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UNFAITHFUL ACCOMPLICES:
FORM, THEME, AND CHARACTER
IN FOUR NOVELS OF HENRY JAMES

By

Andrew Joseph Scheiber

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English
1982

ABSTRACT
UNFAITHFUL ACCOMPLICES:

FORM, THEME, AND CHARACTER
IN FOUR NOVELS OF HENRY JAMES

By

Andrew Joseph Scheiber

Henry James's novels and his critical writings show a growing
awareness of tensions between representation and interpretation in the

novel form. In early works like The American and The Portrait of a

 

 

Lady, the aesthetic evaluations urged by the authorial narrator clash
with the psychic realities of the protagonists; James must resort to
narrative evasions to salvage the tenuous coherence of these works.
These evasions are mainly two: first, he introduces into the novel
characters who are narrative "surrogates," who precipitate and comment
on the action and voice the failed aesthetic norms of the work; and
second, James allows a selective deference in the attitude of the
normally authoritative narrator, who strategically refrains from
commentary which would reveal too directly the inner antagonisms of
form and content latently present in these novels.

In his later works, however, James translates these problems
into themes, through the elevation of these evasive tactics into prin-
ciples of narration and aesthetic theory. The "surrogate narrator,"
no longer peripheral, becomes the focus of the inquiry, and the

authorial narrator surrenders his powers of commentary to allow the

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Andrew Joseph Scheiber

emotions, judgments, and opinions of the surrogate, the "concrete
deputy," to have full and center stage. The result in later novels
like The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove is a remarkable drama-
tization, through the consciousness of these surrogates, of the

ethics of the artistic process and of human perception itself which
recognizes the real brutalities and the visionary beauties which are
essential aspects of consciousness. The purpose of this study is to
trace the progress of James's awareness of these phenomena, both in

his critical writings and in the novels themselves, and to detail the
ways in which this growing awareness determines form, theme, and treat-

ment of character in the novels of his major phase.

©

Copyright by
ANDREW JOSEPH SCHEIBER
1982

ii

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

 

 

 

Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv
Chapter
I. REALISM, ROMANCE AND HENRY JAMES . . . . . . . . I
II. THE AMERICAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
III. THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY . . . . . . . . . . . 62
IV. THE AMBASSADORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
V. THE WINGS OF THE DOVE . . . . . . . . . . . 156
VI. THE GOLDEN BOWL AND BEYOND . . . . . . . . . . 230
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to all those who gave me the inspiration, the
liberty, and the support to undertake and complete this project.
Because of them, and because of the congenial nature of their involve-
ment, it was never anything less than a labor of love. Professor
William Johnsen, the director of the project, provided warm encourage-
ment and assistance, as did the other members of my committee:
Professors Linda Wagner and Howard Anderson, and Dean Alan Hollingsworth.
The integrity, knowledgability, and conegniality of these teachers and
friends has been an incalculable inspiration and aid. I am also
indebted to Professor Clyde Henson, whose exemplary lifetime pursuit
of knowledge and of beauty has helped me understand the lessons of
the Master himself, and to Professor Bernard Paris, who helped me
develop a love of discipline that is only too incompletely reflected
here. Finally, I am grateful to my family--to my wife Mary Lou and
to my parents Mary and Richard. The duration of this project must have
been more interminable to them than to myself; there are lifetimes of
love and patience between the lines of this text, and those who have
seen me through the completion of this work know only too well whose

love, and whose patience, was most greatly tested by it. Thank you all.

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CHAPTER I

REALISM, ROMANCE AND HENRY JAMES

In his preface to The Golden Bowl, Henry James distinguishes

 

between the "impersonal author" and his palpable representative in the
language of the work. This representative (or "ambassador") is him-
self a character and a participant in the action of the story, and
is empowered to receive impressions of events and supply interpretive
commentary with a freedom usually reserved for the author himself;
he thus becomes the author's "concrete deputy or delegate, a con-
venient substitute or apologist for the creative power otherwise so
veiled and disembodied."1 James says he does not want to present "my
own personal account of the affair at hand," but rather "my account
of somebody else's impression of it" (AN, p. 327). Thus in the works
of his so-called "major phase,"2 the language is not a window through
which the clear light of authorial intention passes; rather, the
language records the reflections and diffractions of meaning created
by the characters themselves as they go about their business of
encountering and interpreting experience.

As James elaborates: "It's not that the muffled majesty of
authorship doesn't here ostensibly reign; but I catch myself again
shaking it off and disavowing the pretence of it" (AN, p. 328).

Why should James regard the privilege of authorial commentary as a

"pretence"? And why should he, an artist as passionate as any about
the efficacy of his enterprise, be willing to yield his own hard-
earned speaking platform to the voice of his own creations? James's
ingenuous excuse of the "intensification of interest" (AN, p. 327)
seems too lightly pleaded, given the risks thus incurred. To a critic
no less than Wayne Booth, James's preference for seeing his story
"through the opportunity and the sensibility of some . . . thoroughly
interested and intelligent witness or reporter" (AN, p. 327) has
pernicious and mystifying consequences; Booth says that this technique
creates "a double focus" that blurs the clarity of James's intention
and renders suspect the account provided by his I'flawed reflector."3
Similarly, Charles Thomas Samuels charges that "the entire Jamesian
canon" is "darkened by obscurities," the result of James's own refusal
to provide definitive authorial commentary on the behavior of certain
of his characters;4 Richard Hocks sees in James the difficulty of a
"mind which . . . refuses to perceive values as fixed but is, rather,
constantly imbued with 'possible other cases'";5 and Sallie Sears says
that James entertains "antithetical modes of structuring and compre-
hending reality without granting authority to any one mode."6 Words
like "paradox" and "ambiguity" dominate the criticism, and echo
Booth's judgment that James seems in the end unwilling, or unable, to
come to the point, and that the use of authorial "delegates" serves
the novelist's habit of evasion.

One is compelled to ask, in surveying this critical response,

what advantage, what knowledge, James seeks to gain for himself and

for his readers by his retreat from authorial commentary; surely it

 

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cannot be his intention to be misunderstood, nor can it be his wish
to put into words everything except that which he means to express.
It seems in this light reasonable to assume that the essential "mean-
ing" of these late works lies on a level other than that of the
authorial judgment and opinion which this technique so deeply
obscures. It is possible (and I shall argue that it is indeed the
case) that the "muffled majesty of authorship" expresses, by its
silence and deference, an invitation to examine the creative and
interpretive functions which the characters themselves appropriate
from the artist. The "delegation" of authorial presence, the
"veiling" of it in one or more variously but inevitably fallible
characters, may create ambiguity or paradox on the level of specified
meaning, but it also directs attention to the individual and psycho-
logical origins of meaning itself, and to the problematical processes
by which such meaning is articulated for others.

Thus James in his late works sacrifices the notion of "objec-
tive" and authoritative commentary (a positivistic value which Booth,
in his insistence on "reliable narration," implicitly embraces) to
gain insight into the processes by which individual and subjective
meanings are created, expressed, and maintained. His own "reliability,"
though extending to his faithful accounts of the inner lives of his
various "delegates," does not include the issue of extrapersonal
significances which may be inferred from their impressions or ex-
pressed in their thoughts. The reader can trust James's representation
of his characters' perceptions, but cannot be assured of the validity

or correctness of the perceptions themselves, or of the interpretations

that derive from them. In this light, James's final "canonical"

novels--The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl--

 

seem an extended meditation on the inescapability of the subjective
conditions of human awareness; and this sense of inescapable sub-
jectivity is reinforced by James's own refusal to inject his own
commentary as a corrective to, or as a judgment of, the impressions
recorded by his fallible deputies.

James's later novels also resolve an apparent contradiction
found in his 1884 essay, "The Art of Fiction." In that essay, James
argues on one hand that the novel form has its basis in the subjective
condition of the individual, but on the other hand maintains the pri-
macy of the novel's reference to an external reality which the
individual consciousness interprets. He says that "A novel is in
its broadest definition a personal, direct impression of life," while
expressing a faith in "the importance of exactness--the truth of
detail."7 The problem here is that an experience is not identical
with its object, and James leaves some confusion as to which of these
terms is to have the benefit of the novelist's precise rendering; to
extend James's pictorial analogy, it is unclear whether the novel is
to be a faithful rendering of the subject, or a faithful rendering of
a portrait of the subject as conceived by an observer other than the
novelist himself. In fact many of James's earlier novels display
tensions which (as we shall see) are the result of rhetorical con-
fusions as to whether the internal impression or the external event
is being interpreted; thus some of his works are susceptible to

Booth's criticism that they are afflicted with a "double focus."

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But in his later fiction James minimizes this problem, as the exact-
ing complexity of his syntax is made to represent inner processes of
cognition rather than their external objects.

So the preface to The Golden Bowl, published in 1909, and

 

1884's "The Art of Fiction" show different phases in James's idea of
the novel, and of his conception of his own role as a practitioner

of the novelist's art. But what these two essays have in common is
James's explicit acknowledgment of the centrality of character, of his
designated "receivers of impressions," to all of his work. Throughout

his canon, from his portrayal of Rowland Mallet in Roderick Hudson

 

to that of Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl, James shows his ability

 

and his desire to present the inner, private experience of his
imagined people in the public form of language--whatever the risk to
his larger design. Though it is not until the 1890's, with The Spoils
of Poynton and What Maisie Knew, that James decisively embraces the
internal frame of reference of his "centers of consciousness," one

finds in earlier works like The American, The Europeans, The Portrait

 

 

 

of a Lady, and even The Princess Casamassima characters whose fullness

 

of humanity and liveliness of perception overwhelm the intentions of
the authorial narrators charged with interpreting their stories. The
genial arrogance of Christopher Newman, the latent desperation of
Eugenia Munster and priggish pride of Robert Acton, the bloodless
ambition of Isabel Archer, and the pathetic sensibility of Hyacinth
Robinson—-all threaten to rend the fabric of fiction in which the
experience of these characters is tapped and woven into a narrative

design.

The fullness with which James portrays his characters is essen-
tial to the later novels, in which the "delegates" themselves become
the dominant consciousnesses in the discourse; it is in fact the
completeness and complexity of the imagined humanity of characters
like Lambert Strether, Merton Densher, and Maggie Verver that endows
these novels with their essential conflicts, their richness and
density of meaning. In these late novels, true to Roland Barthes'
prescription, "the discourse creates in the character its own accom-

"8

plice. The dramatic action of The Ambassadors or The Wings of the

 

 

Ogle would be negligible without the peculiar depths that the events

of those novels sound in the consciousnesses of the author's "deputies";
in fact, critics have been known to express dismay with what they
perceive as intrusive lapses in James's apparent policy of strict non-'

9 In the works of the major phase, the direction of

involvement.
James's intention is clear: there is an approaching fusion of
character and design, effected by the author's gradual withdrawal from
the scene of the action, and his dispersal of his own interpreting con-
sciousness into that of his characters.

But in earlier novels like The American and The Portrait of

 

 

a_ngy, authorial emotion and judgment are very much in evidence; and,
Booth's injunctions notwithstanding, the result is that these novels,
for all their greatness, lack a coherence of rhetoric and repre-
sentation. The narrator's consciousness is itself split between two
functions: the penetrating analysis of the inner lives of the pro-
tagonist and selected others, and the rhetoric of ethical and

aesthetic evaluation, including the use of symbolism and allusion

 

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to literary and artistic predecessors. Though the characters are seen
from the inside, judgments are rendered from without, and the result
is a strained connection between what is dramatized and what is
evaluated. As we have seen in “The Art of Fiction," this is a
dichotomy to which James himself is at first blind; but his acute
creative sensitivity and his self-consciousness about his craft
eventually reveal to him the mingled impulses reflected in his 1884
essay, and in his early novels.

It is my intention in this study to demonstrate that the
radical changes in style and structure that occur as James moves
into his major phase can be interpreted as a response to his growing
awareness of the nature and soucre of the tensions described above.
I shall also argue that it is the problem of treating character--of
making his presentation at once faithful to the psychology of the
individual and to the requirements of art-~that both creates and
reveals these difficulties. If one pursues this line of exploration,
the novels of the major phase can be seen to express implicit under-
standings about the genre itself which are not articulated by others
until well after James's death. Although "The Art of Fiction" and the

preface to The Golden Bowl are useful clues to James's method and

 

his understanding at different stages in his enterprise, it is my
feeling that in the end James's greatest and most penetrating criti-
cism is represented in the novels themselves; it is through them that
the author pursues his long journey towards understanding that he,

like each of his protagonists, has had to make.

 

But first it will be useful to describe some of the critical
insights which James's work so remarkably anticipates. Ian Watt,

in The Rise of the Novel, notes that the realistic tradition in

 

which James participates emphasizes the particulars of individual
experience rather than the actions of exemplary or representative
types; the novel, says Watt, achieves its effects "by exhaustive

"10 Watt's idea,

presentation rather than by elegant concentration.
which is generally agreed to, is that the novel, as the first great
egalitarian literary form, emphasizes the imitation of experience
rather than the codification or evaluation of it; it overturns the
old expectation that art should provide "a picture of Man rather
than . . . portraits of men," or "truth about experience rather
than . . . truth to it."11 This, of course, is the value embraced
by James in his endorsement of the "solidity of specification" in

«12

"The Art of Fiction. But both James and Watt state and then

efface their awareness of the subjective conditions under which
such truths are apprehended. Though in novels "the reality imitated

is . . . the concrete and temporal reality of modern empirical

"13

thought, that reality is necessarily mediated through the indi-

vidual human consciousness; Watt acknowledges that truth is "dis-

"14

covered by the individual through his senses, while James states

that the Novel's "personal . . . direct impression of life" "con-

"15 Thus one finds in Watt's argument the same

stitutes its value.
buried confusion over the primacy of subject and object that charac-
terizes James's early essay and his early novels; but Watt, more

clearly than James in "The Art of Fiction,“ sees the inimical

qualities of mimetic representation and traditional literary rhetoric
and plot forms.

Consequently, James's argument in "The Art of Fiction" for
the "intensity" of the represented impression shows his determination
not to forgo the "elegant concentration" by which art distinguishes
itself from reality. James's idea of the novel is that it is true to
experience in its particulars, but that it is less prosaic than
experience in its total effect. For him, the "province of art" may
be "all life" and I'all observation"--but it is "all feeling" and

“all vision" as well;16

and his failure to distinguish among these
mixed values betrays his belief that they are intrinsically connected.
This is a belief which Watt disputes, and which James himself later
deconstructs; but from the beginning it is James's desire to make art
answerable to the truths of experience (particularly psychological)
"without losing all those literary effects which rhetoric alone can
achieve."17
Furthermore, it is clear that what James has in mind in "The

Art of Fiction" and in early novels like The American and The Portrait

 

of a Lady is an analogy with portraiture, with the frozen coherence

of the preserved moment, and not the immersion in the "real time" of
experience which Watt sees as the mainspring of realistic presentation.
The painting metaphors which dominate James's novels of early prime
suggest that these "caught images“ are somehow faithful to the
realities they represent, as actions in time simply become the pro-
gressive brush-strokes by which the total picture, the apprehended

truth, is brought into full view; but the truth thus represented is,

10

as Isabel Archer complains, the painter's truth, and not that of his
subject. In other words, James, like lyric poets, works to bend real
time into his own frame, and to realize in the linear form of lan-
guage an insight, an inspiration, that is in its essence a trans-
formation rather than an imitation of reality.

Thus if one accepts Watt's idea that the essential impulse of
the novel is mimetic, it is clear that from the outset James works
to subvert the genre's basic order of reality. But this is inevita-
ble, not just for James, but for any novelist as concerned as he is
for the aesthetic and ethical propriety of his art. Watt himself
fails to explain how the "realism of presentation" he describes
might be supplemented by an accompanying "assessment"18 which would
satisfy the reader's dual demands for credence and for aesthetic
pleasure, and which would keep the writer himself from becoming a
slavish imitator of the world around him. The novel as described by
Watt does not represent a literary form, but rather a technique, a
value, in which form does not by definition inhere.

"Form" implies organization, interpretation, the balancing
and patterning of experience; it goes beyond, or stops short of,
the local application of close mimesis. In this light, it can be
seen that the novel "has no form of its own";19 James's use of
portraiture to enrich and control his characterizations is one sign
of his intuitive awareness of this fact. But novels, unlike paint-
ings, do not portray static moments; the frame which encloses the
characters is filled by movement in time as well as by spatial and

tonal relations. James's pictorial conceits embellish his record

ll

of impressions struck by individual scenes, but they do nothing to
give direction or a logic of dramatic movement to the ongoing action.
Like any poet who tries to convey a total impression through the
linear and temporal medium of language, James needs to develop a rule
of sequencing: he needs to know which brushstrokes to apply, and
when, in the unfolding drama of completion which his narrative
composition represents.

The novels themselves illustrate James's search for this
sequencing, for the overarching form which will encompass and regulate
the ordering of the psychic data produced by his close attention to
his characters' experience. J. A. Ward, borrowing a phrase from "The
Art of Fiction," depicts James's career as a "search for form" in
which he finds the author "beginning with a blanket exploitation of
some more-or-less standard genre or convention . . . and then trans-
forming that model as he allows his subject to find its own shape."20
But Ward makes things more complex than he needs to by failing to
recognize the underlying exploratory mode which governs both James's
and his characters' quest for meaning and coherence: that of the
romance, which with its misty Otherworld idealities and its promise
of absolute wisdom and fulfillment is the dialectical opposite to the
close mimesis embraced as a value by James.21

It is not difficult to see why the romance mode speaks so
powerfully to James's needs as an artist; while mimesis belongs "to
the present, pure romance really belongs to the future, which is
absolutely cut off from any possible reference to truth of fact or

"22

truth of sensation. The mingling of these two impulses-~the

 

 

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mimetic and the romantic--represents the penetration of prosaic fact
by poetic possibility; it enables James to imagine, without violating
his own credence, sequences of events in which he and his characters
share in the forward lunge away from the literal and towards the
figural world of a dreamed or imagined alternity. Small wonder, then,
that in "The Art of Fiction" James plants his flag on the soil of
romance gNg_on the soil of realism, ingenuously claiming to recognize
no borders between the two; they are, he implies, two sides of the
same coin, and may be exchanged freely without any loss to art or to

23

credibility. He argues that the distinction between "novel" and

"romance" is a "clumsy separation," and insists that such superficial
hair-splitting cannot be allowed to deny the artist his "freedom."24

Lionel Trilling has likened James's use of the romance form
to an "experiment," "an artificial and extravagant contrivance . . .

25 This is a

which is designed to force or foster a fact into being."
useful insight if one recognizes that Trilling cannot mean "fact"

in the sense of an empirical datum, a "truth of detail," but rather

in the abstract sense of an explanatory idea or a compelling verity.
The romantic quest may begin with an empirical goal in mind, but

it always leads one into the land of imagination, of metaphor, of
spiritual or psychic discovery. Northrop Frye recognizes this

when he observes that underlying the most intensely mimetic works of
literature there are hypothetical story structures and mythic impulses;
though displaced or disguised by the "realistic" nature of the pre-

sentation, these properties nevertheless evoke the world of total

knowledge and fulfillment which is expressed in the naked myth

 

13

itself.26 Thus the novel form as practiced by James is inductive,
exploratory; he uses his realistic materials, particularly the psycho-
logy of his characters, to give empirical form to his pursuit of
ethical verities and aesthetic satisfactions; he is constantly in
a struggle against "the refusal of the immanence of being to enter
the empirical life."27
The pattern this "romance" takes in James is invariably a
quest in which the protagonist, spurred on by an exotic and beckoning
Otherworld, pursues the satisfaction of deep needs and desires, but
does so always at the risk of being undeceived and returned, sadder
but wiser, to earth. One sees this pattern in Christopher Newman's
and Isabel Archer's trips to the mysterious continent of Europe, on
whose congenially mercurial landscape they find etched the image of

their unacknowledged desires; one sees it too in the bold flights of

sensibility taken by worshipful idealists like Daisngiller's Winter-

 

bourne, Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima, Lambert Strether,

 

and Merton Densher--all of whom perceive their desired Madonnas in
women who are in the end not up to the role demanded of them; one

even sees the pattern in the experience of less lively imaginations,
as in poor, dull Catherine Sloper's brief glimpse of romantic ful-
fillment in Washington Square. James's novels show us real people

who are attracted by the spectre of decidedly unreal possibilities;
from Newman's desire for the conjugal possession of the best item

on the market to Merton Densher's search for impunity beneath the
gilded wings of Milly Theale, one finds James's protagonists embracing

the image of what is wished for rather than what is provided. The

l4

novels thus become inquiries into the efficacy and durability of
the connection between prosaic fact and poetic possibility.

But in the romance, this inquiry is itself irrelevant. The
hero is insured against failure, both by the rules of the form and
by the fact that he is a "type" designed for success, and not a
problematical human character. In the Jamesian novel, this is not
the case. His characters have a personal dimension, not an exemplary
one, and there is no assurance that his heroes will pass their tests,
or that their ordeals will yield enlightenment or satisfaction.
Thus there is a great deal of tension between the inevitability of
the romantic form, which promises success, and the complex inner
workings of the characters' psychologies, which render that success,
even when it is ostensibly achieved, oddly qualified. As Scholes and
Kellogg observe, this is a "problematic quality which marks the
great serious novels," and derives from "the novelist's insistence
on inserting individualized characters into typical situations."28
Or, as Bernard Paris observes, "in novels of psychological realism
the main characters exist primarily as mimetic portraits whose intri-
"29

cacies escape the moral and symbolic meanings assigned to them.

In early novels like The American and The Portrait of a Lady

 

 

the conflict between mimetic representation and symbolic assessment
is particularly evident; though the overarching form and dominant
tone of these novels derive from the romance tradition I have
described, the omniscient narrator's internal analysis of Newman and
Isabel reveals them to have qualities which are at odds with the

virtues typically symbolized by the romantic hero. Even when their

l5

actions ostensibly conform to the pattern of the heroic model, their
motivations are sufficiently mixed to undercut the rhetoric which
insists on the exemplary character of their external behavior. In
these novels the truth of psychological detail conflicts with the
demands of artistic form; and the authorial narrator, charged with
making his characters at once individual in themselves and repre-
sentative of formal values, is committed to the simultaneous pursuit
of contradictory aesthetic goals.

But James refuses to surrender either the reality of his
characters or the enrichment provided by the structure and rhetoric
he has borrowed from romance. This would be disastrous to the coher-
ence of these novels, or would beg the question of whether James's

l,30 were it not for two eva-

intentions in these novels were ironica
sive devices which James employs: the selective deference of the
omniscient narrator, who at the climax of each novel forgoes detailed
analysis of the hero's inner state; and the creation in each novel of
a character who is empowered to speak for, and act in accordance with,
the romantic norms of the work. One can see in both these phenomena
the germinal form of James's later style; after all, the concepts of
authorial deference and of the essential role of the "reflector" or

"concrete deputy" are the linchpins of the narrative philosophy ex-

pressed in the Golden Bowl preface and realized in the later novels.

 

It will be the task of subsequent chapters of this study to trace the
development of these devices from their roots in the early novels to

a full-fledged narrative technique; but it will first be necessary to
identify the important, if limited, use to which James originally put

them.

16

Paris notes that the difficulty of resolving the mimetic and
mythic aspects of fiction "becomes most evident at the end, where
plausibility and realistic detail are sacrificed to an aesthetically

"31

pleasing resolution. One sees James wrestling with this problem

at the end of both The American and The Portrait of a Lady, as the

 

 

once-omniscient narrator abandons his role of portraying the inner
psychological reality of the protagonist, and allows the hero to
perform his or her final emblematic action without subjecting it to
authorial comment. An explanation of Newman's or Isabel's motives
would surely upset the novel's sense of closure, and might openly
contradict the implications of enlightenment and growth which accom—
pany the completion of the underlying romance cycle. 50 the narrator
draws back and says nothing, letting the characters' final gestures
speak (however ambiguously) for themselves. James thus substitutes
a change in point of view for the unrealized transformation the for-
mal and rhetorical elements argue has occurred; the result is a
phenomenon often repeated in James--that of the character, particu-
larly the hero, who in the end somehow slips through the web of the
book's design and becomes enigmatic, even to the narrator. This

effect is repeated in novels like The Europeans and Roderick Hudson

 

 

as well, and becomes more marked as one moves into the novels of the
major phase, in which authorial deference becomes an almost constant
factor; but in the earlier novels it is most evident at the conclu-

sion, in which it is this evasion of the narrator, and not an actual

change in the character, that creates the reader's final mystification.

17

The second phenomenon--that of the embodied delegate or
apostle of the novel's romantic norms--is also crucial to the tenuous

coherence of the narration. Mrs. Tristram in The American and Ralph

 

Touchett in The Portrait each relieve the narrator of some of the

 

burden of arranging for and presenting the romantic dimension of the
story; they share in the romantic view of the hero or heroine which
the rhetoric attempts to develop, and assist James in facilitating
the romantic turns of the plot--Mrs. Tristram by introducing Newman
to Claire, and Ralph by endowing Isabel with the material liberty

of his own inheritance. Like the device of authorial deference, the
romantic spokesperson becomes more and more central to the discourse
in later novels, until the consciousness of the protagonist becomes
identical with that of the character who embraces the romantic norms

of the work--Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors, and Merton Densher

 

in The Wings of the Dove. But in the early novels these characters

 

remain peripheral; although there are such characters in other

novels, like Mrs. Penniman of Washington Square and Felix Young in

 

The Europeans, among these only Ralph Touchett is developed fully

 

enough to become a realistic character in his own right.

The judicious use of these two devices (which are really
evasions) allows James to keep the conflicting romantic and mimetic
impulses in his novels from creating total incoherence. In INg_

American and The Portrait, for example, Mrs. Tristram and Ralph

 

supply their own romantic conceptions of Newman and Isabel, thereby
deflecting attention from the narrator's own penchant for contradict-

ing his dispassionate psychological analysis with passionately

 

 

l8

idealizing rhetoric; and at the conclusions of these novels, which
depend on the underlying romance plot for a sense of aesthetic com-
pletion, the narrator conveniently abstains from analysis which would
mar the gracefulness of the protagonist's exit.

The crucial quality which both of these devices have in common
is that of their ignorance-~either the willed ignorance of the self—
censoring narrator or the inescapable subjective ignorance of the
surrogate romancer. This ignorance is in both cases strategic to
the author's purpose, since it keeps anomalous aspects of the hero's
personality from coming to light at aesthetically inappropriate
moments. Mrs. Tristram is able to propose Newman as a romantic
hero only because she lacks intimate knowledge of his inner motives,
just as Ralph's idealization of Isabel is dependent on his failure to
recognize her inner weaknesses and insecurities; Mrs. Tristram and
Ralph would be neither as swift nor as assiduous in proposing such
views of their respective protagonists if they shared the benefit of
the narrator's penetrating analysis. Furthermore, the all-knowing
narrator, for aesthetic reasons, imitates the subjective ignorance
of the surrogates by adopting the limitations of their angles of
vision; when Newman leaves Paris and the Tristrams, he leaves the
narrator's sight as well, just as Isabel does when she leaves
Gardencourt.

It is, then, the adoption of these limited perspectives, and
not the empirical "truth of detail" which the narrator pursues
elsewhere in these novels, that provides the authorial rhetoric with

what tenuous coherence it finally has. The greatness of a work of

 

l9

fiction may be, as Booth says, in the "emotions and judgments of the
implied author,"32 but in James's early novels one can see that it
is the conflict, and not the harmonization, of these faculties that
dominates the discourse; emotion and judgment, passion and analysis,
fail to converge, and the coherence of these works is dependent on
the strategic narrative repressions and evasions which disguise this
failure.

Thus novels require ”truth of detail," but not too much truth;
the artist's "freedom" depends on how liberal he may be with his
exclusion of the facts. But it is important to remember what facts
we are talking about. James's realism is psychological, not socio-
logical, and his interest from the beginning is not to establish the

33 the knowledge he seeks is

truth of event, but truth of character;
personal rather than historical, and therefore the discourse seeks

to discover not what hpppens in the life of an Isabel Archer, but BBQ.

 

§Ng_j§, The conflict I have been describing between emotion and judg-
ment, between passion and recognition, results from the discourse
asking and answering this question of identity in two different ways,
one aesthetic and one empirical.

This is the problem, cited by Scholes and Kellogg, of placing
individualized characters in typical roles. As Lukécs observes, "Art
always says 'And yet!’ to life";34 typical characters, and the story-
forms they inhabit, express this desire for alternity, but James's
practice of combining realism of characterization with romanticism of

assessment yokes his art to the very actualities of the human condition

to which it supposedly takes exception. His portrayal of Isabel and

 

 

20

Newman expresses both his sense of who they are and his desire for
what, on a formal level, they might become; the struggle to unify
these two angles of vision is one which, in Lukacs's view, the
novelist can neither win nor abandon, since it can only be solved
either by effacement of the characters' psychic reality or by the
repudiation of the goals of art itself.

James eventually transforms this recognition from a problem
into a theme. He dramatizes the way in which knowledge of others
destroys one's hopeful and romantic illusions regarding them, and
shows how the desire for beauty, in its more intense forms, must
be satisfied through a repression rather than an enhancement of the
facts that are before one. But James continues to regard these illu-
sions, like the artistic formulations they resemble, as necessary
and efficacious. A character like Hyacinth Robinson would be better
off never to have met his Princess than to be disencumbered of his
beautiful idea of her; it is perhaps better to live with one's pri-
vate image of the dead poet Jeffrey Aspern than to have the intimate
knowledge of his letters; and it is possible that the psychic puzzle
of the governess in "The Turn of the Screw" speaks to the reader more
compellingly as an enigma than would its resolution.

These narrative situations all express the avoidance of
knowledge which is the obverse image of the desire for it. Again and
again James dramatizes the hypothesis that the lover of art, of
beauty, ought to fear truth rather than seek it out; the knowledge
destroyed with "The Aspern Papers" may well be the same sort of

knowledge which, when published, itself becomes a destroyer in stories

21

like The Reverberator. So silence and evasion, particularly on the

 

part of the authorial voice, come to signify and express this poten-
tial for danger; as George Steiner says, in these works "we are meant
to observe the tactics of exclusion. What is left out lies in ambush
around the next corner."35
This rule of exclusion is certainly the underlying principle

of novels like The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove, in which

 

 

the fear of the repressed recognition becomes the motive of the plot
itself. Strether's longing for the uncorrected belief in the "vir-
tuous attachment," like Densher's effort to preserve his illusion of
innocence, represents a version of himself and of others which is
dependent on his hiding from rather than engaging the totality of
experience; Strether does not want to know what Chad and Madame de
Vionnet are really doing any more than Densher wants to understand
fully the duplicitous enterprise that he and Kate are involved in.
Furthermore, the reassertion of that repressed actuality is a constant
and mortal threat; Strether fears Sarah and Densher fears Kate because
each of these women is capable of voicing the lucid recognition that
would wreck the romantic enterprise already under way. In the end,
Strether and Densher profess to want knowledge, but in reality stand
in fear of it.

But something has changed from the problematic quality of

earlier novels like The American and The Portrait. The conflict

 

between beauty and lucidity is no longer primarily James's problem;
it has been transferred to the consciousness of his characters,

particularly his protagonists, and the inner quest of the work itself

J

22

is not so much for formal and aesthetic resolution as for the psychic
integrity of the hero. In Strether and in Densher, James's surro-
gate romancer, with his impulsive thirst for the romantic, for the
ideal, has been relocated at the center of the discourse, where he
appropriates and speaks for the formal desire of the novel itself.
Thus the "oddity of a double consciousness" which one finds in
Lambert Strether is a distant reflection of James's own narrative

persona in novels like The American and The Portrait of a Lady;

 

Strether's intense mixture of "curiosity" and "zeal" mirrors the
narrator's impulse in those earlier works to seek a simultaneous
fulfillment of his antagonistic needs for beauty and for knowledge.
Thus in the later works James moves to "veil" himself in
surrogates whose inner psychology reflects the conflicting impulses
of the narrative itself; he is able to make his delegates, and not
himself, responsible for the repressions and evasions upon which his
art depends, and frees himself from his schizophrenic authorial role
as both creator and destroyer of romantic illusion. The real artists
of James's late fiction are his "centers of consciousness" themselves,
"deputies" like Strether and Densher and even Maggie Verver. They are
ultimately the heroes and heroines of their own inner romances, of
their own quests for harmony and integrity; the "process of vision"
dramatized through the rhetoric belongs to these characters, and not
to James himself. Thus any failure to take cognizance of the facts,
any vulnerability of the romantic design to the lucidity of truth,
represents a failure of the character's psyche and of the character's

vision, and not of the artist. Similarly, the cost to truth at which

 

FEE

23

such a vision is realized (dramatized particularly in The Wings of

 

the Dove) is not one which is levied against the artist's enterprise,
but against that of the "reflector" whose process of vision the
novelist records.

My interest in this study is to examine the phenomena in
James's early writings to which this technique, and this definition
of theme, is a response, and to identify both the advantages and
recognitions of liability which James derives from its development.
More specifically, this study will involve two phases of investi-
gation: first, I shall examine the crisis to which the conflicting
demands of realistic presentation and aesthetic form led James as a
novelist; and second, I shall detail how he responded to this crisis
without sacrificing either of the opposing terms which precipitated
it. Since, as I have said, James's consistent interest throughout
his work is the dramatization of human consciousness, a large portion
of my treatment will be comprised by character studies, particularly
of his protagonists; but this is not an object in itself, but a
necessary means to an end-~that of exploring James's awareness and
handling of the conflicting demands of form and mimesis which his
characters excite. I shall also examine, in their germinal and
fully developed forms, James's use in his novels of authorial defer-
ence and of the surrogate romancer, both of which evolve from peri-
pheral devices to determinants of theme and technique in the later
works.

The study will focus on two novels of James's earlier period--

The American and The Portrait of a Ladyr-in which the crisis of

 

 

24

narration I have described is evident, and then will proceed to two

novels of the major phase--The Ambassadors andllweWings of the Dove--

 

 

which show most clearly the nature of James's mature response to this
crisis. I shall also examine briefly The Golden Bowl, whose preface
states in discursive form the philosophy of composition embodied in

The Ambassadors and The Wipgs of the Dove, and which is usually

 

 

thought to complete a novelistic triptych with those other two works.
If one were to state a general theme which unifies all these
concerns, it would be that of awareness: of James's own awareness,
and of the awareness he urges on readers of "The Art of Fiction" of
being ones on whom nothing is lost. James, like his characters,
reveals his liveliness of attention by his changing responses to
expanding knowledge and to changing conflicts as they reveal them-
selves through the forms in which he works. As much through the
novels themselves as in his retrospective prefaces, James documents
his growing sensitivity to the problematical nature of his task as a
writer of fiction; and in particular it is his unflinching fidelity
to the nature of human consciousness which produces his greatest
difficulties and his most remarkable achievements. In the interest
of "showing" his people, and of arguing their importance for the
reader, he is willing to go to any lengths, as he strains to drama-
tize both that which is normally hidden from human consciousness and

that which exceeds its grasp.

NOTES

1Henry James, The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), p. 327. Hereafter cited in
the text as AN,

 

2This term, which usually is used to refer to James's
writings of the early 1900's, is introduced by F. O. Matthiessen
in Henry James: The Major Phase (New York: Oxford University Press,
1932; rpt., 1963).

3The Rhetoric of Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1961),
p. 346.

 

4The Ambiguity of Henry James (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 197)), p. 225.

 

5Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1974), p. 65.

6The Negative Imagination: Form and Perspective in the Novels
of Henry James (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell’University Press, 1968), p. 85.

 

7Henry James, "The Art of Fiction," The House of Fiction:
Essays on the Novel by Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (London: Rupert
Hart-Davis, 1957), pp. 29, 33. '

 

§§LZ, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974),
p. 178.

9See John E. Tilford, Jr., "James the Old Intruder," Modern
Fiction Studies, 4 (1958), 157-64. Also cited in Chapter IV of this
study.

10(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 30.

11Bernard J. Paris, A Psycholpgical Approach to Fittion
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), p. 286. I am
indebted to Professor Paris for his clear formulation of the rela-
tionships among form, theme, and mimesis in the novel, articulated
in Chapter I of his book.

12"The Art of Fiction," p. 33.

13Paris, p. 6.

25

 

 

26

14Watt, p. 12.

15"The Art of Fiction," p. 29.
16"The Art of Fiction," p. 39.

17Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1968; rpt., 1979), p. 189.

 

'BWatt. p. 288.

19$choles and Kellogg, p. 209.

20The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's
Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967),
p. 218.

21There are almost as many definitions of romance as there
are critics who use the term; by romance I mean the general plot
structure of the Grail Quest, with its journey motif and cycles of
departure and return, in which physical action is often symbolic of
an internal search for identity or for spiritual fulfillment.

22Scholes and Kellogg, p. 228.

23"The Art of Fiction," p. 34.

24"The Art of Fiction," pp. 35, 36.

25Introduction, The Princess Casamassima, by Henry James (New

York: MacMillan and Company, 1948); rpt. in The Liberal Imagination
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976), p. 65.

 

26Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957), p.
140. Frye uses the term 1'romance" to describe a median mode between
pure "mythic“ and "mimetic" which suggests "implicit mythical
patterns in a world more closely associated with human experience"
(pp. 139-40). But this does not mean that the possibilities expressed
through romance are more empirically based than those of myth, but
simply that the figures who act out these desires are understood as
exemplary human, rather than divine, entities. There is no contradic-
tion between Frye's conception of romance and that of Scholes and
Kellogg.

 

27Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), p. 71.

 

28Scholes and Kellogg, p. 229.
29Paris, p. 12.

27

30This is the assertion of Anna Brylowski in an excellent
but unpublished doctoral dissertation, "Irony in Henry James"
(Michigan State University, 1967); however, I disagree with this
premise.

31Paris, p. 277.

32Booth, p. 86.

33"The Art of Fiction," p. 34.

34Lukacs, p. 72.

35"Eros and Idiom," On Difficulty and Other Essays (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 107.

“a

CHAPTER II

THE AMERICAN

Henry James's eminent biographer Leon Edel pronounces INg_
American "a firm, rapid stride . . . into full literary maturity,"1
and in many ways Edel's assessment is correct. The hero, Christopher
Newman, is a more fully realized character than either Rowland Mallet
or Roderick Hudson, the principals in his first published novel; the
prose is crisp and confident, right up to the clamactic scenes; and
the novel's rich comedy of manners, in which the ingenuous American
protagonist squares off against a family of diabolical Europeans, is

deftly played. Nevertheless, James himself singles out The American

 

as one of three early novels (the other two are The Portrait of a

 

Lady and The Princess Casamassima) which suffer the defect of "good

 

intentions baffled by a treacherous vehicle, an expertness too
retarded."2 One is in the end forced to choose James's assessment

over that of his biographer, and to acknowledge that The American,

 

in the end, does fail to knit itself together; its form strains at
the edges, and, except for its protagonist Newman, it lacks the
vitality of characterization that one finds in subsequent novels.

Still, The American bears examination--partly because of the

 

strengths cited above, and partly because one finds in this novel the

antagonisms of form and content which, in the novels of his major

28

phase
prise
tic |
it d
ence
the

fort

unpi

of.

3le
New,

Ja~,

29

phase, provoke James into his greatest and most daring fictional enter-

prises. The American bears within it the tangled impulses of realis-

 

tic presentation and romantic rhetoric which mark the later works;
it displays at crucial climaxes the technique of authorial defer-
ence which eventually expands into a philosophy of narration; and, in

the slight figure of Mrs. Tristram, The American shows in germinal

 

form James's strategy of using surrogates, or "deputies," to estab-
lish and articulate the romantic norms of the work.

To gain a sense of the author's difficulties with this novel,
and to glimpse the ways in which it forecasts some of his future
glories, it is useful to attend James's own comments in his 1907 pre-

face to The American. In this belated post-mortem, written thirty

 

years after the novel first appeared, James identifies his original
conception of the work's "theme": it is, he says, "the situation, in
another country and an aristocratic society, of some robust but
insidiously beguiled . . . and cruelly wronged compatriot," who
"should suffer at the hands of persons pretending to represent the
highest possible civilisation." This "compatriot" would, moreover,
"arrive at his just vindication and then would fail of all tri-
umphantly and all vulgarly enjoying it"; he would "in the very act
of driving it home . . . sacrifice it in disgust" (AN, pp. 21-22).
For James, the response of this "wronged compatriot" to his
ill-usage is the essence of the tale; his beguilement by the Belle-
gardes is merely a device, a backdrop against which the drama of
Newman's inner moral conflict is to be played out. Newman, says

James, "supremely matters; all the rest matters only as he feels

 

A

30

it, treats it, meets it" (AN, p. 37). Thus the Bellegardes,
Newman's antagonists, are to be seen purely in terms of their effect
on the hero; their treachery is simply the lightning-rod which draws
the spark of Newman's true mettle. In his retrospective preface,
however, James has some second thoughts about Newman's relation to
his enemies; the author admits that the situation with the Belle-
gardes is gratuitously conceived and insufficiently dramatized,
that the reversal in which they first accept and then spurn Newman's
hand is capricious and inexplicable. James himself accounts for
this defect by asserting that the "measurements" of his protagonist
were such that he "had indeed to exclude the outer air" of realistic
probability in order to "fit him in" (AN, p. 39).

This is a curious assertion, and invites examination. What
James does ppt_mean by this, I think, is that our view of the
Bellegardes is limited to Newman's own direct knowledge of them, and
that we therefore share in his puzzlement at their rejection; this is
a phenomenon one might observe in the later novels, but Newman is
not a "center of consciousness" in the same way that heroes like
Lambert Strether and Merton Densher are. What James means by these
remarks, rather, is that the terms of Newman's test, necessary to
the dramatization of his character, require the Bellegardes to act in
a manner which would seem nonsensical even if one understood their
motives. Thus we find James apologizing for his "affront to veri-
similitude," and admitting, somewhat sheepishly, that "I was so

possessed by my idea that Newman should be ill-used . . . that I

attal

Sm
no

tr

31

attached scant importance to its fashion of coming about" (AN,
pp. 37, 35).

Furthermore, he claims that in writing The American he "had

 

been plotting arch-romance without knowing it," and that Newman's

European debacle must be taken as "the disconnected and uncontrolled
experience . . . which romance alone more or less successfully palms
off on us" (AN, pp. 25, 34). But the apology one senses here, given
James's continuing use of the romance form in the novels that follow

The American, is not for the fact that much of the action is generic

 

rather than realistic, but for the typical quality of the figures
surrounding Newman. James's apology is for the insufficiency of
motive in the Bellegardes themselves, not for the situation they
bring about.

But as we shall see, the author's remarks gloss over a
possible, fuller explanation. James, in his insistence on Newman's
heroism, misreads Newman and therefore misreads the Bellegardes' quite
credible response to this obtuse American. The critical history of
The American reveals that it is Newman's behavior, and not the
Bellegardes', that has proved most difficult to explain. While
capricious evil and inscrutably afflicted women are commonplaces
of the Gothic or arch-romances to which the actions and settings of

much of The American allude, it is not these elements that strain

 

credence; the true dissonant element is Newman himself, whose
psychological complexities overshadow and obscure the lines of
demarcation between good and evil, between innocence and guilt,

which form the essential matrix of his "situation."

 

32

Actually, the underlying romantic structure in The American

 

is not that of the Gothic, whose intimations of violence and psychic
are locally applied touches in this novel; the general outline of
Newman's experience--his journey from America to the strange Other-
world of Europe, his enchantment, fall, and final return to the
point of origin--evokes the pattern of the romantic quest which,
unconsciously or not, James employs in almost all his novels.
Newman's ordeal also follows the legend, identified by Lionel
Trilling, of "the Young Man from the Provinces" who, like "Parsifal
at the castle of the Fisher King," is seen "picking his perilous
way through the irrationalities of the society into which he has been
transported."3

But, though Newman's experience conforms in broad outline
to the patterns of the quest cycle and of the legend sketched by
Trilling, Newman himself does not. Unlike the Young Man of myth,
Newman is not "setting out to seek his fortune";4 he has already made
it. And, as James himself concedes, Newman's eye "is by no means
the glowing orb of romance"; it is "an eye in which innocence and
experience were singularly blended."5 Newman, in short, is more
experienced, more aggressive, and more commercially successful than
the archetypes his story evokes. His innocence is problematical;
it seems more a mark of emotional immaturity than youthful inexperi-
ence. And finally, his view of the world is not illumined by the light
of the ideal which is for the romantic hero the essential ray of
vision. With his "capacious appetite for facts" (p. 60), Newman is

not an ingenuous idealist, but a hardened empiricist; his grasp of

 

33

the world is limited to the palpable and quantifiable aspects of
things and people around him.

Newman's materialist predelictions are evident from the out-
set. His labored contemplation of the Louvre's artistic treasures
has given him an "aesthetic headache," and he is beset by his
inability to understand the "arithmetic" by which the paintings of
Raphael, Titian, and Rubens establish their value (pp. 1-2). He
finally approaches them not with an appreciation of their beauty,
but with "the mania of the collector" (p. 12)--and at that, not
a collector of originals, but of inferior copies which, "if the
truth must be told, he had often admired . . . much more than the
original" (p. l). Newman, insensitive to standards of artistic
merit, would rather possess a facsimile than simply gaze on an
original he cannot have; he measures the value of art objects in
terms of the cost of their acquisition, and derives satisfaction not
from their beauty, but from the proof of his own success that, once
possessed, they represent.

In short, for Newman works of art are signs of status. His
inability to appreciate the contents of the Louvre is humorous, even
ingenuous in a way; but Newman's projection of this attitude into
human relations, particularly romantic ones, seriously damages his
credibility as a potential hero. The parallelism between his ideal
of "extracting a fortune, the bigger the better, from defiant oppor-
tunity" (p. 19) and his idea that a beautiful wife represents "the
greatest victory over circumstances" (p. 35) is unmistakable, and

cannot help but render Newman a little unappetizing as a paragon of

 

'3].

 

 

1‘0

I'm

no

in
tn

0w

he
th
co

SD

in

in

Dr
no
Ja
m

av

34

romance. He is "guilty of the Jamesian sin of treating people as
things."6

There is language in the novel, and even in Newman's own
mouth, which appears to indicate he is ready to make a qualitative
change in his perspective. James writes: "He had won at last and
carried off his winnings; and now what was he to do with them?"
(p. 20); Newman himself seems to portend a change when he tells Tom
Tristram, "I was sick of business . . . I seemed to feel a new man
inside my old skin, and I longed for a new world" (p. 23). But
this rhetoric of spiritual awakening is not borne out by Newman's
own behavior; he simply brings his old philosophy of materialism to
bear on what promises to be an essentially moral quest. Furthermore,
as Richard Poirier observes, Newman is "a man without imagination";7
he doesn't know how to begin this new life, as his hapless visit to
the Louvre and his whirlwind tour of ugly churches attest. He has not
come to Europe to engage experience, but to purchase its spoils; in
short, Newman himself is not capable of seeking out the experience
James has designed for him. He needs a sponsor, a person of
imagination and romance, to show him what to do and to oversee his
initiation into this new Old World.

Newman finds such a person in Mrs. Tristram, whose name
provides a clue to her function in James's design; it is she, and
not Newman, who represents the true romantic spirit in The American.
James describes her in terms which supremely qualify her for this

role: "Restless, discontented, visionary . . . but with a certain

avidity of imagination," with "a spark of the sacred fire" (p. 26).

She

neve
hi gt
New
Cint
qual
lllCE
the

poll
in ‘
my 1
adv-

Tri

908
OM

1301

35

She is constantly giving Newman romantic advice "for which he had
never asked" (p. 27), and it is she who suggests to him that "it was
high time he should take a wife" (p. 33). It is she who sets
Newman's adventures in motion by encouraging him to pursue Claire dé
Cintré; it is she who paints the picture of Claire's extraordinary
qualities on the blank canvas of Newman's imagination. Newman,
incapable of forming his own concept of the ideal woman, assimilates
the one conveniently furnished by Mrs. Tristram; when Claire is
pointed out to him, he instantly sees in her "the loveliest woman

in the world, the promised perfection, the proposed ideal” (p. 39;
my emphases). It is doubtful that Newman would enter this romantic
adventure at all, if it were not for the eager prompting of Mrs.
Tristram.

So Mrs. Tristram's romantic machinations aid and abet James's
plan to place his hero in the "situation" described in the preface.
Like James, Mrs. Tristram wants to see Newman "prove" himself; "I
should like," she tells him, “to put you in a difficult place"

(p. 32). She pushes Newman deeper into the Bellegarde snare by pro-
posing to him heroic projects he might never have conceived on his
own; when Newman expresses outrage that Claire is "subject to com-
pulsion" by her family, Mrs. Tristram urges him "to use his wings . .
Fly to the rescue of Madame de Cintré!" (P. 77)

This pervasive influence of Mrs. Tristram on Newman's fate
makes her the architect of his adventure; she lives vicariously
through his experience as she fills his mind with notions and

propels him into situations which Newman himself but half understands.

36

Her responsibility for what happens is so integral to the novel that
she becomes a kind of surrogate narrator; she has the role of setting
up scenes, dropping prophetic hints (it is after all she who first
suggests that there is a dark and terrible secret in the Bellegarde
family history), and mouthing all the romantic rhetoric which the
sharp-eyed and even-spoken principal narrator avoids. Unlike the
main narrative persona, whose interest in Newman is actual and
individual, Mrs. Tristram admits that her own interest in him "has
nothing to do with you personally; it's what you represent" (p. 32).
And what he "represents" to her are precisely those romantic
possibilities which underlie the action of the novel as a whole;
Newman is the Young Man from the Provinces, the questing knight of
the Grail, the daring rescuer of ladies in distress. But the very
defects of romantic sensibility which place Newman in need of Mrs.
Tristram's services make him in the end unsuited to her plan. She,
like James, confuses the actuality of Newman with the role she has
designed for him; his abortive engagement to Claire de Cintré suffers,
like the novel as a whole, the fate of "good intentions baffled by
a treacherous vehicle." Mrs. Tristram finally refers to the entire
Bellegarde affair as "the highest flight ever taken by a tolerably
bold imagination," and admits that she urged Claire upon him out
of curiosity: "I should have been curious to see," she says,
referring to the marriage that never comes off; "it should have
been very strange" (p. 342). Like James himself, Mrs. Tristram
vicariously pursues the "freedom" of intensified existence, of
heightened effect, at a sacrifice of recognition, and at the risk of

the tragic collapse of the romantic enterprise.

is i
and

the

37

What Mrs. Tristram, like James, fails to come to terms with
is the decidedly unromantic nature of Newman which dooms both hers
and the author's project from the beginning. Newman's failure with
the Bellegardes is, unfortunately, not a gratuitous conception, but
is the natural outgrowth of the hero's own deficiencies of character,
and is in fact analogous to other events in his pre-European experi-
ence. These earlier events, though little attended in previous
interpretations of the novel, are crucial to an understanding of its
controversies; through them, and their parallels in Newman's experi-
ence with the Bellegardes, it is possible to see the motives and
impulses which consistently rule his actions, and to assess the
nature of the difficulties he creates for Mrs. Tristram and for the
novel as a whole.

In the second chapter of The American, Newman tells his

 

friend Tristram of a party who "had once played me a very mean trick.
I owed him a grudge, I felt awfully savage at the time" (pp. 21-22).
Newman gets his chance to repay this wrong, apparently through a
stock manipulation; it would be "a blow the fellow would feel, and
he really deserved no quarter." But with vengeance at his fingertips,
Newman experiences "a mortal disgust for the thing I was about to do"
(p. 22); he discovers that "I was sick of business; I wanted to
throw it all up and break off short . . . I seemed to feel a new
man inside my old skin, and I longed for a new world" (p. 23).

This experience is remarkably similar to his dealings with
the Bellegardes, whose withdrawal of Claire's hand in marriage makes

him feel used and foolish, to the point of humiliation. His discovery

38

of the family secret gives him his opportunity to smite them back;
but when he returns to Paris for his final showdown, he finds that
"the bottom had suddenly fallen out of his revenge . . . They had
hurt him, but such things were really not his game." He then
returns to his apartments and tells Mrs. Bread that he means to
leave Paris and "to stay away forever"(p. 357), once again putting
the ocean between himself and the scene of his defeat.

The parallels between these two patterns of events are too
striking to be coincidental, and one must ask what aspects of
Newman's personality are commonly brought to bear in them. Given
James's assertion regarding Newman that "the picture of his consis—
tency was all my undertaking" (AN, p. 37), it would seem that atten-
tion ought not be focused on the uncharacteristic nature of Newman's
response in these situations; rather, one ought to examine the ways
in which these moments of intense personal crisis radicalize facets
of Newman's personality which are consistently, but less evidently,
in play elsewhere in the story.

Central to Newman's personality, and crucial in his response
to these personal disasters, is what J. A. Ward characterizes as
Newman's sense of "fair play." This idea, as Ward observes, is
intimately connected with Newman's glowing conception of himself.8
James notes that Newman "liked everything, accepted everything . . .
he was not discriminating" (p. 63), a quality which Newman himself
wears like a badge. His eagerness to be pleased reflects in general
his desire to be on good terms with others; but there is condescension

in his generous appreciation of them. He expects that they will

39

recognize the merit of his ”good-humoured prosperity” (p. 61) and
grant him the approbation he feels he deserves. Newman's blandly
indulgent generosity toward others, then, is really a veiled plea
for reciprocal treatment; his good nature is his proof against being
rejected, cheated, or betrayed. Because this tacit bargain with
others is based on Newman's inflated idea of his personal worth
(both moral and material), any failure of this bargain is an affront
to his pride and to his necessary idea that he can be assured, on
his merits, of the good graces of others.

This bargain is broken for Newman twice in The American,

 

first by the business treachery of the nameless "other party," and
second by the refusal of the Bellegardes to make a place for him in
their family circle. These are blows to his pride rather than to
his pocketbook, and the remedy he instinctively seeks is not justice
but vindication. It is the excitement of being avenged that he
experiences in New York, and again when he is handed the damning
note by Mrs. Bread; but in both cases excitement quickly turns to
moral nausea. As much as he may want revenge, Newman's pride is
more deeply invested in his agreeableness toward others; it is

his pervasive but blandly indiscriminate charity that gives him the
pleasure of looking down on others "from the height of his bracing
good conscience" (p. 116). In the end, his moral pride is too dear
to be sacrificed; to carry through on his vengeance would be to buy
satisfaction for the public humiliation by shredding his private
integrity. His solution in both cases it to renounce his vindication,

and to assauge his pain by taking pleasure in his own virtue.

 

40

The pleasure and pride Newman takes in his own goodness is
clear from the moment he lands in Europe; it is difficult to miss
the attitude of lip-smacking moral superiority with which Newman
relates the tale of his sudden severance from his business affairs.
But the very abruptness of his decision to come to Europe indicates
the compulsive and compensatory quality of his renunciation: "When
you want a thing so very badly you had better treat yourself to it,"
he tells Tristram; and the list of things to which Newman intends
to treat himself is impossibly ambitious: "I want the biggest kind
of entertainment a man can get. People, places, art, nature, every-
thing!" (p. 23)

If Newman has come to Europe to seek satisfaction of his
wounded pride, his remarks here do not indicate that the injury has
made anything except that pride more sensitive. It appears to matter
little to him that he lacks any appreciation for the essential
qualities of the mountains, lakes, paintings, churches, or people
he desires to experience; his wants are not authentic, but the
expression of a vindictive need that was left unsatisfied by the
moral nausea which overtook him in that New York taxi. He is not
attracted to Europe by any properties of Europe itself; the Parisian
world "neither inflamed his imagination nor irritated his curiosity"
(p. 27). Europe merely promises poultice for his wound, a place
where he can satisfy his vague but mighty "hankering . . . to stretch
out and haul in" (p. 31).

One of the things that Newman intends to haul, he makes clear,

is a wife. It is part of the program he outlines to Tristram upon

theii
his ‘
vino
to .
What
ther

ONE

981
ha

im

41

their first meeting, and the idea of marrying looms ever larger in
his imagination until it becomes his primary obsession; Newman con-
vinces himself that a "great woman" is "one thing I ppp_treat myself
to . . . What else have I toiled and struggled for all these years . . .
What am I to do with my success? To make it perfect, as I see it,
there must be a beautiful woman perched on the pile, like a statue

on a monument" (p. 34).

As this and previously cited remarks illustrate, Newman makes
no qualitative distinction between the acquisition of wealth and the
acquisition of a wife; they are both blessings of good fortune, a
reward for righteous toil, the outward sign of the good graces in
which he stands with the world at large and of his indisputable
personal merit. Thus Newman depends on success in courtship as he
had depended on success in business to maintain his exalted self-
image; the point of his marriage, like that of his fortune, is to
attest to and confirm in the witness of others Newman's personal
excellence. As James D. Wilson observes, Newman "seeks perfection in
the woman he is to marry because such an object will enhance his own
image."9

Thus, although it is Mrs. Tristram who initiates Newman into
his experience of European courtship, the attitudes he brings to that
experience are stubbornly and uniquely his own. It must be remembered
in this context that Newman's desire to have "the best article on
the market" is a dream of vindictive conquest as well as a dream of
possession; by marrying Claire de Cintré he will be achieving a per-

sonal victory over the manners and mores of a European society hostile

42

to his democratic virtues, and will have the pleasure of broadcast-
ing his success back to America. In fact, the Bellegardes' initial
resistance only magnifies the pleasure he takes in his prospective
conquest; the more adverse the circumstances, the greater the
victory. For this reason too, Tom Tristram's assertions that Claire
is "haughty" and "proud" only spark Newman's interest, and make her
submission all the more gratifying.

But Newman does not perceive the Bellegardes' circle as

superior to his own simply because it is difficult for him to get
into; it is the challenge provided by the opposition, and not the
personal nobility of the opponent himself, that provides Newman with
his satisfaction in victory. In fact, his attitude towards the
Bellegardes is deeply condescending; he has, in addition to his
personal conceit, the generic chauvinism of the American abroad.
He thinks of Frenchmen as being of "a frothy and imponderable sub-
stance," considers their elaborate social rituals as a kind of
"prancing . . . reserved for quadrupeds and foreigners," and even
thinks of his friend Valentin with "the same kindness that our hero
used to feel . . . for those companions who could perform strange
and clever tricks" (pp. 96, 326, 89). Newman's pleasure in rescuing
Claire, whom he prizes as "a felicitous product of nature and cir-
cumstance" (p. 163), seems to promise something of the satisfaction
one might take in snatching a delicate crystal out of the hands of
a family of marmosets.

But Newman will not be satisfied with such a small success;

he takes it as his additional responsibility to teach the monkeys the

 

 

 

 

 

ways

irpe
0rd.
per
ton

cha

80'

Ol‘;

43

ways of men. He is both miffed and condescendingly amused at M. de
Bellegarde's "holding his breath so as not to inhale the odour of

democracy, and thinks with pleasure on the prospect of converting
Valentin "into a first-class man of business" (pp. 167, 229). So
Newman's European excursion is in some ways an exercise in cultural
imperialism, in which he is "determined to impose his will on an
order unwilling to accommodate it";10 yet one must keep in mind the
personal, vindictive needs expressed in this imperialist desire for
conquest, and the egocentric pride that underscores Newman's cultural
chauvinism.

The danger of a project of conquest like Newman's is that
success is all, and there is always the possibility that one has made
one's task too difficult, or chosen a task unsuited to one's abilities.
The danger is all the greater when someone else selects the test, as
Mrs. Tristram does for Newman. The prospect of rejection by the
Bellegardes, of the failure of his suit, afflicts Newman with an
anxiety and resentment as intense as the promised joy of success. If
indeed he regards foreigners as an inferior class, their ways as
irrationally odd and arcane, then he must be all the more outraged
to find himself personally held at arm's length by them, to discover
that his standards of personal worth, his money and his good nature,
are regarded as irrelevant, and to feel their stubborn resistance to
his efforts to make them see his point.

From the beginning of his acquaintance with Claire, it has
chafed at Newman that he has never been regarded by her family as an

equal, much less as a superior; early in the novel, he bristles at

44

Valentin's suggestion that he is not "noble," and expresses surprise
that he is "not good enough to make a trial" at securing Claire's
hand in marriage (pp. 108, 109). Even when he is finally accepted
as Claire's suitor, Newman is "embittered by his having to stand
there and so receive his passport from M. de Bellegarde," and is
furthermore galled by the Marquise's assertion that in approving the
marriage they "are stretching a point . . . doing you a great favor"
(pp. 153, 159). All this, of course, is nothing but a provocation
for Newman to show them their mistake--to prove that he is noble
enough and good enough, to make them accept his own definition of
those terms; and to show them that they are not in a position to
condescendly do him favors, because he does not, in the end, require
their passport. In short, Newman feels that he must vindicate himself,
if not in their eyes at least in his own.

He has his first small chance for vindictive satisfaction
when he receives telegrams from America congratulating him on his
engagement. These missives provide Newman with an opportunity to
remind the Bellegardes of the public way in which they have permitted
their family name to be yoked with his; he "felt a peculiar desire
that his triumph should be manifest," and he can't resist throwing
the broadcast of his victory up in the Bellegardes' faces: "He
wanted for once to make the heads of the house of Bellegarde fppl_
him . . . He had had for the past six months a sense of the old lady
and her son looking straight over his head, and he was now resolved
that they should toe a mark which he would give himself the satisfac-

tion of drawing" (p. 188).

45

Newman's idea of making the Bellegardes "feel" him is an
expression of his thirst for vindication for their refusal to recog-
nize the claims of his personal excellence; and, as is apparent from
this passage, this idea takes root in his mind long before their
breach of faith with him. As I have suggested, there is already a
sense in which Newman's desire to marry Claire is in part an atti-
tude of self-assertion, an attempt to make the indifferent European
aristocracy take cognizance of his democratic virtues. But in any
case, Newman's desire for a vindictive triumph over the haughty
Bellegardes is a thread that runs through their entire relationship.

Edward Zietlow has argued that The American has two dramatic

 

strands, the "love motif" and the "revenge motif," which are unified
by the theme of Newman's moral growth;‘1 but a close examination of
Newman's motives shows that the underlying theme has more to do with
Newman's pride than with his morals, and that in this regard the
"love motif" and the "revenge motif" are intimately connected. Con-
trary to Zietlow's argument, the rejection of Newman's suit does not
represent the beginning of his need for revenge; he already owes the
Bellegardes a grudge, and their withdrawal of Claire's hand is merely
the flowering of their long—standing aversion to Newman which Newman
himself has found so gallingly incomprehensible. Thus the Bellegardes'
breach of faith constitutes a dramatic reversal, but a continuation
of theme.

It is in this rejection that James in retrospect finds his own
affront to credibility; but the "queer falsity of the Bellegardes"

(AN, p. 35) at this juncture may be explained away by a close

 

 

46

examination of Newman himself. As Charles Thomas Samuels says,
"Because the Bellegardes don't have any clear reason for turning
Newman off, we are invited to search his character for the cause . . .
and the search bears fruit."12 What James himself, in his idea that
Newman is a "hero," does not acknowledge is how much of an irrita-
tion Newman must be to the Bellegardes, and how thoroughly mutual

the antimony between the Europeans and himself actually is. For-
tunately, though, there is ample evidence in the novel to explain

the motives of the Bellegardes, even if there is little recognition
of it in James's preface.

The evidence points principally to the intransigence of
Newman's insensitivity to the Bellegardes themselves. Besides the
incident of the telegrams, which is a calculated assault on their
sensibilities, Newman affronts them in other ways which show the
stubborn obtuseness of his provincial pride and manners. He brags,

with all the galling smugness of the nouveau riche, that his "specialty

 

has been to make the largest possible fortune in the shortest possi-
ble time" (p. 132); his bland conceit, and his indifference to their
scale of social values, shows in his insistence that he is, on his
own absolute scale, "the best" (p. 110). He takes for granted his
right to be intimate with Claire's family; his "tranquil unsus-
pectingness of the relativity of his own place in the social scale"
leads him, in a conversation with the Marquis, to indulge himself

in "an unlimited amount of irresponsible inquiry and conjecture"

(p. 166). He condescends to them by expressing the thought that he

finds Valentin (and, by extension, the rest of the family) "amusing"

47

(p. 129). This comes to a head at the engagement ball, when,
"stepping about like a terrier on his hind legs," Newman engages in
an arm-in-arm promenade with the Marquise that leaves him tasting
victory and her gagging on her pride (pp. 214, 218).

In short, Newman shows the Bellegardes the same lack of
appreciation and the same oblivious contempt which he resents them
for showing him. It is conceit, and not innocence, that keeps him
blind to his offenses and persuades him that everything is going
well. But Claire's family are not the only ones to whom Newman's
pride makes him blind; he fails in significant ways to take cogni-
zance of Claire herself, even though she does her painful best to
be lucid with him. Her speech and behavior, if attended to closely,
conveys a sense that her renunciation of Newman is not owing entirely
to the tyranny of her family; it is partly her own decision as well--
a decision made in deep psychic anguish whose hints Newman does not
catch until it is too late.

Oscar Cargill says that "James's greatest failure in the

book [The American] is not to acquaint the reader thoroughly with the

 

heroine."13 While it is true that in the end Claire remains somewhat
enigmatic, her motives unclear, she nevertheless drops sufficient
hints to apprise even the most insensitive listener of the fact

that she is deeply troubled, and that she regards Newman's blind
worship as a burden rather than a boon. From the inception of their
courtship, Claire recognizes, while Newman himself does not, that

he has formed an idea of her that takes little cognizance of her true

nature. She is constantly protesting her weakness as he trumpets

48

her strengths, claiming fear where he claims courage, and expressing
her need for security and peace as he drags her into open defiance
of her family's wishes.

Evidence of Claire's discomfort is everywhere. As Newman
leaves their first interview, James notes that she "looked with a
trouble air at her retreating guest" (p. 87); his proposal of marriage
is "something evidently painful to her," since it leaves "her face as
solemn as a tragic mask" (p. 116). When Newman tells her to take
comfort in the thought "that we love each other," she protests that
she "should be very glad to think of nothing . . . I'm cold, I'm old,
I'm a coward" (p. 180). She tells Newman, "You have some false ideas
about me” (p. 181), and laments that he insists on seeing in her a
creature more ideal than herself: "your mark is too high. I am
not all that you suppose. I am a much smaller affair" (p. 206); she
feels the need to remind him, in the end, that she is "not a
heavenly body" (p. 208).

Newman ignores these protests, passing them off as anything
but the fear of marriage which they appear, in the end, to betray;
instead, he reads in her what he wants, regardless of the text that
is opened before him. Claire is the centerpiece of his compensatory
fantasy, and he has projected all his needs, all his hunger for
vindication, onto her frail and trembling figure. He cannot under-
stand "why the liberal devotion he meant to express should be so
disagreeable" (p. 117), and, finding it incomprehensible, dismisses
it as anomalous; neither does he notice her twice declining to

assent to his spoken assumption that she loves him (pp. 180, 181).

49

Newman, like Mrs. Tristram, is building a vision out of materials of
which he takes insufficient cognizance; what she does to gratify

her imagination, he does to answer the tyranny of his vindictive
needs. Newman's mighty project, like his romantic sponsor's, is a
rock resting on a fairy's wing, tottering for a fall--a hazard which
Claire, the spirit thus burdened, tries to apprise him of, to no
avail.

Thus Claire's announcement that she is "giving him up" should
not come to Newman as a total surprise, but it does; he feels that
the family has "done something" to her, has "persuaded" her somehow
to break with him (pp. 242, 244). He cannot believe that the possi-
bility of her defection has been present all along, since his pride
prevented him from hearing her caveats. But Claire herself, though
she admits she is "obeying" her mother, speaks in terms not incon-
sistent with the fears and predelictions she has expressed before
this turn of events; her last request to him is to "let me go in
peace"--a peace which is "death," but which nevertheless resembles
her earlier wish “not to think at all; only to shut my eyes and give
myself up" (pp. 243, 180).

Newman has been cheated again--first of some money, and now
of a wife. His wounded ego rages, effacing the reality of Claire's
anguish in his own pain as he had once effaced it in his pleasure:
“To lose Madame de Cintré after he had taken such jubilant and tri-
umphant possession of her was as great an affront to his pride as it
was an injury to his happiness" (p. 250). The loss of Claire is a

blow to Newman's pride for two reasons: first, because he faces the

50

humiliating prospect of returning to America ppp§_the European wife
who was to be his vindication, and whose conquest he has already
broadcast; and second, because the Bellegardes, in snatching Claire
away from him, have summarily closed the door in his face and irre-
vocably consigned him to the status of a non-person in their social
circle. Far more than denying Newman a wife, they are insulting him,
belittling him. "A man can't be used in this fashion," he tells them,
incredulously (p. 246); he feels that he has been "snubbed and
patronized and satirized," and is "filled with a sorer sense of
wrong than he had ever known, or than he had supposed it possible
that he should know" (p. 281).

Newman's response to this situation parallels his reaction
to his experience of betrayal, that "injury" which precipitated his
voyage to Europe: his mind turns to revenge, his need for vindica-
tion now compounded and intensified. "I have been cruelly injured,"
he tells Mrs. Bread. "They have hurt me and I want to hurt them";
he wants, he says, to make the Marquis "feel" him. Providentially,
the dying Valentin has hinted at a family secret which, if discovered
by Newman, would empower him to do just that; and when Mrs. Bread
places the scandalous proof in his possession, his vindication is
at hand. He delights in the thought that the Marquise is "scared,"
and, after confronting the Marquis himself with the fact that he
knows the secret, Newman meditates that he "ought to begin to be
satisfied now!" (pp. 295, 317, 335).

Why, then, with the damning note in hand, does Newman not

execute his threat to avenge himself? Quite simply put, he discovers

 

 

51

the "disagreeableness" to himself of acting in such a manner. It
is one thing to conceive of one's revenge, to hold it close and
nurse it, and still another to put that threat into action; the
prospective ugliness of raising a public scandal, of being himself
an agent of discord and destruction in human relations, strikes him
as inconsistent with his ideal of himself and of his bracing good
conscience. As in his earlier opportunity for revenge, he is over-
taken first by a moral nausea, and then by a pervasive sense of
his own superiority to those who have wronged him; the Bellegardes
have blackened themselves with their treachery, but Newman sees
himself as remaining unsullied, serenely but sadly above them.

Yet Newman is able to satisfy his need for vindication, in
a way. He believes in fact that it is taking place, that the threat
which he holds over the Bellegardes is quite adequate to provoke
their terror, without him going to the odious extreme of actually
making good on it. Newman thus finds himself "nursing his thunder-
bolt" and imagining with great pleasure the supposed terror of the
Bellegardes: "He seemed to be holding it aloft in the rumbling,
vaguely-flashing air, directly over the heads of his victims, and he
fancied he could see their pale, upturned faces" (p. 311); he
experiences "a hearty hope that the Bellegardes were enjoying their
suspense as to what he would do yet" (p. 353). It is the perfect
revenge, since it allows Newman the satisfaction of imagining his
antagonists' discomfort, yet requires him to do nothing that he

would find "disagreeable." The supposition that "they were frightened,"

52

he tells Mrs. Tristram, has given him "all the vengeance I want"
(p. 360).

This is hardly the Christopher Newman which Richard Poirier
describes as one who "proves his superiority" to the Bellegardes and
provides the reader with an "exalted view of the possibilities of
human conduct";14 neither is it the hero, observed by J. A. Ward,
who responds to his betrayal by developing "a higher sense of ethi-
cal values," and who acts in the end with "a fineness of response
that counterbalances the anguish of humiliation and loss";15 nor
is the Christopher Newman we see, gleefully imagining the terror of
his enemies, a person who "triumphs through renunciation" to achieve

a "victory" of "moral transcendence."16

If one grants, on the
evidence presented here, that I have indeed been talking about the

protagonist of The American, where does one find the Christopher

 

Newman described by those cited in this paragraph?

There is no enigma here if one agrees that the reader sees
both an actual and a symbolic Newman--one, revealed to us through
the analytical skills of the narrator, a fully realized individual,
with personal conflicts and motives; and the other typically heroic,
deduced from the surrounding rhetorical materials of plot, setting,
imagery, and supporting players. This second Christopher Newman is
the one James sees most clearly in his preface to the novel, so it
is not surprising that many have followed his lead; but the book con-
tains both versions. Newman is both the Young Man from the Provinces

and the Ugly American.

53

This schizophrenic feature is not helped by the ending, in
which James forgoes internal analysis of Newman's character, and
leaves only his enigmatic actions as a clue to whether he has, after
all,achievedsome sort of moral recognition. In the final scene,
Newman burns the incriminating note, an act which cuts off the
possibility of his acting on his threat; as it burns, Mrs. Tristram
suggests to him that the Bellegardes had not been as terrified as
he had imagined, but rather had counted on his "good nature" to
restrain him from taking the full measure of his revenge. She
tells Newman, "you probably did not make them so very uncomfortable

. . they believed, after all, you would never really come to the
point . . . You see they were right" (p. 360). James shows
Newman's response in a terse, one-sentence concluding paragraph:
“Newman turned instinctively to see if the little paper was in fact
consumed; but there was nothing left of it.“

Who is making this backward glance--the Young Man from the
Provinces, or the vengeful, Ugly American? It is difficult to tell
on the basis of the narration itself. William Stafford describes
this final action simply as a formal gesture, an ”antithetical"
motion which fulfills the "pattern of reversal" characteristic of
Newman's behavior throughout the novel;17 Floyd Watkins, viewing
the situation as more problematical, objects that Newman's final
action violates the "beneficent" quality he has displayed throughout
the rest of the work, and says that the reader "must extend his
imagination to a point beyond the actual ending . . . and realize

there is still another change in Newman, even though it is not

54

described."18 These interpretations and others like them embrace
the idea that Newman is heroic, and that his final action must be
explained either as a frustration or a completion of form; but it
cannot be both.

If, however, it is seen as the gesture of the actual
Christopher Newman, still smarting from his betrayal by the Belle-
gardes but believing that his threat alone is enough to terrify
them, then this action makes unambiguous sense. The final "instinct"
to resurrect the burning note shows Newman's abiding need to avenge
himself on the Bellegardes. Until Mrs. Tristram's comment that his
enemies had relied on his "good nature" to spare them, Newman is
convinced that he has had his vindication, that he still is having it,
in their terror of his expressed threat. However, Mrs. Tristram's
comment reveals to Newman that he has not made the Bellegardes
"feel" him after all, and that he has been their dupe to the end;
thus his backward glance may be read as his impulse, acted on too
late, to take up once again the sword of his vindication.

Thus the final scene reveals the actual Newman to be a
character who outstrips and betrays the formal design through which
he is to be revealed. Both in James's conception and in his exe-

cution, the entire raison d'etre of the novel is to show Newman's

 

moral triumph through adversity; but he remains stubbornly unre-
generate in the end, hostile to the rhetoric which argues for his
apotheosis. The equivocal tone of the concluding scene, in which

analysis of Newman's internal reflection is suspended, seems to

55

hint at James's suspicion that something is amiss with his Young
Man from the Provinces, that the hero has failed to pass his test.
So Newman concludes his romantic adventure with the person
who proposed it in the first p1ace--Mrs. Tristram. As I have indi-
cated, it is she who is the architect of Newman's fate, who acts as
an accomplice in James's design of drawing Newman into his snare
with the Bellegardes; and it is to some degree she who is responsible
for the failure of the novel to cohere as well, since it is her
carelessness with the material of Newman's and Claire's humanity
that precipitates the double disaster of the hero's retreat to
America and the heroine's retreat to a convent. In a sense, it is
Mrs. Tristram who creates the "treacherous vehicle" that undoes the
novel's good intention; she proposes to Newman an idealized version
of himself, and of Claire, that he cannot achieve and she cannot
accept. Mrs. Tristram's attempted beauty is her realized brutality.
Thus Mrs. Tristram resembles the "deputized" or "delegated"
character of later novels; as with those other, more fully realized
surrogates, Mrs. Tristram's aesthetic appetites, her necessities
of imagination, precipitate the romantic action of the novel, and
her sensibility either generates or reinforces the romantic assess-
ment of the characters' actions. As do later works, The American
depends for its aesthetic richness on the overreaching imaginations
of its own characters; in her misreading of, or indifference to, the
human actuality of Newman and Claire, Mrs. Tristram is simply taking
on the mantle of "artist," sketching with a stroke, a suggestion,

a whispered detail a sense of a world full of possibilities both

56

"wonderful" and "curious," which strains against credence, and fails
with a descent as dizzying as the bold altitude of its flight of
fancy.

Yet it is her remark in the last scene of the novel, the
uncharacteristically lucid observation that Newman has been ultimately
used, which destroys the novel's sense of formal closure. The back-
ward glance she provokes upsets the motion towards denouement,
towards the careful effacement of the protagonist's abiding con-
flicts, which James so skillfully achieves in later works; contrary
to her function and to the function of the romantic impulse which
she embodies, Mrs. Tristram reopens Newman's psychic wounds rather
than allows them to mend. In the crucial final moment, Mrs. Tristram
speaks realistically when what is called for is romance.

The revised ending which James published in 1907 is a signi-
ficant indication of his later shift away from the strategies of
realistic presentation. In this version, Mrs. Tristram, true to her
function as the voice of romance, lets Newman keep his vision of
potent control. She does not voice the recognition that the Belle-
gardes have after all had him "pinned," that they have manipulated
him to the end; rather, she simply tells Newman that "I like you . . .
Just as you are"; "bending her head, she raised his hand and very
tenderly and beautifully kissed it."20 Mrs. Tristram's gesture here,
its effect on Newman and on the conclusion of the novel, is what one
would naturally expect from a partisan of romance--infinitely more
so than the devastating remark that she levels at the hero in the

original ending; and the same might be said for her final words, the

57

final words in fact of the revised ending, in which she expresses

her grief and sympathy for Newman's lost love: "Poor, poor Claire!"2]
Stafford decries the "neat, tidy sentimentality" of this

ending,22 but in fact the new conclusion is more complex than this.

In his later novels, which precede his revision of The American,

 

James explores both the formal advantages and the real but repressed
costs of sentimental and romantic modes of perception; works like

The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove dramatize the human price

 

 

at which beauty is bought, and at which psychic equilibrium is,
through sentimental and romantic self-conceptions, tentatively
achieved. This is the function of Mrs. Tristram's “sentimental"

gesture in the revised ending to The American; she has not changed

 

Newman, but she has allowed his need for vindication to be satisfied,
at least until the novel comes to a close. Like the authorial dele-
gate of the mature novels, Mrs. Tristram has learned the danger of
lucidity.

Thus the "neatness" of the revised ending is an expression
of James's recognition, arrived at in later novels, that the artist
must depend on illusion and evasion to keep fully realized characters
like Newman from spoiling his effect. Such characters have a ten-
dency to "unsquare" themselves, to break with form, since that form
is, like Mrs. Tristram's romantic conception, an ideal construct.
This ideality is an attribute of which Newman's own vindication
partakes as well; his revenge exists only in his imagination, and
the satisfaction it affords him can easily be destroyed by truth.

Thus Newman shares with Mrs. Tristram and with the novel itself the

58

desire for harmony which can only be answered by evasion and
repression. James's willingness to let these illusions stand, and
to let his delegates voice them with all the authority of the
novelist himself, is what marks the crucial difference between the

1877 and the 1907 versions of The American, and between the early

 

and the late novels in general.
But there is truth enough as well as illusion enough in

both versions of The American. The James of 1907 has not gone

 

soggily sentimental, but has merely heightened his romantic treat-

"23 that

ment in order to show more effectively the "rage for order
is intrinsic to the human consciousness as well as to the forms of
art. Mrs. Tristram is not as fully realized a character as later
romantic surrogates like Ralph Touchett and Lambert Strether, but
the impulses she represents are authentic. Her behavior towards
Newman in the revised ending answers his rage for order, his need
for peace; thus she solves by proxy (as do later delegates like
Merton Densher and Maggie Verver) the author's own problems of
form and content by allowing the protagonist to achieve at the
expense of truth an inner harmony which covers the novel's conclusion.
Yet, this would be shallow if there were not some hint that
this harmony is a qualified one; it takes too much effort, and
affronts too many truths, to represent a total integration of
content and form, of experience and desire. Accordingly, Mrs.
Tristram's final allusion is to one of form's sacrificial victims.

Her final reference to Claire hints at the hidden cost both of her

vision and of Newman's; Claire is a casualty of both, and Mrs.

59

Tristram's sentimental ejaculation approaches this truth without
actually facing it. It is as close as she, or Newman, dare come to
a recognition of what their romance has cost others; thus the
revised ending, far from being sweetly sentimental, imitates the
conclusions of James's great novels, appearing placid only to hide

a darker truth.

NOTES

1The Conquest of London: 1870-1881, Vol. II Of Henry James
(New York: Discus, 1978), p. 247.

 

 

2The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1934), p. 344. Hereafter cited in the text as AN,

 

3Introduction, The Princess Casamassima, by Henry James (New
York: MacMillan and Company,'l948); rpt. in The Liberal Imagination
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976), p. 63.

 

4Trilling, p. 62.

5Henry James, The American, ed. Joseph Warren Beach (New York:
Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston, 1949), p. 3. All references are to this
edition, which follows the text of 1877, unless otherwise indicated.

 

6Charles Thomas Samuels, The Ambiguity of Henry James (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 197)), p. 46.

 

7The Comic Sense of Henry James (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1960), p. 12.

 

81h The Imagination of Disaster: Evil in the Fiction of
Henry James (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961).

 

 

9"The Gospel According to Christopher Newman," Studies in
American Fiction, 3 (1975), 86-87.

 

10Wilson, 36.

11"A Flaw in The American," College Lapguage Association
Journal, 9 (1968), 249-50.

12Samuels, p. 47.

 

13The Novels of Henry James (New York: MacMillan and Company.
1961), p. 51. ‘

14Poirier, p. 94.
15Ward, p. 43.

16George Knox, "Romance and Fable in Henry James's INg_
American," nglia, 83 (1965), 312, 320.

60

61

17"The Ending of James's The American: A Defense of the
Early Version," Nineteenth Century Fiction, 18 (1963), 88.

 

 

18"Christopher Newman's Final Instinct," Nineteenth Century
Fiction, 12 (1957), 88.

 

'9Zietiow, 253.

20Henry James, The American, Volume II of The Novels and
Tales of Henry James (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907),
p. 539. Cited7hereafter as N1,

 

 

Z'Ny, p. 540.
22Stafford, 89.
23This is Austin Warren's phrase, from the title of his book

Rage for Order (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959).
Cited in Chapter VI of this study.

 

 

CHAPTER III

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

In Chapter 19 of The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer and

 

Madame Merle have a brief conversation which will serve as the
keynote for our discussion of this novel. "My clothes," Isabel
complains, "express the dress-maker, but they don't express me."
To this, Madame Merle slyly replies: "Should you prefer to go without
them?"1 Brief as this exchange is, it reveals something of consequence
which Madame Merle understands but Isabel does not. That something
is the necessity, for practical purposes, of expressing oneself to
others through a code or a system of conventions which is a symbolic
extension but a literal concealment of one's actual self. Clothing--
or any symbolic code--is a troping of the very thing it proposes to
express; it necessarily exaggerates some features and effaces others,
with the purpose of producing an identifiable and accessible public
phenomenon. Regardless of one's actual identity, the "figuring forth"
of the self is determined by the givens of the available conventions--
be they sartorial or linguistic--and by the skill and vision of
those whose province it is to ply the medium: the dressmaker, the
painter, the biographer.

One has now a glimmering sense of Isabel's motive in her
refusals of Goodwood's and Warburton's proposals of marriage.
Warburton's suit in particular is an attractive one, but both

62

 

 

63

express their authors rather than Isabel; both, in Isabel's mind,
would require submergence of her identity in theirs, and would pre-
clude her being the author of her own destiny, of having "an orbit
of her own" (p. 95). I shall return to this issue for further
discussion; but it seems essential first to consider whether Isabel
does not, in fact, also reject the suit of her creator, Henry James,
who proposes to make of her the portrait of "a young woman affronting
her destiny."2
The suggestion that a character might be capable of trans-
gression against his creator is not at all as outrageous as it
might seem at first glance. E. M. Forster has discussed this
phenomenon at some length, and suggested that it is a problem endemic
to the novel form. "The characters arrive when evoked," Forster
says, "but full of the spirit of mutiny. For they have numerous
parallels with people like ourselves, they try to live their own
lives and are consequently engaged in treason against the main scheme
of the book."3 This is precisely the point served by my analysis of
Christopher Newman, the problematical hero of The American; though
James intended him as a romantic hero, capable of moral growth and
insight, Newman proved particularly resistant to this plan, and
remained largely unimproved and uninstructed by what should have been
an elevating and enlightening experience. I shall argue that Isabel
Archer is similarly at odds with her role in The Portrait of a Lady;
she, like Newman, is endowed with a nature too complete, too humanly
complex, to fulfill the representative and aesthetic functions James

requires of her. The nature of James's problem in both these novels,

64

and with both these protagonists, may best be expressed by returning
to the clothing metaphor: such characters insist on expressing
themselves rather than the dress-maker, who then has the choice of
either allowing them to spoil his effect or sewing exclusively for
mannequins.

James's description of his method in The Portrait is reveal-

 

ing in the context of this metaphor. Though the image he uses is that
of house-building rather than dress-making, his "organizing an ado"
about Isabel has nevertheless the character of erecting an artifice
about her so that she might be displayed to the reader; this “house,"
the novel itself, "had to be put up around my young woman while she
stood there in perfect isolation" (AN, p. 48). But, though James
places Isabel at the center of this architectural enterprise, the
resulting edifice is, like Warburton's and Goodwood's proposals, made
to express and gratify the author more than his subject. His is the
process of "logical accretion" by which "the mere slim shade of an
intelligent but presumptuous girl" becomes "endowed with the high
attributes of a subject" (AN, p. 48).

There is, of course, nothing extraordinary in this; after all,
it is the author's province to fashion a "subject" and, ultimately, a
novel out of the raw materials of his experience and his imagination.
But in The Portrait this activity is not exclusively the author's;
it is mirrored in many of the characters who surround his heroine.
Ralph and his mother discuss at length the question of "doing" some-
thing with Isabel (pp. 41-42), just as Madame Merle and Osmond con-

spire, with quite different ends in sight, to script her destiny;

65

like the suitors Warburton and Goodwood, all these persons are
engaged in the question of what might be "done" with Isabel, and

all are guilty to some extent of misreading her character. In this
context, it seems that one is invited to judge whether the

"organized ado" which the author supplies Isabel is any more con-
genial to her nature than those of his created rivals; for in the end
James's activity is not so dissimilar from those of his characters.
All are trying to fashion a "part" for Isabel which may or may not

be congruent with her nature.

I have alluded to the fact that in The Portrait conscious-

 

nesses other than the author's are concerned with the questions of
"what to do" with Isabel; but, primarily and precisely, in what form
does James himself attempt to represent her to the reader? His pur-
pose in this respect is dual: he wants to display his "vivid indi-
vidual" for the reader in all her internal complexities; yet at the
same time he wants to transform this "sense of a single character"
(AN, p. 42) into the “subject" of a novel. There is a division

of concerns here--who Isabel j§_as distinguished from what might be
gpp§_with her--which is mirrored in the division of James's treatment
of his subject into two narrative strands. First, he supplies direct
psychological analysis of Isabel, which is devoted purely to the
exposition of her inner thoughts, desires, and conflicts and is
largely non-judgmental; and second, he supplies evaluative rhetoric--
the "house" with which he spoke of surrounding Isabel--consisting of
metaphors, allusions, plot devices, and direct appeals to the reader.

The first strand establishes Isabel's credibility as a "realistic"

66

character, a fully imagined human being whose behavior invites
analysis and understanding in real psychological terms, and is
mainly presentational; the second strand determines Isabel's repre-
sentative and aesthetic functions, and is mainly interpretive,
designed to elicit sympathy and admiration for the protagonist.

Ora Segal usefully distinguishes between these representa-
tional and evaluative functions by saying there are two attitudes

towards Isabel in the prose of The Portrait; he perceives an

 

"authorial narrator" whose "tone is somewhat more critical and less
enthusiastic“ than that of the second, the "observer" (an attitude
embodied in the adoring Ralph Touchett but not confined to that
character's observations), who actively takes up the task of
sympathetic apology.4 Segal notes that the "authorial narrator"
also is "tenderly appreciative of the heroine's basically fine
nature," but this is so only in a passive way; the exposition of
Isabel's inner life merely effaces those details that might
encourage a premature criticism of Isabel. At least in the
beginning, the reader is spared those particulars of her behavior
"such as a biographer interested in perserving the dignity of his
heroine must shrink from specifying" (p. 47). The questions which
Segal leaves unresolved, however, are whether both of these per-
spectives describe the same Isabel, and if not, whether the two
Isabels they describe are reconcilable to each other. I shall
argue that the two perspectives produce views which cannot be
reconciled, and that the presentation of Isabel by what Segal calls

the "authorial narrator" is in its particulars and its implications

67

corrosive to the vision of her that the evaluative rhetoric
urges.
To understand how this is so, and what significance it

has for The Portrait of a Lady as a whole, first it will be neces-

 

sary to characterize the direction in which the evaluative rhetoric

guides the reader. As in The American, James in The Portrait gives

 

 

his protagonist a name which evokes immediate associations with
Romance and mythic prototypes. As Oscar Cargill has suggested,5
the name "Archer" suggests Isabel's affinities with Artemis, goddess
of the hunt; as the patroness of "unmarried girls and of chastity,"6
and as sister of Apollo, the god of fine arts and poetry, Artemis is
the Classical model to which Isabel's distaste for marriage and
bookish predelictions allude. This implication is strengthened
further by the way in which James describes the effects of Isabel's
literary pursuits: "Her reputation for reading a great deal hung
about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic" (p. 33).
Other elevating rhetoric attends her, such as the images of flight
which Ralph's vision conjures (p. 318) and the scene late in the
novel in which she is apotheosized as the Madonna herself (p. 433).
In sum, the reader is invited to understand Isabel as strange,
special, and of a finer grain than the rest of the vulgar world.
Her afflictions derive from her own exceptional qualities.

That James intended this view unironically there can be no
doubt; in his notebooks, he characterizes Isabel's differences with

Osmond as "the open opposition of a noble character and a narrow one";

she is a "poor girl, who has dreamed of freedom and nobleness" and

68

"finds herself in reality ground in the very mill of the conventional."7

To note, as Segal does, that Ralph Touchett ultimately becomes the
novel's main spokesperson for this view does not significantly
complicate the impression one receives of Isabel; but the fact,
revealed in the authorial analysis, that Isabel shares in this
exalted view of herself is a crucial and troublesome issue, and one
which I shall shortly address.

The Portrait has in common with The American a structural

 

 

motif which reveals further the ennobling context in which Isabel is
to be seen. Her history reiterates the theme, present in INg_
American, of the innocent person who, though disillusioned and
wronged, demonstrates nobility and consistency of moral resolve in
the face of an adverse, even consuming, fate. Isabel, like Newman,
is forced by circumstance to renounce a thwarted personal ambition
and to find comfort and justification in an admitted defeat. More
to the point, however, Isabel and Newman both follow the path of
the Grail seekers of Romance, whose quest for the transcendent
artifact leads them through purifying adversity to ultimate union
with the sublime. This is in fact the pattern defined by the over—
arching sequence of events in both novels, from their respective
innocents' voyage forth into the Otherworld (Europe) through their
dispiriting travails and reflective idylls (Isabel retreats to the
flowered walls of Gardencourt, Newman to America), to their return
for their final renunciatory "triumphs." The Grail Quest motif is
evoked with special intensity in the case of Isabel; her rejection

of the "vulgar" and "conventional," her celibate predelictions, and

69

her romanticization of suffering all underscore the symbolic affinity
of her own ordeal with the spiritual and ascetic rigors endured by
Perceval and similar heroes of Romance.

Richard Chase has observed James's "conscious assimilation

"8

of romance into the novelistic substance of The Portrait, noting

 

that Isabel is engaged in a "romance of the self“ which "requires
that self-fulfillment shall take place only at a high level of
abstraction."9 Correctly, Chase says that the aura of romance is
invoked by Isabel's exalted sense of her own destiny; but he speaks
of James's direct authorial evocation of romance as if it were
superadded, a metaphorical "enrichment" of the novel which, like
some aesthetic vitamin, fortifies the grain of the work without dis-
turbing its essential form. He either neglects the evaluative
rhetoric of the work (apart from those fortifying metaphors) or
considers them as direct extensions of Isabel's consciousness, which
is, he says, "to a considerable extent our point of view as we read.
Isabel tends to see things as a romancer does, whereas the author
sees things with the firmer, more comprehensive, and more dis-
illusioned vision of the novelist."10
As Paul Smyth has observed in his own excellent dissertation
on James, Chase cannot be correct in so limiting James's involvement

11

in the romantic components of his tale; for, James's claim of

having made Isabel the "centre" of his novel notwithstanding, she is
revealed to the reader yjp_the intercession of a largely omniscient

12

narrator, whose consciousness guides both the romantic and the

novelistic impulses of the work. The "enrichment" Chase speaks of

70

is achieved through a total synthesis of the author's literary
powers, from the immediate context of metaphor and allusion to the
overarching form of the novel's architecture.

As my discussion of Segal has established, there are indeed

two voices, two "treatments" of Isabel in The Portrait; but both

 

ultimately belong to James. Their relation is not hierarchical,

as Chase and others imply, but dialectical; the "objective"

authorial voice is not given credence at the expense of the "romantic"
assessment (which Isabel as a character shares in, but for which she
is hardly the novel's exclusive agent). Rather, both voices are
endowed with equal strength and authority, and their task is to
negotiate a final balance, a harmonization, of the impulses they
represent.

The ending of the novel represents, of course, the conclusion
of this dialectical process; and if the novel is to be seen as having
any formal coherence, a harmonization of these opposing terms must be
achieved. Critics interested in demonstrating the total integrity

of The Portrait have employed a number of paradigms to bring the

 

novel whole, ranging from the Biblical prototype of the Fortunate
Fall to the more recent, but structurally similar, Novel of Education
as practiced by Jane Austen in such works as EEEE: Whether treating
Isabel's downfall as a fall from grace or from mere innocence, these
paradigms resolve the tensions between the real and the romanticized
views of Isabel by justifying her at the novel's conclusion.
Chastened by the recognition either of her sin or of her folly,

Isabel is glimpsed finally in a state of moral ascendancy, with

 

“I

 

 

71

powers of mature discrimination and inner fortitude. Philip Rahv,
speaking of the novel's conclusion, describes Isabel's case as
involving "a principle of growth which is not to be completely
grasped until she has assumed her final shape";13 Lyall Powers has
asserted that "the career of Isabel Archer has the completeness of

form of the familiar pattern of redemption, of the fortunate fall,"M

an idea he shares with Dorothea Krook15

and Dorothy Van Ghent, who
claims that Isabel finds "in the ruin where Pansy has been left . . .
a crevice in which to grow straightly and freshly," "a fertilising,
civilizing relationship between consciousness and circumstance."16
Other noteworthy critics, particularly R. P. Blackmur and Richard
Poirier, have voiced more complicated, but essentially similar
formulations of the work, but they all have in common the same
purpose: to achieve an interpretation in which Isabel's character is
finally transformed and elevated to a condition consistent with the
glorifying rhetoric that has been lavished on her (perhaps unduly)
throughout the progress of her history.

Given the patterns of evaluation outlined above, it seems
apparent that to suggest such an interpretation was James's con-
scious intent; but, as Maxwell Geismar notes, it is characteristic
of James "to project a series of figures, situations, and relations
which are often directly opposed to, in flat contradiction to, the

t."]7 Isabel Archer, in her fully

conscious purposes of his craf
realized and complex humanity, is just one such contradictory

projection. As with Christopher Newman in The American, the analysis

 

of her character, explicit in the narrator's forays into the depths

72

of her consciousness and implicit in her behavior, reveals a confused
and disturbed young woman for whom the question of growth and maturity,
even at the novel's conclusion, remains problematical. Again, as in

The American, the issue of the work's coherence centers on the princi-

 

pal character; one must settle the question of whether in that character
any positive change has occurred. In the context of the novel as a
whole, with the elevating rhetoric and redemptive structure of the

story as givens, this question takes another form: one must resolve
whether the evaluative material of the novel reflects a transformation
that has in fact occurred, or whether it provides an ironic counter-
point to the ongoing absence of such a change in the character. I

shall argue that in The Portrait of a Lady neither relationship holds,

 

and that both possibilities are effaced; but first it will be necessary
to focus on the pptppl_lsabel and suppress for a time the consideration
of the rhetoric in which she has been clothed.

The character of Isabel Archer is so richly endowed with the
vitality and complexity of "felt life" that she has attracted a long
list of critical suitors, each, like Warburton and Goodwood, with a
proposed "reading" of her to put forward. Nina Baym has aptly
summed up the tone of the criticism which focuses on Isabel's charac-
ter; it is, says Baym, "antagonistic towards her, stressing her self-
righteousness, ignorance, and conceit, or her sexual coldness,
inhibition, and general fear of life."18 Though many of these
critics have, I think, accurately perceived aspects of Isabel's
character, Baym is also correct in discerning their judgmental tone,

which has about it much of the resentment shown someone who is

73

discovered to be undeserving of the indulgence of a generous and
amiable benefactor. For them, James is indeed generous, if not
ironical, with his glorifying rhetoric, and his own commentary on
Isabel seems generally to have been dismissed as of secondary
importance in the furor over his heroine's psychological defects.
Joan Bobbitt, for example, interprets Isabel's "innocence”
and her embrace of suffering as masks for an intense moral conceit;19

the issue of Isabel's egoism is explored further by John Halperin in

his excellent study of The Portrait as a Victorian novel,20 and

 

J. M. Newton attacks James for "not identifying Isabel's ambitious

"21 There is in

imagination or idealism as the disease that it is.
the criticism alluded to by Baym an alternate strategy for demythi-
fying Isabel; adherents of this second approach attack Isabel for her
fear of sexuality rather than for her pumped-up ego. Stephen Reid
attributes her "moral scrupulousness" to her "fear of the Phallic
man," Caspar Goodwood;22 William Bysshe Stein sees her as a character
whose emblematic impulse is "her refusal to acknowledge her own
sexuality";23 and Seymour Kleinberg describes her "failure" to
renounce her bloodless aestheticism in favor of the possibility of
"sexually viable relationships."24
All these views are useful and accurate to some degree, and
one is thankful for them; but in many cases the psychic dissection
proceeds to such extremes that it becomes difficult to return Isabel,
in her integral fullness as an imagined human being, to the context

of the novel from which she has been removed. In the end, one must

recognize that it is not the apparatus of psychological analysis

74

itself that makes these critiques seem blunt and insensitive, but
the tone and emphasis with which that apparatus is applied. One
may profit by their insights, even cite them for support (as I
shall do occasionally in my own treatment of Isabel), while question-
ing the efficacy of their emphasis.

As with my treatment of Christopher Newman, I shall begin
my analysis of Isabel by identifying an incident early in the novel
which is a germinal model for her behavior throughout the course of
her history. James, speaking of Isabel's childhood, tells of an
establishment across the street from Isabel's grandmother's, "a
primary school for children of both sexes" (p. 23). Isabel, "having
spent a single day in it . . . had expressed a great disgust with
the place, and had been allowed to stay home." James's Sparing use
of details in this scene begs explanation of the vehemence he attri-
butes to Isabel's distaste for the place; and through those details
which James provides one sees in Isabel's retreat the germinal form
of her later prejudices and predelictions. Because the school is
coeducational, there is the threat of intimacy with what Isabel will
later characterize as "coarse-minded personEs] of another sex" (p. 50);
and the sound of "childish voices repeating the multiplication table“
is rife with associations later abhorrent to Isabel. "Childish," as
distinguished from "childlike," has the connotation of immaturity,
triviality, and dependence; and the methods of rote learning and uni-
son recitation can hardly be appealing to a child, who like Isabel,
has had both her imagination and her pride deeply indulged. In total,

the scene at the Dutch House evokes the commonness, conformity,

75

dullness, and threat of male domination which Isabel later experi-
ences as part of her abhorrence of the “conventional."

And yet, in her escape from this mean environment, Isabel
feels not only the "elation of liberty," but the ”pain of exclusion"
as well. The voices that emanate from the school and reach Isabel
in the solitary darkness of her aunt's study are, however vulgar,
the sounds of life, the hum of society; and for one who, as James
says, "carried within herself a great fund of life” (p. 33), the
separation from others, and from opportunity, represents a basic
denial of self. This paradox is brought to full flower as Isabel
becomes older, and inescapably torn between her conviction that the
world is too base to be dabbled in, and her crying need to dabble,
to "find some happy work to one's hand" (p. 49).

Thus James provides in emblematic form the pattern of beha-
vior which will rule Isabel throughout the novel: the deepening
isolation of self, the retreat from real society and real males;
the rejection of authority, particularly in an instructive role; and,
simultaneously, the repressed longing for participation in the very
situations from which she has separated herself. This would be
paradoxical were it not for the fact that these opposite impulses
are, simply, expressive of contradictory needs of Isabel's pride,
which on one hand tells her that she is special and apart, and on
the other hand desires the opportunity to gain love and approbation,
which must be sought in the very quarter to which she is exceptional.

Isabel may believe herself to be perfect (or at the very least

76

perfectible); but, as James observes, the "desire to think well of
herself needed to be supported by proof" (p. 62).

But, like most proud people, Isabel is able to repress her
sense of an objective less by converting it into a perceived gain
which enhances her image of herself, so long as those repressed needs
are kept in abeyance. By the time the action of the novel begins,
her isolation and loneliness have been converted into personal
imperatives of independence and freedom, and her uncorrected self-
education has become, to her own mind, the progress of her native
instinct towards a realization of the good and the beautiful. These
ideals of self-determination and self-correction are held to with
a vehemence sufficient to stifle the urgings of her repressed needs;
and on the underside of these personal affirmations is the debase-
ment, in her own mind, of those needs which she has not been able to
countenance. The rejected elements of her own experience grow uglier,
even as her gratified claims for self-determination are elevated to
personal glories. What she spurns, she derogates, and her initial
pain of separation is eventually ameliorated by her compulsive
belief in the inferiority and inefficacy of that which she has given
up.

But these derogated needs are not erased; they are only
submerged, and she must constantly be on guard against them. This
need for perpetual vigilance leads to a suspicion of, and a contempt
for, any inner impulses that might threaten her resolve or her
control; she regards emotions as "profane," and deeply resents what

she perceives as attempts by others, particularly Goodwood, to

77

extort from her any sense of emotional obligation. She fears more
than anything else the disordering sensation of guilt which comes
from "inflicting a sensible injury upon another person”; the mere
possibility of such an "error in feeling" on her part "caused her

at moments to hold her breath" (p. 48). This strategy of repression
leads Isabel to the edge of further self-contradiction: she must at
once be supremely sensitive to the feelings of others, but allow no
untoward emotions of her own to come to the surface; to remain true
to her self-image, which embraces liberty and abhors liability, she
must simultaneously acknowledge and deflect the emotional demands

of others.

But Isabel has a peculiar way of regarding experience which
keeps many of these contradictions at bay. The reading she does in
her grandmother's study represents an activity in which there is at
least a provisional congruence of Isabel's divergent impulses. The
experience and knowledge Isabel gains from books has the illusory
feel of human intercourse, but represents experience refined and
idealized, free of the discordant notes that are sounded when real
life, with its "conventional" brutalization of the self, is directly
and fully encountered. Isabel arrives at an intellectual appreciation
of the significance of feelings in one's life, but her understanding
is one which is aesthetically ordered and regulated; what she sees
is not the depth of true feeling, but what she calls "the natural
and reasonable emotions of life" (p. 106). When she tells Warburton
she cannot be happy if she is separated from "what most people know

and suffer" (p. 123), she is not referring to the disordering

 

78

afflictions of authentic grief, but to something more akin to the
"disagreeable," which her reading has told her "was often a source
of interest, and even of instruction" (p. 31). By so distancing and
abstracting the turmoil of emotion, Isabel's acquaintance with
literature provides her with an easing of her conflicts; it responds
to her repressed needs for contact with others and for participation
in a social sphere--both of which are deeply desired, but too much
of a threat to her precious "liberty" actually to be pursued. Like
other readers, Isabel is instead able to enter an alternate society,
an inner landscape whose atmosphere is purged of unwanted elements;
in these surroundings she has become mistress of all she surveys,
and other real human beings, like Caspar Goodwood or Aunt Lydia,

are instinctively regarded as "intruders" (p. 24).

The result is that Isabel, in denying her need for others
directly, has placed herself outside the necessary system of checks
and balances which keep the subjective valuation of one's personal
stock commensurate with its objective worth. Her view of herself
is as idealized as the world of her books; James acknowledges that
"Isabel was probably very liable to the sin of self-esteem," and
that "she often surveyed with complacency the field of her own
nature" (p. 47); furthermore, "Her nature had for her own imagina-
tion a certain garden-like quality . . . which made her feel that
introspection after all, was an exercise in the open air" (p. 50) . As
long as Isabel remains in her study with her books, she may con-
template her superior nature with total impunity; indeed, she has

been allowed to do so for so long that it has become a habit. But

79

Isabel's pride is restless; she longs to show others her "fineness
of organization," and Aunt Lydia's invitation to come to London
provides an opportunity to gratify this wish.

But there are other forces at work in Isabel's acceptance
of her aunt's offer. Like Christopher Newman's sudden urge to sail,
Isabel's desire to "start anew" reflects an instinctive movement
away from an intolerable conflict. Newman runs away to Europe
because he cannot stand the thought of being a fool unavenged;
similarly, Isabel is motivated by the desire to escape Caspar
Goodwood, a young man whose qualities she respects intellectually
but whose attentions towards herself are emotional torture. In both
these cases the experience is one of intense disjunction between the
image the character has of himself and the "reading" of him that is
implicit in his situation; the threat Newman perceives is the dis-
integration of his basic moral tenet of "fair play," while Isabel
recognizes in Goodwood a threat to her cherished "liberty" and
"independence." Both seek to negate these situations of conflict by
withdrawing themselves from the scene, and by seeking compensatory
triumphs on a new field of battle. Furthermore, both of them are
satisfied that their talents and discriminatory gifts, which have
failed them once already, will be sufficient to the challenges of
Europe.

That Newman has no imagination and Isabel a virtual overdose
of it appears to make no difference in the structure of their fates;
both are to be put "in a difficult position"--Newman by Mrs. Tristram,

and Isabel by her own ambition to "have the pleasure of being as

80

heroic as the occasion demanded" (p. 48). The whole of Isabel's
European experience, like the whole of Newman's, may be seen as an
attempt simultaneously to escape a threat to one's self-image and to
reinforce that image through the exercise of superior virtue. Finally,
both characters are brought full circle to a fresh confrontation

with their initial conflict; Newman faces once again the prospect of
his blunted vindication, and Isabel the smothering embrace of

Goodwood. The recapitulation of this conflict comprises the cli-
mactic moment in both these novels; but before discussing the con-

clusion to The Portrait of a Lady it will be necessary to examine

 

the specific form taken by Isabel's European dream of glory.

Isabel Archer's compensatory ambition is the opposite of
Newman's in that she seeks moral, and not empirical, enrichment.
Her thirst for experience has a moral object--that of "getting a
general impression of life," which is "necessary to prevent mistakes"
(p. 50). As we have seen, "mistake" for Isabel means anything that
makes one vulnerable to the tyranny of emotions or impairs one's
freedom to choose; thus her "general impression of life" has the
practical purpose of making her retreat from the emotional current
of existence more orderly and controllable; the knowledge thus
gained will prevent her own abandoned needs and the expressed needs
of others from fogging the clarity of her decision. Then, her self-
mastery assured, she will be securely and comfortably above the
vulgar stream of life, and will be in a position to undertake her
"difficult task" without psychic risk; she even muses that "she

might make the unfortunate condition of others an object of special

81

attention" (pp. 50-51)--a thought that, paradoxically, has pride,
and not charity, at its root.

This theme of bestowing oneself on the less fortunate is one
which runs throughout Isabel's relationships with Warburton and
Goodwood; and it is an essential filament in the web 6f complicity
in which she is eventually "caught" by Osmond and Madame Merle.

For reasons of pride it is impossible for Isabel to regard herself

as "unfortunate“; it has been her habit of self-contemplation, as

we have seen, to convert emotional and material deprivations (parti-
cularly those of a self-imposed nature) into perceived gains on a
more abstract level. Thus Isabel sees herself, in the "fineness"

of her organization, as being more fortunate than most, and her
ambition and pride seek expression in the demonstration and disburse-
ment of these gifts to an appreciative and hungry audience.

But it is necessary for this demonstration and disbursement
to emanate from a position of strength; that is, Isabel can tolerate
no implication that she needs others more than they need her, or that
what they have to offer her is in any way greater than that which
she herself has to give. This is particularly explicit in her
rejection of Warburton; she feels she would not suit him not because
her demands are too great, but because his are so small. "It is
not what I ask,“ she tells him; "it is what I can give" (p. 100).
This issue also impinges on her relationship with Goodwood; his
very "magnificence" commands of her "a certain feeling of respect
which she had never entertained for any one else" (p. 34). Isabel's

sense of Goodwood's grand self-completeness leaves little room for

82

the exercise of her own imagination on him; like Warburton, he seems
to her insufficiently needful, and insufficiently aware, of the very
moral energies which she regards as her prize dowry.

There is another factor, perhaps more ascendant in Goodwood's
case, which makes these lovers' suits so threatening to Isabel's
sense of her own superiority and self-mastery. We have already seen
how, in Isabel's mind (and, it would appear, in James's), terms like
"liberty" and "independence" are code words for the strategies of
detachment and avoidance by which she protects herself from emotional
upheaval. The banishment of these emotional needs from conscious
recognition is one of the principal achievements of her willed self-
idealization, and one of its most integral. She feels "fortunate"
and superior precisely because she has been able to keep her feelings
under control, and has so avoided the tyranny of "profane emotions";
it is the achievement of this control, of "ardent impulse, kept in
admirable order" (p. 163), which Isabel finds so "ideal" in Madame
Merle.

But the possibility of these subjugated urges rising to
demand satisfaction is one of Isabel's most constant fears.25 She
realizes that she has cooled her passions, but not extinguished them;
James writes that "the deepest thing" in her soul is "a belief that
if a certain light should dawn, she could give herself completely"
(p. 50). Though the spectre of total emotional surrender is "too
formidable to contemplate" (in the final chapter of the novel James
makes it seem like death itself), Isabel is nevertheless shown to

be aware of the insistent pressure of these repressed needs, and

83

of the tenuousness of her studied denial of them. Furthermore,
this awareness goads her compulsive thirst to purge herself of
these dangerous impulses, through the pursuit of abstract moral

and aesthetic ideals. As long as her mind registers the muffled
appeals of her denied emotions, Isabel will be painfully, fearfully
cognizant that the fortress of her self-image is not yet secure;
for this reason, men like Warburton and Goodwood are threatening

in direct proportion to their potential for sparking emotional
excitement in her, and their suits are regarded as "aggressions,"
"persecutions," "threats."

In Gilbert Osmond, one sees the negation of all that Isabel
finds unacceptable in Goodwood and Warburton. He is peculiarly sex-
less and passive as a lover; he has neither the industry of the
American nor the social attributes of the British lord; and, unlike
either previous suitor, Osmond has the advantage of ambiguous form.
He does not appear to Isabel to belong to any recognizable "type,"
and as a result his presence does not strike her as carrying with
it the force of a "system" which might draw her out of her own
orbit. Unlike the figural hardness and opacity of Goodwood and
Warburton, Osmond's ambiguous form is plastic, translucent; he is,
like his daughter, a "blank sheet" for Isabel's imagination to
play upon; or, more accurately, Osmond is like a mirror, upon whose
surface Isabel sees reflected the characteristics she associates
with her own idealized image of herself. He seems to her a person

of fine inner organization but meager external means, who has

84

nevertheless managed to reconcile a rich sensibility with material
poverty. There could be no more perfect parallel to Isabel's

sense of her own condition previous to her inheritance, as her
glowing estimate of him indicates. James records Isabel's thought
that she "had never met a person of so fine a grain" (p. 242), and
that she has "a considerable sympathy for the success with which

he had preserved his independence" (p. 246); when Osmond speaks
confessionally of his "studied, wilful renunciation" (p. 245), he
reflects back to Isabel the very strategy by which she has bargained
for personal moral glory--the rejection as vulgar of that which she
cannot have or which, for reasons of pride, she cannot accept. So
Isabel's admiration of Osmond is not of the real, total man, whose
"egoism," she later discovers, "lay hidden like a serpent in a bank
of flowers" (p. 396); rather, she worships a romanticized Osmond,
an image created by the interplay of her imagination and his
indeterminacy of type, and one which is much like the idealized
image Isabel has of herself. It is on the basis of this perception
that she forms a "fine theory" about Osmond, similar to her theory
about herself, in which she sees "his very poverties dressed out

as honours" (p. 321).

But even a prospective "soul mate" such as Osmond is not
able to declare his love for Isabel without setting off her
defensive alarms; though there is "an immense sweetness“ in his
announcement of love, "morally speaking, she retreated . . . as she
had retreated in the two or three cases we know of in which the

same words had been spoken" (pp. 286-87). For all the positive

85

values Osmond represents to Isabel, his declaration still resurrects
the same conflicts between her emotional impulses and her intellec-
tual censorship of her feelings: "What made her dread great was
precisely the force which, as it would seem, ought to have banished
all dread--the consciousness of what was in her own heart. It was
terrible to have to surrender herself to that" (p. 287). As with
Warburton's proposal, Isabel finds the promise of emotional
satisfaction in Osmond's announcement, and recognizes the appeal
to the heart that his words represent; but though she is able to
entertain the image of such a declaration in the abstract, in the
specific instance she pulls up short of acceding to its appeal:
“That which had happened was something that for a week past her
imagination had been going forward to meet; but here, when it came,
she stopped--her imagination halted" (p. 289).

What eventually determines Isabel's decision to marry
Osmond, then, is only partly in Osmond himself, and only partly in
her need to disburse herself of the "burden" of her inheritance.
In her decision there lurks the magnificent figure of Caspar
Goodwood, whose prospective presence provided a shadowy motive for
Isabel's initial acceptance of her Aunt Lydia's invitation to come
to Europe. From the beginning, Isabel makes crucial decisions on the
basis of her desire to escape this young man, who "had seemed to
range himself on the side of her destiny, to the the stubbornest
fact she knew" (pp. lO6-7). Isabel's marriage to Osmond in large
part is one such decision. It has become clear to Isabel that

Goodwood, a man of infinite persistence and hope, will not desist

86

in his "persecution" of her until she is removed, by marriage to
another, from eligibility for participation in the "destiny" which
his love for her represents.

But it is important to recognize what features of this
"destiny" Isabel is so determined to affront, and why it is neces-
sary for her to go to the length of marrying Osmond to escape it.
Goodwood, besides symbolizing the "phallic man,"26 represents
everything which Isabel has convinced herself she does not need--
love, security, money; to accept him on these grounds, or even to
admit the desirability of these attributes, would force Isabel to
abandon the mask of the independent and unfettered self she has
so laboriously created and maintained. Furthermore, Goodwood's
"magnificence" extends beyond these rejected values to include
crucial elements of Isabel's own value system--independence, industry,
conviction, conscientiousness. In short, Goodwood's proposal repre-
sents to Isabel a situation in which even her best qualities would
have a certain redundancy, serving only to magnify those aspects of
Goodwood which they mirror. In Goodwood's embrace, she is forced
to surrender the distinction of her own fine qualities, and at the
same time recognize the reality of the emotional needs she has
tried to deny in herself. The appeal of the “conventional" marriage
he proposes is one in which male strength interfaces with female
vulnerability; in this context, his sexual appeal is but a com-
ponent of the total lure of the "conventional" which he represents
for Isabel; to her, Goodwood is the embodiment of the entire com-

plex of economic, social, intellectual, moral, and reproductive

87

bondage which is anathema to the strong but which keeps the weak and
vulnerable singing in their chains. That Isabel believes herself
(or wants herself) to be strong but is in fact vulnerable is what
makes Goodwood so threatening.

Marriage with Osmond gives Isabel the security of a pro-
prietary form--the wedding band-~which makes Goodwood's claims
impossible to gratify, and thus shields her from the temptation to
surrender which he represents. Additionally, the facts of her own
newfound wealth and Osmond's poverty reveal a situation in which
her own relation to Goodwood is reversed; now the bonding of power
and ideals is centered in her, so that Osmond becomes the vulnerable
and dependent term of the equation. Her fortune gives her "impor-
tance, gave her even, to her own imagination, a certain ideal
beauty" (p. 207); she is now "magnificent" to Osmond, as Goodwood
had once been magnificent to her. She is Osmond's "providence";
she reflects that "she loved him--a good deal for what she found in
him, but a good deal also for what she brought him" (p. 393). Thus
marriage to Osmond offers Isabel the prospect of giving from a
position of strength while irrevocably voiding, yjp_the exclusivity
of the wedding bond, claims made upon her weakness by Caspar Goodwood.

Thus Isabel's marriage to Osmond is, like other of her
decisions we have discussed, both an escape from conflict and a
vindication of personal pride. Of course, Isabel wishes to be happy
in her marriage, but its salient feature is the refuge it provides
from those emotional appeals, always excited by Goodwood, which

are too formidable for her to entertain safely. Her willingness

88

to turn herself into a portrait in Osmond's gallery is a denial of
self and a virtual resignation from life, but it is part of a
strategy of proud renunciation which Isabel has pursued throughout
the course of her history. Her ensconcement in Osmond's dark web

is the final brush-stroke in a painting that is, after all, a
self-portrait; by becoming a work of art, she has finally removed
herself from the stream of vulgar and profane emotions, and
accomplished the detachment from reality that her aesthetic perspec-
tive in part worked to construct. It can be seen as early as her
first intimate conversation with Warburton that her habit of seeing
life as art was simply the imposition of a proprietary form with
which she shielded herself from the emotional demands of others;

and in her marriage to Osmond, that form becomes total. She hides
behind her identity as his wife, using that mask to deflect the
appeals of Goodwood, Warburton, and even Ralph; in urging her to
leave Osmond's suffocating house and re-enter the stream of life,
they fail to perceive that the desire to escape that very stream was
her reason for marrying Osmond in the first place.

The souring of Isabel's marriage does not impinge in the
least on its ability to protect her from the conflicts which
Goodwood arouses in her; but the disintegration of her relationship
with Osmond does frustrate the other need which she had hoped it
would satisfy: her moral pride. What she originally had conceived
of as her immensely beautiful generosity to Osmond has now been
' polluted by his expectation of her indulgence; she considers how

"the knowledge of his expecting a thing raised a presumption against

89

it. It was as if he had had the evil eye; as if his presence were a
blight and his favour a misfortune" (p. 391). Because of Osmond's
presumption, Isabel is no longer able to give freely; and since she
has put herself in a position in which her giving was to be all,

she is unable to feel any pleasure in the generous impulse which
that giving once represented. Furthermore, Osmond, rather than
rejoicing in their oneness of spirit, has come to demand that iden-
tification of her impulse with his; she perceives now that her

"real offence . . . was having a mind of her own at all. Her mind
was to be attached to his--attached to his own like a small garden-
plot to a deer-park" (p. 398). Where Isabel formerly had experi-
enced her consciousness as a spacious bower, she now sees it as a
narrow annex to Osmond's enclosure. She has become a mere extension
of his ego--precisely the fate she feared with Goodwood and Warburton.
Isabel wishes desperately to escape this oppressive situation; but
she hesitates to seek respite outside it, because to do so would

be to make her vulnerable to the very forces from which her marriage
was to protect her. For this reason, she cannot risk admitting her
unhappiness to Goodwood or Warburton, and she must find another
shield, another proprietary form, which will cover her withdrawal
from Osmond's tyranny.

Isabel finds such a form in her feelings of obligation towards
her dying cousin, Ralph Touchett. Ralph comes to Rome in the ter-
minal stages of his illness, and Isabel immediately seizes on his
"little visit" as "a lamp in the darkness" (p. 400). Osmond resents

Touchett's presence, recognizing in it a threat to his own control,

90

and disapproves of Isabel's ministry to her cousin; but his dis-
approval only exacerbates Isabel's sense of her husband's oppres-
sion, and makes the flouting of his displeasure all the more
exhilerating: "he (Osmond) wished her to have no freedom of

mind, and he knew perfectly well that Ralph was an apostle of free-
dom. It was just because he was this, Isabel said to herself,
that it was a refreshment to go and see him" (p. 426). Isabel has
found in Ralph a project with the dual purpose that has become
characteristic of Isabel's behavior: it allows her to gratify

her moral pride, by her conscious choice to minister to someone
"less fortunate" than herself; and it provides her with relief
(however temporary) from a situation in which her self-image is
under severe attack.

But while Isabel takes pleasure in displeasing Osmond, she
has no intention of openly defying him. This is because, para-
doxically, the more unhappy he makes her, the more emotionally
vulnerable she becomes; and the more vulnerable she becomes, the
more she needs the protection of the marriage bond to prevent her
from indulging the emotional needs she has long ago rejected as
base and profane. For this reason, the more degenerate Isabel's
marriage becomes in its particulars, the more ennobled it becomes
for her in the abstract. She feels that going to Ralph in direct
violation of Osmond's interdiction would be a horrible self-
betrayal: "almost anything seemed preferable to repudiating the
most serious act--the single most sacred act--of her life" (p. 426).

When Ralph, dying in England, asks Isabel to execute her final

91

promise to attend his deathbed, Osmond responds with a categorical
prohibition; and Isabel, though utterly committed to her promise,

is torn between her need to be self-determining and her need to
remain within the "magnificent form" which she has erected to keep
herself from plunging into the dark abyss of her repudiated desires.
She accepts Osmond's judgment out of fear; but "what she was afraid
of was not her husband--his displeasure, his hatred, his revenge . . .
it was simply the violence there would be in going when Osmond

wished her to remain" (p. 498).

But the full revelation by the Countess of Madame Merle's
and Osmond's duplicity is simply too much for Isabel to absorb
directly; upon hearing the tale, Isabel retreats into a state of
such extreme withdrawal that "she almost lost her sense of being
personally touched by the story" (p. 503). Rather than plunge
herself into the sordid emotions of anger and jealousy, Isabel
removes herself from them, placing herself above--or beyond--the
entire ugly situation; she allows herself the virtuous indulgence of
pit for Madame Merle and Pansy, and seizes anew on her obligation
to visit the dying Ralph. This last impulse appears both to the

Countess and to the reader as a non seqpitur in Isabel's behavior,

 

but in fact it is perfectly consistent with her past responses to
intolerable conflict. The project of visiting Ralph offers both an
escape and a moral mission; it is Isabel's only available strategy

for quelling the feelings of rage and self-loathing that the Countess's

remarks must surely arouse.

92

In the narration of Isabel's flight to England, James brings
the full force of his evaluative rhetoric to bear on the issue of
her moral growth. First of all, he has Isabel returning to Garden-
court, the scene of her past innocence; now her "richly constituted
refuge" (p. 516), it has become a pastoral retreat, which in its
romance prototype represents an inward journeying and self-discovery.
That Isabel's mind has been described throughout the novel as having
a "garden-like" quality underscores the symbolic use James makes of
her present destination. Furthermore, Isabel's meditations in the
railway carriage trace her inner descent through pain and regret to
a thirst for death, but conclude with a qualified affirmation of her
will to survive; she has the "sense that life would be her business
for a long time to come" (p. 517). One senses from this passage that
Isabel is symbolically dying and being reborn, and that her blind
but ingenuous innocence is finally giving way to enlightenment and
acceptance of the realities of life.

At Gardencourt, two events occur which underscore these
rhetorical indications of moral growth and regeneration in Isabel.
First, there is Ralph's death, which appears to be a true emotional
watershed. In the deathbed scene, Isabel seems drawn into a full
awareness of, and immersion in, the ebb and flow of life; "There is
nothing makes us feel so alive as to see others die," Ralph tells
her, and Isabel, deeply moved, "feels a passionate need to cry out
and accuse herself, to let sorrow possess her" (p. 530). This
appears to be a genuine moment of guilt and contrition, in which

Isabel realizes her sins and resolves against repeating them; it

93

has the quality of a confessional scene, in which all is forgiven
and grace is restored. This movement towards knowledge and grace is
capped by Isabel's vision, on the morning following Ralph's death,
of the ghost of Gardencourt--an event which, we are to assume, indi-
cates that Isabel has suffered enough, and which marks her full
transformation into a mature but tragically aware individual.27

Throughout this sequence, which begins with Isabel leaving
Rome and Osmond, James is lavish with his imagery of redemption
and enlightenment; and, were one to glimpse Isabel's dark passage
exclusively in the illumination of James's rhetorical flourishes,
one might be convinced that such a transformation were actually
taking place. The critical tone of the authorial narrator, so
strong at the beginning of the novel, has now yielded to the voice
of the apologist or, in Segal's terms, the "observer," whose tone is
almost totally sympathetic. But a shift in the pitch of the rhetoric
does not necessarily indicate a shift in Isabel's character; in fact,
one searches her actions in vain for evidence of the new strength
and self-knowledge and the newly ennobled nature that the rhetoric
assures one is there.

Her growth is in fact an illusion, an aesthetic trope which,
though pleasant, nevertheless effaces Isabel's continuing conflicts.
Those conflicts remain, as does her inability to deal with them.

Even as she mourns Ralph, her guilt and anxiety at having violated
the cold security of her wedding bond begins to afflict her, and she
finds herself seeking a rationale for staying on at Gardencourt:

"She said to herself that it was but a common charity to stay with

94

her aunt. It was fortunate that she had so good a formula; other-
wise she might have been greatly in want of one" (p. 535). She is
unable to admit to herself that she came to England of her own free
will, preferring to think of it as an insane impulse for which she

is not fully responsible: "her coming had not been a decision . . .
she had simply started" (p. 535). Yet in spite of this guilt she
feels "a spiritual shudder" every time she thinks of Rome and Osmond.
In short, she feels guilty for having come to England, but dread at
the contemplation of returning to her husband. This is not the
attitude of a strengthened and purged individual; it is a reassertion
of Isabel's old conflicts, which derive from her need both for the
liberty of independent action and for the security of protection from
its emotional consequences. Her flight from Rome has not changed her
situation, nor has Ralph's death; small wonder, then, that she
experiences an acute paralysis of indecision, "postponing, closing
her eyes, trying not to think" (p. 535). The only thing that keeps
her at Gardencourt even now is the absence of any imminent threat to
either term of this irreconcilable equation.

The reappearance of Goodwood, however, shakes Isabel from
this uneasy equilibrium. He is more determined and self-assertive
than ever, and more certain that he is just the thing for her; and
Isabel's experience, rather than profoundly strengthening her, has
made her profoundly vulnerable to his appeals. She allows herself
to experience a taste of the exultation that might come with surren-
der to him: "she had never been loved before. It wrapped her about;

it lifted her off her feet" (p. 543). Still, she clings to the shield

95

of her marriage bond in an attempt to keep from being totally swallowed
up in the sea of her awakened emotional needs; she tells Goodwood

that the motive behind the "ghastly form" of her marriage to Osmond

was "To get away from you" (p. 543), and as Goodwood presses his suit
James records that "she had an immense desire to appear to resist"

(p. 544). This resistance expresses her stubborn obeisance to the
proprietary form of her marriage; but it also indicates how abstracted
from her true emotional needs this form is. Her need for the pppgir-
pppp_of resistance shows that what she is clinging to is not the
strength of her true self, but the protection of a mask.

But this tumult of emotion, "the confusion, the noise of
waters," recedes, leaving her mind clear and emptied of the orgiastic
emotions which she had been entertaining. She asks Goodwood to
leave her alone, but he refuses to accept this request, instead
embracing her with a passionate kiss and for the only time in the
novel crossing the proprietary distance at which she has so constantly
held him. His flare of passion is to Isabel "like a flash of
lightning; when it was dark again she was free" (p. 544). With this
image, James makes it clear that Isabel's new firmness of purpose
is not the expression of a will to "make life her business," but
of its opposite; it is not the presence of light but the absence of
it that allows her to see clearly. The road back to Osmond is thus
a plunge into darkness, a retreat from Goodwood rather than an
active acceptance of her lot in marriage. She cannot contemplate
the orgiastic surrender which so imminently threatened in Goodwood's

arms; she must escape it, purge herself of its sordid appeal--and

96

the "ghastly form" of her marriage offers now, as it did in the
beginning, a place to flee to. The irony is that her coming to
England was spurred by the same need that sends her back to Rome:
the need to escape imminent and intolerable conflicts.

The language of passion that pulses through this final con-
frontation between Isabel and Goodwood has an erotic intensity like
no other passage in the novel; but it represents an emotional climax,
and not a thematic one. Isabel's response to Goodwood's extreme
behavior is marked only by the degree of its violence and the
suddenness of its reversal; otherwise, it is remarkably like her
earlier flights from Goodwood's arms. Thus the concluding scene
does not represent the moral apotheosis towards which the novel's
tonal and structural features direct the reader's expectation. Our
lengthy analysis of Isabel reveals in the end a troubled young
woman whose conflicts have been exacerbated rather than resolved, and
whose character resists the stylization of the author's redemptive
rhetoric, even as he is putting his finishing touches on the portrait.

This is a problem to which James himself was not entirely
insensitive; in his notebooks, he expresses an awareness that he has
not followed Isabel to the full conclusion of her fate: "The obvious
criticism of course will be that it is not finished . . . that I
- have left her gp_lAgjr," But, he adds, "The Npplp_of anything is
never told . . . What I have done has that unity--it groups together."28
James reveals here his paradoxical sense that character, though

revealed by discourse, is not contained by it; and that it is

97

possible for the discourse to have an aesthetic integrity which
character, though escaping its form, does not rupture.

But this formulation does not hold in The Portrait of a Lady.

 

As we have seen, Isabel does rupture its design, by remaining so
stubbornly irredeemable. Or, taking an alternative view, one might
say that the attitudes and purposes embodied in the narrative design
itself are insufficient to do full justice to Isabel as a character.
In the beginning of the novel, the narrator praises Isabel's noble
instincts while chiding her vanity, and the rhetorics of plot and
evaluation work towards the end of enhancing the former while
correcting the latter. But, as our analysis of Isabel has shown,
her noble and narcissistic impulses spring from the same root: her
need to maintain a self-image in which she renounces and debases
those needs which she can neither satisfy nor accept in herself.
Thus one cannot temper her pride without damaging her noble ideals;
the two are intertwined from their origins. For this reason,
Isabel's supposed "enlightenment through suffering" yields real pain
but not real self-knowledge. One catches in Isabel's battering by

fate a hint of Claire de Cintré in The American, protesting her

 

weakness as Newman insists on her strength of nobility. Neither
character has the invulnerability to risk what the occasion demands
of them; for both Isabel and Claire, the "difficult situation" is an
impossible one.

Has James, then, misread his own creation in Isabel, or has
he seen her clearly and done what he would with her in spite of his

knowledge? This question returns one to a consideration of Isabel's

98

remark that her clothes express the dress-maker, but not herself.

One sees in this statement James's awareness that art is both an
enrichment and an effacement of the living matter which lends it

its substance; James recognizes at once the claims of Isabel as a fully
human creation, and the claims of art that something be "done" with

her or "made" of her. The appeasement of these twin claims leads in
James to what William Gass cites as "the high brutality of good

intentions"; Gass says that "in The Portrait, as it is so often in

 

(James's) other work, Isabel Archer becomes the unworked medium
through which, like benevolent Svengali, the shapers and admirers of
beautifully brought out persons express their artistry and themselves."29
This is the practice of the novel's internal manipulators,
such as Madame Merle, Osmond, Ralph, and even Mrs. Touchett, all of
whom are concerned with the question of what to "do“ with Isabel; but
it is also the concern of the author who, having created Isabel, must
now find a way of putting her through her paces, when it is perfectly
possible that she might be better off left alone, in the walled room
in Albany. That James is aware of this "brutal" aspect of his art
seems evident from his attempt to obscure his own responsibility for
his character's "situation"; as Gass says, "He constantly endeavors
to shift the obligation and the blame, if there be any, to another:

his reflector, his reverberator, his sensitive gong."30 Thus in

The Portrait one sees, as with Mrs. Tristram in The American, figures

 

who become architects of Isabel's fate while amplifying and extending

James's own admiration of his protagonist. In short, James may be

99

the dress-maker, but it is his surrogates who, admiring the figure
thus cut, invite Isabel to their ball.

The most insensitive and brutalizing invitation comes, of
course, from Madame Merle, who does not "pretend to know what people
are meant for," but "only what I can do with them" (p. 222); but
more germane to the question of James's attitude is the treatment of
Isabel by those who share in his admiration of her, and who work to
realize their vision of her happiness, as Mrs. Tristram does for

Newman in The American. In The Portrait, Mrs. Tristram's functional

 

 

counterpart is Ralph Touchett, whom Ora Segal accurately calls the

3] throughout, Touchett's

novel's ”second center of consciousness";
view of Isabel echoes that of the "sympathetic observer" in the
narration itself, and it is the brutality of Ralph's own good inten-
tions that is the moving force in Isabel's fate.

Like Mrs. Tristram, Ralph vicariously participates in the
romantic experience of others. He is initially conscious of his
cousin as "an entertainment of a high order" (p. 58); he tells
Isabel that she has "brought romance" with her to "prosaic" Garden-
court (p. 44), and, adoring her "without the hope of a reward," he
claims as his consolation the privilege at least of "spectatorship"
at the "show" which her life has become for him (p. 137). But Ralph
is not satisfied with mere spectatorship after awhile; Isabel's
means are not sufficient for her to achieve the "magnificence" he
envisions for her. So he becomes actively involved in her destiny

by persuading his father to bestow half of his inheritance on Isabel.

Ralph's motive is partly to do Isabel a service, to prevent her from

100

having to make a vulgar marriage for financial convenience; but pri-

marily, he feels that the money will enhance the quality of the spec-
tacle of Isabel's life, and thus increase the depth of his vicarious

pleasure in it. When Mr. Touchett asks what advantage Ralph expects

to gain from halving his inheritance with Isabel, Ralph responds that
he "shall get just the good . . . of having gratified my imagination"
(p. 172).

But Ralph, in tailoring his view of Isabel to the require-
ments of his own imagination, has tragically misread her. His
simplistic statement that she is "as good as her best opportunities"
is based on an uncritical admiration which does an injustice to
Isabel's true nature, and to her true problems. Her fortune, rather
than giving her the freedom to pursue her life according to her
taste, presents her with the burden of a crushing weight she is only
too eager to discharge. We have already seen how Isabel's "freedom"
is a compensatory ideal, through which her narrowed worldly prospects
have been transformed into a renunciatory moral glory; "freedom"
means to her the right to refuse any claims on, or appeals to, the
material and emotional needs she has repressed. In her inheritance,
she is presented with a surfeit of the wealth she has given up as
vulgar; rather than widening her horizon of opportunity, Isabel's
fortune forces her to narrow her sights, seeking the best way in
which to transform her gross assets into lofty spiritual achievement.
Her sense of the moral responsibility which wealth imparts to her is
incredibly heavy; she is "afraid of not doing right," and is always

on guard against the temptation to satisfy some base urge with her

101

money. She tells Ralph that "one must always be thinking . . . I am
not sure that it's not a greater happiness to be powerless" (p. 206).

She is telling Ralph that she is weak, and that her money
has made her more fearful of her weakness, but Ralph will not admit
such a defect in his ideal. He tells her that if indeed she is weak,
he is "awfully sold" (p. 207), and in this response James turns a
clever pun. Ralph is sold, but Isabel is by the same token made
"saleable" by virtue of the money he has bestowed on her; he has
turned her into a valuable commodity, though one impatient to
dispose of the very attributes that establish her worth. Isabel's
need to do something morally beautiful with her newfound wealth
dovetails with Madame Merle's mercenary instincts to produce, quite
apart from Ralph's intention but quite consistent with James's, the
"difficult situation" in which Isabel is to demonstrate her full
noble and tragic potential.

When Isabel announces her engagement to Osmond, Ralph cannot
imagine what has gone wrong; his script has veered off course, his
heroine soiled by some foul earthly touch. He had envisioned her
"soaring far up in the blue . . . sailing in the bright light, over
the heads of men," but now he sees her felled, by "a missile that
never should have reached you. It hurts me . . . as if I had fallen
myself" (p. 318). Isabel's failure to pursue the destiny Ralph
had designed for her is a personal failure for Ralph himself; the
happy liberty which was to have flowed from his intention has somehow
failed to take hold in Isabel, and his beautiful vision of her,

along with the pleasure he hoped to take in it, is in danger of

102

extinction. But Ralph is not entirely wrong in being troubled by
her engagement to Osmond, and his words have the ring of a partial
dramatic truth: Isabel is making a mistake. What Ralph does not
realize, though, and what the tone of this passage and others like
it does not reveal, is that Isabel's decision to marry Osmond,
though objectively bad and dramatically tragic, is nevertheless
subjectively necessary for her.

Thus Ralph becomes the figure in The Portrait in which the

 

intertwined nobility and inefficacy of romantic idealization may be
most clearly seen. Though one does not, as Segal and others suggest,
see Isabel primarily through Ralph's eyes, in the latter phases of

the novel Isabel is treated with a sympathetic perspective that

is consonant with, but not limited to, Ralph's point of view. The
result of this technique is that crucial scenes involving Touchett

or the influence of his sensibility on Isabel have an intensity and
consistency of tone which allows them to dominate the closing chapters
of the novel; such scenes have a prominence and an emotive power

which almost convinces one that Ralph is, as his name suggests, the
touchstone of Isabel's character and the agent of her full and final
self-discovery. Unfortunately, Isabel betrays Ralph's intentions

as she betrays James's. "You wanted to look at life for yourself--
but you were not allowed," he tells her on his deathbed, "you were
punished for your wish" (p. 531). Ralph believes that Isabel has been
strengthened, "made alive," by the sight of his own dying; but, as

we have seen, it takes only the appearance of Goodwood to show that a

dying man's words may be as mistaken as they are sincere.

103

So James reaches the ending of his tale with his chief
"reflector" departed and his heroine, Isabel, like her predecessor
Christopher Newman, entangled in the same inner conflicts that her
experience was to teach her to overcome. What is remarkable about

the closing chapters of The Portrait is, as Charles Samuels has
32

 

observed, the consistency with which James allows Isabel's
behavior to reveal her conflicts, even as his commentary works to
present a case for her moral growth and self-enlightenment. But in
the end the rhetoric must be seen as indicative of a redemption
effaced rather than achieved. It is a beautiful plan frustrated,
like Ralph's dream of "putting wind in her sails," or Isabel's own
vision of a marriage which would lead her "to the high place of
happiness, from which . . . one could look down with a sense of
exaltation and advantage" (p. 391).

Given this failure, this frustration of the redemptive pro-
cess which Isabel effects, James has to find a way of salvaging his
ending, of "rounding off" his story. His situation, as we have seen,
is similar to that which he encountered in The American; faced with
an unregenerate hero, he was content to let others (specifically Mrs.
Tristram) finish the tale, and thus avoid direct commentary on the
novel's closing state of affairs. The narrator, for his part,
retired to the sidelines, allowing himself to view Newman only from
the outside, and relinquished his powers of inner analysis in order
to end the novel on a muffled, if discordant, note. In The Portrait,
this strategy is radicalized; Isabel is totally removed from the

reader's--and the narrator's--horizon, and her remarkable decision to

104

return to Osmond is left unexplained. The result is that Isabel's
behavior is rendered enigmatic rather than shown to be consistent
with her earlier patterns of impulsive behavior. This shift in
point of view can also be construed, as Segal observes, as
emphasizing "the growth of the heroine's tragic stature and her

"33 But this is not a discriminable intention of

moral isolation.
James's, and is in fact made possible only by the indeterminacy

of evaluation which results from the lack of narrative commentary.
The effect in the end is a mere adjustment of the perspective from
which Isabel is seen, a shifting of the light which imparts an
illusory shine to the finishing touches of the portrait.

Thus the impulses of aesthetic intention and realistic

presentation are never resolved in The Portrait, just as they are

 

left dangling in The American. But in this novel James has insinuated

 

his artistic material more deeply into the fabric of the representa-
tion itself, by articulating it through the consciousness of a
character like Ralph Touchett, who is not a trope like Mr. Tristram,
but has the status of a fully imagined human being, comparable in

his complexity to the heroine herself. But to the degree that James
himself shares in Touchett's view of Isabel and in the brutality

of Ralph's intentions towards her, he must acknowledge the hard lesson
of Ralph's own failure: that the dress-maker may make his model wear
his costume, but he cannot make her become it; sooner or later the

ball must end, and the illusion must be spoiled.

NOTES

1Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (New York: Signet,
1963), p. 187. All references are to this edition, which follows
the 1881 text.

2James, The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), p. 48. Hereafter cited in the text
as AN,

3Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1927),
p. 102.

4The Lucid Reflector (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1969), p. 39.

 

5The Novels of Henry James (New York: Macmillan, 1961),
p. 85.

6J. E. Zimmerman, Dictionary of Classical Mythology (New
York: Harber and Row, 1964), p. 26.

7James, The Notebooks of Henry James, eds. F. O. Matthiessen
and Kenneth B. Burdock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947),
p. 15.

8The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, N. J.:
Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), p. 119.

9Chase, p. 132.
'OChase, p. 119.

1”Gothic Influences in Henry James's Major Fiction," Diss.
Michigan State University 1980. pp. 130-31.

12Leon Edel is the most prominent proponent of the idea that
the narrator of The Portrait is "omniscient." I essentially agree
with his point, but with qualifications. In his Introduction, The
Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956),
p. xv1.

 

13Image and Idea (New York: New Directions, 1957), p. 51.

 

105

106

14"The Portrait of a Lady: 'The Eternal Mystery of Things,'"
Nineteenth Century Fiction, 14(1959), 155.

 

 

15The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1962), pp. 26-61, 357-69.

16The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston, 1953), p. 228.

17Henry James and the Jacobites (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1962), p. 47.

 

18"Revision and Thematic Change in The Portrait of a Lady,"
Modern Fiction Studies, 22 (1976), 184n.

 

 

19"Aggressive Innocence in The Portrait of a Lady,"
Massachusetts Studies in English, 4 (1972), 31-37.

 

 

20Egoism and Self-Discovery in the Victorian Novel (New York:
Burt Franklin, 1974), pp. 247-76.

 

2“Isabel Archer's Disease and Henry James's," Cambridge
Quarterly, 2 (1967), 3-22.

22"Moral Passion in The Portrait of a Lady and The Spoils of
Poynton," Modern Fiction Studies, 12 (1966), 7-23.

 

 

 

23"The Portrait of a Lady: Vis Inertiae," Western Humanities
Review, 13 (1959), 177-90.

 

 

24"Ambiguity and Ambivalence: The Psychology of Sexuality in
Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady," Markham Review, [1] (1969), 2-7.

 

25A number of critics have dealt usefully with the issue of
Isabel's "fear." Most pertinent is Tony Tanner, in "The Fearful Self:
Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady," Critical Quarterly, 7 (1965),
205-19.

 

26See Reid, p. 25.

27A number of critics have asserted that Isabel's story has
a "tragic" dimension. Although the plot and the rhetoric of the
novel derive more from romance than from tragedy, the ambivalent
emotions one feels at the end of The Portrait may be construed as
catharsis. A useful study of Isabel'E)“tragedy" is John Roland
Dove's "Tragic Consciousness in Isabel Archer," in Studies in
American Literature, ed. Waldo McNeir and Leo B. Levy, Louisiana
University Studies, Humanities Series, No. 8 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1960), pp. 78-94.

 

 

28Notebooks, p. 18.

107
29"The High Brutality of Good Intentions,“ Accent, 18 (1958),
66.
30Gass, p. 66.
3'Segai, p. 34.

32The Ambiguity of Henrngames (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1971), p. 128.

33Sega1, p. 54.

CHAPTER IV

TH AMBA SAD RS

I have now examined two novels of Henry James's early phase,
and have analyzed the inner dynamic which they share. That dynamic
is the interplay of two distinct narrative strands. One, the voice
of the authorial narrator, provides critical analysis and commentary;
the second strand takes a more "artistic" view of the main characters
and their actions, and is amplified in each novel by the presence of

a figure (Mrs. Tristram in The American, Ralph Touchett in INg_

 

Portrait) who shares in this view, and who precipitates the action
through which the protagonist is dramatized. The first voice attempts
to present the protagonist as he or she "really is," to reveal the
character's total complexity as an imagined human being; the second
invites the reader to see that person in a role which is aesthetically
defined and which has particular significances in the life of the
imagination, and in the arts which express and speak to that life.

The difference, then, between these two narrative strands
might be expressed succinctly as that between practical insight and
artistic vision--between the recognition of what is, and the imagina-

tion of what might or could be. In both The American and The Portrait

 

 

of a Lady these two rays of perception fail to converge; in both

novels, as we have seen, the protagonists themselves are too complex,

108

109

too fully human, to achieve a total identification with the roles
designed for them. James is so generous with his human insight
that it undoes his aesthetic intention, and these two impulses are
never fully harmonized. Failing to knit up these loose ends, James
carefully tucks them under; at the conclusion of each novel, he
suppresses or effaces knowledge of his materials in order to round

off his form. In The American, the concluding commentary fails to

 

acknowledge Newman's abiding need for revenge, effectively allowing
the novel's formal drive towards the hero's moral apotheosis to

reach its apparent conclusion; similarly, in The Portrait, the

 

climactic moment in which Isabel glimpses her "straight path" back
to Osmond is left unanalyzed, thus sidestepping the question of
whether her action springs from newfound moral reason or from the
blind impulse which governs her in a number of preceding and parallel
situations.

But a period of thirty years lies between The Portrait, the

 

last of James's early major novels, and The Ambassadors, the keynote

 

work of his "major phase.“ That thirty-year period, by no means a
dormant time for James, is represented by a variety of experiments

in form and point of view, by a number of failed attempts at stage
drama, and by a remarkable series of tales which are meditations on
the artistic process itself. Precisely what James came to understand
about this novel during this period would be difficult to say, since
the practical evidence of this understanding is both manifold and

elusive; but the primary feature which distinguishes The Ambassadors

 

from the novels of thirty years earlier is the striking interpenetration

110

of the two narrative impulses already observed. In The Ambassadors

 

James places his powers of analysis at the service, and largely
within the consciousness, of his protagonist, Lambert Strether.
Thus he dispenses with the Victorian baggage of authorial commen-
tary while preserving its authorial tone; the result is a narrative
posture which principally confines itself to the perceptions of a
single character, but which nevertheless appears to make claims for
the "objective" authority of its own analysis. James tries to take
the Victorian device of impersonal commentary and, by tying it to the
movements of a single consciousness, to personalize its analysis,
to make it sensitive to the requirements of the imagination while
sacrificing none of its ability to penetrate the truths of human
nature.

Lambert Strether is himself an accomplice in this revolution
in technique, as can be seen by his difference from James's heroes
and heroines of an earlier phase; he is not the protagonist observed,
like Isabel and Newman, but an observer himself, like Ralph or Mrs.
Tristram. Thus James focuses his attention on the process of seeing
itself, rather than on him who is seen. As Tony Tanner has noted,

in The Ambassadors "James, for the first time, makes the conscious-
1

 

ness of the onlooker figure the central focus of a major novel."
Strether, like the earlier observer figures to whom he is analogous,
is an aesthete, an agent of romance who wishes the life he observes
to satisfy his imagination by its conformity with artistic ideals;
but James has also placed in Strether's consciousness the

responsibility for authorial judgments and discriminations. Thus

111

James, through Strether, directs his energies towards resolving the

conflicts between insight and vision that had plagued The American

 

and The Portrait and rendered their conclusions necessarily

 

equivocal.

This does not make The Ambassadors a "stream of consciousness“

 

novel, as some have claimed. Critics as early on as Percy Lubbock
have observed that the novel is indeed a "drama of consciousness,"
with Strether's mind defining the boundaries of the stage; but the
reader, though limited to this vision, is in the audience--an
observer of the action, and not a participant in it. Furthermore,

as in a drama, the reader is not privileged to know everything in
Strether's mind; there are some operations of his consciousness which
occur offstage; Lubbock says that James, "who all through the story
has been treating Strether's consciousness as a play . . . can at

any moment use his talk almost as though the source from which it
springs were unknown to us from within."2 Furthermore, the reader's
knowledge of Strether's thoughts does not come in the form of those
thoughts themselves, but in authorial summary, heavily digested and
in a fastidiously organized syntax, with barely a hint of the emo-
tional turmoil out of which those thoughts are generated. The

voice one hears as one reads is that of the author, not of the
character, though for the most part the reader's knowledge is circum-
scribed by the limitations of Strether's consciousness.

The precise angle of the point of view in The Ambassadors has

 

been the subject of much debate and confusion; and, while it is not

my intention to conduct an exhaustive analysis of James's method, it

112

is important to recognize the ways in which the author's hand is
present. John E. Tilford, in his article "James the Old Intruder,"
notes that the narrator's use of such phrases as "poor Strether"
and "old friend" in reference to the protagonist "inevitably implies
an amiable understanding between the candid narrator and his gentle

"3 Tilford cites other instances in which the narrator

reader.
ventures outside Strether's own sphere of knowledge or his own angle
of vision, asserting that "James engages in speculations which, by
designation, would never occur to Strether himself."4 Tilford is
correct in noting these periodic expansions of the point of view,
which have the effect of an occasional stage aside; but he mis-
takenly turns his observations into a pejorative comment on
James's technique, labeling these extensions of the narrator's
horizon as "intrusive"--as if, besides these supposed lapses, James's
hand were not otherwise present in the work.

William Thomas answers these objections by stating (correctly,
I think) that "James never arrived at the extreme degree of limita-
tion of point of view (complete effacement of the author) that is

"5

practiced by many . . . twentieth-century novelists. Instead, he

"6 taking upon

sees Strether as "sharing the authorial function,
himself the role of commentator and evaluator ordinarily reserved for
the omniscient narrator. James endows Strether with responsibilities
identical to his own as author, but it does not follow that the
character's consciousness thus conceals the involvement of his creator,

nor should it follow. Rather, the result is that James's concerns are

reflected in and identified with Strether in a way which keeps their

113

functions separate but their ultimate goal-~the credible relation of
art to life--the same. Strether is the vehicle, not the driver, but

in the instance of The Ambassadors the close fit of the two makes it

 

seem, on total impression, that James has foregone the privilege of
extravehicular knowledge.

Thus James achieves an objectivity of tone while preserving
to the greatest degree possible a subjectivity of angle in which
Strether's visionary desires are not mocked or deconstructed by the
demystifying analysis a more omniscient narrator might easily supply.
But, as I have already suggested, James's success in this matter is
a result of subject as much as strategy--or rather of a more perfect
fit between the two than was evident in the novels of a few decades
previous. Unlike Isabel Archer and Christopher Newman, Strether is
a hero with whom the narrator shares an empathy rather than mere
sympathy; he represents the apotheosis of narrative surrogates like
Touchett and Mrs. Tristram, who carry the dramatic ado forward,
prescribing roles for the other characters in the interest of having
their imaginations vicariously satisfied. Strether, like his
predecessors, is afflicted with the desire and the tendency to see
life as art--a predeliction much closer in spirit to James's own
creative commission as a novelist than the hungers for personal
glory shared by earlier protagonists like Isabel and Christopher
Newman.

So the mind of Lambert Strether is a determinant of style in
The Ambassadors to a greater extent than are the consciousnesses of

Ralph and Mrs. Tristram in the novels which those characters

114

respectively inhabit. Strether's "double consciousness," with its
dual appetites for the adventurous beauty of art and for the security
of correct and complete understanding, reflects the primary aims of
James's own literary discourse. Strether has "detachment in his zeal
and curiosity in his indifference";7 James, both realist and romancer,
both analyst and artist, finds his own energies similarly divided
between objectivity and passion. James is engaged on one hand in a
quest for an accurate representation of the facts of human existence,
and on the other in a demonstration of belief in the ultimate truth-
fulness and efficacy of art. Strether, as Richard Poirier notes,
shares with the novelist the desire "to transform the things he sees
into visions, to detach them from time and the demands of nature, and

give them the composition of objets d'art."8

 

But, also like James, Strether hopes and trusts that these
visions are essential and not irrelevant to the questions of how one
ought to live, and that the real world, if understood in the proper
relation, will not prove corrosive to those visions. The motive, then,

behind James's prose style in The Ambassadors may be seen as that of

 

constructing this "proper relation" between life and art, and making
Strether's visions appear to conform (at least for the moment) to

the demands of time and nature which they affront. James's syntax,
so precise and to all appearances objective, is an analogue to
Strether's own cerebral grasping after that magical Prelation" which
would make the enterprise of imagination seem a logically salvageable

proposition rather than a romantic irrelevancy.

115

The forging of this relation is essentially the project of

The American and The Portrait of a Lagy as well; but in those novels

 

the gulf between insight and vision is clearly too wide to be
bridged. As I have shown, James's penetrating analysis of Newman
and Isabel, his unflagging honesty in dramatizing the consistency of
their behavior, works against the aesthetic ends that, through them,
he is trying to achieve. Furthermore, the romanticized "readings"
of those characters by Mrs. Tristram and Ralph Touchett are shown

to have brutalizing and disastrous effects for all involved; it is
left to the author to make art out of the failed scripts of his
surrogates, and in these novels James tries to do so by turning the
botched romances into opportunities for the protagonists' redemption
and growth. But James's intention, like Ralph's and Mrs. Tristram's
failed visions, is a formal end that ill serves, and is ill served
by, Isabel and Newman themselves.

The Ambassadors, in its style, in its point of view, and in

 

its choice of a protagonist, represents a new phase of this pattern
and a new attempt at integrating its dissonant elements. I have
already cited two of the principal characteristics of this new
strategy: first, James moves the observer, formerly a peripheral
figure, to the center of the discourse; and second, he makes the
horizon of the narrator's awareness more congruent with that of

his protagonist. But there is a third characteristic of this new
strategy, in part design and in part a paradoxical effect of the
second phenomenon treated here: one loses in the understanding of

Strether what one gains in closeness to him. Though the novel is

116

burgeoning with Strether's thoughts, they are thoughts of a parti-
cular kind, which reveal only obliquely the depths of his emotional

life. Thus in The Ambassadors the dramatization of the hero's

 

consciousness is more tightly controlled than in earlier novels;
F. 0. Matthiessen observes that the novels of James's "major phase"
"are strictly novels of intelligence rather than of full conscious-
ness."9 Stephen Spender, concurring, says that "James avoided the
shocking revelations of his method of exploring the minds of his
characters, by exercising strict censorship of their thoughts."10

The rationale behind this method may be seen by briefly

considering once again the problematical conclusions of The American

 

and The Portrait of a Lady. In these novels, the knowing narrator

 

is able to explore the emotional conflicts which underly the actions
of Newman and Isabel; and though each character's final gesture
appears to fulfill the formal and thematic patterns of the novel
(Newman forgoing his revenge, Isabel returning to face the conse-
quences of her actions), the analysis of their emotional lives
reveals that they have a less complete understanding of, and a more
suspect motive for, their final actions than the rhetoric of the
novel would indicate. The equivocal voice of the narrator in the
final scene of each novel is designed to avoid acknowledgement of

this disconcerting fact; in The Ambassadors the oblique view of

 

Strether's emotional life is designed to circumvent from the
outset this conflict between aesthetic completion and the unhar-
nessed and unspent emotional energies of the characters. Where

the novel and art in general represents the possibility of order

117

and harmony, the full consciousness of human beings (and characters
who imitate them) represents a riot of thought and emotions; but in

The Ambassadors James tries to reconcile the two and to avoid

 

"falling into chaos" "by making Strether's thought entirely spiri-
tual."H

The novel's suppression of Strether's emotional life helps
explain why he is so often treated as a marvel of James's technical
achievement rather than as a character whom the author has endowed
with the apparent fullness and independence of human consciousness.

But to be at all faithful to James's full intention in The Ambassadors,

 

Strether must be considered in his fully imagined humanity, and not
simply as a narrative device or a formal convention. The composition
of Strether's character and its relation to his formal role in the
discourse are essential features of the intention and the achievement

of The Ambassadors.

 

But the rhetoric of the novel is designed to give the reader
an aesthetic experience of Strether's inner life, and not a direct
understanding of it. James's prose conceals as much about Strether
as it reveals, and as a result those who look to the rhetoric alone
for explanation are bound to duplicate Strether's own confusions.

One is required, then, to examine those aspects of Strether's thought
and behavior which remain consistent throughout the novel, independent
of the shifts of rhetoric which attend them.

Fortunately, thought he is oblique on the topic elsewhere,
James thoughtfully provides in Book Second a summary of Strether's

past which serves as a useful key to his inner life. Having set foot

118

in Paris, the scene of his one youthful, self-gratifying impulse,
Strether remembers with remorse "the young wife he had early lost
and the young son he had stupidly sacrificed" (p. 61). He no
longer feels particularly affected by his wife's death, but his
deceased son haunts him. Strether blames himself for the death of
the boy on several counts: he feels he had been "unwittingly
selfish" in "neglecting the boy" and in having "insanely given
himself to missing the mother." Also, in the "conscious detachment"
which marked his period of mourning, he had regarded his son as
"dull"; now, with regret, he perceives that dullness as but another
effect of his own fatherly rejection and neglect.

In these brief but intense reflections one finds a key to
much of Strether's behavior. The death of the boy is a memory
which reveals many of the beliefs and fears by which Strether lives;
he sees the event as emblematic of some past failure, strangely
unarticulated, which he must at all costs avoid repeating. And,
though this unnamed "failure" is a symptom rather than the root
cause of Strether's conflicts, one can see in his meditations on it
the paralyzing workings of his conscience. He imagines himself
guilty of great sins; "I've sinned enough," he tells Maria Gostrey,
"to be where I am" (p. 52), as if his past transgressions were some-
how the cause of, and commensurate with, his present unhappiness.
But if one closely examines Strether's sense of his particular
failings with respect to his son, it becomes clear that the things
he regards as "sins" are, though intertwined, morally contradictory.

It is out of these contradictions that the conflicts in Strether

119

arise, producing in him what James discreetly labels as "the oddity
of a double consciousness" (p. 18).

Strether feels above all that indulging oneself in violent
emotions is morally dangerous. He views his excess of grief follow-
ing his wife's death as an inexcusable loss of mental equilibrium;
his remorse is described in retrospect as "insane," and his
"sacrifice" of his son as "stupid." Now he aspires towards the
quality, objectified in his first view of Chad, of "extraordinary

. equilibrium arrived at and assured" (p. 111); faithfulness to
such a standard of mental competence will, Strether believes, pro-
tect him from a relapse of "insane" emotion. In addition, Strether
feels that the correctness of his knowledge and judgment must be
as assured as his sanity; being "certain" and "finding out everything"
are obsessions with him, since knowing all and perceiving accurately
are the best proofs that he is in complete possession of his reason.
In dealing with Chad, Strether warns himself that he I'mustn't dis-
possess himself of the faculty of seeing things as they were“

(p. 79); and, believing at one point that his European initiation
is complete, Strether pales at Maria Gostrey's suggestion that he
must "find out more" (p. 118). Most of all, he must avoid mistakes
in judgment that make him seem "stupid" or "foolish"; he feels
anxious, even guilty, whenever his expectations of himself or of
others receive a serious rebuff--a humiliation with which Chad
passively afflicts him during their first meeting in Paris.

Furthermore, Strether feels that his violent grief was

"selfish"--that it produced in him a "conscious detachment" and a

120

destructive insensitivity to the needs and merits of others, parti-
cularly his son. He feels guilty at having judged his boy as "dull",
and regards his sorrow as having uncharitably fogged his discrimina-
tion. Strether now clings to the belief that if he errs in judg-
ment, it must be on the side of charity; he is compelled by con-
science to be right--but if not right, at least mistaken in favor
of others. His abhorrence of personal selfishness has also led him
to live in disinterested service to others, particularly Mrs.
Newsome; and his fear of the "insanity" of grief has led him to
protect himself against tragic loss by the renunciation of personal
wants and gains. He believes, as Madame de Vionnet says, that "The
only safe thing is to give" (p. 321); it is a recurrent theme in
Strether's talk about his European excursion that he is not, "out
of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself" (p. 344).

Finally, Strether sees the "sacrifice" of his son as a
personal loss and self-betrayal; it has come to symbolize for him a
lifetime of missed chances and denied satisfactions. The son is
something "he might have kept" had he reacted otherwise to his
wife's death; the thought of this deprivation, and how it might
have been otherwise, makes Strether "wince with the thought of an
opportunity lost" (p. 61). This "opportunity" has grown in
Strether's mind into something greater than the mere loss of a son
and a human connection; Strether senses that in the intervening
years he, in the very act of avoiding other sins, has sinned

against himself, that he has allowed himself to give up too much.

121

This is the crux of Strether's conflict, and the pole of
opposition on which the entire novel turns; in Strether's system,
to "live" as one defines it in the light of Paris is tantamount to
sinning against others, or at the very least against the moral
truths of human existence; but not to live is sinning against
oneself. As Joan Bennett has put it, Strether's conflict is between

12 On one

the "morality of self-denial and self-fulfillment."
hand Strether's drives for personal satisfaction are checked by
fears of moral transgression: the desire for personal gains is
negated by fear of personal loss; the need for emotional release

is repressed by a determination to preserve the balance of reason;
and the desire to live for oneself is checked by a fear of betraying
one's obligations of charity and service to others. But against
these imperatives presses the very impulse that they are designed

to throttle: the sense that one betrays oneself by not grasping

the enjoyments and satisfactions that life presents.

Strether has for some time avoided conflict between his
contradictory needs by suppressing one term of this painful oppo-
sition. He has given up self-satisfaction completely, and convinced
himself that his opportunity for personal happiness is irrevocably
lost: "What he wanted most was some idea that would simplify,
and nothing would do this so much as the fact that he was done for
and finished" (p. 61). So Strether, rather than face_the conflict
of competing inner demands, surrenders his desires to conscience,
and to the conviction that his choice, determined by his past sins,

could not have been otherwise. So long as he does not admit the

122

possibility of his desires being satisfied, they cannot agitate
his placid resignation, and the "simplicity" of his existence will
remain uncomplicated.

Strether's relationship with Mrs. Newsome represents the
ultimate entrenchment of this solution. Though she never appears in
the novel, this Woollett matriarch presses on Strether's conscious-
ness with all the force of an alternate identity--which she is, in
a way. Though wealthy, she comports herself with a tasteful austerity
which Strether has idealized into a moral magnificence; to him, her
life is "admirable," she is "fine" and "wonderful" (p. 45)--so much
so that he is forced to admit that he is "a little afraid of her"
(p. 46). But because she is "delicate and high-strung," and "puts
so much of herself into everything" (p. 46), she serves as a foil
for Strether's own image of himself as coolly balanced, and her
"vulnerability" of feeling gives him an opportunity to place his
powers of emotional control and fine judgment at her service.
Furthermore, the relationship between Strether and Mrs. Newsome is
not complicated by the danger of any mutual passion; he describes
their attitude towards each other as "imperfectly romantic" (p. 43),
and even her conditional offer of marriage seems to Strether a
reasonable proposition whose material advantages to himself are not
to be contemplated.

So in short Mrs. Newsome offers Strether an opportunity to
fulfill his moral mandate of service to others without the danger of
an intense emotional attachment. In fact, the terms of their rela-

tionship reinforce Strether's strict censorship of his own desires.

123

Because Strether has made Mrs. Newsome the focal point of his life
of disinterested service, her approval has become for him the
measure of his moral performance. She has, in effect, become his
conscience personified, and the austere magnificence of her personal
propriety is projected upon Strether's moral sense with a force
sufficient to make him tremble at the very thought of disloyalty.
This detailed analysis of Strether's motives is necessary
because it is the best way of demonstrating an important point: it
shows that Strether's moral system has personal rather than insti-
tutional origins. By this I mean that such labels as "Puritan" or
"New England" or even "Woollett," when applied to Strether's con-
science, are not sufficient to explain the nature of his conflicts
or difficulties. Such terms, though frequently used, reduce rather
than reveal the workings of Strether's consciousness, much in
the same way the dresses that Isabel Archer complained of failed

to express her inner self. In The Ambassadors, America and Europe,

 

Woollett and Paris, Puritanism and libertinism, are labels beneath
which the actuality of Strether's motives and identity may hide;
Strether uses them himself, dispersing his own psychic conflicts
into the impersonal and abstract consciousness of Woollett, which
"isn't sure it ought to enjoy" (p. 25). But even here the
psychological fact is that Strether is concealing things from him-
self, not revealing them to the reader. The drama of the novel
arises ultimately from personal conflicts and not from cultural

or philosophical differences external to the character of Lambert

Strether. These larger elements give aesthetic texture and symbolic

124

weight to Strether's psychic drama; but whether those resonances are
ultimately harmonized with the actualities of Strether's inner life
is a question which I shall save until the treatment of his character
is more nearly complete.

In the context of the above ppygpt, it can be understood that
the "first note of Europe" Strether feels is the vibration from
within of his long-stifled desires. His awareness of this note
is awakened during the hiatus between responsibilities that his
layover in Chester provides; he finds himself experiencing "such a
consciousness of personal freedom as he hadn't known for years . . .
of having above all for the moment nobody and nothing else to con-
sider" (p. 17). The "deep taste of change" he senses is intensified
by the appearance of Maria Gostrey; she sustains and complicates the
note by striking up a conversation with Strether in which an almost
instant intimacy is achieved, and which finds him "forsaken, in this
sudden case, both of avoidance and of caution" (p. 19). Strether
catches instantly the scent of prospective enjoyment which Maria seems
indirectly to offer; she appears to have the skill of making the most
of experience, of possessing the "advantage snatched from lucky
chance" (p. 21) of which Strether had long ago relinquished pursuit.
But her "perfect plain propriety" and "expensive subdued suitability"
(p. 20) project to Strether an image so "civilized" that he cannot
decide whether she is inviting him to enter forbidden territory.

Strether is able to continue entertaining the prospects
Maria offers partly because she flatters his scruples as well as

appeals to his desires. She makes him feel like a "special case"

125

by turning all his self-deprecations into praise; for her, Strether's
admitted "failures" are precisely his distinction. "Anything else
[other than failure] to-dayis too hideous," she tells him (p. 40).
She also intimates that he is exceptional, not like the other
Americans she is eager to get rid of (p. 36); she insists, against
Strether's half-hearted protests, that he is "so much better--than
all the rest of us put together" (p. 56).

But Maria's appeal to Strether goes beyond mere flattery.
She seems to be like him in many ways. She is, "like himself,
marked and wan," and they resemble each other so much that "they
might have been brother and sister" (p. 21). She commiserates with
his admitted failures in commercial enterprise and personal relations,
telling him that the two of them are "beaten brothers in arms," and
that "There are not many like you and me" (p. 40). So Strether per-
ceives in Maria someone much like himself. Besides the physical
resemblance, she appears to have many of the attributes towards which
he aspires--perspicacity, knowledge, emotional detachment. Yet at
the same time she evokes, through her connection to worldly civiliza-
tion, the very appetites he has so strenuously kept in check. She
at once praises him for what he is (the "perfectly equipped failure")
while giving him the encouragement to question and even to reject
the past which, constituting his self-betrayal, has made him so.

But the censorious spectre of Mrs. Newsome, and Strether's
sense of his sacred obligation to her, keep him from freely enter-
taining even the most innocent of personal pleasures. The mere act

of a walk around Chester with Maria makes him feel that, as she

126

observes, "You're doing something that you think not right"--to which
he responds, tellingly: "Am I enjoying it as much as that?" (p. 25)
To Strether, correct behavior and personal enjoyment are vaguely
inimical, though he cannot say to himself precisely why this is so.
Though he can "enjoy" the thrill of being on the edge of some obscure
transgression, he cannot allow himself any indulgence which would
rupture his tacit bond of loyalty to Mrs. Newsome.

Thus even the modest pleasures he enjoys with Maria are
tinged with guilt and self-doubt. He feels an "exhilaration" at her
"strange and cynical wit" (p. 26), and thrills to the "peril of
apparent wantonness" in her approval of his purchase of a pair of
gloves (p. 38). But his excitement in such moments is accompanied
by a vague discomfort. He admits that he trusts Maria to show him
"how to enjoy," but also that her capacity to teach this is "exactly
what I'm afraid of" (p. 25); ultimately, he can't decide whether the
liberties he has taken with her in conversation (particularly those
on the topic of Mrs. Newsome and Waymarsh) are "magnificent" or
"base" (p. 39). The more Strether enjoys himself, the more he isn't
sure he ought to.

The "cut-down dress" and "red velvet band" which Maria Gostrey
wears to dinner with Strether represent her most lurid intimation of
the enjoyment into which she is capable of initiating him. Under-
standably, these items cause Strether his greatest discomfort yet.
Neither piece is like anything Mrs. Newsome has ever worn, and
Strether fixes on the neckband in particular as something that

"complicates his vision" (p. 42). He feels that his pleasurable

127

appreciation of Maria's ribboned throat is a guilty luxury which
distracts him from his task at hand: "What, certainly, had a man
conscious of a man's work in the world to do with red velvet bands?"
(p. 42) He compares Maria to Mary Stuart and Mrs. Newsome to

Queen Elizabeth; this pair of associations indicates how utterly

at war Strether's inner loyalties have become. Maria's invitation
is for Strether to shake off his old bondage of service, and to
seize this chance at serving his own enjoyment. This suggestion
arouses in Strether a fear of turning traitor to his own moral
obligations; yet it also underscores how sternly those obligations
now press upon him, and how deeply he craves some sort of release
from them. Miss Gostrey encourages while Mrs. Newsome restrains;
these two women, through their contrasting effects on Strether, lay
bare the painful bind of his "double consciousness," as he is caught
between his weakening old resolve and new desires that are entertained
but never consummated.

But for his encounter with Chad, Strether feels the need to
strengthen him moral resolution, to "renounce all amusement for the
sweet sake of . . . authority" (p. 64); he "must approach Chad,
must wait for him, deal with him, master him" (p. 79). Strether is
counting on his own moral scruples to keep himself in the right and
to argue his case with Chad; but his recent experience has somewhat
weakened his conviction in his moral system, and he is not sure
whether his scruples will "give him for Chad a moral glamour" which
would prove persuasive (p. 64). Furthermore, Strether's own con-

fusions make it necessary that he find Chad disagreeable, that the

128

situation in Paris presents him with "the pretence of disgust" which
would enable him to act with resolution (p. 152); Strether feels

that "being sure he was sufficiently disagreeable" is "his only way
of making sure he was sufficiently thorough" (p. 103). Strether's
awakened desires have weakened the hold of his tyrannical conscience
on his judgments and actions; he requires some great and undeniable
affront on Chad's part to reinforce his moral tenets, and to uncom-
plicate his mission by restoring those errant desires to their proper
place.

Strether's first meeting with Chad, however, produces the
opposite effect. Chad, rather than being disagreeable, is exquisitely
mannered and anything but the reprobate of Strether's expectations.
Additionally, Chad seems more confident and self-possessed than
Strether himself; the exotic self-assurance of Chad's "different
ways" points up to Strether the dearth of his own experience and the
insufficiency of his own preconceptions. In his confusion, Strether
finds himself "conscious of everything but of what would have served
him" (p. 91). But there is an added complication to Strether's
discomfort and uncertainty: he has not only expected the wrong
thing of Chad; he has wrongly expected the Npr§t_thing. Strether
has, with the rest of Woollett, mistakenly "insisted on his [Chad's]
coarseness" (p. 101); but whatever he is, Chad is certainly not
coarse. This ruptured expectation is particularly distressing to
Strether because he has now twice judged, in ignorance and harshness,
a "son" he would rather have saved--first his own boy, and now Mrs.
Newsome's. And in both cases, the realization has come too late for

Strether himself to be of apparent use.

129

These reversals of expectation have the effect of alienating
Strether from his Woollett-centered judgments and opinions without
lessening any of their power over him. His horrible gaffe has
occurred because he embraced, with Mrs. Newsome, the necessary view
that Chad's Parisian existence must be degenerate; and, still lacking
a precise adjective to attach to the Chad he now perceives, Strether
is nevertheless struck by the thoroughness with which Woollett is
rebuked by the evidence. He sees now that he, and they, have
judged in pride and ignorance--that, though those at Woollett
"Npgpip a low mind," still "they had worked, and with a certain
smugness, on a basis that might be turned against them." Worst of
all, Chad has "even pulled up his admirable mother" (p. 101), for
whom Strether is expected and obliged to be an apologist. Strether
feels humiliated by this turn of events, betrayed by his own trust
in the theory of Chad's degeneracy. He has "had to take full in
the face a fresh attribution of ignorance" (p. 102); this grievous
blow reveals to Strether his failure to live up to his own imperatives
of perspecacity and charitable judgment, and damages the credibility
of his mission without releasing him from his obligation to fulfill
its terms.

Furthermore, Strether's failure is painful to him because it
has not as yet had the virtue of proving instructive. He cannot
determine whether the favorable impression Chad has made on him
reflects an inner improvement in the young man's character or whether
it is a mask concealing his ultimate decadence. But there is no

question that Strether hopes the truth lies in the first possibility.

130

Though he cannot ascertain whether he is dealing with a "Pagan or
a gentleman" (p. 102), Strether nevertheless is attracted to the
gentility and sophistication of Chad's manner, and to the intima-
tion of grand experience that lies behind it; he sees in Chad "the
hint of some self-respect, some power . . . latent and beyond access"
which, though morally suspect in its origins, is still "enviable"
(p. 99). Self-respect and power are precisely what Strether feels
lacking in his own life, and whose ends he has always felt barred
from pursuing by the moral insufficiency of the means required to
attain them. But, lacking a clear indication that Chad's apparent
splendor is tied to any inner moral compromise, Strether begins to
entertain the possibility that one might, after all, have at once
the satisfactions of being virtuous and of getting on in the world.
Thus Strether begins to look to Chad, and to the "connection"
through which Chad has been transformed, for support in his hope that
conscience and desire are not inimical. This is the "vision" into
which all the particulars of his experience must now be transposed.
And he is only too eager to seize upon any interpretation of those
particulars which will support his new hypothesis. Strether accepts
little Bilham's equivocal assertion of the "virtuousness" of the
attachment between Chad and Madame de Vionnet simply because that is
what he wants most to believe; it gives Strether a "new lease on
life" (p. 112) in every sense of the phrase. He believes Little
Bilham first of all because the latter's statement reduces some of
his painful anxiety about Chad's moral state; but secondly he

accepts the statement because he is eager for "verification for the

131

aesthetic values exalted by his tender sensibilities" rather than
for "the dark truths harbored in the sly evasions of sympathetic
friends."13

For this "verification" Strether is dependent on the behavior
of Chad, in whom he sees what he himself might have become, had
his own "mistake" not irrevocably dashed his prospects. Strether
expects Chad to mirror his own values, and for the "connection" with
Madame de Vionnet to assume the form it might have for Strether
himself, as a young man in similar circumstances. Though Madame
de Vionnet may have "saved" Chad the "social animal" (p. 167),
Strether intends to complete the young man's apotheosis by saving him
as a moral animal, in a way that goes beyond the assumed "virtuous-
ness" of the connection. Strether conceives of the relationship
between Chad and Madame de Vionnet as both romantic and non-sexual;
he sees the two of them as leading a life of mutually devoted service,
"facing the future together" and "giving things up for each other"
(p. 169)--a formula that dovetails perfectly with Strether's own
moral values, but which preserves in the form of a Platonic relation-
ship the luxury of wordly elegance and grace that has been missing
in his own life. Strether refers to his plans for this pair as a
"tribute to my youth," and tells Maria Gostrey that his own youth
"has to come in somewhere, if only out of the lives, the condition,
the feelings of other persons" (p. 197).

Many critics have remarked on this vicarious element of
Strether's vision, and have tried to explain the motivations behind

this phenomenon. Sallie Sears says Strether is one of those Jamesian

132

characters, like Mrs. Tristram and Ralph Touchett, "who achieve their
strongest emotional satisfaction by observing and sometimes mani-

pulating the lives of others";14 to E. M. Forster, Strether is simply
"the observer who tries to influence the action";15 and, perhaps most

to the point, Stephen Spender notes that the whole of The Ambassadors

 

is Strether's "vision of what he has lost," and that "out of his
vision he passionately takes the side of those whom he imagines to

be, as he sees it, living."16

But few have provided an adequate
explanation of why Strether should find vicarious enjoyment his only
avenue of satisfaction, why his position must be, in the phrase of
Tony Tanner, that of "the watcher from the balcony."17 The tendency
has been to invoke formal considerations rather than to focus on

the nature of Strether's character itself; this is not surprising
since, as I have noted, the presentational strategy of the novel

and the workings of Strether's consciousness are closely analogous.

But, as F. O. Matthiessen has noted, The Ambassadors is not a novel

 

of "the full consciousness," and the narrator tends to efface himself
whenever the question of Strether's motivation arises. I shall now
try to explain why Strether continues to perceive his options in

such limited terms even after his imagination has been liberated

from the provincial attitudes of Woollett.

Strether's inability to expand his actions into the enlarged
boundaries of his vision is directly connected to the inner conflicts
I have already described. As much as he might desire "reparations"
for his past injuries of self-deprivation, he must above all remain

faithful in his service to others. He has in effect turned traitor

133

to Mrs. Newsome by rejecting as false her reading of the Paris
situation; but he believes this rejection is based on moral dis-
crimination, and is the reasonable response to the undeniable evi-
dence of Chad's improvement. So Strether must show his good faith
by accepting none of the personal benefits that might accrue to him
as a result of this defection; as a fob to his own conscience, he
must be convinced in his own heart that, however he deviates from
Mrs. Newsome's intention, it is in the interest of rendering greater
and more selfless service to everyone involved. Thus Strether's
best hope is to establish in the lives of others what he himself
perceives as ideal situations and relations; he is able in this way
to cloak his own desires in the garb of unselfish advocacy and
service, satisfying both his active conscience and his sublimated
thirst for a "beautiful" existence.

But Strether's debt of loyalty to Mrs. Newsome is only one
of the liabilities which keep him from actively pursuing the satis-
faction of his awakened desires. Strether's second handicap is his
need to escape responsibility for his past sins against himself.
This he does by denying the freedom of his own will and lamenting
the impossibility, for him, of choosing to be otherwise, either then
or now. Though Strether now has an enlarged view of the possibilities
of life in general, he cannot allow himself to act on that expanded
vision; for him to change his behavior now would be to prove to
himself that he might, at any earlier moment, have thrown off the
chains of his tyrannical scruples and become a better, happier

person. So Strether must renounce active satisfaction in the present

134

to escape guilt for his past; he must cling to his theory that
self-sacrifice and the failure to enjoy are inescapable terms of
his existence.

But Strether's denial of free will does not extend beyond its
application to his own case, as can be seen in his exhortation to
Little Bilham in the crucial garden scene of Book Fifth. Though to
Strether himself "the affair of life" "is at best a tin mould . . .
into which, a helpless jelly, one's consciousness is poured," he
entreats Little Bilham to live with "the illusion of freedom" (p. 132)--
as if, strangely enough, Little Bilham had a choice in the matter,
after all. This is neither a confusion nor a paradox if seen in
the context of Strether's inner conflicts. On one hand, he cannot
recognize in himself the capacity for choice, since he needs, as I have
discussed, to believe in the predetermination of his fate; yet on the
other hand, his liberated imagination, through which his desires
seek covert satisfaction, looks upon the lives of others as a field
of infinite possibility, in which resides the potential for beauty
that has been lacking in Strether's own existence.

So what Strether urges on Little Bilham in the garden scene
is not the gift of wisdom, but a plea for the young man not to betray
the imaginative potential that his untapped possibilities hold for
his older companion. Strether is in effect asking Little Bilham to
play a role in his own vision of lives redeemed by beauty--a vision
of which Strether himself is a sponsor, but which he cannot enter as
a participant. In this respect, Strether's real ambition is to be

like Gloriani rather than like Chad; he does not WBNt to live life,

135

but to be a handler of its substance, transposing the existences
of others into his own conception of moral and aesthetic beauty.
Barred by inner prohibitions from choosing how he will act, Strether
instead develops the option of choosing what he sees, inviting
others to collaborate in his active romanticization of the life
around him.

So, though Strether's "irrepressible outbreak to Little
Bilham" is characterized by James as the "subject" of The Ambas-

sadors,18

Strether's words are primarily expressive of his immediate
personal crises, and do not necessarily comprise a direct statement
of the theme of the novel. His speech in this instance has the
character of what Roland Barthes calls a "snare"; a revelation that
is considerably less than it seems. In this scene, Strether is not
possessed by any new knowledge that would give his words credence or
substance; he is confused and afflicted, despondent over his irre-
versible failure, and as yet unsure of how his mistake occurred or
how it might be avoided by others. But he has seen, in the figure of
Gloriani the artist, the only path of satisfaction open to him, and
his outbreak to Little Bilham is his first move in that direction.
James says in his Preface that in this moment Strether "now at all
events gpgp,"19 but this scene represents only the beginning of
Strether's "process of vision," and not its culmination. Strether's
speech to Little Bilham contains the germ of his discovery that,
though his own life is unsalvageable, he might make something

satisfactory to himself out of the lives of others, by the urging

of his own desires upon them.

136

To this end, as I have said, Strether begins to live vicari-
ously through Chad, whose youth strikes him as a redeemed version of
his own. But if Chad is the medium through Strether experiences
his own effaced possibilities, it is Marie de Vionnet who ultimately
emerges as the object of Strether's mediated desires. She is to him
"one of the rare women he had so often heard of, read of, but never
met, whose very presence . . . from the moment it was at all presented,
made a relation of mere recognition" (p. 150). Madame de Vionnet has,
in other words, insinuated herself into Strether's consciousness as
a figure of imagination, a trope of his idealized desire. She is a
creature of romance rather than of his impoverished actual existence.
The "process of vision" which dominates the middle third of IN;

Ambassadors is chiefly Strether's entanglement in the romantic possi-

 

bilities which Marie de Vionnet represents to him; she is seen as a
"goddess," a "sea-nymph," a "femme du monde" (p. 160). Strether finds
her "romantic . . . far beyond what she could have guessed" (p. 174),
and in fact the principal literary association evoked through his
relationship to her is that of Marie de Vionnet as Cleopatra, with
Strether usurping Chad in the role of Antony.20 Summing up, William
Bysshe Stein phrases it fairly when he says that Madame de Vionnet
"becomes the apotheosis of the life that he [Strether] has missed."21

The extravagance of these associations might prompt the
question of how Strether could allow himself to be so indulged, even
in imagination; and in fact he is wrestling constantly with the

question of "what service . . . he was after all rendering Mrs.

Newsome" (pp. 152-53); he observes that Madame de Vionnet "had only

137

after all to smile at him ever so gently in order to make him ask
himself if he weren't . . . going crooked" (p. 128). But Marie has
given Strether no "pretext of disgust" upon which to base his
objection to her, and in the absence of such a pretext Strether's
imagination is free to construe the most permissibly favorable
impression. Though he is at first uncertain whether "liking" Marie
de Vionnet would be "fair" to Mrs. Newsome (p. 143), his pangs of
conscience are muffled by Chad's assertion that his friend's life
is "beautiful" and "without reproach" (p. 144). Strether confirms
this for himself, being taken in by her "air of supreme respectabi-
lity" (p. 146).

In addition, Strether projects onto Marie many of his own
idealized values. As a divorced woman whose connection to the one
man in her life is supposedly "virtuous," she shows Strether a
remarkable restraint of passion. Furthermore, as he sees it, she
is nobly self-sacrificing, since she has apparently "saved" Chad
not for herself, but for others (p. 168); Sallie Sears is to the
point when she observes that for Strether Madame de Vionnet's vir-
tue "does not consist in her charm" but "in her personal sacrifice
to Chad."22 In the scene at Notre Dame in which her moral apotheosis
becomes complete, Marie is revealed to Strether as a person whose
confidence and security in her own virtue is unassailable; he sees
her as a figure with a "discernible faith in herself, a kind of
implied conviction of consistency, security, impunity" (p. 172).
These are all qualities which Strether has tried, with meager

success, niactualize in his own life; perceiving their palpable

138

rendering in the figure of Madame de Vionnet, he is helplessly
committed to her worship and to her service. She has become
Strether's paragon, with the status in Strether's mind of a full
rival to Mrs. Newsome herself.

So Madame de Vionnet is, like Mrs. Newsome, able to secure
Strether's loyal advocacy. He agrees to "save" her, if he can,
though he is uncertain of what he has assented to (p. 152).
Gradually, as is Strether's habit, this indeterminate project takes
on the form potentially most pleasing to Strether himself; he decides
he must fix Chad's wandering attention on the "virtuous attachment"
with Marie which Strether himself finds so ideal. To this end, he
deliberately forsakes his responsibility to Mrs. Newsome and asks
Chad to stay, at least for awhile. Strether sees this request, of
course, as a part of his "service" to Madame de Vionnet; but in fact
he is dependent on Chad's faithfulness to the "virtuous attachment"
for his vicarious enjoyment. Nevertheless Strether has convinced
himself that he is simply trying to arrange a situation that is best
for everyone, and looks to his own non-existent prospects for gain
as proof of his good faith in the matter.

But Strether's glowing account of Marie to Mrs. Newsome
has produced from Woollett an ultimatum: he must return home, or
Mrs. Newsome's daughter Sarah will be obliged to come and retrieve
both him and Chad. But Strether cannot go back under these
conditions; to do so would be in effect a repudiation of Marie
de Vionnet and the romantic vision of which she is the focus; after

all, the ultimatum carries the implication that he has been seduced

139

and enthralled. Furthermore, Mrs. Newsome's orders challenge
Strether's newfound sense that, as Marie Gostrey puts it, he "can
toddle alone" (p. 190); her note calls Strether back to a psychic
and moral dependence which he feels he has now transcended. Unwilling
to surrender the emotional satisfactions of his Parisian vision,
he tries to buy time by refusing to return himself, and forcing the
Pococks to come and get him.

Only when Sarah's arrival is imminent does Strether begin
to realize the full extent of the risks in the confrontation he has
brought on. He is not entirely convinced that Sarah will see the
improvement in Chad or the virtue and beauty of Madame de Vionnet
which are the underlying assumptions upon which his whole vision,
and his whole rationale for not coming home, is based. The figure
of Sarah Pocock haunts him, as if she were an angry and avenging
angel: "She loomed at him larger than life; she increased in volume
as she drew nearer; she so met his eyes that . . . he already felt
her come down on him, already burned, under the reprobation, the
blush of guilt" (p. 201).

What Strether senses here is the anxiety of insufficient
proof, and the extent of the reproach due him should his vision
turn out, after all, to be a self-delusion. Though dedicated in
theory to the truth and compelled by conscience to seek it out at
all costs, Strether has, as in the period following his wife's
death, allowed his view of things to be determined by emotion rather
than by reason, and in doing so has failed to take complete cog-

nizance of the facts. He has accepted without examination the

140

"virtuousness" of the relation between Chad and Marie de Vionnet; and
his impression of his own "magnificence" has become, in the reflect-
ing mirror of Maria Gostrey's praise, "as impersonal as truth itself"
(p. 197). So the "truth" to which Strether clings is that which is
most pleasant to him, and not one which is necessarily warranted by
the facts in evidence. Strether begins to realize this as the
arrival of the Pococks draws nigh, and finds himself "whistling in
the dark" (p. 194) as he waits for his fragile vision to be submitted
for review. He wonders if he is, "on this question of Chad's
improvement, fantastic and away from the truth," and whether he is
living "in a false world, a world that had grown up simply to suit
him" (p. 212); he admits to Maria Gostrey, in a tone that perhaps
expresses more doubts than he intends, that "I shouldn't be at all
surprised if I were mad" (p. 191).

In these reflections one can see fully the advantages James
gains by moving his "observer" figure to the center of his dis-
course. The susceptibility of Strether's vision to the "menacing
touch of the real" (p. 212) mirrors in effect the risk that all art
runs when subjected to the scrutiny of the cold eye that sees through
its illusion without being trapped by its beauty. The integrity of
art is always maintained by effacing to some degree the reality
which, though providing a "subject" for the artist, is in its
totality inimical to his ends. As James says in his Preface, "the
felicity . . . of the artist's state dwells less, surely, in the
further delightful complications he can smuggle in than those he

succeeds in keeping out."23 Strether's "double consciousness,"

141

grasping on one hand for emotional fulfillment and on the other for
intellectual certainty, is itself engaged in this strategy of
repression, by which the subjective necessity of life-enhancing
vision restrains the habit of objective scrutiny which, if indulged,
would destroy the illusion. Thus James makes Strether, through the
workings of his own consciousness, assume the risks of the novelist;
the record of Strether's inner experience reveals the satisfactions,
beauties, and dangers inherent in the artistic process itself.

This interplay of beauty and danger is most dramatically
rendered in the scene in which Strether discovers, to his horror,
the total sexual aspect of the connection between Madame de Vionnet
and Chad. In fact, one might fairly characterize this event as
the explosion, from the inside, of the artistic illusion. The
surroundings in which this revelation takes place remind Strether
of a Lambinet painting "that had charmed him, long years before"
and which "abode with him as the picture he Npplg_have bought"

(p. 301); thus Strether's pastoral journey represents his literal
recovery of a lost possibility that was, in its original form,

only a likeness of the scene now in his actual possession. Strether
has himself entered the frame in which his desires are contained,
and is "freely walking about in it . . . to his heart's content"

(p. 302).

The danger inherent in this scene is that one element of the
vision, which might seem "exactly the right thing" if kept in
perspective, may betray the whole effect if examined too closely.

This is precisely what occurs when the romantic couple in the boat

 

142

are, at a nearer glance, revealed to Strether as Chad and Madame

de Vionnet. What had begun as the finishing touch to a perfect picture
develops into "a sharp fantastic crisis" (p. 308) as the true sexual
nature of the "virtuous attachment" becomes apparent. This discovery
threatens to overturn Strether's entire vision; the "crisis" derives
not so much from the emergent sexual aspect itself as from the fact
that Strether's impression of the relationship has been so opposite
of its actual character. Strether sees now that what he has been
experiencing vicariously, through its public form, is in its

intimate reality not morally beautiful, but coarse and vulgar. He
feels his "generosity betrayed"24 by the materials on which he has
expended it; his beautiful vision is exposed to him as a lie whose
outward form masks rather than reveals its true origins. The result
for Stretherissa perception that, in the words of J. A. Ward, "evil

"25 and that, by extension, there is

is an attribute of beauty,
impunity in pleasure only as long as one can hide from oneself the
debased nature of what is being enjoyed.

This revelation, and the disillusion it engenders in Strether,
is the real crisis of the novel, and is for Strether's case the
"difficult place" in which all Jamesian protagonists find the test
of their mettle. James himself describes this scene as "the climax
. . . toward which the action marches straight from the first";26 but
the question which James leaves dangling is that of precisely what
in Strether is being tested, and what response on his part would

constitute success. It would be too simplistic, I think, to conclude

that James has brought Strether--and the reader--all this way, only

143

to dash the expectations of both on the rocks of disillusion. Indeed,
the very function of the pastoral idyll, a motif of which Strether's
country excursion clearly partakes, is to be an enabling experience
to the hero rather than a debilitating one. So, then, one is
compelled to ask how Strether is to respond to this unforeseen

smash, and what formal movement the novel, through him, is expected
to complete.

As in The American and The Portrait of a Lady, the pattern of

 

 

events in The Ambassadors strongly evokes the motif of the romantic

 

quest. Allen Stein sees in the novel a process of "testing and
initiation" in which "James exploits in a realistic manner a major
Romantic genre, the internalized quest romance." He states further
that "the growth of Strether's heroic nature" results from the
dynamic opposition of "his commitment to a quest which he believes
will take him through a realm of ineffable beauty . . . and the
opposing, educative pressures of reality guiding him back to himself
and his long forgotten innate integrity."27 John Paterson notes

that the "language of adventure" in The Ambassadors imbues Strether's

 

inner conflicts with the richness and violence of bloody battle

f,28

itsel and James admits in his preface that Strether's internal

peregrinations represent "adventure transposed."29 Thus in its

 

structure of events, in the color of its language, and in the open

admission of its author, The Ambassadors partakes of the form of the

 

knightly quest, or perilous journey.
A corollary view to this interpretation is one that, not

surprisingly, was imposed on The American and The Portrait as well--

 

144

that of the redemptive movement, or the motif of the Fortunate Fall.

Robert Hudspeth says that the plot of The Ambassadors "presents first

the definition and then the loss of innocence";30 Oscar Cargill

 

characterizes the novel as "the story of the growth of a man,
belatedly, from innocence to maturity";31 Daniel Mark Fogel claims
that the novel is "dialectical," and that Strether returns to
Woollett with his spirit enriched and his prospects enlarged;32 and

J. A. Ward writes that The Ambassadors "has to do with an inward
"33

 

transformation" that is much like a "religious conversion.

I find these interpretations consonant with my own view that
the novel creates the expectation of Strether's salvaging something
positive out of his disillusionment. But the crucial revelation
scene presents some difficulties which cannot be easily gotten over
if one wishes to read the book in this way; in contrast to INp_

American and The Portrait (and the romances of which their forms

 

are derivative), The Ambassadors dramatizes a pastoral retreat not

 

in which the hero's strengths are nursed and consolidated, but in
which his vision is totally blasted to pieces. The peculiar question

posed, then, in the concluding chapters of The Ambassadors is whether

 

the "process of vision" which Strether experiences has somehow given
him the power to deal in a positive way with the disintegration of
the vision thus created.

The answer, from a purely formal point of view, must be yes,
and many of the critics who give this answer go to great lengths to
explain the nature of Strether's redemption. But all these explana-

tions in the end have the attenuated timbre of Strether's own

145

whistling in the dark; the impulse to see the novel thus "rounded
off" is merely the rationalization of form, an aesthetic desire

derived from the prototype romances upon which The Ambassadors draws

 

for its structure. This is the "zeal" of the reader as he drives
the novel towards the harmonious completion of a familiar pattern;
yet unless one wishes to repeat Strether's mistake of granting
credence to beauty on insufficient grounds, one is obliged to weigh
against this impulse the evidence of Strether's behavior following
his crucial revelation.

Robert Garis, while concurring with the interpretation of the
novel's formal aspects I have developed here, nevertheless finds
that Strether's redemptive progress appears to stop at the precise
moment it ought to crystallize; he says that "James quite distinctly
changed his mind about Strether at the crucial point when he supposedly

'"34 He asserts that Strether's revelation

rounds out his 'education.
does not bring about enlightenment or integration, but gives rise
instead to "a sickening sequence of acts and attitudes devoid of
imaginative energy," that it "produces, in brief, final evidence of
Strether's incapacity for either education or life."35
Garis's essay is important because it is one of the first
in which the internal irresolution of the novel is recongized; I
take exception only to his view that James "changed his mind" about
Strether. James created in Lambert Strether a character whose
integrity of personality and identity persists regardless of the
author's "treatment"; in fact, that is precisely the problem. Like

Newman, like Isabel, Strether is imagined and portrayed with such a

146

generosity of human substance that he cannot be altered to fit the
needs of the discourse. What Garis senses is not James changing
his mind about Strether, but James's relentless honesty in keeping
Strether consistent, even as the aesthetics of form demand that he
be changed.

Strether is incapable of integration and of growth because
his intelligence is too obsessed with the establishment of self-
protective certainties to entertain actively and consciously his
highly contradictory needs and values. Thus, with his dream of
moral beauty shattered, its full contradictions exposed, Strether
is as before the dream in need of some idea that will "simplify"
his relation to his experience. His "idea" is that he will be all
right if he purges himself of his attachment to the insidious plea-
sures that had brought about his delusion and downfall; he rejects
all aspects of his now-derogated romantic vision, scorning beauty as
but a guise for vulgar worldliness. The violence and the totality
of his rejection may best be explained, then, in terms of his earlier
craving for an "idea that would simplify": Strether's greatest need
of all is for his inner life to be uncomplicated, free from the ambi-
guities and anxieties with which his conscience and desire have con-
spired to afflict him; it is in the interest of serene simplicity
that he pursues total renunciation. When Strether discovers that
the beauty he thought pure is in fact ambiguous and paradoxical in
its origins and effects, he is forced by psychological necessity to

reject it as debased, and to raise himself above it.

147

So Strether receives fresh confirmation of what he had pre-
viously feared and thought vain in worldly satisfaction, in personal
ambition, and in the very appreciation of beauty itself. His
pejoration of such vanities, suspended while he pursued his vision,
has returned with a vengeance, and clamped the lid over his desires
so securely that, for the first time in the novel, Strether allows
himself to display fully the unqualified, priggish moral pride of
Woollett. Looking down with smug, sad superiority at Madame de
Vionnet, "he could think of nothing but the passion, mature, abysmal,
pitiful, she represented, and the possibilities she betrayed" (p. 323).
These "possibilities" are for Strether the vision of what beauty
there might have been for him to appreciate, had she not demonstrated
by her own weakness the lurid vulgarity out of which such beauty may
arise.

But her anguish in this final interview shows the brutalizing
effects on her of Strether's idealization, which she encouraged and
in whose collapse she must now share, with him, some of the suffering
and responsibility. But she, unlike Strether, has known all along
the disjuncture between her real self and the symbolic intensity
with which Strether had imagined her. Madame de Vionnet, like her
predecessors Claire de Cintré and Isabel Archer, is a typical
Jamesian love-object who, protesting her own weakness, nevertheless
shoulders the weight of her lover's idolatry; but the collapse of
the idolatrous vision is in the end more a result of the lover's own
self-delusion than of the insufficiency of its object. Madame de

Vionnet is acutely aware of the significance Strether has attached

148

to her "virtuousness," and of her precipitous fall from his grace;
but her present view of herself as "abject and hideous" (p. 324) is
more a consequence of Strether's habit of seeing her than of her own
actions. As U. C. Knoepflmacher observes, "it is Strether, and not
she, who has shrivelled. For he has become aware that the woman
standing before him is his own creation."36 She represents, in
effect, the debris of his collapsed vision; and the moral superiority
of his tone shows that he has turned his shattered dream of her into
a wreck upon which he may now elevate himself, if he is careful not
again to lose his balance.

But to avoid repetition of this mistake, Strether must once
again protect himself from the snares of experience and desire. To
this end, he begins once again to worship his chains of conscience,
invoking his old prohibitions against the headlong plunges of his
hungry, adventuring imagination. "I never think any further than I
have to," he tells Madame de Vionnet (p. 324); and he asserts to
Maria Gostrey that "I prg_no ideas. I'm afraid of them. I've done
with them" (p. 344). These statements are symptomatic of his
retreat from imagination, and from the thrill and risk of its
outward grasp. His greatest desire now is to be "lucid and quiet,
just the same for himself on all essential points as he had ever
been" (p. 327); and his once-large possibilities shrivel to the
single pale axiom of self-justification with which he began the
novel; his "only logic," he tells Maria Gostrey, is "Not, out of the

whole affair, to have got anything for myself" (p. 344).

149

This sentiment directly contradicts Strether's exhortation
to Little Bilham in the garden scene of Book Fifth; and in his
rejection of the small comfort offered by Maria in the book's final
scene, one sees Strether's final gesture of betrayal of his earlier
insight. And, since Strether's speech of Book Fifth is in fact the

"subject" of The Ambassadors, his spurning of Gostrey's profferred

 

hand represents his ultimate severance from the goals of the dis-
course itself. As Judith Wilt has noted, Strether's pairing with
Gostrey "is the ending the Story seeks, both by the formal energy of
the 'comic' resolution and by the peculiar energies of the Story's
subject."37 His behavior in this final scene, then, represents his
inability to countenance the demands that artistic form places on his
thoughts and actions; he is incapable of integrating in himself the
novel's dual requirements of beauty and discrimination, and retreats
from both.

Strether has despaired of the reconciliation of these demands,
and is unable, for reasons discussed above, to conceive of or
embrace an idea of "good" that is anything less than absolutely pure
and abstract. Gostrey's offer "of exquisite service, of lightened
care, for the rest of his days" appeals to needs which Strether has
now repressed and derogated; though he feels "It was awkward, it was
almost stupid, not to seem to prize such things" (p. 344), Strether
cannot help betraying his conviction that the comforts she offers
are ephemeral and somewhat beneath him in the moral glory of his
total renunciation. He tells her finally that "It's you who would

make me wrong" (p. 345). This is neither heroism nor chivalry; it

150

is moral scrupulousness of a most priggish and overbearing nature,
and reveals that, though Strether may go through some of the obliga-
tory motions of the educated hero (such as his discharge of his final
service to Madame de Vionnet), they are empty for him, and express
formal intentions from which his own inner motives are completely
alienated.

But the severity of this disjuncture between character and
form is not specifically acknowledged in the knowledge of the
novel; Garis says that "the extraordinarily fluent stream of the
late James prose has served to hide this fact from most readers and

apparently from James himself."38

I agree with the first part of
Garis's statement, but must object his final phrase. James him-
self was manifestly aware that Strether's education remains uncom-

pleted at the conclusion of The Ambassadors; in fact, in the very

 

prose upon which Garis remarks one can find shifts in purpose which
reflect James's awareness of this irresolution, and which also repre-
sent his strategy for dealing with it.

In the concluding interview with Maria Gostrey, James permits
the reader only intermittent glimpses of Strether's thoughts; the
narrator appears to have denied himself the privilege and responsi-
bility of internal analysis in this crucial scene. As a result, there
is no interpretation of Strether's final words, which in the absence
of commentary rise like enigmatic bubbles from the invisible depths
of his consciousness. He seems, in this shifted light, to be some-
how different from what he was; he is more mysterious, more

unfathomable, than the creature to whose mind the reader has previously

151

had such easy access. But, as can be seen in his words and in the
consistency of his closing gesture with motives expressed by him
elsewhere in the novel, he is, in his own words, "just the same for
himself on all essential points." James's final strategy, then, is
precisely that with which he addressed similar problems in the

climactic moments of The American and The Portrait of a Lady:

 

 

the effacement, through an increased distance between narrator and
subject matter, of the inner actuality which separates the mind of
the protagonist from the designs of the work as a whole. When
analysis falls silent, form is left to complete its statement, to
fulfill its syntax of expectation.

Thus James tries to preserve, even in the face of Strether's
defection, the unity and roundness of the novel which Strether
himself has rejected. The author thus commits himself, as novelist
and artist, to the preservation of the illusion even when he knows
that, through Strether, it is being undone. James shows a faith in
the efficacy of art, while his protagonist shows disgust and
intellectual despair upon discovering the sullied roots of his vision.
Yet his shift of light, away from Strether's mind and onto the
ambiguous surface of his words and actions, shows James's unwilling-
ness to lie to the reader with explicit assurances of his hero's
triumph; rather, as in the earlier novels, he lets the reader dangle
between truth and fantasy, hoping that, in the generous reader, the
choosing of one will not result in the automatic devaluation and

derogation of the other.

152

Thus James in The Ambassadors has raised the image of a

 

discerning hero, just as Lambert Strether raised in Madame de Vionnet
the image of a person of moral beauty. For both author and charac-
ter there is a risk commensurate with the degree of beauty attempted;
as R. P. Blackmur says, "it is the perennial job of uprooted imagina-
tion, of conscience, choosing from beauty and knowledge, to raise
such an image." But he also cautions that in such an enterprise one
"may not transgress reality without destruction; the images must

not be taken for reality though the heart craves it."39 This is

a lesson James teaches twice in The Ambassadors--once through Madame

 

de Vionnet's failure to remain within the form Strether creates for
her, and again through Strether's own inability to rise to the occa-
sion that art demands of him. James's own equivocations at the end
of the novel indicate that he, unlike Strether, knows what has gone
wrong, and why; it is such displays of awareness, in this novel and
in the others examined in this study, that lend credence to Sallie
Sears' incisive observation that "James's finest talent . . . is for
seeing what will not work." James is indeed, as Sears says, "the '

most unsentimental of our great romanticists,"4o for in The Ambassa-

 

dors he essays to make great art, and great romance, out of the
discovery that these forms are of the imagination, and that one must
neither mistake them for nor judge them against the reality into

which one inevitably awakens.

NOTES

1"The Watcher from the Balcony: Henry James's The Ambassadors,"
Critical Quarterly, 8 (1966), 38.

2

 

The Craft of Fiction (New York: Viking Press, 1957), p. 169.

 

3Modern Fiction Studies, 4 (1958), 157-64.
4Tilford, 161.

 

5"The Author's Voice in The Ambassadors," Journal of Narrative
Technigue, l (1971), 108.

6Thomas, 114.

 

 

7Henry James, The Ambassadors, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (New York:
Norton, 1964), p. 18. All references are to this edition, which is
based on the corrected New York text of 1909.

8A World Elsewhere (London: Oxford University Press, 1966),
p. 124.

9HenryJames: The Major Phase (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1932; rpt. 1963), p. 23.

10The Destructive Element (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), p. 81.
11Spender, p. 82.

12"The Art of Henry James: The Ambassadors," Chicago Review,
9 (1956), 16.

 

13William Bysshe Stein, "The Ambassadors," The Crucifixion of
Sensibility," College English, 17 (1956), 292.

14The Negative Imagination: Form and Perppective in the Novels
of Henry James (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 120.

 

 

15Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1927),

 

p. 120.
16

17

Spender, p. 77.
Tanner, 38.

153

154

18James, The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), p. 307.

19

20U. C. Knoepflmacher has produced a useful study on this theme:
"'0 Rare for Strether!’ Antopy and Cleqpatra and The Ambassadors,"
Nineteenth Century Fiction, 19(1965), 333-44.

21
22

The Art of the Novel, p. 308.

Stein, 290.
Sears, p. 118.

23The Art of the Novel, p. 312.
24

 

Poirier, p. 136.

25"The Ambassadors: Strether's Vision of Evil," Nineteenth
Century Fiction, 14 (1959), 50.

26James, The Notebooks of Henry James, eds. F. o. Matthiessen
and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947),
p. 413.

 

27"Lambert Strether's Circuitous Journey: Motifs of Internal-
ized Quest and Circularity in The Ambassadors," Emerson Society

Quarterly, 22 (1976), 245.

28See "The Language of Adventure in Henry James," American
Literature, 32 (1960), 291-301.

29

 

The Art of the Novel, p. 319.

30"The Definition of Innocence: James's The Ambassadors,"
Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 6 (1964), 305.

3"'The Ambassadors: A New View," PMLA, 75 (1960). 444.

 

32"The Jamesian Dialectic in The Ambassadors," Southern Review.
13 (1977), 468-91.

33"The Ambassadors as Conversion Experience." Southern REVIEW:
5 (1969), 351.

34"The Two Lambert Strethers: A New Reading of The Ambassadors,"
Modern Fiction Studies, 7 (1961), 305.

356aris, 307.

36Knoepflmacher, 341.

155

37"A Right Issue from a light Place: Henry James and Maria
Gostrey," Journal of Narrative Technique, 6 (1976), 78.

38Garis, 305.

39"The Loose and Baggy Monsters of Henry James: Notes on the
Underlying Classic Form in the Novel," Accent, 11 (1951), 139.

4OSears, p. 151.

CHAPTER V

THE WINGS OF THE DOVE

In his Preface to The Wings of the Dove, Henry James describes

 

that novel's "idea, reduced to its essence" as "that of a young per-
son conscious of a great capacity for life, but early strickened and

"' But though Millie

doomed, condemned to die under short respite.
Theale, the tragically ill "dove" of the title, provides the genera-
tive image for the novel, it is not her own "ordeal of consciousness"
which dominates the presentation; as James says later in his Preface,
"her stricken state was but half her case, the other half being

"2

those affected by her. In the end, it is this latter aspect of

Milly's "case" which dominates The Wings of the Dove and gives rise

 

to its essential controversies and interests; the dying Milly Theale
is not, finally, the novel's "subject" in the same way as Isabel

Archer in The Portrait, or Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors. If

 

 

anything, Milly resembles Christopher Newman's love-object Claire
de Cintré, or Strether's romanticized madonna Marie de Vionnet;
like both those women, Milly's principal role in this novel is as
one whose selfhood becomes a field of free play for the imaginations
of others.

It is the consciousness of one of these "others," namely
Milly's purported lover Merton Densher, which becomes the crucible
wherein the novel's elemental oppositions are compressed and heated.

156

157

Milly's situation, while central to the novel's design, "matters"
principally in terms of its palpable effects on Densher, and in its
dynamic contrast with the situation of the vital but impoverished
Kate Croy, Densher's actual lover. As Christof Wegelin says, IDS.

Wings of the Dove is in essence "the story of Densher's changing

 

relations to Milly and to Kate"; he sees in the novel "a skeletal
plot almost of the nature of the fairy tale or the morality play"
which "suggests the struggle of the good and the bad princess for

the mastery of the prince, of the good and bad angel for the posses-
sion of the soul of a man."3 Within this "allegorical framework" are
other associations: "the white and black in which Kate and Milly

are clothed," the Biblical allusions to Christ's own ordeal, and in
particular the bird imagery, which identifies Milly as the grace-

giving sacrificial dove and Kate as the "crow"4

or cormorant, prey-
ing for her sustenance on the fortunes of others or (more to the
point) on their dead or dying flesh.

But these associations, like the moral paradigm they define,
are important as local manifestations of Densher's consciousness
rather than as expressions of the novel's central theme. They are,

"5 emergent

like Densher's role as the novel's primary "reflector,
rather than initially specified features, moving gradually to the
fore as the action progresses. It is the phenomenon of these
features' emergence, and not the mere fact of their evoked associa-
tions, that seems to bear most fruit upon analysis; the novel is

not simply the story of "mankind undergoing regeneration," symbolized

in Densher's final rejection of Kate for Milly.6 It is, rather, an

158

account of how the desire for such a regeneration is aroused in
Densher, and the roles which both Kate and Milly play in the
"process of vision" by which Densher pursues his redemption.
Precisely what I mean by the "emergent" quality of the
novel's features may best be explained by noting some important

points of contact and departure between The Wings of the Dove and

 

the James novel immediately preceding it, The Ambassadors. That

 

novel too is concerned with a "process of vision," but in Strether's
case that process is underlined by a Romance story structure which
has the effect of validating the hero's desperate romantic self-
delusions. What results is, as we have seen, a blurred distinc-
tion between the author's vision and that of his sad, even pathetic

protagonist. In The Wings of the Dove one finds a romance cycle of

 

departure and return (from London to Venice and back again), of
epiphany and moral regeneration, similar to the course marked for

Strether in The Ambassadors; but in Wings, this structure does not

 

govern the novel as a whole. In fact, the pattern does not really
assert itself until the second half of the book, and the symbolic
attributions which define the terms of Densher's ordeal are not
wholly specified until very late in the story. Thus the formal
elements of romance in Njng§_seem less the result of authorial
design than of the collaborative effort of the characters them-
selves (a process increasingly dominated by Densher) as they try to
make something beautiful out of the lot which life has handed them.
It is after all Kate who conceives of Milly as a "dove," and Milly

and Densher who model their behavior according to that definition;

159

furthermore, it is Densher who finally identifies Kate with destruc-
tive worldly ambition, designing for her in the last two books a
series of tests which serve for him as a proof of her inferior

moral nature.

This does not mean, of course, that the first phase of the
novel simply marks time until the "real" story of Densher's moral
ordeal begins; the opening chapters are in fact an implied commentary
on the symbolically charged action which ensues as the characters
finally discover and assume their roles. In these early chapters
James dramatizes the human cost of the role-playing upon which the
integrity of the social and literary fabric is dependent, and calls
into question the efficacy of the symbolic roles which Kate and
Milly are assigned, at the expense of their wholeness and vitality
as characters, in Densher's inner moral drama. In this respect

The Wings of the Dove is both radically different from and perfectly

 

an extension of The Ambassadors: as in that preceding novel, a

 

primary feature of James's technique is his ostensible sharing of
authorial functions with the characters through whose eyes the
story is seen. But in ijg§_this sharing occurs on a far more
pervasive scale; James forgoes from the beginning the strict and
evident formal control of earlier novels, and patiently waits for
the imaginations of the characters themselves to establish the
symbolic and formal properties of the "situation" in which they
find themselves. In this way James allows the characters to absorb
responsibility for the story's controlling form, and through them
examines the process of form-giving as yet another phenomenon of

the individual consciousness.

160

This is not a new area of inquiry for James. As we have seen
in our other investigations, James's novels always dramatize the
human impulse to see real experience in the light of aesthetic con-
ceptions. This impulse is shown most radically in the "surrogate
romancers" like Mrs. Tristram and Ralph Touchett, and most mani-
festly in Lambert Strether, whose "process of vision" so totally

dominates The Ambassadors; but in these precedent cases, the aesthe-

 

tic impulse in these characters is reflected in and implicitly
endorsed by the authorial rhetoric, both in its ongoing commentary

(in The American and The Portrait) and in its determination of

 

 

form (in The Ambassadors). In Wings the authorial presence betrays

 

a suppression of this impulse, and a deference of its powers to the
characters; the question of what to "do" with Milly or with anyone
else appears to be a concern of the participants alone, and not of
the author, whose intentions are principally evident in the establish-
ment of the community of characters in which the question of what to
"do" with Milly is posed and answered. This authorial deference
allows James to show more clearly than ever before that the
"artistic" process by which experience is endowed with form and
beauty is not a faculty of the artist (or author) alone, but is in
fact symptomatic of humans in general, and can be observed in artis-
tic creations of sufficiently realized humanity.

Thus one may see an ostensible rationale for James's indul-
gence of his impulse to "get down into the arena . . . to live and
breathe and rub shoulders and converse with the persons engaged in

7

the struggle" in his novels: the "muffled majesty of authorship"

161

that prevails in these later works represents not so much a renun-
ciation of the authorial function as an attempt to examine its pro-
cesses and its consequences in activities other than the author's

own. In The Wings of the Dove particularly James appears to be

 

engaged in an attempt to understand his own role and his own diffi-
culties as an author by dramatizing and observing the authorial
process in his surrogates, the characters. In the end, James is not
so much getting down into the muddle with his characters as hoisting
them up into his own vertiginous tower, the better to observe the
symptoms produced by breathing such rarefied air.

The principal difficulty that the authorial role presents
for James himself is, as we have seen, that of hewing his materials
into harmony with his design, of forging an identity between the
process of authorial vision and the human particulars on which that
vision is to be imposed. But the achievement of this identity has
proved so problematical for James that in NNpg§_he declines to
attempt it; he appears to understand from the outset that his
characters are bound to betray the symbolic associations which
attend them, so he effaces his own presence as magisterial author
and allows his "bleeding participants" to apply the symbolic treat-
ment themselves. For example, Susan Stringham's view of Milly as a
"princess" imparts a necessary romantic amplification of the story's
texture;8 but this "princess" motif, like the image of the dove which
ultimately supercedes it, is not confirmed by authorial endorsement,
but rather is offered for examination by the reader. Thus, if the

characters fail in the end to adhere to their roles, the onus is

162

on James's surrogates rather than on the author himself; the task left
to the author, then, is not that of supplying an interpretation of his
own, but ofassessing the success of those provided by the characters,
and of measuring the cost at which such interpretations are achieved
and maintained. In this way, James recognizes as given the problema-
tical nature of the aesthetic contract between artist and subject,

but consciously makes this recognition the central issue and the
structural principle of the novel itself. As L. 8. Holland has

observed, The Wings of the Dove is "a novel that builds . . . on
"9

 

its own failure.
The seeds of this failure are conspicuously planted in the

opening chapters with Kate Croy. Though Kate is ultimately cast as

the ostensible villainness of the story, the "destructive persistent

element"10

which parasitically feeds on Milly's moral beauty and
material wealth, she is introduced by James at her moment of great
personal crisis, in which her painful conflicts and mingled motives
are apparent as nowhere else in the novel. Unlike the stalking
"panther" which she is later to become, Kate is introduced as a
potential victim in her own right, afflicted by a dilemma that is
calculated to appeal to the understanding of the sensitive reader.
The terms of this dilemma are crucial to our understanding of Kate,
and the way in which her problems are subsequently effaced is reve-
latory of James's strategies and intentions in this novel.

Kate's dilemma, in its most elementary terms, involves her

making a choice between love and money. But her situation would

not be a dilemma, nor would it be Jamesian, if it could be so simply

163

put. For Kate, as Sallie Sears has observed, neither of these choices

I] On one hand, Kate desires the wealth that would

is acceptable.
derive from a marriage arranged by her Aunt Maud; but she fears the
surrender of identity that would occur in her transformation into a
marriageable commodity. Furthermore, Kate resents her status as her
family's sacrificial lamb, whose selfhood is to be offered on the
altar of marriage so that her disgraced father and impoverished
sister might be provided for. On the other hand, Kate desires to
gratify her romantic impulses by marrying Merton Densher, a young
journalist with a fine mind but no material prospects; but she

abhors the brutalization a penniless marriage has wreaked on her
sister, and is too morally sensitive to her "duty" to her family thus
to "throw herself away" on a romantic urge. The choice of marriage
either for love or money represents a betrayal of Kate's image of
herself, either of her egoistic needs or of her moral sensibility;
she can accept neither without the complement of the other.

What Kate needs is a course of action which will simplify this
dilemma. But the simplifications available to her are both limited
and extreme: she must be willing to give up or to grasp for all.

To give up, as she offers to do in the opening scene with her father,
simplifies by negation; her offer of total renunciatory service,
though it satisfies her sense of her own "family duty," is neverthe-
less in essence an "escape" from the higher demands of Aunt Maud.
Thus to "save herself," Kate admits, she would be willing even to
sacrifice her love for Densher.12 The other alternative--grasping

for all--promises to simplify her dilemma by action; in "trying for

164

everything," Kate would be pursuing the hope of both discharging her
family obligations and satisfying her desires for material comforts
and for Densher at the same time. But this course is more risky,
since it requires Kate and Densher to play a game of delay and
deceit with Aunt Maud, and a sense of when, how, or whether her ends
will be achieved is not immediately forthcoming. But for Kate,
either direct withdrawal or covert engagement is preferable to the
untenable choices between love or money that otherwise present
themselves.

In this context, Kate's resolve to "try for everything,"
which is the motive underlying her deceit and ill use of Milly, is
shown as a decision of last resort, arrived at only after her initial
impulse to try for nothing is frustrated. In the opening scene of
the novel, James clearly dramatizes the defeat of this original
intention: Kate is desperate for relief from her conflicts, and is
willing to give up all to escape them if only her father will provide
her with a moral rationale for doing so by accepting her offer of
service. This scene has important consequences for the rest of the
novel, since it reveals in Kate an impulse totally antithetical to
the actions and imagery which become emblematic of her as the story
progresses; she becomes the "crow," the "panther," only after her
father spurns her offer and "throws her back" into the oppressively
prodigious lap of Aunt Maud (p. 49).

So James's dramatization of Kate's case reveals that her
ultimate acceptance of her role as deceiver and manipulator is a

desperate game played against the constricting limits of her

165

situation. Kate's initial gesture reveals the harrowing anxiety
from which her later resolution springs; thus she sparks a vestigial
sympathy in the reader that even her most duplicitous behavior
cannot completely extinguish. One cannot help but remember, even
as Kate works to sacrifice Milly for herself and Densher, that
she herself has almost been a victim, and that, given a choice, she
would rather have removed herself from the fray than become a
predator. The opening scene reveals Kate's preference for the
renunciatory gesture which, when seen in Densher, becomes the osten-
sible moral standard of the novel; but this option is closed to
her by her father's rejection of her offer.

In such a light, it is difficult to see Kate purely as the
"bad angel" who vies with Milly for the possession of Densher's
soul. The rhetoric which guides the reader towards such an inter-
pretation is mocked by the lucidity with which James presents Kate's
case and dramatizes her desire to escape moral peril. This conflict
between lucid analysis and aesthetic valuation is, as we have seen,
one that is characteristic of James's fictional enterprises; but in
ANpg§_it appears to have become the main issue. James makes Kate's
antithetical impulse the keynote of the work itself; her opening
scene prepares the reader for the discovery that the roles eventually
assumed by the characters are diminutions of the full humanity they
display before their aesthetic values are fixed.

Nowhere is this issue more pertinent than in the case of
Milly Theale, whose humanity is ultimately occluded by her symbolic

function. Among critics who have taken Milly's symbolic role at

166

face value, it has been customary to accuse James of having insuf-
ficiently endowed his heroine with human verisimilitude; Stephen
Koch aptly summarizes this attitude when he states that Milly is
"a character with the literary virtues of the impersonal in a
personal drama," and that "James made her a figure without a con-
ventional fictional being."13 But this "impersonal" or figural
quality of Milly's is an effect of the consciousnesses of James's
"reflectors," beginning with Susan Stringham, and not a direct indi-
cation of James's own attitude. It is evident, from Milly's words
and actions, that James has granted her a greater measure of human
reality than do the characters who supply interpretations of those
words and actions; but this human reality is gradually subsumed in
the symbolic roles through which Milly's identity is eventually
defined by herself and other characters. Her elevation "into a
symbol and a register of a common truth" is indeed "a process that
robs her of her humanity";14 yet Milly's human actuality is not, as
Koch suggests, "retracted" by James, but rather is gradually
repressed in the consciousnesses of the characters themselves.
Therefore there are two aspects of Milly's presence and of her role
in the novel that must be kept in mind: first, it must be granted
that in Milly Theale there are human riches to be plundered for
aesthetic gains; and it must also be recognized that the authorial
James is a passive and not active accomplice in the conspiracy of
vision by which the effacement of Milly's humanity is achieved.

As one might expect, James's endowment of Milly with the full

prerogatives of human will produces some dissonance between her

167

personal reality (the terms of which I shall shortly discuss) and

her "impersonal" literary virtues. Critics have generally regarded
Milly's role in the novel as a redemptive one, in which she allows
herself to be sacrificed so that others in the work--particular1y
Densher--may be enlightened or redeemed.15 These views of Milly's
nobility and transcendent moral beauty are based on the assumption
that her actions are ultimately to be construed as selfless and
benificient; this reading is consistent with Milly's assigned role

as the sacrifical dove, and with the numerous analogues in image and
action which link her to the Christian Savior. Furthermore, this
reading is supported not only by localized imagery in the language

of the novel, but by the overarching pattern of Densher's regeneration
which Milly appears to shape in the latter half of the story. That
some have seen this regenerative process as failed rather than
achieved is an important issue, but is most pertinent to the question
of Densher's fitness for his own role as the moral knight-errant,

and does not bear significantly on Milly's relation to her part.

The rhetoric betrays no doubts regarding the transcendent power of
Milly's gilded wings, though in the final analysis one may reasonably
question whether their descending grace has its desired effect.

Not all readers of The Wings of the Dove have agreed with the

 

view of Milly as a redeemer and symbol of grace; some maintain,
against the indications of the evaluative rhetoric, that she is sadly,
even execrably, human after all-~that her beautiful behavior is
symptomatic of neurotic insecurity, selfishness, or pride, and that

its charming effects conceal basic self-aggrandizing or

168

self-destructive tendencies.16 These interpretations are useful to
the extent that they recognize James's intention of creating in Milly
a fully imagined human being; but they fail in the extent to which
they interpret the disjunction between Milly's psychological weakness
and her symbolic strength as a failure either of vision or of execu-
tion on James's part. If one takes his treatment of Kate Croy as

a paradigm for his method in The Wings of the Dove, it is clear that

 

James is aware of this disjunction, and that he has in fact made it
the governing theme and the prevailing technical consideration in
this novel. Milly, though she provides the novel with its central
symbol, must be understood first in human terms; but an application
of this understanding to her aesthetic function reveals, as in Kate's
case, a number of impulses which are antithetical to the values she
is made to represent in her apotheosis as the selfless, grace-giving
dove.

Milly's inner conflicts are remarkably similar to Kate's; in
fact, they represent the obverse image of Kate's own. Kate is dis-
tinguished on one hand by her energy and vitality, and on the other
by the suffocating threat of poverty which afflicts her; Milly is
financially secure but is passive towards the very thing she desires,
the experience that lies beyond the encircling fortress of her wealth.
Still, like Kate, Milly wants to annex what she lacks without placing
at risk what she already has; or, failing that, she faces the possi-
bility of giving up all rather than accepting the median joys of her
insulated existence. When Milly longs for "The power to resist the

bliss of what I have" (p. 89), she is expressing her sense that her

169

material advantages are either inappropriate or insufficient to her
needs; she is also praying for deliverance, through either enlarge-
ment or total renunciation of her prospects, from the provisional
security which her money has bestowed on her.

So Milly, like Kate, must choose between surrendering or
hoping for everything. Milly's contemplation of this choice is
indirectly dramatized in her introductory scene, in which Susan
Stringham finds her perched at the edge of an Alpine cliff. In
light of the conflict sketched above, this image has a psychological
dimension which is a truer register of Milly's character than the
often-invoked analogue with Satan's temptation of Christ; Milly is
represented here as having the Option of immediate and total self-
destruction on one hand and the deferred possibility of total self-
satisfaction on the other. There is a real sense in which Milly,
like Kate, must choose between giving up all (in the sweet oblivion
of the abyss) and hoping to gain all (by descending from the mountain
into the world of experience). And, though the novel chiefly drama-
tizes Milly's pursuit of the second option, it is the appeal of the
former possibility that immediately registers on the observing
Susan Stringham. She sees in the cliff scene "some betrayed
accordance of Milly's caprice with a horrible hidden obsession"

(p. 84), and suspects that Milly is contemplating a suicidal plunge.
Though this impulse of Milly's is effaced in much of the action

and analysis which follows, the undertow of her potential despair
ripples the surface of even her bravest performances, reaching its

fullest expression in Book Ninth, as she "turns her face to the

170

wall" in an emblematic rejection of life and love. But Milly's
final despair is not for her a pgN_syndrome, sparked by her discovery
of Kate's and Densher's treachery; it is rather an old one revived,
a return to her initial contemplation of death as an escape, in
which she may substitute the successful abolition of her needs for
the failed satisfaction of them.

It is symptomatic, incidentally, of Mrs. Stringham's view of
Milly that she immediately suppresses her instinctive recognition of
her "princess's" unseemly thirst for self-destruction; after all,
Milly is in Susan's eyes a heroine of romance, endowed with an innate
nobility and strength of spirit, and in such a "reading" of Milly the
idea of deSpair or self-surrender must be inadmissible. Therefore,
Mrs. Stringham rationalizes that if Milly was indeed "looking down
on the kingdoms of the earth . . . it wouldn't be with a view of
renouncing them" (p. 84); the prospect of Milly's "sharp and simple
release from the human predicament" is a threat to the romantic
enterprise through which Mrs. Stringham has defined her relation to
her "princess," and is accordingly denied. Instead, Susan sees
Milly as "taking full in the face the whole assault of life" (p. 85)--
a view which overrates Milly's ability to deal with such an onslaught,
though it satisfies Susan's romantic conception of her heroine.
So Mrs. Stringham, out of the necessities of vision, draws a curtain
across the peril of despair she glimpses in Milly, and replaces this
hint of real weakness with a symbolic attribution of strength; but
it is too late for her errant insight to be erased from the discourse;

it has already been shown to the reader, and the effaced prospect

171

of Milly's despair hovers over the subsequent action, a ghostly
antithesis to the rhetoric which argues for Milly's intense love of
life and her noble endurance of pain and betrayal.

But Mrs. Stringham is not the only person in the novel who
has trouble plumbing the true depths of Milly's consciousness.
Milly herself is unsure of who she is, and what her life is for.
Ironically, the very wealth which others (particularly Kate) see
as the wellspring of Milly's strength and liberty is in truth the
source of paralyzing anxiety; her prodigious inheritance actually
keeps her important questions of identity and purpose from being
fully answered. Though endowed with the "creative agency of money,"17
Milly is trapped in the image which her wealth projects; as Susan
Stringham observes, "that was what it was to be really rich. It had
to be thg_thing you were" (p. 82). Milly's money and tragic history,
so palpable in their presence and in the impressions they produce
in others, bespeak themselves through her, rather than the other
way around. Like the clothing of which Isabel Archer complains,
Milly's material advantages are in fact personal constraints; she
does not wish to be identified solely by her wealth any more than
Isabel wants to be known solely by her clothing. But the actual
Milly has trouble escaping the powerful impersonal image projected
by her money and her family history; it is an image which reflects
inward as well as outward, frustrating not only her desire for
authentic human contact--her "plea for people and her love of life"
(p. 97)--but for self-knowledge and self-determination as well.

It is the tyranny of this impersonal identity which Milly ruefully

172

regards as "the bliss of what I have," and her "wanting abysses"
(p. 123) is merely the expression of her desire to feel the deep
plunge of the real through which her true needs can be answered,
and her true self can be revealed and recognized.

Yet Milly has great need of this impersonal image which her
money projects. Though she longs to plunge into the stream of life,
to feel the pull of the real, she also has a fear of drowning in this
powerful tide. Her sense of self is not firm enough for her to
abandon the protection of her given mask; neither is her knowledge
of the world sufficient to sustain her should she forgo the artificial
bouyancy which her impersonal self provides. This vulnerability of
Milly's is revealed in the small crisis of her first extended
encounter with Lord Mark; James records her alarm at the "perverse
quickening of the relation" between them, and notes that "She wished
to get away from him, or indeed, much rather, away from herself so
far as she was present to him" (p. 108). Milly feels endangered by
the prospect of such intimacy because she does not yet feel ready to
be "presented" to others in personal terms. This is particularly
true in her encounters with others who, like Lord Mark, have the
self-possession and the knowledge of the world which Milly finds
wanting in herself; such people, with their "lack of imagination,"
seem to Milly capable of seeing her as she really is, with her doubts,
insecurities, and covert ambitions, and denuded of the romantic
cloak in which Susan and others have protectively wrapped her. By
"keeping herself in abeyance" (p. 110) through the various masks

which circumstances offer her, Milly is able to conceal her inner

173

weakness in a show of apparent strength; thus Milly accepts the
interpretations of herself which others provide, without totally
identifying with them. She would rather pass as a "cheap exotic"
or seem "easy" to Lord Mark than have her actual self exposed to
his scrutiny; such simplified readings, while inadequate to account
for the real Milly, have the virtue of stopping the thoughts of
others at the gates of her citadel, rather than allowing them to
pass through and discover the vulnerabilities within.

Mrs. Stringham senses the lack of identification between
the real and the symbolic versions of Milly when she observes that
her princess lacks a "motive" adequate to her means (p. l30). But
it is typical of Susan not to suspect that there may be a contradic-
tion between the actual Milly Theale and the significance she has
come to assume for her companion; Susan's remark suggests, rather,
that Milly simply has not yet "grown into" her money, and the role
that it determines for her. But in fact, as we have seen, the
money is an impediment to, and not a symbolic extension of, Milly's
possibilities for full self-realization. The conspiratorial effects
of wealth and of tragic family loss have left Milly alone, alienated
from others and unsure of her place and value in the world at large;
but Milly's only defense against these anxieties is her further
retreat into the very situation which fed her insecurity and aliena-
tion in the first place. She is dependent on the insulating and
glorifying effects her wealth projects to others, even as its effect
on her is to exacerbate the very conflicts she is hoping to resolve.

Contrary to her expectations, Milly's money neither brings her closer

174

to the contact with life she desires, nor aids her efforts to
withdraw and consolidate herself for the full assault of experience;
it is ultimately the cause rather than the cure for these difficul-
ties, though it presents itself to Milly as the only medium through
which she may work for her happiness.

So money is the ambivalent force at the core of both Kate's
and Milly's conflicts; just as Kate's dilemma is defined by her
poverty, Milly's is defined by her wealth. Furthermore, Milly's
strategic response to her dilemma is much like Kate's: they both
use the overt roles supplied by circumstance as secured battlements
from which the satisfaction of private needs and desires may be
covertly pursued. But Milly, unlike Kate, does not know how to
become an active agent in the workings of her own fate. Conditioned
to passivity by her fears and by the received advantages which have
ruled her destiny, Milly's idea of grasping for all is "neither to
seek nor to Shirk," but "to let things come as they would" (pp. 96,
97). For Milly, destiny and identity are matters of what is granted
by the world at large rather than cases of what may be grasped from
it. She does not wish to use her money to buy a false image of her-
self, nor does she require it (as Kate does) for the support of a
self-concept that is already formed; rather, it represents for her a
womb-like security, at once safe and suffocating, out of which she
expects eventually to emerge.

Yet she characteristically shrinks from experience, even when
it presents itself without seeking on her part. Though she professes

herself in theory to be "delighted to know that something was to be

175

done with her" (p. 119), in actuality Milly fears the risk of intimacy
that such "doing" might involve. We have already seen this fear
excited, in the context of her conversation with Lord Mark; but it

is evident as well in her response to the imminent return of her
acquaintance Merton Densher. Her first impulse is to avoid him by
making herself absent; and, when pressed by a puzzled Susan Stringham,
Milly simply answers that "I don't know what I want to run away from"
(p. l31). In addition, she seems so intent on clearing Densher's
way with Kate that Susan has to remind her not to be "more interested
for them than they are for themselves" (p. l34). Though Susan inter-
prets these gestures of Milly's as symptoms of a lack of "motive,"
Milly's motive in fact is clear: her fear of direct contact with

life is in the end a more binding inner mandate than her expressed
desire to leave her cocoon and submit to the danger and excitement of
the real world.

What Milly really wants from her existence is revealed both
to her and to the reader in the scene with the Bronzino portrait.
Milly is reduced to tears before the painting, as she contemplates
that the woman in the picture "was dead, dead, dead" (p. l44).

L. B. Holland has remarked that in this scene "the reader is . . .
reminded of a sense in which any work of art, no matter how bril-

liant, is dead";18

but, while this is certainly true, Milly's pity
and sympathy for the woman thus framed comprise only one aspect of
her own recognition. Her statement that "I shall never be better

than this" is not purely a reflection on the image of the portrait

itself, but refers as well to the cathartic outpouring of emotion

176

that the painting has provoked in her. Milly's catharsis has made
her feel vital and alive, and has given her a taste of the full
range of human feeling which she heretofore felt she had not experi-
enced. But this vitality of emotion is extremely qualified; when
Milly tells Lord Mark that "everything this afternoon has been too
beautiful," she is expressing her preference for the aesthetically
aroused emotion over the torrential feelings of actual interpersonal
contact; she professes herself to be "glad" that Lord Mark has
"been a part of" her experience, but in fact he has shared nothing,
understood nothing. The sole emotional transaction has been between
herself and the painting. She has felt a catharsis, surely; but
it is a controlled catharsis, an onanistic emotion which has the
effect and illusion of real human contact without any of its risks.
Milly may weep for the painting, but it cannot weep for her.
Furthermore, her own resemblance to the portrait--insisted
on by Lord Mark-~underscores Milly's subliminal awareness that she
has glimpsed in the painting a representation of her own idealized
self-image: the person who is able to touch life (as the woman
in the picture has touched Milly) without herself being touched by
it. This is the precise condition which Milly has set upon her
attempts to annex the world of experience beyond her protected
fortress, and for this reason the painting speaks powerfully to her.
The beauty of the portrait, its very effect, is for Milly a result
of the portrayed woman's self-sacrifice; it symbolizes a renunciation
which, in the case of the woman in question, was apparently joyless,

but which Milly, pleading the excuse of weakness, would be glad to

177

embrace. Thus for Milly the initial impression of "death" is con-
verted into a symbolization of escape and transcendence in which
Milly, by imitating the woman in the protrait, may gain her relation
to life by abstracting herself from it. Milly's encounter with the
painting shows her how to remove the question of "living" from

the difficulties of personal contact and place it on the level of
the aesthetic, where the possibilities of formal representation
might allow her weakness of will to be symbolized as a renunciatory
beauty. Thus Milly's catharsis partakes both of her sorrow and
pity at the other woman's sacrifice and of her joy in having dis-
covered her own dream of glory.

Milly's discovery of her grave illness comes as a powerful
reinforcement for the course suggested to her by the painting. Her
disease does not only provide an explanation for the attenuated
nature of her desires, but determines the basis on which her relation
to others will henceforth stand; Sir Luke's tacit verdict gives her
something "firm," and she finds that "to see her life put into the
scales represented to her the first taste of orderly living" (p. l54).
Furthermore, Milly feels the elation of "an impulse simple and direct,
easy above all to act upon" (p. l61); the basis of this ease, and
of this newfound certainty, is the simplification of the problem of
"living" that occurs when Milly transfers her pursuit of human
relations from the actual to the symbolic. Although she feels that
she has been given "a great adventure, a big dim experiment or .
struggle in which she might, more responsibly than ever before, take

a hand" (p. 162), the terms of this task are curiously alienated

178

from human society; she feels that "her only company must be the
human race at large, present all around her, but inspiringly
impersonal" (p. 16l). This reflection carries the startling impli-
cation that, for Milly at least, personal humanity (in the form of
real and discrete individuals) is somehow inadequate or hostile to
the requirements of the imagination.

In short, Milly's illness relieves her of responsibility for
taking, in Susan's words, "the whole assault of life"; she sees
her path towards self-fulfillment as a task of forging an "impersonal"
relation to others which keeps her secure in her fortress while she
works her beautiful effects on them. Thus she welcomes signs that
she has made an impression on another, so long as that impression
is neither personal nor connected with the old, restrictive identity
in which her money speaks for her. A telling sign of Milly's
new philosophy is her reSponse to Kate's complaint of Densher that
"one remains, all the same, but one of his ideas"; Milly answers
that "There's no harm in that . . . if you come out in the end as the
best of them" (p. l82). She would rather conceive of herself as a
beautiful idea than as an abject actuality, since such "ideas" offer
Milly an escape from, as well as insurance against, the sad ugliness
of her own weakness.

But Milly's sense of her own real helplessness and weakness
persists, and is brought home to her most pointedly in her relation-
ship with Kate; so it is in this interpersonal context that Milly
feels the greatest need to transform her real situation into a

play of symbols and ideas. Milly is dominated and threatened by

179

Kate's vitality; she feels herself "in a current determined, through
her indifference, timidity, bravery, generosity . . . by others"
and in particular by Kate, who "was the keeper of the lock of the
dam" (p. 178). Milly needs desperately to find an excuse for her
passivity and for the "want of confidence" (p. 183) which overtakes
her when she is alone with Kate. Thus the idea that Kate is "a
creature who paced like a panther" (pp. 183-84) strikes Milly as
apropos; it supplies her as well as the novel with the image of a
predatory Kate--a reading which puts the relationship between these
two women on a symbolic plane, and makes Milly "a little less
ashamed of having been scared" (p. 184).

Kate's reading of Milly as a "dove" completes this new
symbolic relation; though it expresses the truth of Milly's danger,
Milly does not regard it as threatening because it is "not pre-
sented with familiarity or as a liberty taken, but almost ceremon-
ially" (p. 184). In other words, the role of "dove" which Kate
offers Milly is, like Milly's own image of Kate as a panther, a
symbolic attribution which effaces and excuses Milly's sense of
her own weakness in the face of the other's strength. Furthermore,
like Sir Luke's tacit diagnosis, the "dove" image offers Milly a
further specification of her developing self-image: "it lighted
up the strange dusk in which she had lately walked. ngt_was the
matter with her. She was a dove." There remains for her, of course,
the question of "how a dove wpplg_act" (p. 185); but the problem
of symbolic consistency seems to Milly infinitely more soluble than

that of the actual conflicts she has heretofore been wrestling with.

 

180

Like all mentally distressed people, Milly is most acutely in need

of an idea that will simplify her psychic dilemmas; and her encounters
with Sir Luke and Kate conspire to offer her just such an idea.

The image of the dying dove extends to Milly a new symbolic iden-

tity in which her weaknesses are transformed into virtues, and

her retreat from life becomes a renunciatory testament to her

thwarted vitality.

So, finally, the symbol of the dove and the fact of her
disease provide Milly with an aegis under which she can consolidate
her identity and proceed to act; but, unlike the suffocating mask
of her wealth, this new image seems to Milly to express her, to
represent her value to the world at large, in a way her money never
did. This is because her new self-image effaces rather than
exacerbates her conflicts. While her money protected her from the
fearful chaos of experience, it also denied her the desired personal
recognition and esteem of others, even as its prodigious material
potential mocked her own reticence and weakness. But as the dying
dove, Milly feels both protected from the dangers of actual experi-
ence and provided with a reason for begging off; furthermore, she may
feel that her success with others is after all "personal," since
the image they are now responding to is (she believes) not based on
her wealth, which conceals her true identity, but on a new under-
standing of her in which her inner weaknesses are transformed into
an outward moral beauty.

So, though the esteem Milly receives from others is still

based on an impersonalized, symbolic version of herself, she has

181

nevertheless found a way of maintaining her contradictory needs
to be both with other people and apart from them; she has the illu-
sion of contact with life and with others, without the risk of
personal exposure she so fears. Thus she convinces herself that for
her, the question of life "was now beautifully provided for" (p. 187);
but the irony is that these questions are not truly solved, but
only avoided. That these reflections occur to Milly as she enters
the National Gallery indicates the nature of her solution; in
substituting aesthetic relations for interpersonal ones, she has
indeed left the "personal question," in all its immensity, "outside."
But it will only remain so as long as she does not leave the realm of
art, as long as she does not descend from the frame in which she has
ensconced herself, and return to life.

This erection of symbolic interfaces between oneself and others

is symptomatic of the behavior of all the principals in The Wings of

 

the Dove. The novel as a whole seems in fact to stress the tragic
necessity of such symbolic mediation, in human intercourse as well as
in literature; after all, it is the consciousnesses of the characters,
filling the gaps left by the deferent author, which formulate, agree
to, and maintain these interfaces. But these mediated identities

are subject to deconstruction, just the same as the interpretive

and evaluative rhetoric supplied by authorial narration in other
novels we have examined. Like the authorial rhetoric of The American,

The Portrait, and even The Ambassadors, the symbolic interfaces pro-

 

 

duced by the characters in Wings fail for one reason: they do not

articulate the full human possibilities of the characters whose

182

identities they try to express; they are, like Isabel Archer's
clothing, symbolic extensions but actual effacements of the inner
realities of those characters.

James's technique in The Wings of the Dove allows him to

 

examine the conditions which underlie both the creation and the
collapse of these symbolizations; by shifting from one center of
consciousness to another, recognizing the inner necessity of each
view without endowing any with authority, James gives his novel
the density of symbolic texture while reserving for himself the
power to critique the process of symbolization in which the charac-
ters, in their own names and for their own reasons, continually
engage. I have already examined in psychological terms the primary
illustration of this process, in which Milly's identity as the
benificent "dove" is raised before the reader, and before the other
characters in the novel; but I would like to comment briefly on the
significance of this process as a metaphor--or a substitution-~for
the activities of the author himself.

Northrop Frye says in his "Theory of Symbols" that litera-
ture "has the function of expressing, as a verbal hypothesis, a
vision of . . . the forms of human desire."19 A work of literature,
then, represents the author's attempt to symbolize, through recog-
nizable literary conventions, the human desire which has no face or
shape of its own, so that it may be objectified and its satisfactions
pursued. In ijpg, James allows his characters to usurp this
authorial function and seek the formal articulation of their own

desires. In doing so, they attempt to use each other as the author

183

generally uses the materials of his own experience: for them, others
become the base materials which imagination may then shape into
median forms, at once real and ideal, which satisfy the demands of
the senses while providing a phenomenal embodiment of desire itself.
Thus one may understand the issue of "types" in James as expressing
a power relationship in which characters attempt to impose their
own imaginative requirements on each other; "typing" is in the end
a game of reducing others to pure formal possibilities through which
one's own desire may be expressed and actualized. As Frye recog-
nizes, form is dependent on the reductive conventions of "type" to
assure the inner harmoniousness and coherence of its effect; but
when characters are understood first as fully imagined human beings,
as they are in James, this typing process is revealed as brutal and
self-serving. By dramatizing his characters both as objects and
agents of this process, and by holding back from it himself, James
shows how inarticulate desire motivates not just art, but the entire
activity of human perception, and reveals "typing" as a habitual and
cruel symptom of the human drive towards self-fulfillment.

The mutuality of this process may be seen most clearly in
Kate's and Milly's early views of each other. Milly, impressed both
by Kate's vitality and by her mystery, sees her new friend, "by a
necessity of the imagination, for a heroine," feeling "it was the
only character in which she wouldn't be wasted" (p. 114); Kate,
in Milly's eyes, is able "to show as a beautiful stranger, to cut
her connections and lose her identity, letting the imagination make

for a time what it could of them" (p. 138). In other words, Milly

184

sees in Kate the actualization of the romantic mystery, private
self-assurance, and zest for life that she wishes for herself.
Kate, for her part, has "a perception of the high happiness of her
companion's liberty," and believes that Milly "had to ask nobody
for anything, to refer nothing to anyone; her freedom, her fortune,
and her fancy were her law" (p. 116).

In short, each of these women reads the other as an articu-
lation of her own frustrated desires; but neither perceives that the
other, with all her advantages, is no more happy, no less desperate,
than she herself is. Milly does not see Kate's hopeless choice
between moral or material depravity, and Kate herself does not
recognize in Milly the personal paralysis which her wealth conceals
and exacerbates. Instead, each "thought herself, or assured the
other she did, a comparatively dusty object, and the other a favourite
of nature and fortune" (p. 115). By showing the reciprocity of
Kate's and Milly's views of each other, James illustrates how the
lives of others may become for one the stuff of romance, of artistic
symbol and form; he also shows that art itself is not a special case,
but a mere extension of the human drive to convert the materials
of experience into tropes of desire--or, in Frye's words, to make "a
total human form out of nature."20

But this mutual projection of one's desires on another is
not entirely reciprocal. James habitually dramatizes situations in
which passive and introspective characters are dependent on other,
more aggressive personalities for the articulation of their own

wants and needs; his reflective protagonists in particular are often

 

 

 

 

185

forced to receive their impressions and to pursue the actualization
of their desires through forms imposed on them by others. This
is the situation of Lambert Strether, whose suggestible conscious-
ness is easily manipulated by Chad and Madame de Vionnet; it is
also evident in Isabel Archer, whose need to "find some happy work
to one's hand" drives her to acceptance of the "ghastly form" of her
marriage to Osmond; and, finally, one sees this pattern in the experi-
ence of Christopher Newman, whose romantic intoxication makes him
pliable in the hands of the scheming Benegardes.21
The difficulty for these protagonists is that their desires
are generally non-empirical, and are harder to objectify in real
terms than simple material ambition or avarice. All these characters
know they want something, but cannot say precisely what it is. This
difficulty of being unable to specify the object of one's desire
makes it hard for these characters to act, and produces in them an
anxious drive for closure of this question; their desperation makes
them vulnerable to manipulation by others, who may specify for the
helpless protagonist a desired object that best suits their own,
and not the protagonist's, purpose. Thus the passive or reflective
hero in James often is forced to accept without sufficient examina-
tion versions of his own inner needs that other, more active charac-
ters provide.
This syndrome is evident in the relationship between Milly
and Kate in Eiflflés Milly, with her material advantages secured, has
trouble specifying the object of her shapeless longings and the

desired self those longings express. Kate, believing herself assured

186

of Densher's love, seeks only to underwrite her romantic fulfillment
by gaining financial security as well. Thus Kate has the advan-
tage of an easily identifiable object for her desires--money--while
Milly is paralyzed by her ambiguous conception of the "life" for
which she longs. Kate's strength is that she can say what it is she
wants, while Milly's weakness is that she cannot; and this strength
grants Kate the apparent freedom of action which Milly both respects
and fears. Furthermore, this "freedom of action," coupled with
Milly's psychic paralysis, empowers Kate to propose the forms which
Milly's relationship with her (and with others) may take. Thus the
image of the "dove," which becomes the symbolic interface through
which Hilly establishes her relation to others, is the fruit of
mutual consent between perceived and perceiver, in which the latter
(Kate) has the other at a psychic disadvantage. Milly needs the
specified identity that Kate's reading of her provides, just as Kate
ultimately depends on Milly's faithfulness to this role for the
success of her own plan. .

This phenomenon of the "symbolic interface," in which charac-
ters derive the forms of their desires from others, is an important
key to understanding the nature of James's investigations in Wfipgg,
If, as Frye says, form is the articulation of desire, then the
overarching Romance structures and redemptive rhetoric of James's
earlier novels represent the author's attempt to define for his
protagonists what the shape of their own desires should be. It is,
as in the relation between Kate and Milly, a case of one intelligence

with a goal firmly in mind (the author's desire that his imagined

187

"situation" bear, through the character, artistic fruit) impressing
those goals on a character whose own needs and desires are either
confused or unspecified. James wants Newman to peppmg_his "good
fellow wronged," wants Isabel to take on the noble stature of

”a young woman affronting her destiny," wants Strether to embrace
and profit from the ordeal of his supremely sensitive consciousness;
and these characters, unable to articulate desires of their own,
accept the ones provided by James, and at the behest of the author
attempt valiantly but vainly to fulfill those intentions.

What one sees in The Wings of the Dove, however, is the total

 

absorption of James's interests and objectives into those of his
surrogates, particularly Kate and Densher. It is they who, "by

"22 make the novel's symbolic texture

agreeing to enact its plot,
serve their own, and not James's, wasted passion and desire. Kate's
reading of Milly as a "dove," and Milly's acceptance of that symbolic
charge, imitates the author-character relationship I have sketched
above, in which the authorial intelligence impresses its own inten-
tions on a character, and then convinces that character to identify
those expressed intentions with his or her own needs and desires.

It is not James who casts the parts in the internal drama of this
novel; it is the characters themselves, particularly those whose
consciousnesses are clear enough about their objectives to become

an active force. To them belongs the immediate success and the

ultimate failure of bonding character to role which were shouldered

in earlier works by the author himself.

188

It is now time to close the long parenthesis which will
represent our consideration of Kate's and Milly's roles as centers of
consciousness in ijgs, These long expositions of Kate and parti-
cularly of Milly have been necessary for two reasons: first, it
must be understood that James created in these two characters
imagined people whose fullness of humanity exceeds and occludes the
symbolic roles which they ultimately assume; and secondly, it must
be recognized that the roles with which Kate and Milly become iden-
tified do not arise directly from the needs of the discourse, but
from the processes of vision of the characters themselves. Further-
more, the tension between inner psychology and outward symbolism is
marked by initial and antithetical motions on the part of each charac-
ter: Kate, who is eventually signified as predatory and cruelly
calculating, becomes so only after the frustration of her attempt to
escape such moral peril; and Milly, who emerges as the sacrificial
dove, is shown as having a thirst for personal satisfaction which is
so intense that she considers destroying herself rather than see
her desires frustrated. Thus the roles these women assume are indeed
simplifications of their own complex inner identities as presented
by James; but the simplifications are their own, not the author's.
They are self-desired and self-willed, and are based on the needs of
the characters themselves to suppress or excorcise impulses threaten-
ing to their psychic harmony.

Having established both the psychologies and the symbolic
properties of Kate and Milly, I turn now to a consideration of the

character who completes the romantic triangle about which the

 

 

189

significant action of the novel revolves. I have saved my analysis
of Merton Densher until now because it is only in relation to

Kate and Milly, and to the roles assumed by them, that he emerges as
a fully realized character; his own introductory scenes are, signi-
ficantly, sandwiched in between those of Kate and Milly, and reveal
him to be a character of indeterminate possibilities; his function
in the novel, like the question of his personality, does not receive
its "final stamp" until the presences of Kate and Milly are firmly
established. This is appropriate, since the climactic phases of the
novel show Densher achieving this "final stamp" by a systematic
repression of the full humanity with which James endows Kate and
Milly in the first half of the novel. Through "his revulsion at the
methods of the lioness, and his gradual surrender to dove-like

human nature,"23 Densher establishes his identity by defining his
relations to symbolic versions of Kate and Milly; like his predeces-
sors Strether and Newman and, to a lesser degree, Ralph Touchett,
Densher is a character whose satisfaction depends on the unconscious
symbolic abuse of the very women he idealizes, and upon his success
in ignoring the psychic integrity and reality of others.

Early in the novel, for example, Densher sees Kate as the
essence of life which, to compensate for his own deficient vitality,
he feels "he must somehow annex and possess" (p. 37); later, when
Kate's energy has begun to lose its luster for him, Densher turns
his eyes to Milly, who suggests a symbolic value quite different
from Kate's: he perceives in the dying heiress the ethereal but

impersonal essence of "embodied poetry" (p. 337). It is in fact

190

these opposing readings of Kate and Milly as representative of the
appeals of flesh and spirit which comprise the basic terms of Densher's
conflict and of the dialectic between symbol and substance which
dominates the last third of the novel. But this dialectic, like
the roles that Kate and Milly perform in it, is local to Densher's
own consciousness; it emerges from his own psychology, and is not
authorially impressed on his experience. Indeed, this dialectic
becomes, through Densher, the dominant personal crisis of the novel
as a whole; but to understand the centrality of Densher's role, and
to explain the motive and necessity for his behavior, we must first
have a grasp of the reality of this character's inner conflicts.
Densher, like Milly, is basically a passive character whose
desires are transcendental rather than material; but the elevated
character of his desires represents a response to his lack of wealth
rather than, as in Milly's case, to a surfeit of it. In a society
that defines wealth as the measure and symbol of one's personal
worth, Densher enjoys a distinct lack of material prospects; and,
as a defense against his sense of this painful inadequacy, Densher
attempts through professed indifference to devalue the material
exigencies of life, and to shun the pathways of social ambition
which, personified in Mrs. Lowder, he regards as "cruel" and
"colossally vulgar" (pp. 54, 53). Furthermore, he regards monied
society (again represented by Mrs. Lowder, and by his rival for
Kate's hand, the "brute" Lord Mark) as "stupid," and perceives out-
ward social forms as false "codes" which force one to dissemble

and prostitute oneself (pp. 235-36). Thus Densher is like Isabel

191

Archer in his disparagement of that which he cannot have, and is
morally committed to its repudiation.

Having rejected social and financial standing as measures of
self-worth, Densher embraces a value system in which his very defi-
ciencies can show as strengths, at least to himself. He prides
himself on remaining undeceived by the illusory social codes he
disparages, and holds instead to a personal code of fealty to
"truth" in its pure and positivistic form. His "weakness for life"
finds its positive inversion in a "strength merely for thought"

(p. 37); and in his studied detachment ("detached . . . was indeed
what he called himself"), Densher displays his independence of, and
contempt for, the promiscuous interpersonal contact in which others,
through the application of their false standards, might find him
wanting. Densher thus confines himself to a narrow circle, and
denies entry to all but those who, like Kate, are tolerant and
supportive of his value system. It is, in fact, the introspective
and insular nature of Densher's consciousness that gains him the
esteem of Kate, and forms the basis for their mutual idealization of
each other; where she represents "life" to him, he symbolizes for her
"what life had never given her . . . all the high, dim things she
lumped together as of the mind" (p. 36).

But, because his value system is a defensive and compensatory
one, Densher must be totally faithful to his ideals in order to keep
his self-image happily intact. His private honor is dependent on his
rigorous adherence to his axioms of clear-sightedness, honesty, and

independence, and on his avoidance of the guilt that would be

192

engendered should he betray any of these ideals. James notes that

for Densher innocence is even more crucial than egoistic satisfac-
tion: "Being kept down was a bore, but his great dread, verily, was
of being ashamed, which was a thing distinct" (p. 216). Furthermore,
to assure himself of avoiding such mistakes, and as protection against
the dissembling powers of the social codes he loathes, Densher

demands of others the same total sincerity and honesty he requires

of himself. For Densher, the free exchange of information, parti-
cularly regarding the feelings of others, is the guarantee against
doing anything he would be "ashamed of" on one hand, and against

being deceived and made a fool of on the other. This is the basis

of his need for total "lucidity" from Kate, and for his belief in
"sincerity making a basis that would bear almost anything" (p. 208).
These ideals of independence, honesty, and clarity supply Densher

with the feeling that he is free and clear, unencumbered by false
status or false ambition, and immune to the accusations and recrimina-
tions regarding his self-worth.

Yet the material exigencies he has rejected still have the
power to afflict him, particularly when manifested in the form of
Kate's view that they cannot consummate their relationship without
the material advantages to keep it from degenerating into brutality
and meanness. Densher cannot escape the sense that his own want of
means is "a great ugliness" (p. 44), and he recognizes in Mrs.

Lowder "the great public mind that we meet at every turn and that we
must keep setting up 'codes' with" (p. 63). So, in spite of his

contempt for money and society, Densher admits that they are facts

 

 

193

that must be dealt with, and is acutely aware of the measure to
which they find him wanting; he knows he is "a very small quantity,
and he did know, damnably, what made quantities large" (p. 58).

Because he cannot escape this sense of material inadequacy,
Densher needs constant confirmation of the sufficiency of his own
positive attributes; and, because his relationship with Kate is
the only arena in which he experiences an interpersonal assurance
of his own self-worth, Densher is desperately dependent on her con-
tinued company and approbation, and on the enduring exclusivity of
their circle of two. Not trusting the durability of their privately
consecrated agreement, in which they see "marriage . . . somehow
before them like a temple without an avenue" (p. 42) Densher longs
for the confirming and enforcing effects of a public betrothal, and
is frustrated by the necessity of having to deceive Aunt Maud. Densher
is fearful that any change in their relationship will be to his own
detriment, and pleads with Kate, in the absence of marriage, for
"Our being as we are" (p. 67) in perpetual futurity.

These feelings of Densher's are made all the more intense
by his long absence from Kate when he goes to America; he returns
to find that "His demands, his desires, had grown," and that he
cannot hold out "against a patience that prolonged, that made a
man ill" (p. 199). The combined strategies of deference and decep-
tion by which Kate and Densher have forwarded their cause are
damaging both to Densher's pride and to his sense of his own
moral forthrightness; he feels that "Waiting was the game of dupes"

(p. 200), and regards the difficulties of their clandestine meetings

194

as proof that they ought to bring all above board and announce their
engagement. "It's one more nail, thank God, in the coffin of our
odious delay," he tells Kate, only to be reminded by her "dodging
the ultimatum . . . how little they could work it" (p. 206).

Thus Densher is doomed to participate in a charade which
requires Kate to act in a manner totally contrary to the very
assurances that Densher requires of her. He distrusts the apparent
relish with which she plays her role, and begins to resent the
thoroughness with which she publicly denies her affection for him;
he tells her that she shows her "complacent eye" to him more than
her part requires (p. 213). Densher has great difficulty in his
situation of having a lover whose actions are not concomitant with
her supposed feelings for him; his personal anxiety makes him
dependent on the equivalence of word and action, of motive and
gesture, which Kate actively subverts, and the open flouting of
this equivalence brings Densher to the disturbing realization that
Kate might be "deeper than himself," that he might not be able
"to keep her . . . where their communications would be straight and
easy" (p. 207). Denied the proofs and assurances he has always
required of Kate, Densher is simply left to wonder helplessly "at
her freedom of action and his beauty of trust" (p. 213).

The ambiguous and confusing nature of Densher's situation,
and his deep fear of doing something of which he might be "ashamed,"
keep Densher from acting to change his intolerable situation. He
finds himself reduced to mere spectatorship, viewing Kate's per-

formance "as in his purchased stall at the play" (p. 217). Paralyzed

195

by his opposing commitments to remain faithful to Kate and to his
own prohibition against the active lie, Densher suffers from a
"humiliation of . . . impotence" (p. 216) whiCh he is powerless
either to ameliorate or to escape. He is rendered totally passive,

"dominated by Kate's vitality,"24

and must accept on grudging faith
the "beauty" of the ends towards which Kate's deception is leading
them.

But Densher's discomfort is so intense that he begins to
resent Kate for the situation in which she has placed him, and
gradually starts to feel his alientation from her. Densher is able
to tolerate this increasing distance from Kate because he has found
in Milly Theale another person whose company provides him the
emotional satisfaction he craves. Kate's concealment of her own
affection creates in Densher a thirst for approbation so intense
that he would have stopped to drink at the first congenial fountain;
but Milly is much more than a convenient water-stop. She asserts
herself in Densher's mind as a kindred Spirit to himself, in many
ways more attractive to him than what Kate, with her newly revealed
potention for scheming and dissembling, has lately come to be.
Milly has wealth; but, unlike the materialist order which has held
Densher in judgment, the young heiress's money strikes Densher as
a passive, benevolent phenomenon rather than an active, aggressive
one. Her nobility of spirit appears to be innate, and not derived
from any of the social codes which Densher himself finds false and
vulgar. And, though she is reticent, Milly strikes Densher as

ingenuous and incapable of the sort of deception into which Kate

196

has so dizzyingly plunged him. In all, then, the American heiress
figures forth to Densher a distaff version of his own idealized
self, with her appearance of intrinsic dignity, ingenuous sincerity,
and benevolent wealth. Thus Densher sees in her an image in which
all his needs, both moral and material, are wonderfully harmoniZed;
and her company allows him to assuage the doubts and conflicts he
experiences as a result of Kate's own complacent behavior towards
him.

Milly is, furthermore, as different from the denizens of
Lancaster Gate as Densher himself; her "success" there represents a
triumph over the rigid social order in which Densher himself may
feel the pleasure of a vicarious vindication. But Densher sees
Milly, as he sees himself, as a potential victim of that order as
well. Her own innocence makes her vulnerable to the hidden
machinations of cultured society; aware of the plot afoot against
Milly (in which he, ironically, has a major part), Densher sees her
as "a Christian maiden in the arena, mildly, caressingly, being
martyred" (p. 222). Here Densher calls up the image of Kate as the
lioness, and identifies himself with Milly, the victim, rather than
with Kate, who is his actual partner in the sacrifice; this deflec-
tion of Densher's sympathy from Kate (who is implied in this analogy
but is not named) to Milly displays his unconscious impulse to deny
his identification with Kate and with her mercenary intentions.

But so long as his relation to Milly is still identified
with Kate's own purposes, Densher is dependent on her to see to it

that he plunges into no odious moral peril. He contemplates his

197

entrapment in Kate's "wondrous silken web" (p. 237), and pleads
with her not to betray his trust: "Don't fail me," he tells her,
"It would kill me" (p. 236). Given these anxieties on Densher's
part, it may be seen how Kate's suggestion that he "comfort"

Milly provides Densher with the very device he needs to maintain
his illusion of his own innocence: it establishes a proprietary
form through which he may safely, and without shame, pursue his
relation to the dying girl. Densher sees that by following Kate's
suggestion he can indeed "please his conscience and Kate at the

same time,"25

and have the pleasure of Milly's company as well.
Still, Kate has the power to crush Densher by speaking the
words that would strip away his rationalization and hit him full in
the face with the truth of his own part in their treachery. Further-
more, any demand of explicit assurances on Milly's part would force
his moral crisis as well, necessitating either that he reveal his
hypocrisy by telling the truth, or that he seal it with the dreaded
lie. Thus Densher's earlier demand that Kate and others be "lucid"
with him is now countered by his need for the evasion which will
allow him to maintain the illusion of his innocence. He has, para-
doxically, become as dependent on others' silence for his peace of
mind as he once was on their sincerity and openness; he needs the
aid of Kate's and Milly's ellipses to escape awareness of his
shameful behavior towards the dying girl. And Kate, sensing correctly
Densher's susceptibility to guilt, wisely tries to get him "to

carry out her plan without putting it into words."26

 

.,p_

198

Densher's conflicting needs for silence on one hand and for
"lucidity" on the other comprise an opposition which is central to
his character, and to the point of view of the novel as a whole.

As we have seen in our analysis of him, he requires knowledge in
order to feel secure and in control; but at the same time, his fear
of shame makes him want to disavow knowledge and relinquish control,
insofar as these things represent responsibility for action and the
potential for guilt that comes with such responsibility. When he
pleads with Kate "Don't fail me," his words express two implicit
requests: first, he is praying that being caught in her web of
intrigue will not have for him the consequence of disillusionment,
regarding either himself or Kate; or, if her plan does involve
actions and consequences that might produce such a result, that she
will shrink from specifying those elements, and allow his beliefs
in himself and in her to escape contradiction.

So Densher's psychic integrity, like the integrity of a work
of art, is dependent on the selective effacement and unspeaking of
the very facts which may be pertinent to it, in the interest of
excising those elements that would violate the need for inner harmony.
Densher's simultaneous needs to be deceived by silence and to have
the assurance of lucidity in others reflect in a personal way the
conflicting demands of artistic form, particularly of the novel, in
which human materials must be worked to achieve effects both credible
and beautiful. As a novelist, James like Densher (and, as we shall
soon see, like Milly) depends not so much on the overt lie as on

the strategic silence, the indeterminacy of meaning which allows

 

 

199

interpretation to rush over the errant or discordant facts without
feeling too sharply the pierce of their jagged edges. This is the
effect and, I believe, the intention of the equivocal narrative

voice which treats the closing scenes of The Portrait and Ihg_

 

Ambassadors, in which analysis of the characters is suppressed to

 

keep them from kicking the conclusion to pieces; but in ijgs_this
phenomenon of strategic silence is revealed as a psychological as
well as an artistic necessity.

The revelation of this necessity comes primarily through
Densher, whose need for inner harmony gradually becomes the con-
trolling force in the novel's rhetoric; but in fact all the princi-
pals in Wipg§_engage in this tactical retreat from specification.
Kate, having deceived both Aunt Maud and Milly with a lie, must
secure Densher's collution without perpetrating an untruth on him
or revealing the full moral consequences of his participation;
Densher himself tries to gain the advantage of an indeterminate
silence which will spare him the choice between the moral ugliness
of lying to Milly and the emotional ugliness of hurtfully undeceiv-
ing her; and Milly effaces the fact of her emotional vulnerability
and her physical disease by "denying it a verbalized existence."27
In all these cases, one may view both the advantages and risks of
a silence which allows for the freedom of interpretation; this

freedom is a mixed blessing which James characteristically claims

for his fiction, and one which, finally, in The Wings of the Dove,

 

he claims for his characters as well.

200

This interpretive freedom, based on a willful repression of
the facts, allows these characters to present themselves as formal
expressions of each others' desires. Densher, for example, becomes
for Milly the spurned lover to whom she may give the comfort of her
passive goodness and beauty, while she becomes for Densher a
symbol of devulgarized wealth and transcendental beauty. And,
because these characters derive emotional benefits from being so
perceived and so treated by each other, they evade discussion of the
discordant facts; Densher is loath to probe the subject of Milly's
disease, and Milly reluctant to mention Densher's relation to Kate,
because they fear that such "lucid" examination of these topics might
spoil the efficacious beauty of the relationship that their mutual‘
effacements have created. In other words, Milly and Densher, while
pleading for knowledge of the world, hide from the truths that
would interfere with the image of fulfilled desire they perceive in
each other; in life as well as in art, the need to believe in the
beautiful illusion is often stronger than the need to recognize the
bald, stubborn fact.

Thus if it is true, as John Carlos Rowe says, that "Milly

becomes the author of her own composition,"28

she is dependent on
the uncritical response of Densher, her reading audience, for her
carefully composed public image to have its desired effect. The
success of Milly's poeticized self is a direct consequence of the
fact that she shows Densher what he wants most to see; he does not
perceive in her the real, dying, vulnerable Milly that Kate has

specified for him, but rather an image, embraced and set forth by

201

Milly herself, in which the fact of her disease is transformed into
an outward show of intrinsic nobility, benificence, and ethereal
beauty. It is to this beautiful illusion, and not to the facts of
her case as "lucidly" communicated by Kate, that Densher is drawn;
his response to this raised image reveals that, for all his supposed
fealty to the "real," he is in fact an acolyte of the ideal, which
has now become embodied for him in the person of Milly. He embraces
her symbolic denial of the fact of her disease by assuring himself
that she "was never, never . . . to be one of the afflicted for him"
(p. 243); and in his view of "poor pale exquisite Milly" (p. 316)
one sees Densher's repression of the intimate bond between her
figural beauty and her actual decay.

Thus Densher gradually "comes to recognize Milly as someone
whose claims on him outweigh Kate's, and also as someone to whom
he spontaneously responds."29 The strength of Milly's claims on
Densher derives from the fact that, as I have already said, she
shows Densher what he wants to see; the terms of their relationship
are concomitant with his desires and inclinations, and have the
additional advantage of providing him with immediate and ongoing
satisfaction of his needs. Kate, by contrast, shows Densher pre-
cisely what he doesn't want to see. He is nettled by her publicly
complacent treatment of him, and is disturbed by the private evidence
she gives of her capacity for the vulgar usage of others, including
himself. Furthermore, the satisfaction she promises is in the
distant and hazy future; she asks Densher for the immediate surrender

of their relationship's moral integrity in the interest of gaining

 

 

202

the material means which will ultimately enable them to assume and
maintain the deferred mantle of romance. Densher cannot accept the
idea that he and Kate must be prosaic now in order to be poetic in

the future, particularly when he has before him as a fait accompli

 

the "embodied poetry," inviolate and uncompromised, of Milly herself.
So Densher must somehow divorce himself from Kate's plan,
even though it is as a part of that plan that he receives the bene-
fit of his proximity to Milly. He resents that his behavior "was
all doing what Kate had conceived for him; it was not in the least
doing . . . anything he himself had conceived" (p. 309); he finds
that, in acting under the auspices of Kate's motives, he is
"reading the romance of his existence in a cheap edition" (p. 310).
Thus it is not the outward form of his role that galls Densher; it
is the inner awareness of its origins. What Densher wishes to
rewrite is the inner subtext which explains his actions to himself;
he needs to purify his own motives by casting out Kate's, while
retaining the advantage of the situation in which she has placed him.
In short, Densher wants to continue playing his part in
Kate's plan without incurring any responsibility for its consequences.
To do this, he must first demonstrate that his own desires are not
concordant with Kate's--that he does not, after all, want Milly's
money, but only her company. So he rationalizes that "he really
hadn't 'begun' anything, had only submitted, consented, but too
generously indulged and condoned the beginnings of others" (p. 315).
Because his part in Kate's plan may be explained as a result of his

own benevolent deference, Densher is able to excuse his participation

203

on the grounds of his passive inclinations; but at the same time he
places before himself the idea that his own reasons for wanting to
be close to Milly have a causal primacy over Kate's: since "he

had been the first to know her," he "was not tpppg . . . through
Kate and Kate's idea, but through Milly and Milly's own, and through
himself and hjs_own" (p. 327).

Thus Kate and Kate's motives are significantly excluded, or
repressed, from Densher's private version of his relation to Milly;
but, as always, he requires some external correlation of this newfound
inner truth. Since Densher's actions serve Kate's ends as well as
his own, he must demonstrate the primacy of his own motivations by
exerting his own will over Kate. He takes the first step towards
such a demonstration when he changes his Venetian residence,
knowing that Kate will misconstrue his motives for doing so; her
inability to fathom his reasons enables Densher himself "to impute
to her a weakness of vision by which he could himself feel the
stronger" (pp. 312-13). Kate interprets Densher's move as a sign
that he is taking up her purpose, when in fact he is working against
her; the "proof of will" that Densher now requires takes the form of
a vindictive testing of Kate, in which he uses her love for him to
force her into a compromising situation, in a direct reversal of
Densher's perception of what Kate has done to him.

Densher's request is, of course, that Kate should visit him
in his rooms, for the implied purpose of a sexual liaison. When
Kate agrees, Densher has his needed confirmation that he is indeed

ruler of his own destiny, and firmly in possession of his own

204

motives: "He had never tasted, in all his relation with her, of
anything so sharp--too sharp for mere sweetenss--as the vividness
with which he saw himself master in the conflict" (p. 346); after-
wards he reflects with pride on the fact that "It had simply wppkgg,
his idea, the idea that he had made her accept" (p. 347). Densher's
reaction to his success is a clue to the motive behind his plan:
the "conflict" is between himself and Kate, and between competing
versions of reality which each tries to enforce on the other.
Densher cannot accept Kate's impression that he is capable of the
betrayal of Milly which is his part in her design; he needs to assert
his own idea of the situation by his domination of Kate herself. He
does not in the end care so much for the security of Kate's loyalty,
or for the pleasure of her sexuality, as for the knowledge that he,
too, is capable of asserting his will and making the necessities
of his own vision binding on others. Densher's real object is not
to consummate his relationship with Kate, but to cleanse his relation
to Milly.

But Kate's admissions and Densher's proof of will confirm
more than his new identity as the "hon prince, capable of exerting a

will and being seen to";30 it is also the culmination of a long

 

process of vision through which he has been trying to define his

idea of Kate herself. All along Densher has been torn between his
attachment to Kate and his revulsion at her ruthless methods; further-
more, as much as he has "admired and envied . . . her great talent

for life" (p. 310), he has resented deeply his own helplessness

before her. He has seen her as lover and destroyer, as goddess and

 

 

 

205

tyrant. So Densher's attitude towards Kate is deeply ambivalent;
he has feelings of both identification and alienation, of affection
and dread, which are alternately sparked by identical actions and
attributes on Kate's part. He has been spared from the full intensity
of these conflicts by Kate's careful effacement of the brutal
realities of her plan, and of Densher's part in it; but the result
for Densher has been a kind of indeterminacy in Kate herself, and
an inability on his part to maintain a fix on her inner reality.
His sense that she is thus "deeper than himself" produces in him a
need to press her for the very clarity, the very "lucidity,"

which on other grounds he so deeply fears.

Thus Densher's insistence on "dragging things out into the
open"31 comes only after he has distanced himself from Kate and
disacknowledged his responsibility for his own part in her plan; the
knowledge he seeks is not to establish the depth of his own guilt,
but of Kate's. He finally gets her to admit her intention--that he
is to marry the dying Milly for her money, so that he and Kate might
be provided for after the heiress's demise; and, though this reve-
lation "was a truth he hadn't been ready to receive so full in the
face" (p. 342), it is nevertheless Densher who phrases it, Densher
who wants it, because Kate's confirmation has the desired effect of
revealing her own guilt, and not his. Her breach of their "grace
of silence" allows Densher, he feels, "to know her, spiritually,
'better'" (p. 343); but what he perceives in this revelation is not
a more accurate version of Kate so much as a more palatable view

of himself, achieved at Kate's expense. She is made, in Densher's

 

206

mind, to shoulder the responsibility and the guilt for the plan in
which Densher has participated through willed ignorance; she has,
by her admission, cast herself as the antagonist in a moral struggle
which Densher, though himself implicated, views as if from a
spectator's seat, in the impunity of his own passivity.

Furthermore, by surrendering to Densher her closely guarded
truth, Kate also gives up the advantage of "mystery" which has kept
her a formidable rival to Milly in Densher's imagination. Like
Milly, Kate has depended on ellipses and silences to maintain her
appeal for Densher, and her control of his image of her; the effect
of her "lucidity" is to rob her of this power to compete with
Milly's prodigious show of symbolic strength and transcendent
beauty. The contrast of Kate's admitted deceit and betrayal with
Milly's triumph of "candour" (p. 345) reveals Kate to Densher as
Milly's opposite, her antithesis in symbolic associations. And
Kate has become--regard1ess of initial motivation--the external
correlative of Densher's own morally despised self, which longs for
the liberty of material wealth, freedom of action, and indulgence
of passion, even at the expense of honor, truth, and beauty.
Densher now sees Kate's own promise of beauty as the proffered
Edenic apple which he, having eaten of in ignorance, now recognizes
and rejects for the snare it is.

This recognition is completed, even consecrated, by Kate's
visit to Densher's rooms. Paradoxically, the moment in which Kate
gives Densher the greatest demonstration of her love for him is the

moment in which her ultimate eclipse by Milly is assured. His

207

physical possession of her denudes her of her final shred of

mystery and transcendent appeal; their carnal knowledge, the undrama-
tized putting off of clothing, represents the final lucidity through
which Kate's identity becomes symbolically impoverished for Densher.
She becomes for him the embodied representation of prosaic human
passion, contrasting with the "embodied poetry" of Milly's grace.
Where Densher simplifies his relation to Milly by worshipping her,

he simplifies his relation to Kate through derogation of her own
appeals to him; he has brought Kate down to terms he can understand.
What Densher has sought to establish through his "test" is not

Kate's loyalty, but her non-transcendent sexuality, signified even in
the phallic terms in which he perceives his triumph: "all erect
before him, really covering the ground as far as he could see, was
the fact of the gained success that this represented" (p. 347).

He has succeeded in disencumbering himself of his ideals regarding
Kate; her lingering presence in his rooms is a mere "lucidity" into
which "he sat and stared" (p. 349).

So Densher, torn between his loyalty to Kate and his worship
of Milly, is forced to choose between the claims of rival goddesses;
and his only way of making his choice clear is to bring one of those
deities to earth. Kate is the easier of the two to pull down because
she is most frank, and because her lucidity reveals the disjunction
of her motives with the high-minded idealism that Densher requires
in his love-objects. So Densher's demand for the truth, and the
sexual demands he places on Kate, are expressions of his need to

demystify her so that he might more freely worship Milly and Milly

208

alone. His disillusion is deliberate and disingenuous, and his
"proof of will" simply a strategy by which he makes it possible to
pursue his preferred goddess--the ethereally beautiful and benifi-
cent Milly--without the nagging consideration of Kate's rival
claims.

Densher prefers Milly in the end because she does not
demand action of him as a proof of his fealty and worship; her
beauty, unlike that which Kate works for, is in Densher's eyes
achieved, static and ethereal, and does not involve or evoke the
process of vulgar striving which Densher finds so abhorrent.
Furthermore, Milly has so totally identified herself with her role
that there is no danger of the lucidity which, in Kate, stirs
Densher's anxieties as to the identity of appearance and reality;
though Milly's behavior is, as we have observed, a show of strength
which covers her vulnerability, she gives no lucid acknowledgement
of her weakness to Densher, while Kate on the other hand cannot
help but remind Densher of the defects of their own situation, and
the deceitful part she plays in her attempt to remedy it. Where
Kate exhibits a wordly passion and energy which overflow Densher's
original idea of her, Milly is for him eternally "as she is," fixed
in that ghostly phase in which life is frozen without being destroyed;
Milly's is the captured moment, the figured identity, which she had
glimpsed in the Bronzino, and which Densher now sees in her.

Thus emerges the struggle between Kate and Milly, the "bad
and good angels," which Wegelin and others have characterized as

the essence of The Wings of the Dove. But this opposition is not

 

209

central to the novel as a whole, but only to Densher's conscious-
ness; the full significance of Milly's and Kate's roles is determined
by Densher himself, and arises out of his need to be relieved of

the paradoxical qualities of human relations. The "final solution"
to which he subjects both Kate and Milly is therefore hostile to

the full humanity of the characters themselves; and the sense one
has in the final chapters of recognition "tapering to a point" is
not a property of James's large design, but of Densher's local pro-
cess of vision as he desperately tries to harmonize his inner con-
flicts. James's exposition of Kate and Milly in the first few books
of the novel enables one to examine the repressions on which
Densher's final solution is based; this order of presentation also
shows James's recognition of the problems one encounters when one
attaches symbolic values to real quantities. In his earlier novels,
the formal design expresses a hope that the character may fulfill
the role which the rhetoric of event and evaluation indicate for him
or her--a hope that is dashed by the characters, and its failure
effaced by James. The deference of form in the first half of ijgs,
however, establishes a lucid understanding of Kate and Milly which
serves to deconstruct the views of them eventually formed by
Densher. Thus James proceeds from, rather than towards, a recog-
nition that the real and the symbolic values presented in these
characters are not in harmony with each other; he undercuts from
the outset the hope that Densher's choice may in the end have the
clear moral significance that Wegelin, Anderson, and others have

argued for it.

210

James himself has called the latter part of’Wipgsf-the
part dominated by Densher--"the false and deformed half" of the
novel;32 he sees in this section the impulse for "foreshortening
at any cost, for imparting to patches the value of presences, for
dressing objects in an gjp_as of the dimensions they can't possibly
have." But the deformity he describes--that of the presentation
being insufficient to the implied evaluation--is not the result of
James's defect of design, but of his deference of control. It
comes of his sharing authorial responsibility with a character,
Merton Densher, whose hungry imagination and sensitive moral palate
create the terms in which the action is dramatized, in which Kate
and Milly are seen. The symbolic values which these two women are
made to assume are indeed based on foreshortened and patchy render-
ings of the characters themselves; but, as we have seen, both the
foreshortenings and the symbolizations which one observes in the
second half of Wipp§_may be explained more directly and more fully
as phenomena of Densher's psychology than as requirements of the
discourse itself.

Because the reader may recognize in Kate's and Milly's
symbolic roles a deformation of the original human potential with
which James initially endowed them, there is a failure of the symbolic
texture finally to realize the associations and implied evaluations
which it strains towards; the good-bad opposition which Milly and
Kate finally come to represent is one that holds only for Densher
himself, whose powers of repression, of selective interpretation,

are allowed to have precedence over James's own. John Carlos Rowe

211

has observed that though "the mythic referents of Milly's character
provide points of reference for describing her journey, they nonethe-
less lead us no closer to any final meaning";33 one could remark
similarly that Kate's final relation to her role, and to the implied
moral correlative which it represents, is an ambiguous and incon-
clusive one, even though Densher believes it is clear enough. So
Densher appears to achieve the satisfaction of a final meaning which,
as others besides myself have noted, the novel as a whole does not.
But the novel's failure to achieve such a satisfaction is James's
premise rather than his investigation in ijgs; his topic is this
very success of Densher, as it is seen in the context of the novel's
own inner antagonisms.

To understand the nature of Densher's qualified success
(for qualified it is) and the conditions which make it possible,
it is necessary to examine his method of dealing with the greatest
threat to his newly defined project of imagination. The ultimate
recognition that Milly is dying is a literal fact which mocks the
illusion of transcendent vitality which she has impressed upon
Densher's consciousness; her impending demise represents the
disintegration of her mask of beauty and show of strength, and of
her symbolic value as incorruptible "embodied poetry." Densher
realizes, to his "outrage," that Milly's beauty is a result of an
aesthetic impulse, a "generous ideal," shared by himself and all the
others in the "conspiracy of silence" that had effaced the truth of
her disease (p. 388). He understands that the beauty he has been

worshipping is based on a selective unspeaking of the facts, and

 

in _ _

.l'_._..
A

 

212

that he has been living in "a general conscious fool's paradise, from
which the specified had been chased like a dangerous animal."
Densher experiences, as does his predecessor Lambert Strether, the
risk of disillusion that is incurred in the worship of beauty, and
the condition of willful ignorance which makes the appreciation of
such beauty possible. The "smudge of mortality across the picture"
compromises Densher's transcendental object of worship without
extinguishing his need for it, and threatens to throw him back upon
the now-demystified Kate, who no longer gratifies his imagination.
But Milly's imminent death presents Densher with a psychic
defense that is not immediately apparent. She has all along displayed
a tenuous relation to and acceptance of human society that reflect
Densher's own "weakness for life"; and it is not long before he comes
to regard her death as the ultimate embrace of that weakness. He
perceives that Milly, like himself, wants to "live," but finds that
life asks too much, is too gross to be entertained on any large
scale; Densher explains Milly's death to himself as her trans-
figuration of the "terror of the end" into "heroic" resignation
(p. 415). This interpretation allows him to formulate clearly the
contrast between Kate and Milly which he needs to establish:
Densher sees that Kate is willing to give up her moral beauty in
order to live, and that Milly is impelled to surrender life in order
to be beautiful. Since in the end it is beauty, with its qualities
of stasis and passivity, that Densher prefers and Milly embraces,
he understands her death as an ultimate sacrifice to that ideal. He

finally sees that what he loved in Kate and what he worships in Milly

213

are really inimica1--that Kate's very vitality is the antithesis,
and not merely a corrupted form, of the sort of "life" that is
symbolized in Milly. Milly's death is the final sign that she is
superior to the lucid and prosaic world which Kate has such abysmal
need of, and from which Densher has always insisted on his independ-
ence. In the end Densher worships in Milly his own weakness symboli-
cally transfigured and justified; and he rejects in Kate the vitality,
denuded and pejorated, which he himself lacks. It should also be
noted that the newfound active will with which Densher achieves his
triumph over Kate is thus revealed to be but a temporary attribute;
rather than representing a real qualification of his passivity,
Densher's "proof of will" is at root just another expression of his
need for "justifying and consecrating his alienation from everything
except his inner vision of an ideal."34
Densher's spiritual transfiguration of Milly's disease is
in the end sealed by her removal from him, first by geographical
distance and finally by death; she disappears from the arena of
Densher's experience, and enters the more congenial environs of his
memory and imagination. Where Kate lives before his eyes, help-
lessly lucid and inflexibly real, Milly lives on in his mind,
helplessly symbolic and pliable to the designs of desire. But
desire is inward, and requires the articulation of external form to
be recognized and pursued; so Densher's private idea of Milly takes
on a public reality in language, as he voices his own version of
Milly to Mrs. Lowder. As he "pictured the case" to Aunt Maud, Milly

assumes for him the "heroic" character of "some young victim of the

214

scaffold, in the French Revolution" (p. 415); he begins to see her,
in the reflected objectivity of his own words, as a noble casualty,
silently raging against the dying of a light that is after all too
strong for her (and for Densher) to bear.

The role of language itself in this process cannot be under-
estimated. Densher finds a "relief" in the process of "naming" by
which he gives verbal form to his internal fears and desires regard-
ing Milly; and because Milly is dead to him, she can no longer give
theliezto these accounts of her character. Her absence is also a
silence, and she is in death expressed and made present only through
the words of others. Densher may thus engage, freely and without
risk of contradiction, in the speculations which most gratify his
need to wring something positive and beautiful out of Milly's
dying. Densher, always in need of external corroboration, seeks
to confirm his inner vision of Milly in the only way available to
him: through the form-giving powers of language, which makes possible
in human relations as well as in literature the creation of hypothe-
tical realities, and the giving of substance to the urgings of inarti-
culate desire.

Thus Densher's project of erecting his symbolic temple over
the literal fact of Milly's death illustrates the important function
which the demise of the love-object plays in this and other of
James's works. Death, and its symbolization through language, enables
a character's existence to assume for others a determinacy of meaning
which is impossible, or at best provisional, so long as the character

continues to speak and act with his own motives and towards his own

215

ends. Characters who die or otherwise take leave of the work do not
outlive or outstrip the formal roles assigned them by others
(including the author); they become in death or absence fields of
free play for the imaginations of those others, and may be made to
represent, through the symbolic assignations of language, ideals
which living, thriving characters will inevitably betray. Thus in
death, Milly becomes for Densher a finished book, a rounded poem of
coherent and harmonious wholeness; this effect stands in marked con-
trast to the paradoxical and jagged emotions which Kate excites in
him. Kate in fact recognizes the source of Milly's triumphant appeal
when she accuses Densher of having loved the dead girl not "for the
time she lived" (p. 456), but only after he had seen her for the last
time; Kate sees, finally, that the ideals embraced by Densher can be
fulfilled only by a woman who is dead to him, because the living,
like Kate herself, have ideas of their own.

Thus one can observe on a personal as well as on a formal
level the simplifying force of a death symbolically or vicariously
experienced; and through the example of Densher it is possible to
understand the impulse of the Jamesian hero, who characteristically
builds altars to his dead while shrinking from the flame of life that
burns one's fingers as it lights one's way. Life does not offer
closure, security, harmony; and those who seek such assurances,
whether out of aesthetic hunger or inner anxiety, are bound to be
disappointed with life, and to prefer images of death or stasis in
their symbolic forms--such as the Bronzino portrait, or the image of

the sacrificial dove. Mildred Hartsock observes that "in James,

216

memory of the dead is destructive when it turns the living away

from the pursuit of their lives";35 but for characters like Densher,
driven by desire but paralyzed by moral risk, such turning away

is nearly inevitable. The memory of the dead love is simply more
pliable matter than the reality of the living, acting person.
Language is safer than action, art is safer than life, so long as
they do not have to compete with the reality whose absence they mark.

The only thing that threatens Densher's temple of worship
is Kate's rival construction of what they have done, and how they
must now act. Densher has assured himself all along that he does
not really want Milly's money; his resolve to get nothing for himself
out of their relation has been for him his proof of good faith, his
shield from guilt and his badge of moral glory. But Kate's version,
though only partially verbalized, is quite different. Without broach-
ing the subject of Densher's personal relationship to Milly, Kate
insists that it is in the acceptance of Milly's money, and not in
his refusal of the bequest, that Densher's and her own glory must be
achieved. Thus she insists that for Densher as well as for herself,
success is to be signified by the surrender of the outward proofs
of innocence.

The topic of Milly's money is for Kate a subject apart from
that of Milly herself, which Kate scrupulously avoids when with
Densher. Her strategic silence is calculated to shield him from
guilt; she knows that any allusion to Densher's part in their decep-
tion will weaken his taste for seeing their plan through to the end.

But Densher has seen too much already. There is between them "a

217

knowledge of each other that they couldn't undo" (p. 447), and
Densher cannot help filling the gap of Kate's conspicuous silence
with the spectral image of his own culpability; while he still has
a "horror . . . of her lucidity" (p. 421), her illucidity is now
just as threatening, since her silence gives free play to his
suspicions of his own deep-rooted guilt.

Furthermore, Kate's silence has the additional effect of
denying Densher's idea of Milly a verbalized existence between them.
Densher feels the "heroic" version of Milly he has put before Mrs.
Lowder is somehow inadmissible with Kate; and Kate's evasion of the
subject allows him to confirm this. Their mutual repression of the
topic eventually interposes between them a gulf of silence so great
that it impoverishes their relationship, at least for Densher;
despite their "perverse insistence to make up what they ignored"
(p. 449), the superficial quality of their intercourse cannot dis-
guise for him the "bland" depths into which their relationship has
fallen. Denied an expression of his ideal, and afflicted with the
real threat of personal shame, Densher must finally and irrevocably
divorce himself from Kate, and flee from the despised definition of
himself and of his relation to Milly that, either in silence or in
word, Kate figures forth to him.

Thus Densher's "obsessive guilt turns him . . . toward a

'35 in which he seeks to exercise the preroga-

cruel testing of Kate'
tives of his own vision by forcing her to conform to his image of
her. He gives Kate the opportunity, on successive occasions, to

open two letters: the first, a deathbed message from Milly, is a

218

"sacred script" (p. 444) through which he offers Kate a final
glimpse of the transcendental truth he believes himself to have
found; the second letter, from Milly's New York executor, is the
vulgar script which announces the extent of their sinful gains, the
knowledge of which Densher refuses. Kate, perhaps because she is
afraid of being personally confronted, even in writing, by one whom
she has used and betrayed, tosses the sacred artifact into the

fire (p. 445); but she does not hesitate to discover the contents
of the second letter.

This dual test is calculated to force Kate to reveal her-
self to Densher as the representative of prosaic human greed and
passion; he has already come to regard her as "alien" to himself
(p. 430), but the letters provide him with an opportunity to show
his difference from Kate, and to project his shame onto her. It
is his rationalization that guilt, in the end, is proved by one's
acceptance of the spoils of sinful action; so if Densher can demon-
strate his innocence through his rejection of Milly's money, then
Kate may prove her guilt to him by her willingness to accept the
bequest. Densher's hope is, ironically, that Kate will prefer the
contents of the vulgar script to those of the sacred one, since in
so choosing she will irrevocably prove her difference from him, and
will take upon herself the weight of his own guilt. In Densher's
world, to the sinners go the spoils.

Kate recognizes in Densher's final ultimatum his "desire

. . to escape everything" (p. 455), and correctly diagnoses what

has happened to their relationship: "Her memory's your love," she

219

tells Densher, referring to Milly. "You want no other" (p. 456). A
more succinct and accurate assessment of Densher's final condition
would hardly be possible. He has finally made room for Milly by
forcing Kate to give him up, and has secured his sense of his own
innocence by rejecting in Milly's inheritance the profits of sin.
Through total renunciation of everything but his symbolized ideal,
Densher has made himself free to withdraw to the moral safety and
comfort of his passive solution.

Sallie Sears has noted that there is a defect in this ending.
She feels that "Densher does not suffer enough,"36 and that Kate is
made to bear too greatly the brunt of the shame and pain. This is
indeed a defect, but not one attributable to James; the ending must
be understood as the culmination of Densher's process of vision, which
is not necessarily identical with the author's. Densher's mental
energies throughout the novel are focused on the project of deflecting
guilt from himself and purifying his relation to Milly; and his
testing of Kate in the final chapters is, as we have seen, an attempt
to make Kate assume the mask of responsibility by forcing her into
a choice that shows her to her own moral disadvantage. But it is
Densher who is forcing Kate's hand, and not James; and it is Densher
who is responsible for distributing the guilt in this final scene.
The defect of the final scene is not, as Sears implies, that James
does not believe in Densher's guilt; it is that Densher does not
believe in it. For this reason, and because Densher's consciousness
dominates the discourse in the final chapters, it naturally appears

that he escapes the lion's share of moral responsibility. The

220

defect that Sears senses in the ending is therefore intentional,
since it represents the corrective to Densher's sense of his own
final impunity.

The failure of the ending to achieve a satisfactory closure
may be attributed to a failure in Densher that James, in his earlier
novels, discovered in his own authorial narrators: there is in
Densher's vision a lingering antagonism of representation and evalua-
tion, of materials and form. Densher's difficulty, like James's,
is that the human beings on which he builds the vision of final
redemption cannot in the end be confused with the masks which they
assume in his imagination. Because James takes pains to introduce
Kate and Milly through angles of vision other than Densher's own,
we understand them more deeply, see them more clearly, than Densher
himself, even though it is his perspective which ultimately dominates
the novel. They are certainly endowed with greater measures of human-
ity tha Densher grants them; if one recalls the early chapters of the
novel, one becomes aware that Densher's final illusion of impunity is
achieved at the expense of Kate's desperate humanity and Milly's
effaced actuality.

Densher does not recognize Kate's anguish over the cruel
choice he puts to her; neither does he recognize her self-sacrificial
impulse, revealed in the opening scene with her father and again in
the penultimate scene at her sister Marian's, to exchange the risks
of grasping passion for the abject peace of renunciatory service.

He does not see in Milly, his apotheosized dove-goddess, the covert

rejection and fear of life which is the actuality behind her rage

221

against the dying light; nor does he see "the infernal pride that
causes her to repel help in the very time when her need is greatest."37
But most of all, Densher does not recognize the true face of his
own weakness. He does not see in himself the hidden moral egoism
which must be gratified and protected at all costs from the slightest
smudge of shame; neither does he recognize his covert desire for the
very things he professes to find vulgar and repugnant--wealth, social
acceptance, gentility. Finally, he does not see that it is the
satisfaction of these covert desires that he, through his passive
acquiescence, has empowered Kate to pursue for him, even as he

has enjoined her to protect his moral pride from peril. In the end

he cannot come to terms with any of the inner hungers, either spiri-
tual or material, that have resulted in his symbolic brutalization of
Kate and Milly.

Thus the ending of Wipg§_strikes a hollow but tenuously
concordant note, echoing Densher's desperate attempt to harmonize his
inner conflicts at the expense of the human actuality of himself and
others. His redemption is illusory, an apotheosis imagined rather
than achieved, but is sustained by the creative power of the language
in which it is couched. As with his idealization of Milly, Densher
depends on the phenomenal reality of his own words to argue the
truth of his necessary view of himself. Yet here the language itself
cannot help but hint at the absence that it marks; Millicent Bell
says that in the end the "language . . . fails to offer consolation";38

the hollow ring of the conclusion does not signify, as Dorothea

Krook suggests, that "language is grossly inadequate to the

222

experience,"39 but rather that Densher himself is inadequate to the
role which the language, and the action, suggest for him. He is a
moral hero only on his own insular terms, and achieves his heroism
only by a rampant use of others which calls the very morality of his
triumph into question.

James in The Wings of the Dove, then, has dug to the very

 

seed of the brutality on which art and human relations are predicated.
The quest of his characters for meaning, for psychic coherence, and
the ruthlessness with which they impose their desired forms on
others, reflects the impulse of all art to rein in the chaos of
experience and give it an order which pleases the senses and alle-
viates anxiety. In Wfipgs_James shows through the actions and mental
processes of his characters that this impulse is pervasive in human
relations, that ordinary perception partakes of the same partial
cognizance, the same horror of lucidity, which is expressed in the
controlling form of art. The very process of "seeing," of "knowing,"
is itself a negotiation between the given and the imagined which is
never formally concluded, and which requires the constant sacrifice
of small truths to keep from breaking down.

In human transactions such as those between lover and
beloved, between victim and victimizer, and even between author and
created character, this process is marked by tyranny, and often by
the sacrifice of human truths which, while hostile to form, are
essential to understanding. For this reason, Milly's "apotheosis
as the beneficial dove is . . . her personal defeat";40 the role she

assumes represents a form conferred on her by others, and precludes

223

the possibility either of personal growth or of an authentic
response on the part of others to her psychic vulnerability. Her
acceptance of her bestowed image "cheats her of the world's com-

"41 as the human "desperation of her loneliness" is finally

passion,
converted into the inhuman image "that 'covers' the book."42 In
her ultimate apotheosis as the love of Densher's memory, it is
Milly's essential human truth, and not her life, that is the real
redemptive sacrifice.

Just as Milly's humanity is sacrificed so that she might
be worshipped, Kate's is sacrificed so that she might be cast away.
Densher's gradual change from reliance on Kate to derogation of
her energy, vitality, and creativity indicates how necessary her
powers are to the process of his vision but how inimical they are
to the values reflected in its achieved result. James's dramatiza-
tion of this gradual shift reveals how deeply, and with what mingled
discovery and dread, James must have probed the artistic process in
its analogue, the mind of Merton Densher. Densher's final solution,
in which he projects his own guilt onto Kate, mirrors that of
James himself, who depends on surrogates, many of them well-meaning
villains, to organize the ado by which something is "done" with the
people he has so lovingly created. Densher by his passivity has
authorized Kate to act for him, but recoils in horror at her methods,
and in the end rejects her as debased, adoring instead the beautiful
image in another that her surrogate efforts have provoked into being.
This is precisely the practice of James in his earlier, less self-

conscious novels, in which he relies on the Osmonds and Madame

224

Merles, whose behavior he abases, to create the "difficult situation"
in which the moral beauty of his Isabel Archers will be clearly and
wonderfully visible.

Densher is one who worships the beautiful result but finds
the process of creating it abhorrent. He does not want to know at
what cost the transcendent image of Milly has been produced, nor
does he want to know his own part in extracting that price. He
would rather believe, for impunity's sake, that Milly's beauty is a
natural emanation of her own personality, and not a forced effect
produced by the energy of Kate's lie and the force of everyone
else's wilful repressions. Thus James shows through Densher the
degree to which art, and the symbolic renderings of people that are
like art, partakes of a brutality that the artist himself suspects
but does not acknowledge; the artist, like Densher, effaces the very
energy through which reality is converted into desire, and makes it
seem as if this forged unity is, after all, an innate and natural
one.

There is a temptation to argue that Densher's withdrawal
from the chaos of experience, and "to renounce life in society for

"43 is a reflection of James's own increasing habit

solitary integrity,
of deference in his fiction, almost as if he were afraid of incurring
responsibility for exerting the brutal authorial will; but James is
not Densher, nor Densher James. Densher's consciousness is a model
of the unconscious and unreflective artistic impulse, unwilling to

subject its constructions to the lucid facts that might mock it;

James's purpose in The Wings of the Dove and, to a lesser extent, in

 

225

The Ambassadors, is to turn conscious reflection on that impulse, to
discover its sources, its hidden repressions and vulnerabilities.
Where Densher's deference is defensive and self-embedding, James's is
expansive and exploratory: he wppts.to reckon the cost to truth
that the unopened envelope, the strategic silence, the hermetic
metaphor represent. This, and not the struggle for the soul of
Densher, or even the tragic self-sacrifice of Milly, is the issue
at the heart of this prodigious novel.

In Wipgs_James turns his analytical and dramatic capabilities
as a novelist inward on the form itself, to examine the inner ten-

sions he had been wrestling with for thirty years. The Wings of the

 

993g is an assessment of the cost of alleviating those tensions--of
the cost, in a way, of art itself. James's conclusions are twofold.
He reveals through Milly's abrogated selfhood, in Kate's final
abjection, and in Densher's waste of passion, that the cost of art
is great; but the fact that after finishing ijg§_he turned to

another novel, The Golden Bowl, demonstrates his estimation that it

 

is not, in the end, intolerably prohibitive. James discovers in the
realistic novel the continual horror of lucidity that characterizes
all art, but finds it coupled with the simultaneous demand for lucid
reportage of human actualities. This is the paradox at the center
of the novel form itself, the inner antagonism that can never be
resolved. But this discovery represents for James cause for reflec-
tion, not for despair. In the various fictions which follow Ihg_
Wings of the Dove, one sees James's continuing conviction, all the

more articulate for his investigations in this novel, that the

226

beautiful mask is a habitual and probably a necessary domestication
of the raw and violent truth; but it is too insubstantial to replace
the reality it tropes, and it must not be employed without full

recognition of the potential cost at which it is imposed or assumed.

NOTES

1Henry James, The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), p. 288.

 

2The Art of the Novel, p. 294.

3The Image of Europe in Henry James (Dallas: Southern
Methodist University Press, 1958), p. 110.

4Wegelin, p. 110.

5The seminal article embracing this view belongs to Quentin
Anderson, "The Two Henry Jameses," crutiny, 14 (1947), 242-51.

6Anderson, 250.

7The Art of the Novel, p. 328. Although this description of
James's method is found in his Preface to The Golden Bowl, it is
not specific to that novel, and in fact has its most fertile appli-
cations in The Wings of the Dove.

 

 

8See R. P. Blackmur, "The Loose and Baggy Monsters of Henry
James," Accent, 11 (1951), 142; F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The
Major Phase (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), 59. These
two critics give succinct and pertinent accounts of Mrs. Stringham's
contribution to the story's "romantic" elements.

 

 

9The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henrnyames
(Princeton: ’Princeton University Press,l964), p. 286.

loBlackmur, 137.
11The Negative Imagination: Form and Perspective in the

Novels of Henrnyames (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press,
196g), p0 71.

 

12Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (New York: Penguin,
1972), p. 50. All subsequent references are to this edition, which
follows the text of the first English edition.

13"Transcendence in The Wings of the Dove," Modern Fiction
Studies, 12 (1966), 98.

 

 

14Koch, 94.
227

228

15Again, Quentin Anderson's article is the seminal one for
this idea.

16Dorothea Krook, for example, asserts that Milly's "fatal
flaw is her pride" ("The Wings of the Dove," Cambridge Journal, 7
((1954)), 678); and Robert C. McLean, in a reading of the novel that
is idiosyncratic to say the least, suggests that Milly's manic-
depression causes her to kill herself, and that her bequest,
which separates Kate and Densher, is a form of posthumous revenge
("'Love by the Doctor's Direction': Disease and Death in ng_

Win 5 of the Dove," Papers on Language and Literature, 8, supp.
((1972)), 128-48).

17John Goode, "The Pervasive Mystery of Style: The Wings of
the Dove," The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James, ed.
John Goode (LOndon: Methuen, 1972), p. 253.

 

 

 

 

18Holland, p. 303.

19Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1957), p. 106.

 

20Frye, p. 105.

2(For an extensive treatment of the phenomenon of "passive"
and "active" characters, see Daniel J. Schneider, The Crystal Cage
(Lawrence, Kansas: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978).

 

22Holland, p. 287.

23Leo Bersani, "The Narrator as Center in The Wings of the
Dove," Modern Fiction Studies, 6 (1960), 137.

 

24F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1932; rpt., 1963), p. 74.

 

253. M. Conger, "The Admirable Villains in Henry James's
The Wings of the Dove," Arizona Quarterly, 27 (1971), 157-58.

 

26James E. Mulqueen, "Perfection of a Pattern: The Structure
of The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl,"
Arizona Quarterly, 27 (1971), 136.

 

 

27Sita Patricia Marks, "The Sound and the Silence: Nonverbal
Patterns in The Wings of the Dove," Arizona Quarterly, 27 (1971), 148.

 

 

28"The Symbolization of Milly Theale: Henry James's ng_
Wings of the Dove," Journal of English Literary History, 40 (1973),
158.

293ersani, 137.

Studies, 22 (1976-77), 523.

James's
114.

Image,"

229

3OGoode, p. 288.
3(Mulqueen, 136.

32The Art of the Novel, p. 302.
33

 

Rowe, 141.
34Bersani, 144.

35"The Most Valuable Thing: James on Death," Modern Fiction

 

36Sears, p. 97.
37Krook, 678.

38"The Dream of Being Possessed and Possessing: Henry
The Wings of the Dove," Massachusetts Review, 10 (1969),

 

39Krook, 687.

4OAian u. Bellringer, "The Wings ofithe Dove: The Main
Modern Language Review, 74 (1979), 23.

 

 

4lit-irks, 148.
42

43

Koch, 98-99.

Bersani, 144.

CHAPTER VI

THE GOLDEN BOWL AND BEYOND

 

The Golden Bowl is in many ways a meditation on, and an

 

elaboration of, an issue raised by Milly Theale's behavior in the

closing chapters of The Wings of the Dove. Informed by Lord Mark of

 

Kate's and Densher's treachery, Milly assures him that he is mis-
taken, and convinces him that it is she, and not Kate, that Densher
really loves. What Milly signifies by this action is crucial not
just to our understanding of her character, but to our view of the
relation between truth and beauty that W1pgs_and its successor, 15g.

Golden Bowl, explore so deeply. Milly, knowing Densher's love to

 

be counterfeit, nevertheless is disposed to continue treating it as
the real thing; she thus attempts to redeem the foolishness of her

credulous conduct by trying to realize the appearance of a beautiful

 

relation between herself and Densher as an end in itself. But in the
end, Milly is not able to sustain the connection between the beauti-
ful appearance and its antithesis in the lucid facts as provided by
Lord Mark; in an emblematic gesture of despair and disillusionment
with life, she "turns her face to the wall," and covers her exit with
a final show of benificence toward those who have betrayed her.
Milly's dilemma is put to Densher by Kate herself, who observes:

"She never wanted the truth . . . She wanted yp_p_."'I

230

231

Kate's remark is equally appropriate as a description of
Maggie Verver's attitude towards her husband, the Prince, in IE2
Golden Bowl. Like Milly's idea of Densher, Maggie's beautiful image
of her Prince is threatened by the ugly revelation that his loyalties
as a lover are divided at best; but unlike Milly, Maggie is able to
see the truth and yet live. To be sure, Maggie is shocked and
demoralized by the discovery that her husband Amerigo and her friend
and stepmother Charlotte Stant have been, and continue to be, lovers;
but her response is not the despair of life displayed by Milly, but
rather a determination to survive the loss of her overingenuous
innocence. She is determined, for her father's happiness as well as
for her own, to neutralize the destructive potential of the Prince's
and Charlotte's infidelity--to keep the ugly truth from intruding on
the beautiful forms in which she and her father have ensconced them-
selves. To this end, Maggie seeks and discovers in herself the
strength (some would say the cruelty) which allows her to absorb the
lucid truth about Amerigo and Charlotte without letting them escape
the roles in which she and her father, by virtue of their marriages,
have fixed them.

Thus one finds repeated in The Golden Bowl a conceit which

 

rules The Wings of the Dove as well: human relations, particularly
love relations, are like art works which both depend on and are
vulnerable to the human materials which lend them substance. The
Verver marriages, though beautiful in their outward forms and in the
emotional satisfaction they provide Adam and Maggie, are nevertheless

based on an incomplete recognition of the nature of their spouses,

232

and on the Ververs' own misconceptions about each others' needs.

The neat symmetry of mutual satisfaction comprised by this foursome
is, then, in actuality a map of misreading, in which the objects

of these misconstructions--some intentionally and some inadvertently--
engage in an overt acquiescence to, but a covert subversion of, the
designs imposed on them by others.

This is a potential problem which the Prince recognizes from
the beginning. He tells Maggie that, while she does know his
"public" self, "there's another part" about which she has thus far
found out nothing--"my single self, the unknown, unimportant--
unimportant save to ou--persona1 quantity."2 The Prince knows that
Maggie does not perceive or understand him in personal terms; rather,
he is to be the crowning addition to the Verver museum, a perfect
Old World specimen whose charm lies in the romantic seeds of his
ancestry. He is to the Ververs a "personage" rather than a person;
his value to them is symbolic and greater than the sum of his actual
attributes, which they leave unexamined. He "was to constitute a
possession, yet was to escape being reduced to his component parts"
(p. 43).

In this light, it is obvious that the golden bowl, with its
incipient and fatal flaw, does not represent the Prince himself so
much as the Ververs' habits of perception. It is Adam who regards
Amerigo as "a pure and perfect crystal" (p. 120), and his and
Maggie's thirst for romance which creates the illusory "charm" that
pervades the Verver household. The vulnerability of this illusion,

though revealed by Amerigo's and Charlotte's adultery, does not

 

 

233

ultimately derive from it; the fault is not in the human passion
of the illicit lovers, but in the inhuman readings of them proposed
by Maggie and Adam, who gloss over the personal, emotional truths of
the Prince and Charlotte in the interest of making them "romantic."
Thus the cracked bowl is not a symbol of Amerigo's or Charlotte's
inability to sustain the beauty the Ververs have imagined for them;
it represents rather "the Ververs' deformed attitude towards their
precious people. For when people are treated like works of art, cer-
tain human needs are ignored which will eventually assert themselves."3
But these ignored needs, expressed particularly in the love
between Amerigo and Charlotte, represent private feelings which need
not be carried into the public and symbolic forum of the Verver family
circle. The Prince is aware of this disjunction of public and
private reality from the beginning; he sees his responsibility as
being not so much to remain faithful in essence to his role, but
merely to avoid betraying the appearances which it requires of him.
Similarly, Charlotte is expert at using public gesture to disguise
personal realities, such as the show of "cleverness" with which she
hides her "abjection"--letting it "be known for anything, for every-
thing, but the truth of which it was made" (p. 61). In other words,
the Prince and Charlotte both recognize the value of playing the
parts that the Ververs desire of them; the "beauty" of their relations
with their victims "covers" the lovers in The Golden Bowl as surely
as Milly Theale's symbolic wings reach out to cover Kate and Densher

in The Wings of the Dove. But, like Kate Croy and unlike Densher,

 

Amerigo and Charlotte in no way confuse their parts with their

 

 

 

234

actual selves; nor do they let the dimension of the personal,
banished by the Ververs' idealized conceptions of them, enter into
their marital relationships. Rather, they hide behind the silences
and evasions which serve the single purpose they share in common
with their spouses: the preservation of the placid beauty of
appearances, regardless of its relation to the lucid facts.

The Ververs themselves contribute to this conspiracy of
silence and manufactured ignorance, but for far different reasons.
They do not want to be disencumbered of their idealistic notions
regarding their spouses because, as Maggie tells the Prince, being
romantic "is just what makes everything so nice for us" (p. 34).

But the air of romance with which they have surrounded themselves
is, as we have seen, an impoverishment rather than an enhancement of
the actual atmosphere; it is based on a depersonalization of the
beloved, in which he or she becomes an aesthetic object, an image
bound up intimately with one's own desires but served from his or her
own human actuality. Like Milly, the Ververs would rather have
romance, and the imagined "life" it represents, than the living
truth itself; and, like Milly, Maggie and Adam foster the conspiracy
of silence which keeps them insulated from the truth but makes them
vulnerable to the designs of others. They are reluctant to solicit
answers, to break the seal on envelopes, in which they might find
struck the "note" of the personal, the real, which would obscure the
image of desire which they see reflected in their spouses. It is

precisely this willed absence of lucidity which allows the balloon

of romance to float free of its earthly moorings;4 but it also

.141

235

leaves one dancing on air, and with a long, long way to fall. Small
wonder, then, that characters like Maggie and Adam are so reluctant
to look down.

The story of The Golden Bowl, then, is like that of so many
other of James's novels: that of the "lucid truth" rising to
confront the dream of the beautiful; and of the efforts of one or
more of the characters (in this case Maggie) to continue valuing that
beauty without denying the facts which reveal it as an illusion.

In previous novels like The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove,

 

such attempts result in moral paralysis (Strether), withdrawal

(Densher), and even death (Milly Theale); but in The Golden Bowl,

 

Maggie Verver survives her initial disillusionment and converts it
into decision and action. She learns to deal in ambiguity and illu-
sion herself, and in doing so is able to deceive those who have
begun by deceiving her.

She is able to accomplish this reversal because, while she
and Adam have misread the Prince and Charlotte, the two lovers have
misgauged Maggie herself; it does not occur to them that Maggie,
like themselves, could be a dissembler. The Prince does not consider
that the worm of knowledge could find a nest in the flower of his
wife's apparent innocence, nor does he doubt that her faith will be
sufficient to "cover" his betrayals; he is convinced, rather, that
her "easy imagination . . . would keep up with him in the end," and
that her view of him is "unruffled by a sense of anomaly" (pp. 238,
252). The Prince, in short, makes the mistake of holding as

blindly to Maggie's belief in him as she herself does.

236

The Prince values Maggie's idea of him not because it repre-
sents an interpretation which he finds flattering, but because it
provides him with a knowledge of what others believe and expect of
him; he is able to know, through Maggie, the boundaries of the public
form that interposes itself between his personal reality and the
identity conferred on him within the Verver family circle. The
advantage the Prince gains from thus knowing the shape of his mask
has as much to do with his connection to Charlotte as with his
relationship to Maggie; it gives him a sense of what he may do in
the name of love without publicly violating that which he ought to
do (or ought not to) in the name of marriage. The Prince, like
Charlotte, must rely on his external adherence to the symbolic con-
tract he has formed with Adam and Maggie because he knows that on a
personal and private level he is bound to betray their agreement.
Amerigo knows that he can never be, through and through, what Maggie
believes him to be; the best he can do is make, like the gilded bowl,
a public display which suggests a consistency of surface and sub-
stance, but which in fact conceals the flawed material to which the
pristine gilt is bonded. The Prince recognizes the intrinsic flaws
in Maggie's illusion, just as he recognizes the fault in the bowl;
and this recognition weighs heavily on him, especially when he runs
the risk of exposing his true self to Maggie's or Adam's scrutiny.
Accordingly, he admits to being "afraid of cracks" (p. 269), and
has his "real, honest fear of being 'off' some day, of being wrong

without knowing it" (p. 48).

237

Thus when the Prince finds to his horror that Maggie has
discovered the very "crack" he feared, he is desperate to know how
far her awareness has spread--whether the discovered flaw has
merely affected pep_idea of him, or if it has become a public
fact of which he must now be cognizant. When Maggie refuses to tell
him what Adam knows of his and Charlotte's infidelity, the Prince
is stymied; he can no longer be certain which of his actions, past
or present, remain concealed under the public image of his conjugal
faithfulness. He cannot know what personal liberties of word or
of action he may allow himself, nor what past indiscretions have
risen into the light of general knowledge. It is an axiom of the
Prince's moral system that playing a role is not hypocritical
unless one is careless enough to supply others with the proof that
one is actually playing; but Maggie's silence leaves him uncertain
as to whether anyting has been proven at all, except to Maggie
herself. The result of this is that the Prince and Charlotte, unable
to admit or deny the truth of their relationship without risking
public compromise, are paralyzed by their uncertainty, and become
malleable to Maggie's design.

Thus Maggie finds her salvation by gaining a knowledge of
her deceivers that they never expected, and becoming as mysterious
to them as they had previously been to her; she substitutes power
over others for ther now-defunct belief in their intrinsic beauty.
She also escapes the "ambush of truth" that lies in wait for so
many Jamesian protagonists by perceiving finally that "knowledge

was a fascination as well as a fear" (p. 395) and by not shrinking

238

from the prerogatives in action that such knowledge brings. The Golden

 

Bpwl, then, shows us two Maggies, neatly divided by a narrative
ellipse at the center of the novel: one is innocent and deceived,
like Milly Theale, while the other is, like Kate Croy, hardened by
experience and willing to play a part to gain an objective. Maggie
changes from a passive admirer of the Prince to one on whom the
Prince himself looks with a mixture of fear and gaping wonder; she
triumphs over Charlotte, the "Dark Lady" of the novel,5 by adopting
Charlotte's own methods of beguilement, clothing her new under-
standings in the expired truth of her old innocence. And, like

the authorial "Personage" she finally resembles (p. 166),6 Maggie
takes pleasure in the creation of an effect she knows to be purely
formal--the preservation of her own and Adam's marriages-~while
knowing also that in other eyes, particularly her father's, it will
be viewed as the real thing.

But the symmetry of the novel, which shows Maggie as deceived
and then as deceiver, as victim and than as victimizer, makes her
final triumph over the Prince and Charlotte seem more like a vulgar
payback than a positive step toward maturity. Because Maggie
succeeds by mastering the methods of her betrayers, she is a
problematical heroine whose actions in the final analysis evoke as
much sympathy for her enemies as for herself; after all, she has
done little more than exchange roles with the Prince and Charlotte,
and her final claims for moral heroism are hollowly pleaded if the

best one can say on her behalf is that others sinned first.7

239

As always in James, the problems of sympathy in The Golden

 

Bppl arise because the author has created in protagonist and
antagonists alike characters whose actions spring from psychic
necessity as well as from the dramatic needs of the discourse.

It is difficult not to feel the anxiety of the Prince, who must
read in Maggie's mystical silences the extent of his exposure;

and one cannot help experiencing the frustration of Charlotte as

the Prince is slowly, inexorably removed from her, and her passion
for him walled up within the bland confines of her marriage to Adam.

Thus in The Golden Bowl the claims of humanity obscure the claims

 

of moral assessment; but if one is looking for judgments in this
novel, for clear assignations of guilt or of innocence, one is mis-
taking James's point. As with previous novels like The Ambassadors

and The Wings of the Dove, the story of The Golden Bowl is ultimately

 

 

the quest of one character--in this case Maggie Verver--for psychic
wholeness, and the assessment of the cost at which this is pursued.
Like Strether and Densher (and, incidentally, like early
protagonists such as Newman and Isabel), Maggie requires an external
and public form which will articulate and corroborate her sense of
her own inner integrity, restoration of harmony and order to her
marriage; this is an enterprise which, if successful, will signify
the active realization of her creative power and her control over
the forms of her existence--proofs against her earlier abjection at
seeing herself as a bird in a "gilded cage" of the Prince's and
Charlotte's making (p. 329). She needs, in other words, to dispel

her sense that her life is not her own; Maggie wants to be the

240

keeper, not the pet. The demonstration of her strength, of her
maturity, will be her construction of a cage that will hold her
husband, the Prince, while keeping out Charlotte; she must bring
whole through revision an earlier, failed project whose design had
been ruptured by the Prince's adulterous deception.

To achieve this end, Maggie must repudiate her old innocence;
as Charles Thomas Samuels observes, Maggie knows that her old,
childish Eden had in it the seeds of disorder and coiiapse,8 and her
plan to recapture the Prince is in essence an attempt to conceive in
all lucidity what she had previously misconceived in all ignorance.
Maggie now recognizes that the Prince will not conform naturally to
the role of husband, but that she must make him do so through mastery
and mystification, closing his escape route to Charlotte and leaving
him no choice but to accept the binding mandate of form.

But in her lucidity, as in her ignorance, Maggie regards the
Prince's personal actuality as distinct from his essential value to
her; she knows his acceptance of his role is forced, but she does
not care so long as he does not actively protest. Thus her quest
through marriage for an integrated identity is merely a recapitula-
tion of her childish dream of possession. She does not seek to
recapture the Prince to gain "erotic fulfillment,"9 but to reclaim
him from Charlotte as an object she believes to be rightfully hers,
to restore that object to its proper place. Maggie's idea of the
Prince has been changed by her discoveries, as have her methods for
dealing with him; but the essential use she wishes to make of him

remains constant. It is the integrity of the form she is interested

241

in--a goal to which the Prince's real pain of loss and real

sense of helpless wonder is a small but recognized obstacle. Like
an author relentlessly pressing his characters into the desired
pattern of action, Maggie manipulates and mystifies the Prince into
behaving as she will, even as she senses his stifled cries of
protest.

50 Maggie is like the novelist who must build on knowledge and
against it to achieve effects which are most purely apprehended in
innocence; or, rather, she must control the actual elements in her
field of vision so they do not distort the image she is projecting
on them. For her, as for the novelist, the tactics of silence and
evasion are essential tools. Maggie wants her plan to reach fruition,
but she does not want it to be forced; like the Jamesian narrator,
she depends on others to take up the suggestions (in this case, threats)
which she leaves dangling in her deferent silences, even as those
others disacknowledge the painful imprint of her will. In short, the
Prince and Charlotte must bend to Maggie's plan without admitting
they are being bent; the slightest protest or denial, particularly
from the Prince, would make Maggie conscious of the mark of her own
heel, and upset the delicate moral equilibrium which allows her drive
for integration to stay on course.

So, though the Prince is tormented by his exposure and by
his separation from Charlotte, Maggie can risk no provocation which
would bring this truth to his lips; such an open admission would
compromise both the purity of her intended effect and the impunity

of her means. Maggie is afraid of challenging the Prince on the

242

still-unpublished score of his love for Charlotte for another reason
as well: she wants to avoid striking the abhorrent note of her own
"jealousy" which, though authentic enough, would be inharmonious
with her rationale that her desire for the Prince is really a desire
to preserve her father's "stillness of peaceful sleep" (pp. 351-52).
She feels the "specific" must be kept caged, since letting it out
"would run to earth, somehow, the truth . . . at which she mustn't
so much as indirectly point" (p. 357)--that truth being, again, the
suppressed reality of Amerigo's love for Charlotte. She is fearful
of the Prince admitting the pain which would testify to the fact of
that now-frustrated attachment, feeling that "any blindness that
might wrap it [the Prince's unhappiness] would be the nearest
approach to a boon" (p. 423). Finally, even as Adam and Charlotte
march away from them into the New World, Maggie finds that the pros-
pect of hearing a "confession" from Amerigo "charged her with a new
horror . . . All she knew, accordingly, was that she should be ashamed
to listen to the uttered word" (p. 547).

What can.all this mean, except that Maggie intends to have her
truth and bury it too? It is knowledge she has asked for, and knowl-
edge she has gotten; but it has not served her much better than
ignorance, since the power it engenders is made dangerous by the
moral complications which attend its use. The acquisition of truth
has, paradoxically, proven useful to her means but destructive of
herends; she cannot accept the stain of guilt that comes from using
truth as a weapon. Thus Amerigo, though he may not know it yet, still
has the power to burst the cage, to shatter the bowl, by the single

243

lucidity which will reveal the flaw in Maggie's moral reasoning. It
may be true, as J. A. Ward maintains, that "Maggie really is an
artist . . . who seeks the ideal fusion of the appearance and

the content of her marriage";10

yet what she actually achieves is
not fusion, but exclusion. Her tenuous harmonization of content
and form derives from a repression of old truths, and not from the
forging of new ones. The clear triumph which she appears to have
achieved is in fact a trick of perspective, of focus; there are
truths hovering in the background which "she agrees not to know or
judge." Instead, she "labors to keep things fuzzy"; she "sacri-
fices clarity."11
The image of the gilded bowl with its incipient crack is
thus symbolic not only of Maggie's initial conception of Amerigo,
but of her response to the "discovery" of his and Charlotte's
adultery. In the second half of the novel Maggie builds on knowledge
to create an image of herself, and of the Prince, that is just as
vulnerable as the one which, in the first half, she builds in ignor-
ance. Unlike Densher, who replaces his blind worship of Kate with
an equally blind worship of Milly, Maggie Verver emerges from her
blindness into the light of experience, only to embrace the axiom
with which, unconsciously, she began: that the truth, whether known
or not, will not in and of itself suffice. Maggie cannot help
seeking the comfort of beautiful forms, even when she is able to
recognize the debased reality of the things they symbolize; her

knowledge has not changed her need or her desire for these forms,

but only her methods for bringing them to realization. So even

244

though in the end she trades her father to get a husband, her
maturity is illusory; in saving her marriage, she merely substitutes
an artificial innocence for the actual one that has been given up.
One may infer from Maggie's final disposition a sense of
where James himself, after four decades as a novelist, finally
"comes out." The Golden Bowl, like its preface, has the air of "a

ceremonious leave-taking";12 as the last work in James's canonical

 

revisions, it represents an endpoint in the author's long quest for
an artistic fusion of form and substance. This quest is mirrored,
carried out by proxy, through the "process of vision" of James's
various reflectors and appointed delegates--surrogate artists to a
person, who like himself try to make desire answerable to truth, to
make pleasure consonant with credulity.13 By letting his characters
go their own way, by dispersing the terms of his enterprise into
their own inner lives, James is able to gain a direct sense of the
problematical nature of his art without, like his characters, becoming
too hopelessly entangled in difficulty and ambiguity. As I have
suggested, The Wings of the Dove represents the final exploratory

phase of this long process of inquiry, and The Golden Bowl a drama-

 

tization of conclusions arrived at. The position this last great
novel occupies in the Jamesian canon is true to the image which
governs it and provides its title: it is James's vision of his own
problematical Grail, just as the cracked crystal itself represents
the uncertain terminus, the tremulous tapering to a point, of Maggie

Verver's own quest for internal consistency.

245

The Golden Bowl, in its style and structure, expresses a

 

conviction that the illusion of the bowl's integrity is more valuable
(and even, in some senses, more functional) than the piecemeal truth
of its constituent parts; this is, of course, reflected in Maggie's
own conviction that form is, in the end, a greater comfort, a richer
prize, than the knowledge which strains or breaks it. Significantly,
the novel's title alludes to the appearance of wholeness, of identi-
fication of substance and form, which is the bowl's illusion rather
than its truth. I do not believe that James means this ironically,
as a reference to the fact that the "golden bowl" is in fact gilded
crystal, and cracked crystal at that; rather, the title is a cautious
recommendation of the desire for beauty, of the imagination's power
to mend faults which lucid awareness does not press on too heavily.
The bowl may not be all it appears to be; but, as the shopkeeper
tells Charlotte, that is something that a "gentleman" would decline
to notice (p. 106). Like the bowl and the thirst for beauty which

it symbolizes, the novel itself must in the end have "justified its
title by the charm of its shape as well as by the tone of its
surface" (p. 104).

The "charm" of the novel's shape, with its carefully
arranged symmetries and parallels between the first and second books,
has been more than adequately analyzed elsewhere;14 but of more
immediate interest is the "unique tone of its surface," which brings
the clustered sonorities of James's late prose style to a dizzying
crescendo. James has all along argued for the special "intensity"

of artistic effect, beginning with "The Art of Fiction" in 1884;

246

but in The Golden Bowl he finally explores the full depths to which

 

the imagination must plunge in order to bring the "felt life" in
all its fullness to the surface of language. He describes in his

preface to The Golden Bowl the ideal for which he strives in that

 

novel: not that of "pretended exhibitory prose," which one reads in
vain "for closeness and charm, for conviction and illusion, for
communication," but rather that of those "poetic" forms, "whose
highest bid is addressed to the imagination, to the spiritual and
aesthetic vision, the mind led captive by a charm and a spell.“5

In'HwaGolden Bowl, James the novelist turns lyric poet, imitating

 

that artist's special interest in the correlation between image and
insight, between qualities of mind and language.

While this may at first glance seem an incongruous standard
for a "realistic" novelist to invoke, it is for James a natural
step if one considers his long-standing preference for portraying
the internal register of experience rather than its external stimulus.
The language of his late style is not analogous to action and object,
nor to the field of visual arts which seems to function as an

ancillary code in novels like The American and The Portrait of a

 

 

Lpgy; rather, it takes the form of elaborate symbolic figures, like
the pagoda image which rises from the center of The Golden Bowl and
dominates the novel at large as well as the enclosed garden of
Maggie's consciousness. Such linguistic structures do not refer to
events and objects in the real world, or even in the fictional
world shared by the characters; rather, they signify conditions of

thought and memory, impulses and desires--qualities of human

247

consciousness that exist outside of real time, in pre-linguistic
states for which the language nevertheless seeks to find its own
correlates.

As Austin Warren has suggested, it is this quality of
16

"emblematic perception,’ of "symbolized intuition," that gives

a character like Maggie Verver her mythic dimension, even though

the metaphors themselves attempt to describe real psychological
states. The hermetic consistency of a metaphor like the pagoda
image, for example, appeals to Maggie because it provides an
explanatory analogy for her confusions of happiness and discontent;
yet at the same time the image provides a metaphorical enrichment of
the novel itself. Her search for psychic clarity is thus shown in
terms which imbue the narration with a greater richness and density

than more "lucid" analysis might produce. This technique is James's

real triumph in The Golden Bowl, as he at last achieves the suffusion

 

of his psychological insights with the poetic "intensity" of pre-

sentation. One sees this phenomenon intermittently in The Ambassadors

 

and The Wings of the Dove--Strether's idea of the "jelly" of his

 

consciousness and, of course, the overarching image of Milly
Theale's "wings" being instances--but in The Golden Bowl, the very
logic of the presentation, particularly in the second half of the
novel, seems to derive from the associative properties of these
metaphors.

It should also be noted that the search for identity which
Maggie engages in is, like Strether's and Densher's, internal; it

is the process of vision, not a plan of action. Like the exploration

248

of the pagoda, it occurs in a mode somewhat disconnected from the
world that is shared with other characters, other consciousnesses.
The result is that temporal and causal relationships become
obscured, extraordinary coincidences are effaced, and the conflict
itself is expressed through minute fluctuations in the awareness or
anxiety level of the principal "reflector." As Joseph Warren Beach
observes, it seems that James "had agreed . . . that time--as well
as space-~is not a reality, but a condition of our consciousness."17
James would assent, I am sure, so far as to admit at least that

these qualities matter only in terms of their impression, their

register, on the mind of the individual; and in The Golden Bowl

 

one feels through Maggie's internalized metaphors that subjective
sense of the world's movement, that lyric time in which it is thought,
and not event, that seems to rush.

One finds such moments of lyric intensity in earlier novels

like The American and The Portrait of a Lady; James's description of

 

 

Isabel's bookishness, in which her "reputation for reading" is

like "the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic," is but one
example of his determination to have romance as well as realism in
his presentation. But metaphors such as this one are exclusively
the narrator's; they are imposed interpretations in which the
characters themselves do not necessarily share. And, as distinctly
authorial commentary, such imaginative flights clash with the
"empirical" mode of presentation which the narrator engages in

elsewhere in these novels. For this reason, The American and ng_

 

Portrait do not harmonize the realistic and romantic impulses in

249

their presentation. But in the novels of his major phase, James
relocates these impulses in the minds of his characters; the meta-
phors, the allusions, appear to speak through them as well as about
them. The imaginations of his "reflectors" provide the romance,
while their experience provides the requisite "air of reality"; as
a result, their quest for psychic coherence, through the harmoniza-
tion of desire and reality, is identified with the discourse's own
need for internal consistency.

The Golden Bowl, like The Wings of the Dove, is a novel in

 

 

which the protagonist's quest for identity is pursued at the expense
of truth, particularly truth about other people; but more than in
hfipgs_or any previous novel, James dramatizes the active, creative
power of the word itself as an instrument of vision. Maggie finds
in language her own romance of self; while the elaborate metaphorical
figures of The Golden Bowl contribute to the poetic "intensity"

of James's effect, for Maggie they are keys which help her unlock
the secrets of her own desires. Furthermore, she discovers the
power of words to subvert and exclude the real world; she uses
language to create meanings contrary to the facts (her lying to
Charlotte is the ultimate instance of this) and to erect barriers
between herself and others which gain her the advantage of mystery.
Thus, in language, Maggie finds the means as well as the end in her
attempt to define and reconstruct her lost Eden; metaphor and hypo-
thetical diction become operative realities for her and for the
novel, squeezing out the lucidities which would prove hostile to

her--and to the author's--enterprise.

250

But language has powers of suggestion as well as expression,
and James shows in this novel the ways in which the associative
properties of the medium itself lead understanding and desire for-
ward. It is in her exploration of the pagoda, and not through any
identifiable event in real time, that Maggie discovers the kernel
of her suspicion and discontent; language is shown here to precede
knowledge, to suggest the directions that discovery might take. But
more startling, and more revealing, is language's effect on Adam as
he prepares to propose to Charlotte. He initially decides to marry
her to "square" himself with Maggie; but as he prepares to speak,
he is struck with an awareness of "the word itself being romantic,
pressing for him the spring of association" (p. 169). Bringing his
idea to the conscious level of language changes his attitude towards
it; it is no longer something for Maggie, but something for himself.
It calls back and reconstitutes in his imagination a youth which he
has left behind but which suddenly, through the suggestive power of
language, seems again within his grasp.

Thus the "romantic" thrust of language in The Golden Bowl
18

 

has the peculiar effect of marking the absence of its object while
turning attention away from the present truths to which it might
refer. Words in this novel are often used to express a desired
world, not an existing one, an Eden in which the principals are free
to imagine themselves "lying like gods together, all careless of
manking" (p. 361). It is the world of innocence and impunity,

unmarred by the consequence of action, which provides Maggie with

"that ideal consistency on which her moral comfort almost at any

251

time depended" (p. 303), and once it is lost she can think of nothing
but getting it back. But it is, as Adam is aware, a world summoned
forth and sustained by a "charm" (p. 361); it is a trick of language,
in which the expression of desire and the repression of truth rush

up to meet the flight of the imagination. It is not real, but it

is beautiful, and the only way of creating or maintaining it is to
screen out, to edit, the reality it affronts.

The elaborate metaphors of Maggie's consciousness perform this
function for the novel as well as for herself; their sense, like the
lyric poem, is insular rather than expansive, centripetal rather than
centrifugal.19 They efface the patterns of act and consequence, of
sin and retribution, which if given a stronger foothold in the novel
would challenge Maggie's final sense of her own reconstructed
innocence. Thus the metaphorical terms through which we come to know
her are indicative of her self-absorption and of her disconnection
from the human actuality of others. Furthermore, the novel as a
whole appears to imitate her willed blindness; following Maggie's
own process of vision, it sacrifices clarity for harmony, substitutes
metaphor for analysis.

But the overriding image, the conceit which "covers" the novel
and gives it its name, hints that the effect is in the end as
essentially compromised for the work as it is for Maggie. This is
because James's own attitudes are split; he sympathizes with her
aims, but abhors her methods and regrets the cost at which her
fragile success is achieved. She is, like himself, an artist trying

to realize a vision, exercising the freedom of imagination which

252

James himself has endorsed; but Maggie, like other heroes and
heroines throughout James, reveals the degree to which the exercise
of this freedom partakes of the brutal use of others. The cry of
their strangled selfhoods is the note that always mars the harmony
of the final effect; it is the crack in the bowl that, try as they
might, neither James nor his delegates can prevent. Maggie's success
is in the end illusory because she still has not recognized the
personal reality of the Prince or of Charlotte, and that suppressed
truth may still rise to shatter her fragile peace. Her tenuous
satisfaction, constantly vulnerable to the ambush of this truth, is
both her reward and her punishment.

James's intention in The Golden Bowl is not identical with

 

Maggie's; as I have already suggested, the image of the bowl itself
indicates that he knows from the outset that the substance, if not
the effect, of his enterprise is flawed. James does not want, as
Maggie does, to achieve success at the expense of those who inhabit
his field of vision, or to deny their problematical reality; but
neither does he want to portray his desire for success as shallow
but insincere. He wants what Maggie wants, what Densher wants, what
Strether wants; but, unlike those characters, he recognizes the
expense of vision, and backs away. James's attention to the wholeness
of his characters, even at the sacrifice of clarity of theme or
roundness of form, is what gives his novels their paradoxical quali-
ties of fullness and incompleteness; unlike Maggie, he is unwilling
to tell the lie which will bring his plan whole by violating his

materials.

253

The Golden Bowl in the end expresses to the reader a twofold
plea: to recognize its flaws, but to believe in its creator's good
faith. James wants his readers to be, like the good artist, "ones
on whom nothing is lost"; but by this he does not mean that they
should scrutinize the bowl for cracks so closely that they lose
sight of the bowl itself. He wants his readers to appreciate both
the efficacy of his work and the necessity of the flaw which mars
it. This is what James himself sees, and tries to represent; and it
is this double recognition of James, his equal sensitivity to form
and substance, and his undying faith in the necessity of both, that
is responsible for the essential glories and difficulties of his
work. His novels in particular dramatize the dual nature of his
prodigious imagination, which allows him to recognize the disaster
that lies in ambush as well as the desire that, dangling constantly
ahead, draws one on. The lingering note of novels like Ipp_

Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove is an exhortation for indul-

 

 

gence and recognition, for trust and alertness, in short for an
embrace of the accursed "double consciousness" which will allow the
reader to recognize the inherent flaws of the object and the attempt
at flawlessness which hovers, ghost-like, about the artifact. This,
in the end, represents the wisdom of The Golden Bowl, the meaning of
the symbol from which it takes its name, and the importance of the

author who created both.

NOTES

1Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, p. 405..

2James, The Golden Bowl (New York: Penguin, 1966), p. 33.
All references are to this edition, which follows the text of the
first English printing.

3Adeline Tintner, "The Spoils of Henry James," PMLA, 61
(1946), 250. F. R. Leavis, in The Great Tradition (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950), expresses a similar view (p. 160).

 

4James, The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York:
Charles ScribnerTETSons, 1934), pp. 33-34.

5Austin Warren, Rage for Order (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1959), p. 156.

 

6The epithets "Personage" and "Author" are originally applied
to the Prince; but in Book Second these mantles pass to Maggie.

7Oscar Cargill, in The Novels of Henry James (New York:
MacMillan and Company, 1961), provides a useful summary of the criti-
cal schizophrenia that Maggie has provoked (pp. 403-5).

 

8The Ambiguity of Henry James (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1971), p. 210.

95amuels, p. 211.
10The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's

fjptjpp (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967),
p. 213.

 

nSamuels, p. 210.

12Ward, p. 199.

13See Walter F. Wright, The Madness of Art: A Study of Henry
James (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), pp. 253-54.
Wright provides a useful account of Maggie as an "artist."

14See Ward, pp. 205-8.

15The Art of the Novel, p. 346.

 

254

255

16Warren, p. 149.

17The Method of Henry James (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1918). p. 40.

 

18The idea that language marks the "absence" of the thing it
signifies is the observation of Jacques Derrida, in Of Grammatology,
trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1974).
To a certain extent, this is true even of the most "referential"
use of language, since speech itself is metaphorical. But the
metaphorical quality is compounded in the analogies of psyche we
are discussing here, and it seems to me that what these figures
express is as distantly absent from reference as one can get.

19This terminology is borrowed from George Steiner's discus-
sion of the difficulties of translation in After Babel (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1975). Steiner is particularly interested
in the interface between public and private dimensions of language;
his discussion of this interface has a great deal of applicability
to James's work, and my approach here bears his influence.

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