’s The Ambassadors is considered by many James scholars his most complex novel and his central character, Lambert Strether, a man whose decisions are not always easy to explain to either the reading audience or the other characters in the text. Adapting this work to other media formats presented challenges that, this article argues, were not fully met. One of the major problems faced by the two television versions and one theatrical version of this work is their failure to address what James calls a ‘virtuous attachment’, a term understood by Strether to define the relationship between young New Englander Chad Newsome and his French ‘companion’, Madame de Vionnet. This article examines this issue as well as the particular demands that television and stage adaptations of literary works must address and that these ambitious and distinctive approaches to The Ambassadors faced, including adapting the work into a big Broadway musical.

Live for Me: Vicarious Experience and Aesthetic Education in The Ambassadors and Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

Abstract A capacity for vicarious experience is one of Lambert Strether's most celebrated characteristics, apparent not only in his famous injunction to Little Bilham to “live all you can,” but also in his more general attitude toward Chad Newsome's life in Paris, which he proposes, at one point, to regard as a substitute for his own youth. This incorrigible tendency to live his life through the experiences of others might seem to conflict with the goals of Bildung or aesthetic education, since, if nothing else, the experiences that constitute such an education ought surely to be one's own. But although the bildungsroman as a genre is often thought to be concerned with the formation of an individual subject, the concept of Bildung articulated by Goethe and his Weimar associates in the 1790s in fact assigns a particular importance to the idea of vicarious experience. In the archetypal bildungsroman, for instance, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Wilhelm's education is not complete until he can see himself as a “representative of the species,” in Schiller's phrase, and thus seek consolation for his own limitations in the achievements of other human beings. In this perspective, James's portrait of a “man of imagination” whose education consists in imagining the experiences of others is not a deviation from the tradition of the bildungsroman but a realization of one of the genre's originary possibilities.

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

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.

Encoding the Circumambient Psychological Moment: Clause Relations, Parallel Structures and Alliteration in Henry James’ “The Ambassadors”

Henry James’ “The Ambassadors” might be termed an Impressionist Suspense Novel in that the action of the novel centers on the shifting impressions and groping for hidden meaning in the mind of its main character, Lambert Strether. The subtle changes in Strether’s struggle for understanding are registered in a series of intense encounters with Chadwick Newsome, and his lover, Madame Marie de Vionnet and are communicated to the reader in the complex syntax of James’ prose. This article will examine James’ use of four linguistic devices to render character portraits and signal shifting impressions: clause relations, parallel grammatical structures, lexical repetition and replacement, and serial alliterative modifiers.

Feeling Right in The Ambassadors

Feeling Right in The Ambassadors Anne Langendorfer "Feeling right" was an important idea in nineteenth-century American literature, as many novels from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)1 to Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)2 attest. But when in The Ambassadors (1903) James takes up this crucial phrase, he offers readers a new idea: that "feeling right" can be understood as the meeting point between emotion and ethics for both characters and readers. Throughout the novel, James shows the protagonist, Lambert Strether, struggling with the concept of "right" feeling: Strether "wanted to feel right about it, but could only, at best, for the time, feel vague" (315). Strether's desire to feel right opens a gaping vagueness, which leaves readers, too, feeling bewildered. In keeping readers close to Strether through the novel's focalization, James invites the authorial audience to consider not only characters' emotions and ethics but also their own emotions about and ethical judgments of these characters. In The Ambassadors, to feel right is neither a command to readers, as practiced by Stowe,3 nor an entirely ironic statement, as articulated by Twain, but rather a desire shared and interrogated by characters and readers alike. Indeed, both Stowe's and Twain's uses of the phrase "feeling right" leave behind a persistent question about the efficacy of sympathy: how far can sympathy take readers? In The Ambassadors, James offers readers an opportunity to engage with the notion of feeling right as an emotional process, focalizing the story through Strether's self-questioning dialogue with himself and therefore suggesting that a specific and complex affective education is required of characters and readers in order for anyone to make claims about right feeling. More broadly, I argue, James's concept of emotion is tied to a larger emotional-ethical conversation in the late nineteenth century about the nature of "feeling right" and how one achieves this condition through reading.4 As Faye Halpern proposes in her clever and generative 2018 investigation of James's meditation on sentimentality in The Bostonians, James is not as dismissive of sentimentality as many critics have argued and indeed is deeply engaged with it. [End Page 251] Halpern suggests that the sentimental novel's reading practice of cultivating readers' sympathetic identification with characters is important in James's work, even as it is often replaced in James's novels by "a love of difficulty, a toleration of ambiguity, and judgment borne of critical distance" (63). In Emotional Reinventions: Realist-Era Representations Beyond Sympathy (2015), Melanie Dawson argues that James and other realist authors have moved "beyond sympathy" toward the act of analyzing and cataloging emotion (103). I agree with Halpern and Dawson that James's novels portray emotion differently and therefore create different reading experiences, refusing readers easy sympathetic identification with protagonists like Lambert Strether. But how then do we feel about Strether? His desire to feel right encourages readers to engage with a sustained feeling of affection for the difficulty, ambiguity, and judgment-making process with which James requires readers to engage. If Strether's own right feeling is achieved only through a novel-long process of emotional-ethical change, then we must also attend to the ways in which this process affects readers. Emotion and ethics work together in The Ambassadors to encourage readers to engage ambivalent emotional responses, as Kate Stanley and Joshua Held suggest. In this short essay, I suggest a rhetorical narrative approach that combines ethics with emotion, yielding new insights for understanding James's complex communication to his authorial audience. Given the space limitations, I will offer (drawing on James Phelan's work in Experiencing Fiction) an overarching sketch of the narrative progression from the global instability to key complication to resolution, focusing on the complexities of the ending, to describe this process. I use this framework of narrative progression to insist on the importance of seeing the interactions between the judgments of characters and the authorial audience as integral to understanding the reading experience as one attuned to a skeptical engagement with Strether's understanding of himself as, finally, not only feeling but being right. Narrative Progression and Instabilities: Knowledge, Ethics...

The color of things in Henry James’s The Ambassadors: complicating the process of vision

This article focuses on how description generally, and color particularly, “bear upon” Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1903), the action of which is understood as the process and education of Lambert Strether’s vision and that of the reader. While the narrative of The Ambassadors is largely Strether’s “intimate adventure” and “even the projection of his consciousness upon it,” he is not at “once hero and historian” (XXI, xvi), a distinction too often erased. Focusing on the use of color in The Ambassadors helps bring this distinction into relief, both on Strether’s sense of past and present, of “should” and “is,” and on the very separate narrator/historian’s perspective. The central intelligence separately shapes the education and process of Strether’s vision, as well as that of the reader.

Breaking the “Mould” of The Ambassadors

This essay claims that the friction between sexual identity and desire in The Ambassadors is given shape by an evangelical language of election and abjection. My interpretation centers on Lambert Strether’s metaphor of the tin mold, an embodiment of a fatalistic sensibility that admits no surprises. This image responds to the ideological fallout from the Oscar Wilde trials, which popularized notions of fixed sexual identity in a way that also reconstituted queerness as merely a type. I argue that Strether’s experience, written into the temporal disjunctures of the late Jamesian sentence, orients his sexuality around a Calvinistic fulfilment of fate.

The Dispossession of Character

The Dispossession of Character

Lambert Strether: A Dilemma of an Impaired Vision and a Question About the Homogeneity of the Protagonist

Our discussion centers on the downfall of Henry James’s protagonist in his novel The Ambassadors . Lambert Strether, who not only fails to get hold of his promise to his well-off fiance, Mrs. Newsome, but also cannot accept the Parisian life-style and becomes emotionally and financially paralyzed at the end of the novel. One of the major critical discussion on The Ambassadors was the nature of its ending; although many believe that it is actually an open-ended novel, the others based their discussion on the embedded facts which are placed by the author in the narrative. Based on the close reading of the text, we posed the question on the homogeneity of Lambert Sterther with other characters and elements in the painting-like narrative of the novel. Also, the function of vision in correlation with the protagonist’s consciousness is probed; moreover, knowledge and morality are discussed as the key factors that reign over the character’s final decision.

Finding the Jimmy in James: How James Baldwin Discovered Giovanni's Room in Lambert Strether's Paris

In “The Art of Fiction” (1884), Henry James argues that when it comes to subject matter the novelist must be granted broad freedoms: “If we pretend to respect the artist at all,” he writes, “we must allow him his freedom of choice” even in the face of “innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify” (38). Although James agrees with Walter Besant that “A novel in its broadest definition” is a “personal impression” (33), he nonetheless rejects Besant’s stricture that therefore “a young lady brought up in a quiet country village should avoid descriptions of garrison life” (34). After all, James argues, there is no telling what, “imagination assisting,” a provincial young lady might not divine regarding the lives of men in the military. The only necessity is that she be “blessed with the faculty which when you give it an inch takes an ell and which for the artist is a much greater source of strength than any accident of residence or of place in the social scale.” Furthermore, James democratically suggests, this “power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things,” is discovered in novelists “from town and country and in the most differing stages of education” (35). One prefers to think that, had it occurred to him, James would also have pointed out that this most “blessed . . . faculty” of the novelist is as little dependent on the “accident” of race as it is on gender, class, or geography. That it seems not to have, however, is not especially surprising since even contemporary critics have frequently been reluctant to accord the novelist the freedom and authority to imagine the lives of racial others. James Baldwin’s lifelong embrace of Henry James’s fiction, and more particularly his early and arguably most Jamesian novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), offers a revealing case in point, one that has inspired a long controversy. With its all white characters and its Jamesian theme of the American naif in Paris, the novel seemed to some early critics a youthful literary misstep, an errant excursion beyond the boundaries of Baldwin’s native literary environment, which was to say the black experience in America as he had chronicled it so convincingly in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). For others, both early and late, the novel represents a misguided bid for artistic legitimacy

Henry James at the Ethical Turn

Matthew Flaherty, “Henry James at the Ethical Turn: Vivification and Ironization in The Ambassadors” (pp. 366–393) Taking its cue from recent work by Dorothy J. Hale, this paper begins by exploring the extent to which Levinasian, deconstructive, and Aristotelian critical approaches have associated Henry James’s fiction, and the ethical import of reading literature more broadly, with an array of related values including particularity, impulsiveness, and indeterminacy. Seeking to complicate this characterization of the ethical effects of Jamesian fiction, this paper emphasizes the debt of The Ambassadors (1903) to a form of dialectical narration that privileges an array of antithetical values including abstraction, analysis, and understanding. Attending in particular to the novel’s opposition between Lambert Strether’s imagination and Maria Gostrey’s discrimination, I argue that The Ambassadors uses perspectival relations between characters to clarify and challenge the judgments of its characters and, by extension, its readers. By building dialectical oppositions like these into his novels, James does not disrupt structures of thought with immediate feeling so much as he shapes immediate feelings into structures of thought. The paper makes the case that it is through juxtaposition to characters like Maria that the full significance of Strether’s feeling—that is, the perspective of value that motivates his practice—can be grasped by readers seeking to refine their own ethical thinking. By emphasizing how James’s fiction facilitates thoughts that attend to the whole, rather than just provoking feelings that attend to the particular, the paper seeks to expand both received understandings of James’s fiction and of ethical approaches to literary criticism more broadly.

Experience at home and innocence abroad: social and cultural capital in Machado de Assis's Esaú e Jacó and Henry James's the ambassadors

This study examines two literary worlds fashioned by epic authors Machado de Assis and Henry James. In the novels Esaú e Jacó (1904) and The Ambassadors (1903), the writers explore the theme of ambassadorship. In these two texts, key characters act as emissaries. Councilor Aires, Lambert Strether, and Sarah Pocock discover that ambassadorial service brings with it many complication Each of them fulfills his or her mission in a particular way and does so with difs. fering motives. For these three individuals, access to and interpretation of information becomes decisive in fulfilling their respective commissions. This information circulates in distinct ways, yet the ability to access and understand the information depends on each ambassador's social and cultural "capital", as can be seen in the theories of Pierre Bourdieu.

James as Magician: Deception and the Moment of Truth

By what magic does a writer create a picture in a reader’s eye? James, wanting to create “a state of hallucination” in the reader, imagined himself a conjuror. This essay examines how James achieved one of his most marvelous and improbable tricks: the revelation of Chad and Madame de Vionnet to Lambert Strether, as they appear to him boating in the countryside in The Ambassadors . My purpose, however, is not to dissuade or debunk James’s magic but to praise the truth he allows us to envision. Contrived by all his arts, his trick is to reveal the falsehood of Chad and Madame de Vionnet, to lay bare their deception in a moment of truth, and thereby to give a moral fable, worthy of Hawthorne himself, about human deceit.

Conscience and Consciousness in The Ambassadors : Epistemology, Focalization, and Narrative Ethics

Through focalization and details like reflexive pronouns, verbs of perception, and counterfactuals, Henry James’s narrator in The Ambassadors reveals that Lambert Strether’s consciousness and conscience are not just perceived, but imagined, even created. This creation of Strether’s interior world foregrounds the solipsistic torque of focalization on narrative ethics, suggesting the narrator and focalizing character as the principal directors of the novel’s ethics, as of its perception. While Strether’s conscience can hardly make claims on other characters, much less on readers, focalization both proffers a model of ethical response and makes conscience the command center of a new ethical world.

Foreign Bodies:

Foreign Bodies:

The Jamesian Oedipus and the Freudian Moses: Image, Word, The Later Style, and The Ambassadors

During the famous garden party scene in Henry James's The Ambassadors (1903), a group comprised of the freethinking Parisian Miss Barrace, the expatriate American artist Little Bilham, the novel's itinerant hero Lambert Strether--who has been sent to retrieve the prodigal Chad Newsome from what his mother in Woollett, Massachusetts presumes is the clutch of a European temptress--discusses Paris's subversive effects on Americans abroad. The subject of the conversation is Strether's traveling companion Waymarsh, a dour, puritanical Connecticut lawyer who staunchly resists Paris's seductions. Miss Barrace has taken the intractable American under her wing is delighted amused that her charge refuses to give in. Desiring to be further entertained, she comments: Oh, hope it's lasting! ... But he only, at the best, bears with me. doesn't understand--not one little scrap. He's delightful. He's wonderful, she repeated. Michelangeloesque!--Little Bilham completed her meaning. He is a success. Moses, on the ceiling, brought down to the floor; overwhelming, colossal, but somehow portable. (125) Qualifying this suggestion of Waymarsh's portability, Miss Barrace adds, Certainly, if you mean by portable ... looking so well in one's carriage. Yet geographical mobility does not equate, in Waymarsh's case, with a change in cultural or moral position. I show him Paris, show him everything, she says, and he never turns a hair (125). The metaphor produced by this exchange, Michelangelo's imposing, larger-than-life statue of Moses, the Jewish lawgiver, which adorns the tomb of Pope Julius II in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, introduces a paternal authority figure of mythic stature into the heart of The Ambassadors. (1) At first glance, this seems a rather ironic introduction given that fathers are otherwise notably absent from the novel that the story of intercultural conflict is, as Leon Edel argues, driven by the opposing desires of two mothers, the puritanically American Mrs. Newsome the seductively Parisian Marie de Vionnet (537). Yet the appearance of the iconoclastic, law-giving father, which occurs in the critical moment between Strether's consciousness-altering vision of the sculptor Glorianiand his speech enjoining Bilham to live life to the full, points up the crux of Strether's dilemma: he is caught between a world of sensory perception that generates desires mediates understanding of reality through material phenomena on one hand, a world of abstract conceptuality that demands renunciation of sensory-induced desires obedience to transcendent categorical truths on the other. Translating this cultural conflict into psychoanalytic terms, would argue that Strether's tale can be read as an oedipal struggle: enamored of the maternal European imaginary, Strether struggles against the demands of the paternal American symbolic. But The Ambassadors offers readers an amended version of the conventional oedipal narrative, which reaches closure through renunciation of desire for the mother identification with the father, by refusing to subsume the image into the word, the imaginary into the symbolic. Strether disrupts the trajectory of oedipalization by refusing to bow to the paternal will; however, he also refuses to remain enraptured with the maternal fantasy, suggesting that the novel does not simply reverse the oedipal narrative's course resolve itself back into the imaginary. In thus avoiding the post-oedipal sentence to the father's version of reality the pre-oedipal fantasy of uninterrupted pleasure, Strether achieves a subjectivity that resists psychoanalytic categorization. My ultimate interest, though, is not the state of Strether's psyche but rather what his tale has to tell us show us about the aesthetics hermeneutics of James's later style. By unpacking this narrative complication, hope to demonstrate that James adapts the oedipal myth to illustrate a principle that characterizes his fiction criticism throughout his career but that becomes especially pronounced in the major phase: Every good story is . …