ELIZABETH DALTON
R ecognition and Renunciation
in
The Ambassadors
Although James himself thought
The Ambassadors
"quite the best 'all
round' of my productions," there has always been an undercurrent of
skepticism about the novel, even among his admirers. F. O. Matthiessen
complained of the "relative emptiness" of the hero; Strether "does noth–
ing at all" at the end. More recently, Harold Bloom alludes to the
"imbalance between the matter and the manner," although like everyone
else he concedes that the novel makes "a beautiful pattern."
The crux of this pattern, the fullest revelation of both the matter and
the manner, is the recognition scene, when Strether sees Chad and
Madame de Vionnet on the river. Despite his reservations about Strether,
Matthiessen considers this the most brilliant scene of its kind in James.
Indeed James's recognition scenes - those moments when the protago–
nist, in the prevailing Jamesian metaphor for understanding, "sees" the
truth - are the epitome of his method and conception. A skeptic might
question the use of the Aristotelian term; after all, the recognitions in
Greek tragedy involve matters of great weight: murder, incest, and the
passions at the heart of the state and the family . In comparison, the issues
in the tragicomic world of
The Ambassadors
may appear trivial. Yet
somehow the scene on the water, with its Impressionist pink and
turquoise and silver, seems luminous with meaning, suggesting that the
moment of recognition is not merely an empty formal event - part of
the "beautiful pattern" - but a revelation of passion and fate.
Although in a way Strether "does nothing" afterwards, as
Matthiessen avers, from another perspective he does something quite
drastic. Like many ofJames's protagonists, he renounces - love, pleasure,
comfort, even, in this case, Paris. This is not really the denouement of a
comedy of manners, but something more akin to the profound and
painful reversals of tragedy. The ambiguous language and imagery of the
scene on the water, features always present in James but particularly strik–
ing here, suggest that the "nothingness" and "emptiness" of the novel
and its hero may be quite full, containing a whole shadowy inner world
of fantasy, desire, and suffering. Matthiessen described James's fictions as
"strictly novels of intelligence," with "none of the welling up of the
darkly subconscious life that has characterized the novel since
