ELIZABETH DALTON
459
appointment." He feels as though he is stepping inside a picture frame:
"the poplars and willows, the reeds and river ... fell into a composition
... the sky was silver and turquoise and varnish ... it was Lambinet.
Moreover he was freely walking about in it."
Like Alice stepping through the looking-glass, Strether has broken a
barrier. There is a sense of license and danger, suggested by a reference to
Maupassant (whom James considered brilliant but "obscene"), but also of
euphoria and magical empowerment: "Strether heard his lips, for the first
time in French air ... emit sounds of expressive intention without fear
of his company." He's speaking French! Released from inhibition, re–
clining on a grassy hillside, Strether has "a sense of success, of a finer har–
mony in things." Falling asleep, he "lost himself anew in Lambinet." He
has entered an inner world of unconscious fantasy, a suggestion con–
firmed by many references in the following pages to "dream" and
"fancy."
Strether's nap turns gradually into a reverie about Madame de Vion–
net, with whom he's still "careful," fearing "a lapse from good faith." In
view of her feeling for Chad and Strether's own diffidence, this fear
seems a bit unrealistic. But he continues in this vein, thinking of the
"danger of one's liking such a woman too much." His relationship with
Chad has by this time undergone a curious reversal. Strether, a man of
fifty-five and the fiance of Chad's mother, has come to Europe like a fa–
ther retrieving an errant son. As it turns out, however, Chad, in his ex–
perience of Paris, of women, of "life," seems immensely older than
Strether himself. Strether marvels, "If he's going to make me feel
young!" Now, in visiting Chad's beautiful friend alone, in risking "liking
such a woman too much," Strether is competing in his diffident way
with the more powerful male, as if trying belatedly to achieve an oedipal
victory. He has some impression of success: "the after-sense of the couple
of hours spent with her, was almost that of fullness and frequency."
Strether seems to be having a rather decorous sexual fantasy here,
thinking of "the delightful facility, with such a woman, of arriving at a
new tone; he thought, as he lay on his back, of all the tones she might
make possible if one were to try her. ... " The explicit sense concerns
Madame de Vionnet's tact and social sensitivity, but the image of her as a
responsive musical instrument contains a sexual idea as well. Strether en–
tertains these thoughts while stretched out on his back - a natural posi–
tion for reverie or fantasy. There is also a suggestion of passivity, further
developed in the imagery: "how had their time together slipped along so
smoothly, mild but now slow, and melting, liquefying, into his happy il–
lusion of idleness?" This melting and liquefying, the culmination of the
fantasy about Madame de Vionnet, suggests orgasm, but also, perhaps, a
more primitive idea: it has the diffuse quality of pregenital rather than
