ELIZABETH DALTON
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which Madame de Vionnet seemed to float so expertly in the scene on
the river now begins to engulf her. Water "had never risen higher than
round this woman." Fantasies of danger and death multiply: Madame de
Vionnet is drowning, she is going to the guillotine. The decapitation of
a woman suggests the castrated genitalia. No wonder the sexual
relationship strikes Strether as "hard" and "grim." It evokes the smell of
blood; it leads to castration and death. As Strether puts it to Madame de
Vionnet, " 'You're afraid for your life! ' "
After this encounter, Strether meets briefly with Chad - telling him
he'll be a "brute," a "criminal of the deepest dye" if he leaves Madame
de Vionnet - then pays a last visit to Maria Gostrey. In this final scene,
the characteristic Jamesian movement from recognition to renunciation
occurs. Strether, having lost Mrs. Newsome and her fortune, now refuses
the offer of life in Paris with Maria. Matthiessen attributes Strether's de–
cision to "unacknowledged love" for Chad's mistress. But Strether's at–
traction to Madame de Vionnet is in one crucial way hardly more
powerful than his fondness for Maria: both interests lack the force of
sexual desire. The fact that Strether can be drawn sexually to a woman
might seem to be established by the story of his early marriage, but that
episode is so dimly sketched that it is far from convincing. In any case,
"the young wife he had early lost," like Madame de Vionnet, like all
sexual relationship, is associated with injury and death.
There is, of course, a character who is able, unlike Strether, to play
the man's part in the scene of sexuality, and that is Chad. Strether's re–
jection of Maria also has something to do with him. Although it is
mainly the woman who suffers the harshness of sex - " 'when a woman's
hit,' " says Maria, " 'it's very awful' " - for the man too, there is danger
- something "awe"-ful. On first meeting Chad, Strether recognizes in
him "the young man marked out by women; ... the dignity, the com–
parative austerity ... of this character affected him almost with awe.
There was an experience on his interlocutor's part.... "
Experience with women is seen here as a kind of austere discipline,
an ordeal for which Chad has been destined by his unambiguous mas–
culinity. Strether regards him with boyish "awe" - and perhaps with
something more. He is struck by Chad's "palpable presence and his mas–
sive young manhood"; here and throughout, the reader is made power–
fully aware of Chad as a phallic presence "massive" and "palpable"
through Strether's own response . Maria appeals to Strether mainly be–
cause of her knowledge and wit. Madame de Vionnet, though exquisite,
is somehow quite bodiless. The descriptions of Chad, however, are lushly
physical. He is "brown and thick and strong ... he was actually smooth
. .. as in the taste of a sauce or the rub of a hand..... The phe–
nomenon ... was marked enough to be touched by the finger." And
