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PAJ:tTISAN REVIEW
genital pleasure, of the wish to merge with the mother associated with
the earliest period of life. Thus although Strether thinks of himself here as
successful with a desirable woman, the imagery betrays the childlike pas–
sivity that has kept him from the freedom and fullness of adult experience
he envies in other men.
For the moment, however, Strether feels as if he is part of the bright
scene of life, inside "the oblong gilt frame," instead of a dim, excluded
spectator. At the end of this charmed afternoon "in the picture," he finds
himself at a small inn, with "the river flowing behind or before it - one
couldn't say which," in an ambiguous watery landscape that echoes the
earlier melting and liquefying. Now out of this pre-oedipal landscape
rises "a stout white-capped deep-voiced woman" - the innkeeper. With
her stout body and deep voice, this woman seems almost more male than
female; yet she may nonetheless correspond to an aspect of the maternal
imago - perhaps to the sexually undifferentiated "phallic mother" of
earliest childhood.
Indeed, all the women in the novel play some maternal role for
Strether - whether to boss him around like Mrs. Newsome and her
daughter Sarah, to guide and instruct him like Maria Gostrey, or to be
idealized like Madame de Vionnet. The innkeeper, performing the func–
tion par excellence of the pre-oedipal mother, offers to give him dinner
as a "comfortable climax" - comfortable, perhaps, because it involves
only nourishment. Any climax associated with adult sexuality might gen–
erate conflict and fear - such as the feeling of danger in visiting Madame
de Vionnet. Thus, although Strether's journey into the unconscious be–
gan with thoughts of a possible oedipal victory, he seems to have with–
drawn into an earlier fantasy, with images of fusion and of appetites pas–
sively gratified by a presexual mother who is somehow both male and
female. In this "land of fancy" - perhaps infancy as well as fantasy - the
moment of recognition will occur. It will involve the reality of sexual
difference, with the attendant anxieties, which this soothing maternal
land-and-waterscape seems to deny.
Strether sits down near a landing where some small boats are tied up:
... the view had an emptiness that made one of the boats suggestive.
Such a river set one afloat almost before one could take up the oars -
the idle play of which would be moreover the aid to the full impres–
sion. This perception went so far as to bring him
to
his feet; but that
movement, in turn, made him feel afresh that he was tired, and while
he leaned against a post and continued to look out he saw something
that gave him a sharper arrest.
