466
PARTISAN REVIEW
lationship, so Strether must have known that Madame de Vionnet was
Chad's ITllstress. In fact, this was the very idea he started out with. Mter
the scene on the river, he imagines Maria asking, " 'What on earth -
that's what I want to know now - had you then supposed?' He recog–
nized at last that he had really been trying all along to suppose nothing."
He had been trying, that is, to repress his adult knowledge of sexuality,
because of the fantasies and fears aroused in him by the lovers. Recogni–
tion is not, after all, first knowledge, but re-cognition, a re-knowing of
something lost to repression. The recognition scene dramatizes the return
of the repressed.
The implications of the scene on the river are played out in Book
XII. Strether has a final interview with Madame de Vionnet in which she
acknowledges more openly than ever the peril of her situation vis-a-vis
her restless young lover. She seems older, "visibly less exempt from the
touch of time," and "vulgarly troubled." Strether finds it "appalling"
that such a woman can be "by mysterious forces, a creature so ex–
ploited." He is particularly disturbed by the moral disparity between
Madame de Vionnet and her lover. She is "the finest and subtlest crea–
ture," while Chad is "only Chad" - fundamentally the same crude and
unimaginative young man who left Woollett. What on earth does she
see in him? His lack of moral or intellectual distinction makes the answer
obvious: Chad's power of attraction is sex. He is a beautiful, glossy
young male, fully at ease with his sexuality. The very lack of other
qualities, the shallowness and caddishness suggested even in his name,
highlight a sexual power that may be especially attractive to the super–
civilized woman - or man - trapped in the exquisite cage of culture and
tradition.
Strether finds this "so hard it was fairly grim"; for him, "the real co–
ercion was to see a man ineffably adored." Through the grim, coercive
power of sex, Madame de Vionnet has been made vulnerable to age, ex–
ploitation, and vulgar trouble. She has become, if only in her own e ti–
mation, "old and abject and hideous," whereas Chad is at least superfi–
cially improved. Here, as elsewhere in James, notably in
The acred
FOUI/t,
sex is ultimately a vampirish transaction in which one partner is subject to
grim exploitation by the other. In
The Ambassadors,
the images suggest
some of the ideas behind that representation. Indeed, this quiet evening
encounter is permeated with imagery of violence. The noises of the city
remind Strether of "the days and nights of revolution" and "the smell of
blood." Madame de Vionnet seems dressed "as for thunderous times,"
like Madame Roland on the scaffold. Referring to her certainty oflosing
Chad, she speaks of living "in terror" - like the aristocrat condemned by
the revolutionary Terror.
The imagery of the recognition scene reappears here. The water in
