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The Ambassadors (changes)

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Folks

Lewis Lambert Strether, “a perfectly equipped failure,” the closest of all James’ characters to a portrait of himself; curious and observant and imaginative, intensely reflective and discriminating, compared by James in the preface to a phial of chemicals ready to react and change colors brilliantly, he suffers from “a failure to enjoy” and has wasted his life in provincial Massachusetts, a total breakdown of his moral code; the lesson to seize the day comes too late for him, too late for him to get back the chance, but now he learns how to live for the moment and appreciate now and here, rather than always thinking of something else (67); his “false position” is going to Paris to fetch back the son of his potential mate because this son is apparently boozing and wenching his way to scandal – and yet Strether ends up siding with the wench and culture involved, believing that it’s the only right moral choice to stay in Europe and not leave Vionnet. “The situation was running away with him:” 279: instead of chastising Paris and taking Chad out from the immoral atmosphere, the atmosphere charms him; fate, history and accident are altogether plotting. Bilham says he’s of the rococo generation, so old he’s in 18th century, but that because people here have “collections,” he’ll be okay (203). By giving up Mrs. Newsome, letting Chad return to Paris, and yet not staying in Europe and not marrying Gostrey, he has no real satisfaction at the end except staying true to his new knowledge and feeling like he didn’t compromise his values.

Waymarsh , Strether’s companion, joyless, also from a small Massachusetts town; he’s the Typical American, unresponsive and hostile to the sweet influences of decadent Paris at first; it creates in him a “sacred rage” he must needs solve by shopping, of all things (“he has struck for freedom” when he randomly buys stuff because it’s done to seem different from everyone else and because he buys whatever he wants without explaining it to anyone: conspicuous consumption. Also, she tries to give Miss Barrace stuff: he’s buying her off 254 but she only accepts flowers – impermanent). Allergic to Europe, he by the end of the book decides to stay a little longer. There’s hope. His health gets better, and even though he betrays Strether to the Pococks, Strether knows it was only to save Strether.

Maria Gostrey, the ficelle , who facilitates meetings among people and introduces Americans to Europe. She ties the characters together (an acquaintance of Waymarsh; school buddy of Vionnet), a mere narrative tool for James, like Henrietta Stackpole. She is the “reader’s friend” and Strether’s confidant (and almost life partner), a classy yet slightly risque American expat who has lots of nice Stuff. “I am a general guide—to Europe, don’t you know?” (65) and she sorts people, her hand ~~“pigeon-holes~~ “pigeon-holed them” as “freely as that of a compositor setting type.” She’s truly, however, “an agent for repatriation,” with a system for making people go back to America almost as soon as they come, and seeing that they don’t come back. Strether can’t marry her because then he would profit from the trip (and from trying to make Chad stay).

Mrs. Newsome , the formidable yet invisible Presence that hovers over the book, a manufacturer who needs her son to come back and manage the failing factory and therefore sends Strether out for recon work. Unlike Vionnet, she does “take for granted vulgar things” (283) when she sends Chad out. “Essentially all moral pressure” (416).

Chad Newsome , the recalcitrant son who has had a lovely polish put on him by Paris and his amour, Madame de Vionnet; a new man of the world, he is shallower than the other characters, however, and he lets people do things for him instead of doing them himself (he does get involved in passing Vionnet’s daughter off to be married – just as Vionnet herself was unhappily married), and his apparent love for Paris isn’t as strong as Strether’s, and he ends up abandoning Vionnet for a new life back in America with Mamie getting into the latest tech: advertising the factory. His mission: acquit himself well, to somehow make good the debts he owes Vionnet for finishing him: which he’ll solve by securing Jeanne’s future (provide dowry? or just do the negotiation?) He only stays in Paris so long after Strether’s offer because he thinks that Strether would benefit from more Paris. His beauty is ~~that~~ “his he knowing ~~knows~~ how to ~~live,~~ live” (427), but Strether realizes later that a large part of that is his letting other people do the dirty work for him

Madame de Vionnet, the ideal femme du monde who is beautiful, graceful, intelligent, noble, but unhappily married to a Count and stuck in the marriage forever. FDMonde = manifold, changeable. Though Woollett suspects she’s an immoral low-class harpy, she, not Strether, is the one who saves him, and who makes him a “social animal” and gives him a “moral lift” fit for kingship at Woollett (265). She loves Chad quite a bit, but you won’t see her publicly crying. At first, Strether only sees how she is just like the Woollett proper women (ie, he wanted a Turk or Pole but got something he already knew about, disappointingly), but then learns she’s not sinless and has “depths” (but still good, they insist), and then finally realizes her complete foreignness from women he’s known, and she “somehow made their encounter a relation” (239), thus making it about liking her or not (affinity) instead of facing the facts, which is his objective job (his American task). She wants Strether to save her: convince the Newsomes and Pococks that she’s worth saving, that she’s good, get Chad to stay, and by keeping her with Chad save Chad’s new self. Even though she knows the money is too big a bribe to stay and he’ll get married off once he leaves. Eventually, she stops caring: she realizes how her happiness cheats other people of theirs, so she detests any impulse in herself to ask for happiness: “It’s never a happiness, an happiness at all, to take. The only safe thing is to give. it’s what plays you least false.” (481)

The Pococks , the second string of ambassadors; Jim, Sarah (“Sally”), and Mamie. Jim is the bland representative American man, Sally is domineering and as intelligent as her mum, and Mamie is the pretty bait to get Chad back. They come out “to act” (332), though Strether comes out to “observe” (328). Sarah’s position is that Vionnet is immoral, that Chad’s change is monstrous, and that Strether is keeping Chad from his moral duty to those back in Woollett. And she makes a pretty strong case for the fact that Chad has abandoned his family.

Little Bilham, the young painter Strether addresses his monologue to. Bilham takes it seriously and believes that part and parcel to Strether’s advice to “see” everything, is the “wonderful” situation of Chad setting Jeanne de Vionnet to get married off to a “good” connection, just as her mother was! (262) – a dubious result to Strether’s main good

Miss Barrace , Chad’s racy young ~~friend,~~ friend (she “compromises” all the men around her, she says), our only real link to the Paris manque that we think we should be seeing, according to Newsomes’ version of the story. She’s the first hint to Strether that Chad’s life might after all be corrupted. She is one “to stand before life as before some full shop-window,” merely pointing and choosing (205). She’s antique and modern, using the antique stuff to make modern points, but she’s always vague, never will tell you what you want. She is interested in the people no one else is interested in, but is bored by the supposedly amazing (revaluation)

Gloriani, the famous Italian sculptor living in Paris. His glory, beauty, success, and general wonderful-ness make him the top example of “Europe,” just as the boating scene (knowledge that they’re having sex) is the lowest. For Strether he is a celebrity sighting, but a spiritual one (calls it “being on terms with one of the illustrious spirits”)

Harry Levin’s introduction

Paris is “a sensitized and heightened state of mind” (9)
Quotes from James’ notebooks: “disenchanted without having known any great enchanters” (16)
Those lemon yellow books? Contemporary realist French novels of 1860s
The book is a “belated Bildungsroman” with long overdue development (17)
E. M. Forster on James: “They can land in Europe and look at works of art and at each other, but that is all…Their clothes will not take off.” (24)
“not so much the mot juste as the gradual approximation, the continuous modification, the qualifying nuance.” (28)
In a letter, James notes that the most difficult thing for an artist to do is convey a sense of the “real lapse of time” (29)

New York Edition Preface

The Novel is Awesome
- “the Novel remains still, under the right persuasion, the most independent, the most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms.”
- No failure of exhaustion here!
Balance of the Scenic and Non-Scenic
- James says that plot is the “spoiled child of Art” and likes to take prime attention (“Story is the just the spoiled child of Art”)
- But the preparation for all of these scenes is quite necessary and increasingly he sees it as good on its own, too (cf Ford on Impressionism and the “disproportionate frame” required to set up an impression)
- The rhythm of the book is the alternation of, the “equal play of” preparation for scene and scene (action is built up carefully)
  - Calls it an “extravagance” that he “consciously fail[s] to shrink from” in order to help push further the boundaries of fiction
  - Moves away from absolute primary of plot, even though the first part of the intro says that plot is the “prime and precious thing:” it’s like he changes his mind as he thinks about his book after-the-fact
Set-piece
- Strether’s grand carpe diem speech to Little Bilham in Gloriani’s garden
- Cf Isabel Archer’s set-piece meditation in front of fireplace
“This process of vision”
- The whole book is set up to show Strether’s awakening consciousness
- “He now at all events sees
- The “action” is in the mind
The “not-to-be-slighted fun”
- Of making something that doesn’t seem to belong to the story, sound perfectly natural
- Making the insertion of necessary material and preparations sound inevitable and necessary
- It’s the problem of necessity v contingency: sometimes, the apparently contingent is quite necessary for the author because of the way he’s writing, so he has to make it seem necessary for content/plot’s sake
  - Example is Maria Gostrey: why is she there? we don’t need her
    - She is just there so Strether can say things that James doesn’t want the narrator to have to say
    - She doesn’t need to be there for the plot, just like Henriette Stackpole in Portrait
    - Well, make her “false connexion carry itself, under high polish, as a real one” (48)
- Modernists will decide that this problem isn’t worth James’ ponderous teasings-out, and they make the reader figure it out or let the character think about it somehow, by not making plot central

Realism and Modernism

Realism
- Love of the plot as the germinating seed and ruling principle for creating a work of art
  - “the irresistible determinant and the incalculable advantage of his interest in the story as such”
- Faith in writing
  - “Values infinitely precious” will be transmitted: he is sure of his moral purpose for writing
  - “raising artistic faith to its maximum”
  - “ideal beauty of goodness:” you must believe in your topic’s beauty
    - Lack of Irony or Distance
- Quantification/Calculation
  - To describe writing, uses terms like “calculating”
  - Compares writing to work of a “chief accountant” by working in terms of probability and likelihood
  - Is completely satisfied with himself that his handling of the subject was “admirably objective”
  - Thus, verisimilitude and realist commitment to “truth”
Modernism
- Admission that action is not the only good thing that lit can give
- Dispensing of background explication so dear to the realists
  - He gives Strether Waymarsh and Maria Gostrey as confidants to avoid it
- Quantification stuff does show that he sees writing as craftsmanship, not just divine inspiration
  - James is fond of revealing the kernel that spurred the narrative and glorying in the beauty and joy of the perfect story—sounds like inspiration—yet he admits that the craftsmanship is the real fun, the real work
- Depiction of mind
  - “the pleasure of my cutting thick…into his intellectual, and to his moral substance.”
  - “his very gropings would figure among the most interesting motions”
    - he does care about the mind having problems, which is modernist because modernism does show the quirks of consciousness, not its perfect working
  - “intense reflexion”
  - “analytic faculty”
    - Notice how he still uses Balzacian science language!
  - James, of course, is less interested in the movements of consciousness in and of itself as he is in its alliance with a specific train of thought, a specific topic
- Style of depicting consciousness
  - Sometimes indirect discourse
  - But with James, it’s focalization: narrator hovering above the person’s mind, and only that person’s mind
  - Why not first person, which is “the privilege of being both subject and object?”
    - Too loose: you can’t control enough; the “exhibitional conditions” will prevent the “fluidity” that 1st person sloppily allows
    - The structure of the work “encages and provides” for him so he will show himself at his best
    - You can’t make the “certain precious discriminations,” ie, allowing for authorial irony
- Obsession with Form
  - “composition alone is positive beauty”

Linguistic Issues

Vague Conversation
- Preface: His goal is to have “produced ambiguity of appearance that is not by the same stroke, and all helplessly, an ambiguity of sense” (49)
  - I’m guessing he’s referring to the “So there we are”s and “Here we are”s and the other vaguenesses of communication
- Underlying Issue: imperfect signifiers
  - James says it’s a fun intellectual game to make sure they communicate a specific meaning, and he arranges everything else so that you’ll get the specific meaning despite the vague words

What is Paris?

Immanence: living in the moment
Good taste and art
Different type of knowledge: not scientific but kind of tacit, in the air, about experience and intuition, not “evidence” and jury/judge mentality
- Maria Gostrey making her prophecy, “oracle”
- “There was no computing at all” (165): you can’t understand people like an arithmetic problem
  - “But what is the simple truth?” He can’t seem to find it out.
- The “seeing” that Strether doesn’t isn’t knowing objectively
  - “I can admire and rejoice even when I’m a little in the dark.” (264)
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)
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
Simmelian
- “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)
- the city requires exhausting perceptions!
“Irregular life”
- Immorality
- Miss Barrace coming to tea with a bunch of men alone! Oh my!
- And you know sex
No prejudice
- Little Bilham’s being a representative of an American adopting this European way of life involves him looking at a Paris towards which he “hadn’t a prejudice” (146)

What is Woollett?

Full of juridical metaphors: they judge.
Strict moral standards
Prejudice (judging beforehand what something is and refusing to change the idea even in face of contrary evidence)
- “New reasons” are wanted, Strether explains (300), to justify Chad’s return, but Sarah won’t accept it
Cold reason and thought
Never enjoying

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
- ~~You’ve~~ “being ~~changed~~ affected ~~your~~ by ~~moral~~ some ~~standards~~ light so pleasant ~~that~~ piece ~~instead~~ of ~~reflecting~~ art” ~~economy~~ while or watching ~~duty,~~ Chad’s ~~they~~ duplicity ~~now~~ (nice ~~reflect~~ face ~~aesthetics.~~ to ~~What~~ family, is but ~~morally~~ wry ~~good~~ smile is to ~~the~~ Strether ~~aesthetically~~ (327) ~~beautiful.But what happens if you see something morally ugly despite its aesthetic beauty?~~
  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!~~ “She ~~Can~~ spoke he as ~~reconcile~~ if ~~bad~~ her ~~morals~~ art in were ~~good~~ all ~~art?~~ an ~~“quite~~ innocence, ~~horrible”~~ and is then ~~this~~ again ~~situation~~ as to if ~~him~~ her innocence were all an art.” (354)
  - Are they interchangeable?
  - Can’t see difference between honesty and concealment
- “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.
Chance as Fate
- Chance is the way fate brings you into its picture
  - ie, the “a chance in a million” (462) that Strether would happen to alight, without meaning to, to Chad and Vionnet’s habitual retreat led to the knowledge he needed

Work

The business is the absent center: we don’t know the object they manufacture
Chad wants to apply to the business the latest forms of advertisement

Otherness

Vionnet worries if her daughter Jeanne might be so different from Mamie Pocock that they won’t “get” her
And indeed, the Pococks do not get the otherness!
- They judge, they superficially tour, and that’s all
True otherness is indicated for Strether by the objects first and then by the people
And the closer you get to it, the less reason and language count: it’s more about pure experience, about taking things in the moment as they are
- The otherness Strether encounters is nothing less than leisure and materiality!

Materiality

Objects as ambassadors: that’s why interiors are so important because they embody the difference of the European mind
- They are got by a different form of acquisition than the Americans’ objects (Chad, Gostrey buy at flea markets, haggling for price)
  - Not at all in reference of exchange value
  - They are usually somehow a tribute: honoring some event or some person’s glory
  - They are inherited, not bought all at once
- They create a medium through which Strether receives the true message: taking things as they come, not being so prejudiced and moral
The bad version of materiality: greed, Chad being tempted by huge sum of money

Shopping

Everyone must shop in this book, even Sarah Pocock and her lingerie!
Waymarsh’s sacred rage: conspicuous consumerism is his rebellion against the Beautiful Culture that Strether sees and Strether’s cosmopolitan reception of everything
- Buying versus Seeing
- And he tries to buy off Miss Barrace: what he’s “supposed” to do for his European pseudo-flirt

Style

Set-pieces
- The one James planned carefully: 215
  - The speech to Little Bilham, which was the kernel given to him by a young friend to whom William Dean Howells gave a similar injunction
- 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?
Spatial metaphors for morality, for conversation
- “touching bottom,” “walking about” in conversation
- Space for morality: says that space helps to determine morality
- Space for conversation: it makes concrete the abstractions they speak of, it anchors them down into the specific because their conversation doesn’t
Impressionism
- The boat scene is a great work of impressionism b/c he doesn’t know what’s going on & James records Strether’s confusion; and then he doesn’t know why they’re awkward until later: he doesn’t know that he at that moment found out they’re having sex until later on
- James tells us “that belated version…is most to our purpose,” not his original impression: so he doesn’t value the impression, but the interpretation (anti-impressionism)
- For James, impressionism is a technique that creates drama, not that reflects truth or shows what’s important in life (unlike Ford)

Paris/Europe: What does it mean?

Ghosts/religion
Art (lemon yellow books, the Lambinet painting)
Affinity, not morals, are the real requirement for belonging: “if you like it, feel this way, then it shows you are not the least out of it,” says Bilham

Vague Phrases

“There you are,” “here we are,” which spatialize abstractions
Strether’s characters give abstract words for which James wants us to believe have very specific, and always understood, meanings to the interlocutor
Immanence: there’s no words for what’s actually here

Money metaphors

James doesn’t let you forget that the upshot is money, money that Chad will make from this investment opportunity and the money Strether will marry

Ship/water metaphors

Keeps reminding you that the whole book is still a journey to Paris, between Woollett and Paris

Slang

James’ mixture of extremely formal language with extremely slang-laden language makes it an alternation between the high and low, complex and clear
For readers now, it’s harder to get the slang b/c it’s archaic!

Travel/Leisure Space

Acquaintance with Gostrey done under the lax conditions of travel: the publicity of ship and hotel lead to friendship
Waymarsh
- He goes to Europe for the cure: rest from overwork
- Waymarsh initially says that the rage for resting is what makes him tired
- Eventually he succumbs to it, and his health really does return
Pococks
- Strangely enough, they get from Europe what they think Strether so scandalously got
- Erotic fun, social sightseeing, lavish tourism
- They blame Strether for doing this, yet he actually doesn’t, while they do
By some Swiss lake: where Gostrey first sees Vionnet married (resort)
Watering-places as Escape
- Chad and Vionnet at Cannes, the watering-place, when Strether arrives
  - It’s an escape, a perch to wait for him from
- Miss Gostrey, to escape possible calumny of what Vionnet could say about her, or about what she could say about Vionnet, goes to Mentone (271)
Public Eateries/Cafes as Intimacy
- Scenes of intimate conversation occur in famous cafes, restaurants
- ””delightful house of entertainment” he calls the restaurant for luncheon with Vionnet
  - At this time, Vionnet gets to indulge because she’s got social duties, but she casts them overboard, lets her life “go smash” for a chance to dine out: “costly disorder” they call it (278)
  - And it’s when Strether irrevocably sides with Vionnet
Theatre is integral: James has them all go to theatre periodically, and he uses plays as metaphors (people as acting, stages, etc)
Tourism as a Call to European Life
- Strether is made to tour Paris on his own so he will be seduced by Paris, and thus by Vionnet, the representative of this type of life
- Bread and circuses, being covered in flowers
- It works by variety: so many things, you can’t keep up, “too thick for prompt discrimination” (199)
  - All the objects dim your ability to discriminate morally
    - Cf how Gostrey’s beautiful items make him want to marry her
- It works by “indifferent persistent order,” by everything being so artfully composed
Strether’s Real Leisure
- Once he gets off the job, he goes for a pastoral indulgence…where he meets his work with a vengeance!

Quotes

81: “mere discriminations about a pair of gloves” are how Strether starts his subtle adventure in learning new ways to live
141: On Vionnet’s house, which has an atmosphere “charged with possession,” “the empire of ‘things’”
167: the change in Chad could be a metaphor for literary history: “He had formerly, with a great deal of action, expressed very little; and he now expressed whatever was necessary with almost none at all.”
301: “the great new science of beating the sense out of words” (about contemporary American journalism)

Revised on September 7, 2008 12:02:16 by Shawna? (71.58.78.59)

Andrew's Wiki The Ambassadors (changes)