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James Aesthetics

Question

A few sentences below E. M. Forster�s famous send-off of Henry James and his incapacity to depict �round characters� in Aspects of the Novel (�their clothes will not take off�), Forster graciously describes what James actually permits his characters to do: �They can land at Europe, and they can look at works of art and each other, but that is all.� As James does not generally represent the Atlantic crossing, his characters only look, and only at two things: art and their fellow �flat� characters. A hyperbolic claim, Forster�s comment nonetheless illuminates a very significant theme in James� work: the development of aesthetic judgment and its application not only to art, but also to the spectator�s fellow human beings. What do characters gain or lose by using, or by being the target of, this interpretive mode? In particular, how does this aesthetic judgment alter or replace traditional systems of moral judgment, and does James view this replacement with the euphoria, complacency, or anxiety? Using at least four works, discuss the role aesthetic judgment plays in James� oeuvre.

Material

• Portrait of a Lady (1881)
  • As a story about understanding what freedom truly means (where Mrs. Touchett, Isabel’s aunt, a tangential character, actually appears more important b/c her life, choosing and then abandoning her husband, using him as the source of wealth that will allow her to move about the continent as she pleases; but she realizes after her husband dies and then her son dies soon after what she missed – the family life, getting to know her son): it’s the destruction of the modern, facile understanding of freedom as the unimpeded action of the personal will, by the older, Kantian and Lockean understanding of freedom as the ability to make decisions and behave according to the dictates of reason, or at least some other organizing factor.
    • The key here is that freedom is found within constraints, not the lack of constraints.
  • Moral: Isabel’s cousin Ralph Touchett, the actual source of her wealth (he made his father bequeath her half of his own inheritance), had had an aesthetic interest in her. He treated her like a living painting… that is, he wanted to act like Zola and experiment on Isabel: given a certain character, you will change one variable (wealth) and watch what happens.
• Aesthetics: So, Zola’s naturalism is what we’re seeing, Ralph is the artist doing the experimental method on Isabel, using the inheritance to place her into a position where her inherited characteristics (locally, from her aunt; but symbolically from her Americanness), her need for freedom and independence, can have a larger scope
  • The determinism here is also one so conventional that it too seems like a genre convention: Mr. Touchett asks Ralph if Isabel won’t be hounded and caught by a fortune-hunter. And that’s exactly what happens.
  • But here’s where James differs from Zola: Ralph dies…and in fact his death is where Isabel finds her ideas of freedom tested. After she recognizes that she was had by Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle, she is bitter and beset by paralysis, unable even to help her acquaintance Edward Rosier get together with his true love Miss Pansy Osmond. All she gets is what James considers one of his very best pieces of writing, her nocturnal meditation where she realizes exactly what had happened (Pansy is Madame Merle’s daughter), but when Ralph’s death is immanent, something switches off, and she is able to reevaluate what freedom means.
    • Her deterministic narrative stops, and she is able to find meaning again. She accepts what happens and realizes that her life hasn’t ended: in effect she enacts the feminism of the earlier parts of the book that seemed to be negated by her marriage…because she now can truly say that her life is more than just a man b/c her life hasn’t ended w/her marriage. That she can be happy again. Her true independence occurs when she realizes the CONSTRAINTS of her freedom, and decides to be happy with them.
  • The conflation of moral and aesthetic judgment has here been seen as positively disastrous, something heroically to be overcome.
    • But sixteen years later, what maisie knew will reevaluate it, possibly b/c he has switched from what he considers to be the ideal situation to investigate (the woman who has not clamped down her life decisions…this book is neat b/c it shows him about to change, where James himself is recognizing that the marital decisions of his heroines shouldn’t be the ending of the book), to an unideal situation (this horrific modern situation)
• What Maisie Knew (1897)
  • Old systems of morals: her parents’ divorce represents those destabilizing forces of modernity and makes traditional morality inapplicable to her situation
  • Moral: what this girl has to see provokes her guardians arguments we have typically seen in relation to realism: whether the blunt presentation of socially unacceptable behavior corrupts or teaches by negative example
    • Especially in her nostalgic recognition of her mistake in choosing the glamorous and youthful but unreliable Miss Overmore over the mutely suffering, loyal but unattractive and aging Mrs. Wix
    • On one level, Maisie tends to bring people together (such as her governess and her father; and bringing together her mother w/her paramour) and brings people into connection, but all of these connections turn sour and actually turn out to be a negation of previous relationships (father and mother; mother and step-father; father and step-mother)
    • Her innocence brings in bystanders into the whole problem and into the swirl of corruption: she is the conductor, a channel through which corruption spreads, while she herself still has the possibility to grow and remain unsoiled by the adult menace around her
    • Mrs. Wix represents the moral sense, but the narrator tells us that what’s working in Maisie by the end of the book is “something still deeper than her moral sense:” her need for personal relation, for love
      • But Maisie has got to realize that the people she wants love from are actually using her to believe that they can “Get together” morally (ie if the two step-parents are really trying to protect Maisie they can feel like they are doing right in living together w/out marrying; Sir Claude doesn’t really want this but he’s weak and has come under Miss Overmore’s powers) (“you’re ours and ours only now!” the stepmother enjoins)
      • What does Maisie want? Sir Claude and Mrs. Wix together, b/c then they love her for herself and there’s no potential of her two guardians having a sexual relation that would make her manipulable. Maisie asking Claude to give Miss Overmore up is “as if some lovely work of art or of nature had suddenly been set down among them” that Sir Claude sees “With fine appreciation” so that there’s an aesthetic beauty to the solution Maisie comes up with. (But what ends up happening is the Maisie has to make the sacrifice of Sir Claude b/c he is too weak, too chivalrous to leave Miss Overmore alone.)
      • And what has happened? Maisie finally learned what she truly wanted, the narrator tells us, after a long process of learning. It’s consciousness, a recognition of how things stand. Which is diff than moral.
  • A sidenote: just like Strether’s moment of truth when he sees that Chad and Vionnet had gotten it on together, through an ingenious manipulation of the leisure industry (transportation, distance, hotels, restaurants), Maisie has ended up learning about Sir Claude and Miss Overmore’s sexual encounter which they had engineered through a complex use of telegrams, ship and train schedules, and the layout of the hotel itself.
  • Aesthetic: James’ preface to this book is what is significant here b/c he finds the biggest aesthetic provocation in trying to chart the course of evolving moral consciousness on the part of a child
  • Moral judgement isn’t presented for its own sake, but because it gives James an opportunity to watch the workings of a mind, which for him is the greatest aesthetic task that a novelist takes on
    • we hear the narrator commenting about trying to understand Maisie’s �personal relation to her knowledge� where Maisie begins to learn that she must judge her knowledge for herself
    • In a very very very rare interruption from the narrator, the narrator complains, �I despair of courting her noiseless mental footsteps here��
    • And we even hear a deadpan relation of what from any author would sound like self-parody: �her vision of this vision of his, his vision of her vision, and her vision of his vision of her vision�
  • It is an early version of Ambassadors except later we’ll get the evolving consciousness and education of someone slightly older; also b/c it shows people mutely understanding each other
    • Fine, I’m impressed with Maisie too. And James being impressed is part of the inward turn.
    • Moral is aesthetic b/c it requires interpretation and isn’t automatically a given. Unfortunately, “interpretation” on a moral level translates into pretending, lying, and rejecting; on an intellectual level it is a recognition of patterns, where actually Maisie’s life becomes a narrative genre where a heterosexual couples uses Maisie to come together and then to fall apart and then to fight each other. Her life becomes a repetition of genres, and she has to find a way out of it.
      • Moral decisions can only occur through aesthetic knowledge because the “correct” decision requires an accurate reading of the stylization of life into genres as people try to manipulation one another.
  • The conflation of the moral and aesthetic is acceptable if the situation requires it, and you can find value (if it’s not quite moral value) in your success to adapt to this new circumstance.
• Golden Bowl (1904)
  • Aesthetic morality: Maggie had gotten her father to marry Charlotte, and the conversations about it revealed that it was actually a product of order and balance, like a neo-classical temple, where they want life to be as organized and arranged as a piece of art
    • Also b/c all actions are evaluated within the rubric of consciousness: people do things in order that they may have a particular consciousness, to afford them a certain quantum of thinking time where they can discover lovely correspondences and beautiful moments in the actions they already have done or are contemplating doing. It’s why every action needs dozens and dozens of pages to explain: because it’s more about the consciousness that attends the action.
  • Morality: for James, the only morality is character growth through heightened consciousness, which actually has to happen through the apprehension of evil, sordid stuff. The Prince’s and Charlotte’s “betrayal” is quite mild, almost trivial, a mere excuse for the growth Maggie will experience because of her engagement with it. It’s almost like that’s what her father bought her: when he bought her a husband, who says the she doesn’t know what she bought, they figure out later on what they have bought: the history that affords Maggie the most exquisite and rare object, the refinement of consciousness that makes it too a work of art.
    • And that’s when the actual husband is earned for Maggie. Her own machinations make her appropriately experienced for some jaded Continental like Amerigo, and the last line of the book is him saying, “Seeing? I see nothing but you.”
    • One by one, James eliminates the complexity of characters: first Adam, then the Prince, then Fanny Assingham (who admittedly is not the powerhouse that the protagonist’s confidante typically is) and then finally even Charlotte herself, who’s a victim
  • Morality of aesthetics: Mr. Verver is engaged in an act of aesthetic colonialism, buying enough pieces to make a museum for American City
  • Aesthetics: the golden bowl is itself a flawed work of art, broken order, but when it is broken, that’s when Maggie has grown herself and created something new and perfect. The golden bowl was a “gift” that was bought that would be “flawed,” so it represents Amerigo. The shopkeeper came to Maggie to tell her not to give it to her father b/c giving a flawed present is bad luck: which means that their own judgment about Amerigo had been flawed. They were able to make the repair, but something has to be sacrificed: their own relationship.
    • It’s like Portrait: you misjudge character, you do not have the aesthetic judgment; and then you end up developing the fine consciousness that is aesthetic judgment, so you can make a save, but it won’t be perfect. However, your sacrifice will reconstitute the beautiful order, and then you have proven your aesthetic judgment. You have successfully made life your own artwork.
  • At this point, it’s bittersweet, to make your life your art. It requires sacrifice and more importantly TECHNIQUE, intelligence, and a perception that recognizes value, that is, that understands what true beautiful organization looks like.
    • Maggie begins to think of the events in her life as a play that she is the author of: “they might have been figures rehearsing some play of which she herself was the author….like a stage again awaiting a drama, it was a scene she might people, by the press of her spring, either with serenities or dignities or decendies, or with terrors and shames and ruins.” 470
      • And she directly says she learns to “act” and play parts
      • And she talks about the Prince and Charlotte “being invented” 548
    • Her reward? sexual desire (she desires her husband) and being the object of it (the Prince is now interested in her)...and yet she only realizes it in speaking with her father, as the flaunting of it, as her being able to prove it only through conversation b/c then she can express her exquisite consciousness, how she has had knowledge of love that even her father doesn’t have (as she explains to her father what real desire is like, that is, it’s like JEALOUSY, so she turns around Charlotte’s affair with the Prince into her own exquisite consciousness)
  • James is ambivalent about the costs of Maggie’s development: you watch Maggie relishing in Charlotte’s defeat, watch her lingering over her power to arrange people like figures on a canvas, yet the narrator persists in calling her “exquisite” “sublime” “marvellous” b/c of the mental states she gets herself in: “nothing was now absent from her consciousness, either, of the part she was called to play in it” 478
    • You see the creepiness of her instrumental use of the couple, and her focus on protecting her father seems to invite psychoanalysis, but then again you are feeling appalled for the sake of the betraying couple. What happens is morality ceases to signify in its usual ways, and immorality becomes the necessary pretext for something good, while regular morality seems to
      • And regular morality ends badly: says Fanny, �It�s their mutual consideration, all round, that has made it the bottomless gulf; and they�re really so embroiled but because, in their way, they�ve been so improbably good.�
      • Amerigo is deemed good on aesthetic grounds: �You�re at any rate part of his collection� a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of price.� says Maggie to him, but he ends up having aesthetic value
      • This reminds me of what Marshall Berman says about Faustian modernity
  • Random
    • Difficulty of Moral Judgment
      • Maggie can�t ever just revel in being angry at being a cuckolded woman; the feeling dissipates before she can act on it
      • Thinks Maggie, �There was, honestly, an awful mixture in things� so that �you couldn�t be sure some of your compunctions and contortions wouldn�t show as ridiculous� (512)
    • �We�ve been like a pair of pirates,� Maggie says to Amerigo about her and her dad (10)
    • Even though Maggie exults in their �knowing�when great things were great,� �the discovery that it doesn�t meet all contingencies to be right� (124)
    • James� favorite quality: �a very high level of debate�in the cool upper air of the finer discrimination, the deeper sincerity, the larger philosophy.� (220)
• Ambassadors (1903)
  • Still have a whiff of Zola: compared by James in the preface to a phial of chemicals ready to react and change colors brilliantly
  • Moral: total breakdown of his moral code, the code of Woollett, and then seems to have reached the Jamesian aesthetic sense of morality where its much more about a mode of consciousness apprehending order, a mixture of the position of the artist and the critic (more the artist if you’re in the action; more the critic if you’re like Fanny Assingham or like Maria Gostrey)
    • Morality: you assume that if a boy is staying away from his family and his duty, then that boy is being seduced by booze and wenches, rather than an different world that could represent a genuine alternative
    • Strether is in a “false position” b/c he’s supposed to be the moral guide, but it turns out Chad will direct Strether to new morals instead, epitomized by the painter Gloriani, leaving Strether to interpret his own ennui and lack of success (“a perfectly equipped failure”) as the unwillingness to seize the day irrespective of given social codes
  • His moral conversion is made aesthetically: Paris becomes for him a gem of many facets, where a diversity of elements are suspended into one perfectly formed whole, which at one moment looks all surface and the next all depth: which for human interaction means a system of suave “don’t ask, don’t tell”
  • Morals come back: Strether, after the showdown with the second supply of ambassadors, finds out that Chad and Vionnet do not have the tragic, innocent “babes in the woods” relationship that he thought they had, but instead are having a rather humdrum affair that will not end in heroics but instead in Chad going back and re-assimilating to Woollett values
    • What is left is Strether: he has changed, grown, and now the morality he gets is knowing that he didn’t profit from the whole affair. Which means that he gives up his chance with Mrs. Newsome, and also that he gives up a life with Maria Gostrey.
  • Disinterestedness was the key for his morality. It is a kind of overly spectacular aesthetics, only about sight, about maintaining distance from an object you appreciate with detachment and objectivity.
    • Strether realizes his own particular moral limitations when he recoils in horror from Chad and Vionnet: he didn’t change as much as possible. So again, a sacrifice makes things right again…because such a sacrifice reveals the perfection of his vision, how he saw all the way through the problem.
    • He had accepted Little Bilham’s milieu that had “disorder” everywhere
  • Woollett: “Mrs. Newsome was essentially all moral pressure” but in the end we learn that she “takes for granted vulgar things” (ie that Vionnet is a prostitute or low born)
  • Chad: is always someone else’s work of art: first his mother’s, then Vionnet’s, and then finally he will be Mamie’s forever. He is an object that other people are going to arrange, without much will or strength of his own.
    • Strether sees Chad’s way of managing his life, which he thinks is great, isn’t great after all b/c he ditches Vionnet and brokers the political marriage for Vionnet’s daughter and will be an advertiser
  • Maria Gostrey: as a ficelle, she arranges tourists and makes sure that their visits are streamlined, perfect, arranged so that they will leave swiftly and never come back again: calls herself “an agent for repatriation.” If their experiences are a complete whole, they will leave the important people, the expats and the natives, alone. People are the material that her art works on: she sorts people, her hand �pigeon-holed them� as �freely as that of a compositor setting type.�
  • Miss Barrace with her eternal tortoiseshell opera glass, exemplifies this artistic distance from life, where you stand back and judge it like you would a painting, just like Strether with his “Eternal nippers”
    • When James notes that she sees her mission as �to stand before life as before some full shop-window,� you see how Miss Barrace and Chad reveal the connex between aesthetics and consumerism: they can run in to each other b/c the aestheticization of things makes them saleable (advertisements) and puts you into the position of merely buying things instead of making them yourself or participating in a culture
  • In preface, James calls Strether’s journey “this process of vision” saying that the book is about his awakening consciousness, “he now at all events sees”
    • Aesthetic pleasure is consciousness pleasure: �the pleasure of my cutting thick�into his intellectual, and to his moral substance.� and �his very gropings would figure among the most interesting motions�
    • Consciousness is the new object of art, rather than plot, which he calls “the spoiled step-child of art”
  • Life as Art
    • Composed life: life is as harmoniously ordered as art
    • Visual beauty, and the time to appreciate it
    • Books and paintings and beautiful objects and beautiful views
    • �the air had a taste as of something mixed with art� (111)
  • The Moral of Paris? Inscrutable and Dangerous
    • �almost any acceptance of Paris might give one�s authority away. It hung before him this morning, the vast, bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next.� (118)
    • Strether can�t seem to find anything out: he requires Miss Gostrey�s help because it�s such a mystery
      • Regular sorts of judging simply will not work.
      • The truth seems to change, sparkle, hide
  • Paris is Simmel’s modern metropolis: �the imagination reacted before one could stop it. This perpetual reaction put a price�on pauses; but it piled up consequences till there was scarce room to pick one�s steps among them.� (123)
    h2. Themes

• Virtuous Attachment and Moral Structure of Woollett
  • Strether is shocked when he realizes that it isn’t truly one
    • But should that make him think the worse of Europe? Should it mean they’re really corrupt?
  • Others’ opinions all imply their relation isn’t “morally innocent” in the Woollettian sense, but that overall it’s wonderful anyway
    • Bilham says appearance of virtue is enough for him (204), that if it passes as such, it’s fine (and he implies it’s because people think the attachment is for the daughter, not Vionnet herself)
    • Barrace: It’s more wonderful that she affects him without their getting married: the “virtuous” marriage isn’t interesting or unique, but that “every Jack and Jill can bring that off,” (252) but Chad and Vionnet, to put it simply, have something more precious than a typical relationship.
      • She also implies innocence is not interesting at all.
  • Strether’s conversation with Chad over breakfast the day after he meets Vionnet
    • He finally asks if she’s “bad,” but it sounds stupid because he ends up with contradictions like saying “is she bad when she’s very good to you?”
    • When he finally asks the question about sex, he feels prudish and stiff
    • Transvaluation of values: is bad good? good bad? His moral structure is teetering.
      • Eating lunch with Vionnet, he can’t tell if it’s good or bad that he “touched bottom,” if he was “sinking” below or “soaring” above
  • 263: He says he does get it, that that kind of friendship couldn’t every be vulgar and that she gave him “moral lift;” Bilham agrees that it’s fine and distinguished
    • But he does think it’s only a friendship
    • But this idea must survive the sex/boat scene
  • He believes that because she haunts churches, she must be innocent (cf their unexpected meeting in Notre Dame 276)
• Strether as Object / Relations as Monetary Exchange
  • Strether
    • Base of the objectification: he realizes that “he was being…used” (245) by the contingent in Paris, not just the one in Woollett
    • Strether as a rococo item in someone’s collection of beautiful things (203), like Vionnet or Gostrey
    • Strether “made a present of, given away” by Chad to Vionnet by the suave mode of introduction (209)
    • So, is cosmo mutually making objects of each other (Strether reifying the Europeans into types, them making him an object to pass around)? And if so, is that bad?
      • Bad for Strether: even if he “amuses” others, ”’ But what am I to myself?’” he asks Bilham (216)
    • But it could be to help others: for Vionnet, Strether wants to be a “firm object she could hold on by” (277)
  • Gostrey
    • Her business of showing people around leads to rewards like the box at the Comedie Francais
  • Vionnet and Chad
    • 228-9: the bill has been sent for her improving him
    • Strether is the ambassador of Woollett paying for the work of Europe via Vionnet
    • This image James makes even more obvious by having it concurrent with Strether paying the bill at the restaurant, making change, settling the bill
• Objects as Ambassadors
  • Vionnet’s stuff (235-8) truly convinces him of the otherness of Vionnet and her family, convinces him to help her
    • They are so different because they were acquired differently: not bargained for, haggled for, but received and put into relation with honor
  • Not about their exchange value, which is what Gostrey and Chad do, but passively inheriting it: history
  • Books
    • Yellow paperback volumes of contemporary French fiction
      • They represent the lure of Europe that he was tempted by at age 25 but ended up letting go
      • They represent culture and striving, always trying to be a more sophisticated person
    • Seventy volume red and gold set of Hugo bought on a super-good deal
      • It’s an extravagance
      • It’s romantic because Hugo is a Romantic
• Vague Speech
  • The goal is to have a perfect interpersonal understanding that doesn’t require the additional helpfulness of precise diction
    • The seventy piece set of Victor Hugo got at a good price
      • He worries that they’ll be all he can show for his trip to Europe
• Immanence and Imagination versus Unbudging Cold Reason
  • Woollett: “find cold thought” that doesn’t allow any new information
    • The image is being stuffed so full you can’t move anything or pack anything new in
    • They work things out in advance and don’t accept anything else but their prejudices
    • “She imagined stupidly,” Mrs Newsom
  • Strether: his imagination allows him to see things as they are, not as he wants them to be; lets him see the possibility of alternatives, which clears his vision
    • The ability to think otherwise is the key to seeing correctly
      • What a great paradox!
• Life as Art
  • Examples
    • Everything about Paris is “composed.”
    • The pastoral escape is figured as a journey within a specific painting
    • Strether knows it’s beautiful aesthetically, but can he handle the alien moral vision that goes along with this life?
  • Why?
    • It creates a pleasurable alternative to life as work or life as morality determined by women (US)
    • It makes world easier to deal with, not about chaos, but order
      • It makes thing seem “more nearly natural and right” and so they’re “easier, pleasanter, to put up with” (458)
      • “not a breath of the cooler evening that wasn’t somehow a syllable of the text”
      • and the clincher, that sets Strether up to a false position indeed: as he sees the as-yet unrecognized couple, he thinks, “had been wanted in the picture, had been wanted more or less all day, and how now drifted into sight…one purpose to fill up the measure” (461)
    • The cynical interp: Strether aestheticizes so that he can ignore the hints all around him that they’re having sex, that Chad will leave the woman, that Gostrey has some compromising past behind her
      • At least, Strether does need to not look too far into things to keep thinking that Chad and Vionnet’s relationship is beautiful: he’s refused to see the truth, and now he knows it
      • My cynical interpretation is right: his composing had been done to avoid the lurid truth, and he recognizes at the end how silly it had been to ignore it and make a fairy tale about their innocence.
• Danger of Life as Art
  • “being affected by some light pleasant piece of art” while watching Chad’s duplicity (nice face to family, but wry smile to Strether (327)
  • “She spoke as if her art were all an innocence, and then again as if her innocence were all an art.” (354)
    • Are they interchangeable?
    • Can’t see difference between honesty and concealment
  • You’ve changed your moral standards so that instead of reflecting economy or duty, they now reflect aesthetics. What is morally good is the aesthetically beautiful. But what happens if you see something morally ugly despite its aesthetic beauty?
    • Strether knows he has to take the consequences like a man: “he was responsible for what they had now thrown up to the surface” (364) because he already accepted and applauded it, so now he must suffer the consequences
    • Before the pastoral scene, he insists on seeing the relationship as virtuous, despite all the hints Barrace and Bilham give him otherwise
    • As he looks on the pastoral scene thinking it’s a play with everything arranged correctly, as well as the picture he had wanted to buy but now gets to experience instead of luridly possess, where “the fun was harmless” (458), suddenly the vision of Chad and Vionnet is….perhaps not so fun
  • Shocking! Can he reconcile bad morals in good art? “quite horrible” is this situation to him
    • No, he can’t. “I’ve been sacrificing so to strange gods that I feel I want to put on record, somehow, my fidelity—fundamentally unchanged after all—to our own.” (3930
      • He’s truly shocked by the sex, and he doesn’t want to take it, but knows he’s acting childish not to. What can he do? Well, he decides to leave Europe and go back to US. He’s still uneasy morally.
    • What if he somewhat can? “He was mixed up with the typical tale of Paris…They were no worse than he, in short, and he no worse than they.” (472)
    • He even feels “demoralized and disreputable” and realizes that he abetted their affair, but also he realizes that lies can sometimes be in “good taste” (477), Vionnet makes the ugly not look ugly
  • “What it all came to had been that fiction and fable were, inevitably, in the air.” (465)
    • Life as art is life as lying/evasion: the composed is not honest (ie, artifice is lying), or if it is, it’s honesty that you don’t want to hear
      • “there had been simply a lie in the charming affair….detached and deliberate” (466)
    • Yet he asks himself if he had been able to face the truth, and implies that he couldn’t: the situation “disagreed with his spiritual stomach” (468), and he blames himself for deliberately acting naive. He realizes that he had merely avoided the truth to avoid reckoning with the fact that he was siding with an affair.
  • In the end, he says they’re “all right” despite the sex.
  • Scene-painting: 452
    • Strether is “in” the Lambinet painting
    • A pastoral, randomly taken, a land of “romance” that leads to moral lesson
    • When the artwork he couldn’t afford to buy in Boston becomes real, when is is “freely walking about in it,” the conditions behind it, lurid indeed, he now must face
      • Note that this form of engagement with cosmo is one conditioned by a moment in America and could be considered a kind of artistic “prejudice” of France
      • Do I have to be so cynical here? Could it be good cosmo? (if it’s not real cosmo, at least it’s true leisure)
      • He does have a consistent habit of understanding his experiences through art
    • They are not virtuous! !!
      • Does it ruin the artwork? Or does it show what art needs?
  • His going inside the Lambinet painting demonstrates the danger of looking at life through an aesthetic lens: it might shock any last bit of moral you might have. It will strip away all of your polite assumptions, and constantly make you “forgive” more and more so that you can accept the beauty of the picture. It paralyzes you morally, and you either step out of the painting and lose the beauty; or you stay in it and accept everything.
    • Strether? He steps out of the painting by acknowledging the two figures on the boat, which means he ACTS, he participates, which is against the artwork (objective sight, don’t touch), and ruins everyone’s lovely trip. Later, he has to accept it again. Like in the other James books, the protagonist has accepted more than he can chew, but the course of enlightening of consciousness that occurs makes this person more equipped to deal with life and see it aesthetically. When the confrontation happens, the shoe falls, the person will use the superior skills of aestheticizing life to make the “right” decision, but it will come at a cost.
      • Affirmation always seems to require negating something in a James novel. There is always a cost involved. And sometimes this cost is the recognition that the beautiful pictures you made out of life were instrumental or naive. In the end all you have is the power of judgment, not even the illusions.
  • Art: the Victor Hugo set that he bought, and the painting
    • lemon yellow books: the wasted opportunity he had to seize the day after his first European trip
    • Hugo:
    • Painting:
  • Paris is art, and then his consciousness is the art
    • his first afternoon alone there, he realizes from a park bench that there’s nothing that shouldn’t be there, that it’s arranged exactly like a painting
    • and later: “Not a single one of his observations but somehow fell into a place in it; not a breath of the cooler evening that wasn’t somehow a syllable of the text.” He has learned to BE Paris, not just enjoy it.
• Mention: the Outcry (1911)
  • In a reversal of the other works where value must be abstracted from objectively bad circumstances, found from within the private creation of values systems separate from social organization, we have a comedy
  • Two parallel couples are united in their noble sacrifice of art for the good of the nation and their decisions not to sell them for profit
  • The indebted Lord Theign invites the brash, affable American tycoon-collector Breckenridge Bender to buy his Sir Joshua Reynolds portrait. Hugh Crimble, a young art scholar and erstwhile dealer, is brought in to judge its authenticity, but also ends up finding an undervalued work which he finds out is made by this rare Italian master.
  • Once has arrived and has investigated around the manor and its art, and once he meets the daughter Lady Grace who values art and tradition over money, he becomes outraged about the sale. They connive and use commercialization against the American magnate: they get the potential sale publicized, but in such a way that raises a public stink: people don’t think such works should leave Britain. And Lord Theign has to make a decision.
  • In the end, he decides not to sell it but to give it away to the People, to the National Gallery – because of a classic deus ex machina, the Prince John, visited Lord Theign in a furor over the matter. Lord Theign’s act mesmerizes his lovely neighbor Lady Sandgate, who decides also to sell her own priceless family painting, which act brings the two together, and they are thus to be married: which wasn’t hinted at before, and is therefore the obvious product of just the artworks being saved. Hugh and Grace have come together in marriage through their saving of the artwork.
  • Elgin Marbles reference: controversial even at the time they were taken (1801), Lord Byron calling Elgin a vandal in his “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” (“snatch’d thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!”)
  • Critics see it as a light, frothy, lovely afterthought, a half-effort
  • James brings attention to the Brits’ own role in letting the works go away, not just implicating the Americans
  • What I’m interested in is the association of the socially “right” decision (which we know b/c of the range of people who espouse that opinion in the novel) with the comic ending: where the successful institutional placement of art accompanies social integration in the classical tradition of comedy: the healing of social divisions symbolized by as many marriages as possible. James can find an happy ending within genre conventions (initially a play), whereas in his heavy theorizations of fiction, he only allows a more equivocal ending.