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PAIl...TISAN REVIEW
chapter, Strether - like Isabel Archer, or Maisie Farange, or Hyacinth
Robinson - "found himself supposing innumerable and wonderful
things."
The typical response of the child enlightened about sex is disillusion–
ment, particularly with the mother, who seems suddenly defiled and un–
faithful. Something of this attitude appears in Strether's changed vision of
Madame de Vionnet. During their encounter in the country she is so
rattled that she loses her English and for the first time speaks to him in
French, "shifting her back into a mere voluble class or race.... When
she spoke the charming slightly strange English he best knew her by he
seemed to feel her as a creature, among all the millions, with a language
quite to herself ... " Unique among the millions, endowed with a spe–
cial language , Madame de Vionnet had been very like the child's ideal–
ized vision of the mother. Now she has re-entered her "mere voluble
class or race"; she has become, in other words, an ordinary sexual
woman.
During his sleepless night following the encounter, Strether thinks
about "intimacy revealed": "Intimacy, at such a point, was
like
that. ...
It was all very well for him to feel the pity of its being so much like ly–
ing." The tone here is not that of a man who has had a wife and child,
but the virginal amazement of a young person. The revulsion at sex is
suggested by the comparison with lying - which, as every child know, is
wrong. Yet a certain kind of lying is inseparable from sex, in that the
couple must protect its privacy, especially from the curiosity of the child.
Sex is thus always somehow compromised and morally ambiguous. It can
never be pure, as Strether has wanted the relationship of his friends to be
- or as the child wants its parents to be. The adult in Strether knows
all
this; he expresses his embarrassment at his own childishness in an image
that contains many of the conflicts dramatized in this episode: "he had
dressed the possibility in vagueness, as a little girl might have dressed her
doll." The characteristic vagueness - in the river scene, Strether "vaguely
felt" that "they knew how to do it" - conceals bodies whose nakedness
would reveal disturbing genital difference.
The fact that the child here is a girl suggests this anxiety about mas–
culinity and sexual difference; perhaps the girl, with her "castrated" body,
has less to lose in sex. Moreover, the girl with the doll plays at the
reversal and mastery of dependency on the mother; with her make-believe
baby she is also playing at adult sexual life, at which she is only a
spectator - like Strether, who feels "lonely and cold," like a child ex–
cluded from the parents' intimacy. The image of the girl with her doll
may even reveal something about the impulse behind the style of the
novel, that difficult late style that also dresses possibility in vagueness, of–
ten enveloping persons and their actions in nearly impenetrable ambigu-
