Jamesian Dynamic Imagination

Chapter Three

Jamesian Dynamic Imagination

The artist . . . has but to have his honest sense of life to find it fed at every pore even as the birds of the air are fed; with more and more to give, in turn, as a consequence, and, quite by the same law that governs the responsive affection of a kindly-used animal, in proportion as more and more is confidently asked.

Henry James (AN 201) [T]he waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread before me, and the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came in at my windows, to which I seem to myself to have been constantly driven, in the fruitless fidget of composition, as if to see whether, out in the blue channel, the ship of some right suggestion, of some better phrase, of the next happy twist of my subject, the next true touch for my canvas, mightn’t come into sight.

Henry James (Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, AC 286) In dynamic imagination, everything becomes active; nothing comes to rest.

Motion creates being; whirling air creates the stars; the cry produces images, speech, and thought.

Gaston Bachelard (AD 227)

In his late phase Henry James presents us with the subtle yet dynamic force of the imagination, accessible through a true understanding of, and participation in, the movement of the “material.” The imagining process is dynamic since it does not confine itself to either pure rational-abstract speculation or to the sub/unconscious level. Instead it makes the imaginer part of a conscious, productive (poesis as

“to make”) practice. The dreamer becomes an actor, and his/her reverie becomes the seed with which the multifaceted development of the story is impregnated. In this

chapter I will discuss the three novels that mark the culmination of James’s writing career—The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). In these works, we are presented with that poetic space or inter-space

formed through the constant dialogue between the imaginer’s consciousness and the

“real” (objective, factual) world of reality. Here the context and the dialogic strategy become more explicitly social: the characters open up their individual imaginations in such a way that their jointly created scene or situation itself becomes, arguably, a sort of inter-personal imaginative space, one which allows the individuality (individual imaginative space) of each of the characters to further develop, further expand. In this way the (social) world itself is affirmed, revalorized. But here, and this is equally important, we are also presented with a gloomy realm where the imagination fails. It is also this latter point which defines the mature James, who is not blind to the pitfalls we encounter en route to individualization; he confronts them and, in the end, accepts them as an indispensable step along the way. The ideal of perfection exists in the form not of a destination but of a meandering road one edges along towards that destination, and this is the place where life and art—the longtime concerns of James—enact their germination, their perfecting transformation.

1. The Wings of the Dove: Imagined Flight vs. Conceptualized Wing

Like the works discussed in the previous chapter, The Wings of the Dove focuses

on the theme of greed, but the way of portraying this greed and the sequential events it gives rise to are addressed on a scale that is unprecedentedly refined and sophisticated. The central images of this novel are doubtless the “dove” and its

“wings;” nevertheless, through a Bachelardian reading we will understand how easily a fallacy can be produced by connecting the two images together, unthinkingly. The analyses of Milly Theale, Kate Croy, and Merton Densher, the three main characters’

affected imaginations, can verify this point. Imagination resists or reverses the steps of a logical thinking: a bird can fly without wings and the wingless human beings are not necessarily earth-bound.

The soaring inspiration—to mix oneself with the air, the light, and the wind—exists prior to the formation of that inspiration into the form of a wing, as Bachelard evinces, “I am inclined to believe that flight is a warm wind before being a wing” (AD 73). That is the freedom the reverie graces the daydreamer.

“Oneiric life is purer the more it frees us from the tyranny of forms, and restores us to substances and to the life of our own element,” says Bachelard, “Given the profound dynamic experience that is the dream of flight, the wing is already a rationalization”

(AD 26, 26-27). Milly Theale, the fatally sick American millionairess,¹ is taken as

1 Robert C. McLean remarks, “from all the evidence in the novel, Milly’s disease is primarily mental, not organic . . . Her illness, therefore, is not just a dramatic circumstance of the novel; it is a decisive category of the action” (128). “The James family’s tendency to use illness for social reasons of attention getting or manipulation bolsters the position that Milly need not have had a physical illness,”

remarks Rita Charon, “her suffering leads to her being heard by Sir Luke, and that this hearing allows her to come to her own conclusions about her fate” (115). McLean points out two important women’s

“a perfect angel” “with a thumping bank-account” by her friends in England (WSD 283). Kate Croy names her a dove. Together with her secret lover Merton Densher, her Aunt Mrs. Maud Lowder, and Milly’s loyal companion Mrs. Susan Shepherd Stringham, Kate contrives to have the dying girl fall in love with Densher, who can thereby get her money and marry Kate. I will attempt to demonstrate that Kate’s plot is ironically both effected and then undone by her naming the orphaned heiress a dove, a dove with wings.

The bereavements of her family leave Milly alone in the world, but she does not bury herself in sorrow. She is mild but active, and with the freedom granted by her huge legacy, she is endowed with “liberty of action, of choice, of appreciation, of contact” (AC 349). She reaches for Mrs. Stringham and asks her to be the companion for a journey around Europe. Milly’s aspiration reveals in an important scene taken place at the Alps in which the disconcerting Susan finds her young friend sitting on a dangerous edge:

The whole place, with the descent of the path and as a sequel to a sharp turn that was masked by rocks and shrubs, appeared to fall precipitously and to become a

deaths that affects James greatly: one is his sister Alice James, the other Constance Fenimore Woolson, a great admirer of James. And McLean further notes, “Despite the terrible loss of family, Milly rarely alludes to her tragedy, thus burying her grief only to have it emerge as neurosis. Her somber black dresses, her unsmiling ‘constant white face’, her brooding melancholia, all testify to her private mourning, her inability to desire to live, to cope with reality” (134). James’s depiction of Milly’s disease is vague, and Joan Lescinski suggests, “One possible explanation for James’s reluctance to reveal the specifics of Milly’s illness may lie in his determination to shroud her in levels of mystery in order to heighten the power of this lonely millionaire upon the novel and the characters in it . . . His treatment of the illness is, in fat, in line with the privacy about herself that Milly protects so fiercely”

(125).

“view” pure and simple, a view of great extent and beauty, but thrown forward and vertiginous. Milly, with the promise of it from just above, had gone straight down to it, not stopping till it was all before her; and here, on what struck her friend as the dizzy edge of it, she was seated at her ease. The path somehow took care of itself and its final business, but the girl’s seat was a slab of rock at the end of a short promontory or excrescence that merely pointed off to the right at gulfs of air and that was so placed by good fortune, if not by the worst, as to be at last completely visible . . . This was the impression that if the girl was deeply and recklessly meditating there she wasn’t meditating a jump;

she was on the contrary, as she sat, much more in a state of uplifted and unlimited possession that had nothing to gain from violence. She was looking down on the kingdoms of the earth, and though indeed that of itself might well go to the brain, it wouldn’t be with a view of renouncing them. Was she choosing among them or did she want them all? . . . During the breathless minutes of her watch she had seen her companion afresh; the latter's type, aspect, marks, her history, her state, her beauty, her mystery, all unconsciously betrayed themselves to the Alpine air, and all had been gathered in again to feed Mrs.

Stringham’s flame. (WSD 134-36)

After coming back to the hotel, Milly inquires Susan whether the doctor, seen before their leaving for Europe, told her something. The honest lady can find no particular information during their meeting, but is alarmed by her young friend’s physical condition.

Mrs. Stringham at this flared into sympathy. “Are you in trouble—in pain?”

“Not the least little bit. But I sometimes wonder . . . Well, if I shall have much of it.”

Mrs. Stringham stared. “Much of what? Not of pain?”

“Of everything. Of everything I have . . . I only mean,” the girl broke in,

“shall I have it for long? That is if I have got . . . everything,” Milly laughed.

(WSD 139)

The “view” at the edge—“great extent and beauty, but thrown forward and

vertiginous,” the “gulfs of air,” and the panorama of “the kingdoms of the earth”—sublimed in “the Alpine air,” energizes Milly with a desire of breaking through the human limitations by inhaling in the air charged with cosmic boundlessness. “In infinite air dimensions are obliterate that we come in contact with a non-dimensional matter that gives us the impression of an absolute inner sublimation” (AD 9). Air is an element to Bachelard as characterized by the least substance; it exists and can be explained only by its dynamic moment. “With air, movement takes precedence over matter,” and “where there is no movement there is no matter” (AD 8). The “gulfs of air” in its tremendous formlessness is the primordial force that imagination shapes into images, a conscious process in which the imaginary joins in the cosmic power. “With violent air, we can grasp elemental fury, which is entirely motion and nothing but motion. In it we can find some very important images in which will and imagination are united” (AD 225). The images at this stage may not be clear to Milly yet, but she definitely feels the surging force in herself. “Through dreams of air, all images become elevated, free, and mobile,” and she is ready for an exploration to realize her will and imagination (AD 251).

Inspired by the scenery, Milly is aware of a possible future unrolling itself in front of her. She tells Susan “I don’t think I’ve really everything,” but she is “only too

happy” that she “can scarcely bear it” (WSD 139, 139, 140).² She experiences the thrill of the joy which is brought not by the apparent “everything” she has had, but by the sense of questing, of seeking after something felicitous that will truly substantiate her life. Milly then expresses her decision “to go straight to London:” “She was all for scenery—yes; but she wanted it human and personal, and all she could say was that there would be in London . . . more of that kind than anywhere else” (WSD 141).

The descending from the heights to the crowded city symbolizes her determination in altering her present situation: instead of being a lonely wanderer, Milly desires for a world where she can reconstruct relationships with other people: “what she wanted of Europe was ‘people’, so far as they were to be had” (WSD 141). The Alps air serves not as merely an enthralling phenomenon, but pushes her into a living that is much more active and involving, forwarding and expanding.

It is through Susan, who contacts her old classmate Mrs. Lowder in London, that the two travelers meet the social circle of that rich widow.³ Mrs. Lowder keeps her niece Kate Croy on condition that she will “break off all relations with” her

2 As Gary Kuchar points out, Milly “is far less rooted in the past as she moves towards deeper and deeper self-awareness until her consciousness is fully disclosed to herself” (171). On the other hand,

“Kate’s perception is impoverished, in a Heideggerian sense, insofar as it is saturated by the material conditions around her,” and “the visible past” for her is “a very real and entirely present weight that leaves her with a sense of being suspended between an unpleasantly proximal past and an imposing and narrowly outlined future” (ibid., 171, 171, 172).

3 It is in this circle that James reveals how the social factor influences the individual. “Through Kate, James examines how social forces play a large role, but not the only one, in molding character into a state that defies the assignment of strict responsibility,” notes Milton Kornfeld, “and through Densher he explores the role of psychological factors as they influence behavior and our judgment of that behavior” (344).

ignominious father,⁴ and intends to marry her to Lord Mark, who has no money but can give her a title (WSD 64).⁵ Kate’s lover Densher is a penurious journalist, and their relationship is opposed by everyone around her. At this juncture, when Milly presents herself as an innocent, free and loving friend, and, most importantly, when her fragile physical condition is gradually revealed to them, they all tacitly agree to have Milly fall in love with Densher, a decision that is supposed to make everyone happy. For Susan, her dear young friend will get a love she needs and deserves; for Aunt Maud, Milly’s loving Densher will keep him away from her niece; and for the clandestine lovers, the dying heiress’s wealth will fall into their hands through a natural course.⁶ To incarnate the “perfect angel,” to facilitate their goal, Kate tells her new friend, “you’re a dove:” Milly’s inspiration and aspiration that the Alps air has nourished are suddenly actualized in this concrete image.

With which she felt herself ever so delicately, so considerately, embraced; not with familiarity or as a liberty taken, but almost ceremonially and in the manner of an accolade; partly as if, though a dove who could perch on a finger, one

4 The relation between Kate and her father is a complex one and draws quite a few critics’ attention.

Linda Raphael notes, “Lionel does not have the resources—nor does he even have the average paternal concern—to offer material or emotional comfort to his daughter. Nonetheless, he stands at once for what is missing and what she desires:” “he is paradigmatic in his ability to control his own life” (63).

5 In this novel, as Alfred Habegger notices, the relationships of the characters are established on the concept of contract: “Kate joins this world [Lancaster Gate] when she contracts with Maud Lowder;

Densher joins, at least for the time being, in contracting with Kate. But Milly, in spite of her wealth—or rather, because of it—never joins . . . Throughout the novel Milly’s forgiveness and generosity form the converse of the acquisitive market instinct that defines Maud Lowder’s world”

(461).

6 Michael Trask points out the historical background for the characters’s adventurous questing spirit,

“the late nineteenth century witnessed a shift in opportunism that, reversing the coordinates of the earlier dispensation, sought happiness in pursuit itself,” yet as this novel reveals, “to imagine desire as a function of choosing . . . a choosing whose determination remains inevitably ‘slippery’, beyond one’s reference or control” (359).

were also a princess with whom forms were to be observed. It even came to her, through the touch of her companion’s lips, that this form, this cool pressure, fairly sealed the sense of what Kate had just said. It was moreover, for the girl, like an inspiration: she found herself accepting as the right one, while she caught her breath with relief, the name so given her. She met it on the instant as she would have met revealed truth; it lighted up the strange dusk in which she lately had walked. That was what was the matter with her. She was a dove. Oh wasn’t she? (WSD 236)

Kate’s naming Milly as a dove decidedly directs the development of her contrivance, as “the naming of things is often sufficient to cause a precipitate; before the name, there was only an amorphous, troubled, disturbed solution; after the name, crystals are seen at the bottom of the liquid” (PF 39-40).⁷ Milly, “the final flower” of her family, is often called intimately by Susan as Mildred without particular references (WSD 126).⁸ Basically, for Bachelard, in the world of imagination to name is an act of agitation: “calling a flower by its name is taking a liberty that disturbs reverie.

Flowers, like other things, must be loved before they are named” (AD 204).

For Kate and others, they love more of the name and the meanings the name metaphorically stands for, than of Milly as she is. Moreover, as Bachelard notes,

7 The idea of one’s name and the action of naming are important to Kate. In a Derridean reading, Kevin Kohan reveals that the name given to Milly by Kate signals “a powerfully appropriating translation. Significantly, the metaphor functions, for Milly, in what could be called a lateral fashion.

Its radical power originates in its ability to refer, almost instantaneously, to another image” (1999: 139).

Moreover, Kohan notes although James uses death “as the ‘central’ subject—centrifugal force—of the world of the text,” still he focuses on the struggle within the process of life and exists at the intersection of knowledge desire” (138). Jonathan Warren gives an analysis of Kate’s family name: “Croy is the root of a number of French words associated with the verb croire: croyance means ‘faith’ or

‘belief’” . . . “for Kate the name Croy is doubled by her act of having faith in it” (114). “By linking her will to her name,” Warren remarks, “Kate cripples her movement into liberty not merely because the name calls out the concentrated and suspended music of familial history, but because the concept of faith in the future itself is so troubled by faith’s attachment to the contingencies of the past” (124).

8 James in the Preface also takes Milly as “the last fine flower—blooming alone, for the fullest attestation of her freedom—of an ‘old’ New York stem” (AC 349).

“the less we know about something the more names we give it” (PF 78). Here one name is enough to determine the young American girl’s fate, because, compared with her sophisticated European friend, Milly is only too simple and innocent to be cautious of any sinister motive underlying the name.⁹ Kate’s plot is set, and Milly is ready to fit herself into the glimmering frame where there are “forms” “to be observed,” and her destiny indeed seems “sealed” by the magic word through

“the touch” of Kate’s enchanting “lips.” In a sense, Kate has Milly fragmented by placing her into that picture of dove which does not take her as a whole person but exaggerates certain features that will suit the other people’s plans. The name petrifies her into one of the “objects that are merely objects of perception; their names have lost the close connections which once made them part and parcel of the human imagination” (ERW 51). Unanimously, they assume to have found a mode in which everyone can appear as an autonomous agent to assert their free will in choice which is in effect highly selective and predetermined. She will be from then on as docile and submissive as a dove can be: “she had felt in a rush all the reasons that would make it the most dovelike,” and “She should have to be clear as to how a dove would act,” “though she saw before her . . . as something of a complication, her need, each

9 In Doran Larson’s analysis Milly is not passive in this naming episode, “The ‘power’ of money here is conditioned not by market economies, but by the metaphor Kate herself supplies. Indeed, Milly accepts the image of the dove—traditionally read as her dressing for sacrifice—only because it serves her own purpose. That purpose is to compose her final tableau—a tableau which will in turn free her money, as gift, for Kate” (94).

time, to decide” (WSD 237).¹⁰ Milly’s full-hearted acceptance of the name “dove”

overwhelms her lurking uneasiness she is then half aware of: the danger in Kate,

“a creature who paced like a panther” (WSD 235). This apprehension later makes her leave London for Venice where she deceases without attempting a last flight.¹¹

It is ironic but understandably not surprising, after this christening that fashions her with a beloved appearance, Milly’s first action is to lie.¹² She dictates Susan Shepherd to meet the doctor Sir Luke Strett at the appointed visit: “He’s to be told, please, deceptively, that I’m at home, and you, as my representative, when he comes up, are to see him instead” (WSD 237). Her heart is too full to allow her to stay at home in peace, and she goes to the National Gallery. Unlike her previous decision to go to London as an aspired adventure to enlarge her vision of life, Milly’s roaming around the Gallery is more of a retreat from the harsh and complex reality.¹³ Her imagination is form-conditioned and frame-determined. She engages herself intently on observing the lady-copyists, and thinks she would like to be one of them because

10 John Kimmey compares Milly’s innocence and sacrifice to Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot: they both adhere to the “‘holy wanderer’ archetype;” and Milly exemplifies for those wrong her

“courage bordering on martyrdom and a forgiveness bordering on selflessness” (67, 74).

11 In Venice, Milly resides at Palazzo Leporelli which “is a tacit reaffirmation of her kinship with the Bronzino portrait,” notes Michiel Heyns, “Like Matcham and the National Gallery, the Palazzo is the proper setting for a work of art, for the beauty that is immortal because it is dead” (126).

12 Janet Gabler-Hover notes, “Milly’s ‘deceits’ . . . differ radically from Kate’s because they are much more existential in nature; they involve the issue of how one creates freedom and identity within the boundary of restriction—not how one denies those restrictions, but how one dynamically interacts with them to alter the undesirable aspects of one’s future, such as impending death or thwarted love interests” (183).

13 In identifying the places mentioned in this novel, Chris Brown indicates, “There is nothing occult about the location of the National Gallery, but even this setting offers perspectives that ironize. Again in search of other worlds—she is dying, after all—Milly now elects art . . . Yet art proves tangential to her and the other gallery-goers: the only people who actually concentrate on painting are the copyists, who do so for money” (219).

“it met so the case. The case was the case of escape, of living under water, of being at once impersonal and firm. There it was before one—one had only to stick and stick” (WSD 239). Milly also realizes “before long that what held her was the mere refuge, that something within her was after all too weak for the Turners and Titians,”

and she “indeed at present fixed her eyes more than elsewhere on the appearance”

(WSD 239, 240). This stick to the make-believe appearance evolves into a self-deceiving mode that is exemplified in her unexpected encounter at the Gallery first with Densher, and then with Kate: the two are evidently out for a date.¹⁴ The crisis passes gracefully as if nothing had happened. “Whatever the facts, their perfect manners, all round, saw them through,” even though Kate is “to wonder in subsequent reflexion what in the world they had actually said, since they had made such a success of what they didn’t say; the sweetness of the draught for the time, at any rate, was to feel success assured” (WSD 244). Their “success” is paid for by Milly’s self-delusion, and the tension one feels in it is that she indulges herself in it consciously and willingly. Kate precisely tells Densher near the end of the novel:

“She never wanted the truth . . . She wanted you,” says Kate, “You might have lied to her from pity, and she have seen you and felt you lie, and yet . . . she would have

14 For James E. Mulqueen, Kate is finally defeated by her own making: “What really happens is that Kate, having successfully created the impression that she does not love Densher, is trapped by that appearance, for she convinces Densher himself;” because “In the Jamesian ethic, ‘plausibility’ is not a virtue. Milly Theale is incapable of appearing other than she is; in this respect, she is James’s ideal heroine, far more so than Maggie Verver, who in the end triumphs because she becomes a mistress of appearance” (137, 136).

thanked you and blessed you and clung to you but the more” (WSD 458). In order to love and to be loved, Milly subjects herself to the image “dove” in total surrender, and it is where the dynamic imagination ends in her as the elemental movement dies out within a form that stops trans-forming.

As the imagining liberty is increasingly shaped into the given form, Milly’s self-image is step by step oriented towards mere picturesqueness.¹⁵ The Bronzino portrait she is invited to look at Matcham reveals this point. “Have you seen the picture in the house, the beautiful one that’s so like you?” says Lord Mark, and when Milly stands before the picture (WSD 193),

she found herself, for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair—as wonderful as he had said: the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly dressed; a face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a mass of hair, rolled back and high, that must, before fading with time, have had a family resemblance to her own. The lady in question, at all events, with her slightly Michael-angelesque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great personage—only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead. Milly recognised her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her. “I shall never be better than this.” (WSD 196)

15 “Her similarity to the Bronzino is threatening, not only because . . . it brings her face to face with her mortality, but because it makes her once again the subject of public scrutiny, a face to be examined and read;” remarks Anna Despotopoulou, “By putting her on display, the Matcham guests make her one of them, all outer and no inner. Milly can no longer retain the privacy of her consciousness but is forced to take part in the spectacle” (238). Lee Clark Mitchell points out, “Milly’s glance at her painted likeness recapitulates the opening scene of Kate before her father’s mirror. The difference, however, is that Kate was creating the appearance she wanted seen while Milly accepts an identification others merely happen to recognize” (200).

She is no longer as certain as before of her will to live; she is instead only conscious of the impending death that constantly overshadows her.¹⁶ Milly’s falling a prey to the collusion of the coveters around is mainly caused by her helpless and complete dependence upon others to secure her own identity.¹⁷ The most pitiful aspect of this reliance on others to make sense of herself is that she seems not fully aware of, or afraid to admit, the fact that if she is a dove, then the dove can do good only when it becomes a dead dove.¹⁸ She can then be a “perfect angel”—all abstract and all celestial—only when she is turned into the status like the dead lady framed in the picture, that is, a legacy for the beneficiaries. Although noticeably, like the empathetic effects produced by the picture on Milly, she in the end has her revenge beyond her grave by affecting the conspiratorial lovers, I am more interested in analyzing the way the couple is misled by their plan than in demonstrating that dénouement as a poetic justice imparted by James.

The image of Milly as a dove has an impact on both Kate and Densher, but, as blinded by their stratagem, the former imagines too little while the latter imagines too

16 “In the scene in front of the Bronzino,” says Kenneth Reinhard, “Milly dies a figurative death; in her dialogues with Doctor Strett that closely follow that scene, Milly fashions a place for herself in the

‘grim breathing-space’ that opens between this symbolic mortification and the real death it anticipates”

(129).

17 “Milly accepts identity from others in order to defer her own isolated, mortal view of herself;”

indicates Emily Schiller, “She tries to drown out her own elegiac voice with a chorus of admirers, and she attracts those admirers by learning to coo like the dove they covet” (206).

18 Stephen Koch observes, “it is precisely by making Milly into this symbol that Kate and Densher have robbed her of life. They have made her life unlivable because they hide themselves from her, and see her only through their own deceptive, cruel, groping personalities” (98).

much, vacuously.¹⁹ The two clandestine lovers are led astray by their false imaginations. They share Milly’s destiny to be restricted by the image of dove, but more specifically, their plot is in effect wrecked by the image of wings. Before Milly is embedded in the image of dove, she can fly with the Alps air without a wing, as

“Milly’s range was thus immense; she had to ask nobody for anything, to refer nothing to any one; her freedom, her fortune and her fancy were her law” (WSD 167).

For Bachelard, the essential beauty of the flight exists in the motion itself, in the dynamic imagination that is neither in need of nor weighted down by a wing.

What catches our eyes watching a flying bird is less the color or shape of their feathers than the tension produced by the very combination of the bird and its flight.

“What is primordially beautiful about birds is their flight. Flight is a primordial beauty for the dynamic imagination. The beauty of the bird’s plumage cannot be seen until it has landed on earth, that is, until it is no longer a bird in our reveries”

(AD 66). In the same token, the freedom that a dove as a bird is supposed to have is clipped, paradoxically, when the image of wings is attached to it. This seemingly

natural attachment of wings to the act of flight, as Bachelard reveals, is

19 As Syndy McMillen Conger indicates, “Kate’s agile mind is also a selfish, an unscrupulous mind . . . as in the case of her cleverness, it does not add to her moral stature. It rather encourages her in her duplicity” (153). Conger observes, “in his portrayal of Densher, James probes deeper into the human psyche, daring to suggest that even the person who is trustworthy and conscientious is not always an ethical person” (155). Kathleen L. Komar points out the differences in their consciousness: “Kate has a determined and directed character but she is driven and harried by her consciousness of external pressures. Merton’s character is indecisive, vague, undirected, and extremely malleable, but he is not conscious of any really pressing difficulties in his life” (480).

“a consequence” of “an old rationalization,” as ancient as the myth of “the Icarus images;” the truth is, “In the dream world we do not fly because we have wings;

rather, we think we have wings because we have flown” (AD 27). At this point, it becomes clear why the image of wings in this novel brings with it not soaring or uplifting aspiration but constraint and restriction, because the wings to them—Milly, Kate, and Densher—are a product generated within a rationalized mode of thinking, a step too far away from the liberating dynamism entailed in the imaginary.

The meanings of wings are different to Kate and Densher. For Kate they represent power and money, manipulation and control. She tells Densher about the way Aunt Maud keeps her:²⁰

“She fixed upon me herself, settled on me with her wonderful gilded claws.”

“You speak,” Densher observed, “as if she were a vulture.”

“Call it an eagle—with a gilded beak as well, and with wings for great flights. If she’s a thing of the air, in short—say at once a great seamed silk balloon—I never myself got into her car. I was her choice.” (WSD 103)

And the vertical flight in the infinite air is here merely a symbol of hard money and worldly title, as Aunt Maud tells Densher of her expectation of Kate: “I want to see her high, high up—high up and in the light” (WSD 108). Propelled by the ambitious

20 “Maud exemplifies . . . commodity culture’s ability to absorb the more traditional value of

‘self-sacrifice’ into itself and transform it into something that bears no resemblance to the original;”

Henry McDonald notes, “to the extent there is a plot to deceive and defraud Milly in this novel, the principal author of that plot is Kate’s Aunt Maud, not Kate herself, and that Kate, quite as much and perhaps more than Milly, is the ‘victim’ of that plot” (2002: 200, 198).

plan to obtain Milly’s wealth, Kate ignores until it is too late, during the process of her transforming the young millionairess into a dove, how Densher has merged himself with that image of Milly. A subtle connection has been established between them perhaps even without Densher’s own knowledge. An example reflects such resemblance:

He walked northward without a plan, without suspicion, quite in the direction his little New York friend, in her restless ramble, had taken a day or two before.

He reached, like Milly, the Regent’s Park; and though he moved further and faster he finally sat down, like Milly, from the force of thought. For him too in this position, be it added—and he might positively have occupied the same bench—various troubled fancies folded their wings. (WSD 257)

Compared with Kate’s forceful determination, Densher is a man characterized by susceptibility, aimlessness, and passivity.²¹ Wings to him are by no means to carry him for an imaginative flight into the air, but something to provide protection and security: the wings are not animated by flying but in a position either permanently expanded or, worse still, folded. Another scene shows the different attitudes in the lovers’ opinions of wealth. At a dinner party Milly presents herself with a pearl necklace—“the long, priceless chain, wound twice round the neck, hung, heavy and

21 To George McFadden, “Densher and Kate are totally mismatched;” and as the story develops, “her attachment to him has becoming weaker the more she sees of his total obliviousness to social responsibilities that to her are the strongest things in life” (123, 124). Julie Olin-Ammentorp also notices the contrast between these two characters, “Throughout most of the novel, it is Kate who plans, Densher who acquiesces; Kate who pledges her love first, Densher who follows . . . Kate is clearly the active and thus the masculine member of the pair, while Densher follows more or less passively and femininely” (40). Michael Moon even says that The Wings is “a novel without genuine female characters;” “for most of the novel it is the female (or pseudofemale) characters who are represented as being in possession of the phallus and in command of the phallic territory in which the novel is situated” (429).

pure”—“She’s a dove . . . bejeweled,” says Kate (WSD 389). Densher recognizes the effects produced on Kate, for whom “the impression of that element of wealth in [Milly] which was a power, which was a great power,” but to him it “was dove-like only so far as one remembered that doves have wings and wondrous flights, have them as well as tender tints and soft sounds;” “wasn’t he in particular, nestling under them to a great increase of immediate ease?” (WSD 389). It is therefore, when later Mrs. Lowder tells him the news of Milly’s death, “Our dear dove then, as Kate calls her, has folded her wonderful wings,” that the enshrouding of Densher by Milly’s wings is complete (WSD 477). The scale of the transmutation of Milly to a dove at this moment lays bare its full impact: when the dove is gone, her wings remain, in their invincible stillness.²² The wings, like those of the fluttering butterfly’s according to Bachelard, are “too beautiful and too large” that “prevent its flying,” and its beauty can be portrayed only “in sleep” or death (AD 66, 66, 67).

The adjective they frequently use to describe Milly changes from the early

“extraordinary” and “magnificent” to “stupendous” after Milly’s death.²³ The word differs from the first two in its largeness and heaviness, and that shows how the relationship between the lovers is stuffed up into stiffness by the wealth they crave

22 Marcia Ian indicates, “If we translate psychological into moral terms, Milly’s triumph over physical death becomes an ethical conquest. She subdues Kate’s and Merton’s predatory impulses by giving up her desire for personal happiness to ‘benefit’ those she loves” (108).

23 The word “stupendous” first appears in page 467 and is seen for the last time in page 507. Within forty pages it reappears for five times in increasing intensification: two times in page 467, one in page 488, and then two in page 507.

for.²⁴ In the end when they eventually receive from Milly’s lawyer the

“long envelope” that contains her legacy as a gift, Densher asks Kate to choose between him and Milly’s wealth—an impossible choice (WSD 504).²⁵ The reason is simply that he is, or imagines he is, in love with Milly. This knowledge is repressed by Densher himself until Kate enlightens him: “I think that what it really is must be that you’re afraid . . . that you’re afraid of all the truth. If you’re in love with her without it, what indeed can you be more? And you’re afraid—it’s wonderful!—to be in love with her” (WSD 508). The image of Milly that at present occupies Densher’s mind is mounted in a deadening frame, lacking the true liberating spirit one experiences in the imaginary of reverie. “I used to call her, in my stupidity—for want of anything better—a dove. Well, she stretched out her wings, and it was to that they reached. They cover us” (WSD 508). Densher can not deny that he is in

love with the memory of Milly, and his weakness is completely exposed to Kate:²⁶

“Ah . . . don’t speak of it as if you couldn’t be. I could in your place; and you’re one

24 The longer absent Milly is, the more power her absence creates; and in the end her death makes Kate completely loses her power over Densher. Kristin King takes that process as “etherealization:” “the tendency to see Milly as dove, angel, savior, or priceless pearl, as the absence or mystery that brings the other characters into relationship with one another” (1). Sheila Teahan also notes, “Even after her disappearance from the narrative, Milly exerts a ghostly coercive power as absent center of consciousness,” and she “becomes, at once, an unreadable painting” like the Bronzino portrait and “a reflective center” (207).

25 Like many male characters in James’s stories, “Densher is to have the luxury of inaction,” as “the hard choice is once again to be Kate’s,” says Kumkum Sangari, and “Whereas Kate is defined and condemned by her actions, Densher’s inaction blurs the edges of his guilt;” but unlike Milly, “It is Kate, despite all her planning and plotting, who ‘lets off’ Densher with more charity and who is finally both undeceived and undeceiving” (295, 295, 294)

26 “Kate sees Densher’s footing, the reason why he needs to fall in love with Milly’s memory, and in seeing these things, is forced into a sobering recognition of his double bind, his reasons, and his confused intents and motivations for engaging in, in the final analysis, what he yearns to see as Kate’s project, not in any sense his,” Maya Higashe Wakana remarks (54).

for whom it will do. Her memory’s your love. You want no other” (WSD 509).

The novel ends in Kate’s final sentence, “We shall never be again as we were!”

(WSD 509). The sadness and remorse are given a positive twist in the following two novels that celebrate this change.

2. The Ambassadors: Un-framing History and Memory

In The Ambassadors Lambert Strether, the middle-aged editor,²⁷ is sent by his patroness Mrs. Newsome to bring back her son Chad, who is presumed to have detained by a woman and lost himself in the alluring but degenerating Paris. The journey from the conservative American town Woollett, Massachusetts, where everything is judged by a rigid binary division, to Paris where that very division is challenged and redefined, is of tremendous importance to Strether’s self-development into moral and spiritual maturity. It is a journey because, instead of staying in Paris where he relishes the feeling of freedom, Strether in the end decides to return. He is no longer a mere agent whose value lies in his accomplishment of the assigned mission. With the impact of the differences he experiences in two cultures, Strether refuses to commit himself unquestioningly to either of them. The hard-earned freedom that underlies Strether’s independence is owing to his possessing a receptive and imaginative mind that enables him to open himself to other possibilities generated

27 Hazel Hutchison points out two possible sources that James takes to shape this character: one is Honoré de Balzac’s “Louis Lambert (1832-33), one of the Études philosophiques included in La comédie humaine;” the other is “the eighteenth-century philosopher J. H. Lambert, who was also engaged with problems of knowledge and appearance” (233, 234).

in reverie, through which the socially or historically ordained role is unbound.

In other words, what distinguishes Strether from the people in Woollett is his ability to dream, through which he obtains a stance that can not be demarked within the provincial grid of tradition or history, because “Reverie extends history precisely to the limits of the unreal” (PR 122).²⁸ For Bachelard, not all kinds of dreams are bestowed with transcending power. He makes a distinction between night dream and day dream: the former drags the dreamer back to the past with a dark force that is the target of psychoanalysis, whereas the latter is a liberating faculty that frees the daydreamer by granting him a vision to look higher and farther, that is, to look at the future. “The night dream (rêve) does not belong to us. It is not our possession . . . It abducts our being from us. Nights, nights have no history. The night has no future” (PR 145). The “no history” in the night dream can be understood in the sense that it is not truly personal, because the images repeated in the night dreams are usually something repressed by the history of others under the name of civilization or culture. Besides being subsumed into that history, the dreamer can do little to change. On the other hand, the history of a dreamer in reverie is serene and immanent in one’s very being, because it surpasses the documented historical events

28 The dreamless Woollett is therefore leaving no room for the ambiguities or the coexistence of a double entailed in imagination, and in Richard D. Hathaway view, “Woollett-mindedness cannot abide ghosts, and the essence of ghosts is polarity. Ghosts are impalpable or ‘thin’, yet thronging and

‘thick’; they are usually absent, yet called ‘presences’; luminous, yet called ‘shadows’; knowing, yet withholding knowledge; . . . They float, just beyond our ken” (84).

and partakes in the history of a cosmos order: “if one wishes to speak of those dreams (songes) which constantly return, living and active he takes refuge in history, in a distant history, in a faraway history, in the history of forgotten cosmoses” (PR 177).

His vision must keep growing, and that is the reason why Strether in the end relinquishes both Woollett and Paris because he recognizes the limits of these two places. He can be seen as his own ambassador who mediates two disparate selves:

the Woollett identity and the one in Paris. His maturity is processed not by the availability of what they can provide, but by the realization of what they lack. It is the recognization of his being a germinating actor that both cities are to be shed off before Strether starts his journey anew. He understands he can write his own history that is open and inclusive, aesthetically creative and morally responsible. He is a redeemable man mainly because of his imagination, as James characterizes him in the Preface to this novel: “My poor friend should have accumulated character, certainly;

or rather would be quite naturally and handsomely possessed of it, in the sense that he would have, and would always have felt he had, imagination galore, and that this yet wouldn’t have wrecked him;” and for the painter of life, “It was immeasurable, the opportunity to ‘do’ a man of imagination” (AC 363).

Strether’s imagination makes his Paris mission a fruitful one to affirm his individuality, and that helps him relieve from the constriction at Woollett where he

defines his own identity by the Review he edits: “it’s green,” and “My name’s on the cover” (AB 44). A names on the green cover of a Review recognizable by other people is the only way Strether asserts his identity. It can not be denied nonetheless, as Bachelard evinces, “Only through the accounts of others have we come to know of our unity. On the thread of our history as told by the others, year by year, we end up resembling ourselves. We gather all our beings around the unity of our name”

(PR 99). On the other hand, “reverie does not recount. Or at least there are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name” (PR 99). Strether embarks from Woollett with a heart weighted by two histories: his personal one is sad and passive while the Newsome’s family history is simply unspeakable. Strether has taken himself as a failure, as a man whose present life is empty and lonely, burdened by a cumbersome past: “The fact that he had failed . . . in everything, in each relation and in half a dozen trades . . . might have made, might still make, for an empty present; but it stood solidly for a crowded past;” and that past “was . . . grey in the shadow of his solitude. It had been a dreadful cheerful sociable solitude, a solitude of life or choice, of community; but though there had been people enough all round it there had been but three or four persons in it” (AB 58). His loneliness has him include even the newly acquainted Maria Gostrey whom he meets in Liverpool on his

way to Paris, into the “three or four persons.” “Beyond, behind them was the pale figure of his real youth, which held against its breast the two presences paler than itself—the young wife he had early lost and the young son he had stupidly sacrificed”

by his having “in those years so insanely given himself to merely missing the mother”

(AB 59).²⁹ Mrs. Newsome promises to marry him after she retrieves her prodigal son, and Strether grasps it as an opportunity to set his life once again into the right track.

As concerning the prosperous Newsomes, Maria is puzzled about his dodging postponements to tell her what the “article” is produced by the “big brave bouncing business” and “roaring trade” of his wealthy patroness (AB 41).³⁰ “Unmentionable?

Oh no,” defends Strether, “Only, as a small, trivial, rather ridiculous object of the commonest domestic use, it’s just wanting in—what shall I say? Well, dignity”

(AB 41).³¹ Still, we are not told what the “article” is. Chad is expected to take up the family business which has an unnamable infamous past: “The source of his

29 As Phyllis van Slyck points out, “it is his deep sense of loss, of having missed out on something important in life, much more than his mission, which most insistently and poignantly shapes his response to Europe;” and “Madame de Vionnet has been Strether’s sublime or ideal love object, through whom he has finally confronted his desire. But she is also the fantasy object through whom he has successfully learned to mourn his lost self” (1997: 562, 574).

30 Strether is painfully aware of the fact that Mrs. Newsome is “his business superior and his future wife,” and his “debt is so large that Mrs. Newsome can direct his movement,” remarks Siobhan Peiffer, and later he tries to use the same idea of debt to influence Chad, as “Chad is ‘free’ from Woollett’s commercial demands only by another debt. Strether uses the same tactic to keep Chad with Madame Vionnet,” to whom the young man owes everything (97, 101).

31 “Nameless and unnameable, the commodity that signifies the determining presence of American economic power is not permitted to obtrude into the purified realm of Parisian culture,” but, as Richard Salmon notes, “The difference between the culture of Woollett and Paris lies not in an opposition between the commodified and the purely aesthetic, but in their respective codes of consumption. The prestige of the European commodity spectacle lies precisely in its apparent distance form vulgar commodification, in its appeal to Strether’s taste, rather than to the crude economic resources of Woollett” (44).

grandfather’s wealth . . . was not particularly noble” (AB 43). On entering Europe, his Woollett self that carries a baggage of history exposes itself to reevaluation.

During his ambassadorial mission, Strether is tempted to question his former attitude, and as the Woollett criteria prove less and less sufficient to cope with the sophisticated situation he confronts in Paris, he is symptomatically wondering where he stands. It takes several stages for Strether to come to a full awareness of his stance, that is, an awareness of himself as a being that is constantly in process, and open to the risks and opportunities in self-transformation. At the beginning, he expresses himself in a typically blunt Woollett attitude. After Strether gives an account of the reason that brings him to Europe, Maria summarizes, “Mr. Chad” is

“a young man on whose head high hopes are placed at Woollett; a young man a wicked woman has got hold of and whom his family over there have sent you out to rescue. You’ve accepted the mission of separating him from the wicked woman. Are you quite sure she’s very bad for him?”

Something in his manner showed it as quite pulling him up. “Of course we are. Wouldn’t you be?”

“Oh I don’t know. One never does—does one?—beforehand. One can only judge on the facts. . . .” (AB 37)

Instead of a self-assumed objective view, Maria provides him with a perspective of how other aspects to look at a thing are also possible. “She may be charming—his life!” says Maria, and he replies, “‘Charming?’—Strether stared before him. ‘She’s base, venal—out of the streets’” (AB 37). That episode is but a prelude, and his

imagining mind allows him quickly to adjust himself to the multifarious style in Paris.

This acceptance without pre-judgement proves an immense influence on Strether to the extent that he feels rejuvenated, if not a total rebirth.

The wide-eyed Strether strolls alone in Paris, waiting to meet his belated friend Waymarsh, and he catches attentively and reflectively the flakes of Paris life around him. He is overwhelmed and his imagination is given liberal reins. “Poor Strether had at this very moment to recognise the truth that wherever one paused in Paris the imagination reacted before one could stop it. This perpetual reaction put a price . . . on pauses; but it piled up consequences till there was scarce room to pick one’s steps among them” (AB 68). It is almost an epiphany in its violent form that revolutionizes the narrowness of his previous inflexible thinking pattern.

“Nothing . . . could well less resemble a scene of violence than even the liveliest of these occasions. They were occasions of discussion, none the less, and Strether had never in his life heard so many opinions on so many subjects. There were opinions at Woollett, but only on three or four” (AB 123). The “three or four persons” plus the “three or four” opinions are what Strether had at Woollett. The invigorating air he breathes in Paris confronts him with a challenge to receive something decisively different from the close atmosphere at Woollett, and he discerns it is this difference that sets him free. “It was the difference, the difference of being just where he was

and as he was, that formed the escape—this difference was so much greater than he had dreamed it would be; and what he finally sat there turning over was the strange logic of his finding himself so free” (AB 57). And one thing amazes him most is that,

“He had never expected . . . again to find himself young” (AB 57). His feeling of a youth restored reflects the renovating effects the imagination produces within his being because, “Dreaming has nothing to do with tradition; dreaming is in the first flush of youth” (RD 147). The impressions of Paris make him aware that the life at Woollett is spiritually barren and futile, but this awareness is almost impossible if he does not venture into another space, a space for miracle and magic to its spectator.

To be in Paris is enough for Strether to trigger the yearning, long neglected or/and

ruthlessly suppressed: “it was doubtless little enough of a marvel that he should have lost account of that handful of seed. Buried for long years in dark corners at any rate these few germs had sprouted again under forty-eight hours of Paris” (AB 60).

“The presence of the image triumphs over history and legend and culture,” says Bachelard, and Strether gradually extricates himself from the old shell in germination (FPF 117). The difference he comes to realize is not only present in others, but also in himself. He appears not just an ambassador, a mouthpiece of Mrs. Newsome, but one who holds on tight his own individuality, and Marie de Vionnet, the lover of Chad, is an indispensable figure in helping Strether achieve his new status.

Besides Maria, Madame de Vionnet is the medium and the embodiment of the enchanting refinement of the Old World for Strether. The woman who is supposed to have bad influence on Chad turns out to be exquisitely warm and human.

Strether’s unwavering loyalty to her is less because he loses himself in her charm than because he is, sympathetically, conscious of her being burdened with a history which proves to be too complex a matrix for her to escape.³² History for Strether now is something that vibrates and resonates with the present; that is, with the immediacy of presentness in imagination the past is brought forth in fresh combination. For instance, in a party held by Gloriani, the famous sculptor, Strether meets Madame de Vionnet for the first time; and during that party, he is then stepping “into the ‘great world’, the world of ambassadors and duchesses, the items made a meagre total,” and he feels, “the hour, the picture, the immediate, the recent, the possible—as well as the communication itself, not a note of which failed to reverberate—only gave the moments more of the taste of history” (AB 160). Moreover, the history he experiences in Paris is mystifying and complex. For example, it is the same

“history” that “the charming girl so freely sketched by his companion should have been married out of hand by a mother, another figure of striking outline, full of dark

32 “For all her fineness and distinction, Mme. de Vionnet remains prisoner of an old, invidious way of life; of feudalism, the Catholic Church, of old-world ‘arrangement,’” notes Daniel J. Schneider, and that is why both Woollett and Paris have their limits: “None of the people attached to either city are capable of free choice, of spontaneity, of revising received attitudes and values: attachment to either city is therefore moral slavery” (187, 176).

personal motive” (AB 161). The latter refers to the arranged marriage for Madame de Vionnet’s little girl Jeanne, and that greatly troubles Strether’s conscience.

Besides, what strikes him most is that, as a tacit tradition, people there do not divorce.

Maria tells Strether, “‘Ces gens-la don’t divorce . . . any more than they emigrate or abjure—they think it impious and vulgar;’” nevertheless, “It was all special; it was all, for Strether’s imagination, more or less rich” (AB 161). Madame de Vionnet is, in a word, weighed down by her current status muffled by a history she can only helplessly revolve around: “her marriageable daughter, her separated husband, her agitated history” (AB 241). Her history-bound inextricable situation is also exemplified by the house she lives in, and Strether is deeply impressed by it:

The place itself went further back—that he guessed, and how old Paris continued in a manner to echo there . . . He had never before . . . had present to him relics, of any special dignity, of a private order . . . His attention took them all tenderly into account. They were among the matters that marked Madame de Vionnet’s apartment as something quite different from Miss Gostrey’s little museum of bargains and from Chad’s lovely home; he recognised it as founded much more on old accumulations that had possibly from time to time shrunken than on any contemporary method of acquisition or form of curiosity. Chad and Miss Gostrey had rummaged and purchased and picked up and exchanged, sifting, selecting, comparing; whereas the mistress of the scene before him, beautifully passive under the spell of transmission—transmission from her father’s line . . . had only received, accepted and been quiet . . . There had been objects she or her predecessors might even conceivably have parted with under need, but Strether couldn’t suspect them of having sold old pieces to get “better”

ones. They would have felt no difference as to better or worse. He could but imagine their having felt . . . the pressure of want or the obligation of sacrifice.

(AB 172-73)

Strether notices the distinction, the historical depth present in Madame de Vionnet’s house. It highlights the comparatively shallow appearance of Maria’s apartment whose “compact and crowded little chambers, almost dusky, as they at first struck him, with accumulations, represented a supreme general adjustment to opportunities and conditions;” and as Strether looks at “the empire of ‘things’, what was before him still enlarged it” (AB 83). Both Maria and Chad’s houses lack the aura that can be created only through the continuation of a history; and that history demands its human subjects, like the furniture, not to judge it in terms of good or bad, not to free from, but to feel tacitly “the pressure of want or the obligation of sacrifice.”³³ The hostess of the house is one of the sacrifices. Her appealing to Strether’s help proves not only irresistibly touching but righteous, not in the Woollett’s view of course, and he finds himself in a dilemma of split loyalty. Strether experiences doubt and uncertainty, and that is illustrated in an important but less-observed image: the boat.

This vessel image appears in The Wings of the Dove as well, in which Milly is often described as a survival of a shipwreck. “I’m a survivor—a survivor of a general wreck. You see . . . how that’s to be taken into account—that every one else has gone. . . I’m all that’s left.” (WSD 210). Susan even compares Milly to the boat

33 Although Madame de Vionnet leaves an impression of her free movement, and with her, “James radically revised the flâneur tradition that epitomizes Benjaminian consumerist-modernist Paris,” as she is no longer a passive woman gazed; yet the purchase activities of Chad and Maria reveals also the burden of a cultural past: “Consumerism involves the activity of individual agents,” indicates, Marianne DeKoven, “while Madame de Vionnet can only passively receive and accept the

‘transmission from her father’s line’” (112, 115).

itself: like the “new great streamers” she reads in newspapers, “Milly drew the feet of water, and odd though it might seem that a lonely girl . . . should stir the stream like a leviathan” (WSD 127-28). The use of this image in The Ambassadors refers less to survival then to a frame of formed opinions, and the water image that can carry and overturn the vessel is not fully developed until James’s last great novel The Golden Bowl. Strether here is under the trial of how to balance himself between two boats:

one sails towards Woollett where Mrs. Newsome is the prize when he brings back her son; the other towards Paris where life opens itself to the captivating variations he could only dream of before. It is a long process before Strether gains a foothold of his own, and during which he is misled, lied to, and frequently flounders in the tension created by the two irreconcilable parties. His imagination sometimes makes him naively credulous, but it also leads him to ultimate revelation of the truth.

From time to time we witness a Strether who is disconcerted for lacking the affirming knowledge of where he stands, and the boat image sometimes points up such confusions and sometimes the conflict between his imagination and conscience.

Madame de Vionnet is first connected with the boat in Strether’s picturing and, indeed in his imagination, idealizing her situation: “there would have been . . . a judicial separation. She had settled in Paris, brought up her daughter, steered her boat. It was no very pleasant boat . . . to be in; but Marie de Vionnet would have headed

straight” (AB 163). He perceives her as an extraordinary being, but he stops describing her as different; in fact, when he meets her at Gloriani’s party, “at the end of five minutes . . . she—oh incontestably, yes—differed less; differed, that is, scarcely at all . . . from Mrs. Newsome or even from Mrs. Pocock,” his patroness’s daughter (AB 149). As his stay in Paris is prolonged, Strether less and less views things in terms of differentiation as he first saw them; the difference has in a sense internalized in him and become less disturbing. But he is nevertheless still relatively innocent to believe things as they are presented to him, and Paris is profoundly a world of appearance. “‘What more than a vain appearance does the wisest of us know? I commend you’, the young man declared with a pleasant emphasis, ‘the vain appearance’” (AB 142). The young man is Chad’s friend John Little Bilham, a young American whom Strether is very fond of. Little Bilham misguides Strether by assuring him that the relationship of the pair is “a virtuous attachment,” and that somehow disarms Strether’s vigilance because “His imagination had in other words already dealt with his young friend’s assertion” (AB 128).³⁴ But his caution does not completely slacken. When Chad asks him to see her and he inquires, “Excuse me, but I must really . . . know where I am . . . Is her life without reproach?” to which

34 “Little Bilham, then, does not lie when he describes the liaison between Chad and Madame de Vionnet as he does: he merely affirms the Parisian judgment of the relationship;” remarks L. Moffitt Cecil, and in the final revelation at the boat scene, when the “shame, insecurity and fear masked by the decorous appearance of the affair are made manifest,” Strether understands, the “system is but a license to pretend; it changes nothing; therefore it is finally cruel and vitiating” (723).

Chad answers, “Absolutely without reproach. A beautiful life. Allez donc voir!”

(AB 169). During his visit, Madame de Vionnet also appeals to his own judgement of what he sees to save her:

“Simply tell her the truth.”

“And what do you call the truth?”

“Well, any truth—about us all—that you see yourself. I leave it to you.”

“Thank you very much. I like,” Strether laughed with a slight harshness,

“the way you leave things!”

But she insisted kindly, gently, as if it wasn’t so bad. “Be perfectly honest.

Tell her all.”

“All?” he oddly echoed.

“Tell her the simple truth,” Madame de Vionnet again pleaded.

“But what is the simple truth? The simple truth is exactly what I’m trying to discover.”

She looked about a while, but presently she came back to him. “Tell her, fully and clearly, about us.” (AB 178-79)

Facing this lady in all her impressive charm, Strether is conscious of the fact that

“she was . . . in vivid imperative form—one of the rare women he had so often heard of, read of, thought of, but never met, whose very presence, look, voice, the mere contemporaneous fact of whom, from the moment it was at all presented, made a relation of mere recognition,” and “he felt the simplicity” in such impression (AB 178).³⁵ In the end before he takes leave, he realizes, “So it was that the way to

35 “Strether’s willing acceptance of appearances generates an internal and external conflict which only brings about his stronger support of Madame de Vionnet. She leads him to acknowledge the relationship between seeing and acting;” indicates Joanna A. Higgins, “Strether sees another reality, a greater ‘virtuous attachment’ than the ambiguously implied by the Bilham-Barrace conspiracy.

Strether continues to accept Madame de Vionnet as a representative of a truth of appearances, and . . . appearances may not be definitively true or false, and may represent not one but several truths” (169, 172).