Europe in The

Ambassadors and The

Portrait of A Lady
Seminar 1
 Theoretical context:

The House of Fiction The Great Form

(1889): impressions = paintings, framed
pictures

The Ambassadors (1903)

Europe vs. American Myths

H. James engages an American concept of

masculinity (exploration and conquest)
and an American myth of shaping
narratives of nation and identity to further
colonial projects;
Strether, from Woollett, Massachusetts,
comes with a portfolio stuffed with
conventional identity narratives about
sexuality, morality and national identities.
Europe vs. American Myths
The American narrative broken during
WWI, in a European context
consciousness questioning the power and
authority of past narratives, focusing on
multiple identities, states of dislocation,
criticism toward capitalism, valorisation of
individual freedom;
Jamess female Parisian characters
embody the challenges of the modern
metropolitan consciousness.
 His great uneasiness seemed to peep at
him out of the imminent impression that
almost any acceptance of Paris might give
ones authority away. It hung before him,
this vast, bright Babylon, like some huge
iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and
hard, in which parts were not to be
discriminated nor differences comfortably
marked (64).

The New Babylon

The New Babylon
Paris the new Babylon, a clich since
the 19th century (William James also used
it in his letters);
Paris (19th WWII) the paradoxes,
dangers and promises of modernity
(imperial power, cosmopolitanism, a city
hosting refugees, artists, a narrative of
national identity, technologised and
aestheticised urban space).
Paris a city of spectacle with
women on view
Maria Gostreys apartment in Quartier
Marboeuf, cluttered with antiquities (she is a
successful participant in the global economy,
aesthetically appropriating the past); Maria
teaches Strether an alternative way of
engaging reality allowing events to enfold
organically rather than controlling them;
Mme de Vionnet multiple facets (scenes:
Glorianis garden, Notre Dame) - modern
woman: a citizen of the public sphere (at
ease in hotels, restaurants, streets, shops).
Conclusion: Strether goes back home with a
new consciousness; Chad also brings home a
new advertizing technique for the Newsome
company.
 Isabel Archer a process of self-
discovery; initiation through loss of
innocence;
Caspar Goodwood typical American;
Lord Warburton the typical upper class
Englishman;
Gilbert Osmond the sophisticate,
corrupted European (American expatriate)

The Portrait of a Lady (1881-

1882)
 For Isabel independence involves financial
freedom (obtained through her cousin Ralph
Touchett), thus she can afford a complete
freedom of her imagination;
America vs. Europe the clash visible though
the marriage (Isabels innocence, idealism vs.
Osmond sophistication and corruption);
Gilberts life-long affair with Mme Merle and
their daughter Pansy; his cruelty to Isabel;
his determination to break her will (he refers
to her friends as a unfortunate collection; he
does not want her to travel to see her cousin
before dying);
 had become too flexible, too useful, was
too ripe and too final. She was in a word
too perfectly the social animal that man
and woman are supposed to have been
intended to be; and she had rid herself of
every remnant of that tonic wildness
which we may assume to have belonged
even to the most amiable persons in the
ages before country-house life was the
fashion. ( 171)

Madame Merle
 she remembered rightly he had said he wished to
take his last look at her. Since then he had been the
most discordant survival of her earlier time-the only
one in fact with which a permanent pain was
associated. He had left that morning with a sense of
the most superfluous of shocks: it was like a
collision between vessels in broad daylight.
There had been no mist, no hidden current to excuse
it, and she herself had only wished to steer wide. He
had bumped against her prow, however, while her
hand was on the tiller, and to complete the
metaphor had given the lighter vessel a strain
which still occasionally betrayed itself in a faint
creaking (484-485).

The ending and the metaphor of

the sea and the ships
 This new type of mobile American identity,
which has forsaken his/her homeland and
which has resisted its agrarian and
innocent qualities (embodied by Gilbert
Osmond and Mme Merle) is the symbol of
a third hybrid civilization. The
mesmerizing values of the Old World have
led to a shift since the expatriates accept
Europes sophisticated alterity and they
encompass it only to misuse it.

Conclusion