this is essential to understanding the sublime, death never results for the hero. In the eighteenth century, people like Edmund Burke wrote theories of the sublime where they gave everyday examples. For example, on a stormy night the candle is blown out and a noise is heard. The instinct of selfpreservation kicks in as paralysis. When the nature of the danger becomes evident, fight or flight occurs. An evil person tries to maintain paralysis as long as possible to enact a kill or domination of the hero’s will. Of course, when the light comes back on the noise source is discovered and nerves settle, eventually. The sensations of the body felt during the episode are described in order to transport the reader to a belief in the novel—escapism. For Burke, the greatest example of the sublime comes from Milton’sParadise Lost, when Satan journeys to Eden. Along the way he has to face his daughter, Sin, which is frightening in itself. But Satan experiences sublime terror when he senses something more frightening in the obscurity of the shadows. Death reveals himself as Satan’s son by Sin. In this episode, Satan faced uncertainty and fear and gained the knowledge of incest’s horror. James, who was well versed in this theory, recreates Satan’s encounter with Sin in the moment of Chad’s appearance. The assumptions about his activity that had the town of Woollett paralyzed vanish in Strether’s first look at Chad.

James’ novel, as many critics have noted for the last hundred years, concerns the consciousness of, to use James’ wording from the preface to the novel, an “imaginative person.” The adventure, therefore, is within the mind of Lewis Lambert Strether. Maria Gostrey makes this evident by noticing that Louis Lambert is the title of a novel by Honore de Balzac. That novel concerns the fate of a mystic writing a treatise on spirituality when he falls in love. Much like a character in the twentiethcentury movie, The Fisher King, he falls into a catatonic stupor. When he awakes, he has arrived at a new plain of wisdom and awareness. The parallels with Strether are as follows: he has been sent out from Woollett—whose idea of the world is that it is full of monsters—on a mission. Though he would rather flee, he fights his way through to find not monsters but people. Maria, in fact, summarizes Strether’s mission in the melodramatic light of the play she has seen with Strether. That play contains “a bad woman in a yellow frock who made a pleasant weak good-looking young man in perpetual evening dress do the most dreadful things.” The ideas that Woollett and Strether have about the world come from similar literature. Strether, therefore, fears he will be made to do dreadful things. Strether’s exciting journey becomes the catatonic stupor of his namesake, and, at the end, he is awake. So the novel, in its large movements, mirrors the adventure tale to the point where, Patterson notes, the psychic confrontations take on the metaphors of blood to heighten their importance in accordance with psychological principles.

According to the psychological theory of William James, as laid out in his The Principles of Psychology, three sources of anxiety, or fear, prompt the self-preservation instinct in normal people (those not faced with vampires, cannibals, or barbarians). They are “those of bodily selfseeking, those of social self-seeking, and those of spiritual self-seeking.” The first impulse category describes “the material Self in the widest possible sense of the word,” or the vulgar worries dogging all Americans in the novel: monetary well-being, job security, and physical comfort. If Strether fails, Maria discovers, he loses “everything.” The second can be summarized as the dandy’s terror: to be shunned and ridiculed by society. Strether matures beyond this after failing to impress Gloriani. The last impulse comes out of the religious tradition. At its crudest, it is a fear of hell or all things sinful; Waymarsh exemplifies this. At its most enlightened, it is the “impulse towards psychic progress.” Strether wants to learn, and he devises a way of staying in Paris just a little longer to continue to learn. Eventually, as Freudians would note about neuroses such as the fear of the unknown paralyzing Woollett, Strether’s anxieties disappear upon contact with the source of the anxiety.

As soon as Strether has distanced himself from Woollett, questions begin to mount. It is immediately apparent that the world outside Woollett is wonderful. Once in Britain, he discloses his mission to Maria who, as a good judge of character, finds Strether’s blind adherence to the theory of the horrible strange, “are you quite sure she’s very bad for him?” “Of course we are,” Strether replies; Madame de Vionnet must be an evil person if she has been able to keep Chad in Paris. However, Strether finally meets Madame de Vionnet, “the embodied influence, the definite adversary, who had by a stroke of her own failed him and on a fond theory of whose palpable presence he had, under Mrs. Newsome’s inspiration, altogether proceeded.” Strether finds her “wonderful.” Instead of the “horror” he “must have imagined,” he finds in the presence of Madame de Vionnet that “horrors were so little . . . in this robust and reasoning image.” Reality for the traveler and scientist proves to be greater than the goblins from childhood tales. Strether can no longer follow his orders, “you’ve got morally and intellectually to get rid of her.” Strether cannot believe in the idea that the world outside Woollett is horrible because his senses tell him otherwise. Thus, he must recreate his idea of the world, which involves recreating his own psychology. The result is that Strether is less anxious about bumps in the night. Mrs. Newsome, who depends on the theory for her hold on Strether, no longer has power over him. By understanding “the Theory of the Horrible,” Strether’s transformation becomes obvious.

Waymarsh and Sarah attempt to check Strether’s investigations. Waymarsh safeguards the boundaries of Strether’s thought and, for this reason, Strether is “in terror of him.” If Strether steps out of line, Waymarsh can denigrate him to Mrs. Newsome. Waymarsh, as a threat to Strether’s social self-seeking, increasingly finds himself outweighed by Maria and Madame de Vionnet. That is why Sarah is sent out; “she keeps up the theory of the horrible.” Sarah petrifies Strether but he faces her and nothing happens. Strether accumulates “notes of freedom” with every successful contact with his fears. He continues to write home about his success at freeing himself from fear. Newsome’s “disappointment” in him begins in the letters because Strether has failed to repeat the theory of the horrible and sprinkle his observations with monsters. Those letters home as well as the conversations with Maria are Strether’s efforts to understand Newsome’s system.

Creating the mind of the normal person as grounds for adventurous investigation was no easy task. James accomplished this in The Ambassadors by using the language of “Adventure” as well as “the Theory of the Horrible. The theme of culture clash and the fear of difference were James’ favorite themes throughout his career, and when he investigated the underlying psychology of that fear in one particular person, James created a ground breaking case study. Strether has discovered that the goblins with which Woollett had peopled the earth are not real. He wrote his conclusions to Mrs. Newsome, but she would not believe him. Strether comes to understand that people simply have to learn for themselves although, the novelist believes, they can do so vicariously. If the novelist successfully infects the reader with Strether’s experience, then James has not wasted his effort to open the eyes of those back home. Short of that, in terms of fiction’s evolution, in literature written after The Ambassadors, the mind becomes as exciting as an adventure tale.

Source: Jeremy W. Hubbell, Critical Essay on The Ambassadors, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

There is scarcely a page in Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1903) that is not ambiguous in the common loose sense of the word, in which ‘ambiguous’ means simply obscure, puzzling, mystifying, baffling, and the like. This passage or this sentence could mean this, or that, or something else, we say to ourselves as we gaze at it, often blankly, trying to make out what it could reasonably mean. Here is a typical example. It is the last passage in a long colloquy between Strether and Maria Gostrey late in the story, ending the chapter (Book XI, Chapter 2) which is immediately followed by Strether’s fateful day in the French countryside (Book XI, Chapter 3). Maria says:

"Mr. Newsome and Madame de Vionnet may, as we were saying, leave town. How long do you think you can bear it without them?"

Strether’s reply to this was first another question. "Do you mean in order to get away from me?"

Her answer had an abruptness. "Don’t find me rude if I say I should think they’d want to!"

He looked at her hard again—seemed even for an instant to have an intensity of thought under which his colour changed. But he smiled ‘You mean after what they’ve done to me?

"After what she has."

At this, however, with a laugh, he was all right again. "Ah but she hasn’t done it yet!"

It is James’s elliptical, allusive late style that makes the difficulties, of course. The key questions to be answered are: Why should Chad and Madame de Vionnet want to get away from Strether? What is the thought in Strether’s mind that makes him change colour? Why, having evidently pushed aside this thought whatever it was, does he smile when he says ‘You mean after what they have done to me?’ And what have they done to him?—what does he think they have done to him? And what does Maria mean when she corrects him, saying, No, after what she (Madame de Vionnet) has done to him? What has ‘she’ done to him? And why is Strether relieved (‘at this . . . he was all right’) to think that it’s what she has done to him, whatever it is, that makes them want to get away from him? Finally, what does Strether mean when he says ‘with a laugh’ that she hasn’t done it yet—whatever it is she is supposed to have done?

The list of questions is longer than the passage that raises them; but this is not surprising—it takes less space to produce an obscurity than to explain why it is obscure. I give my gloss for what it is worth. Maria is telling Strether that Chad and Madame de Vionnet want to get away from him because they are beginning to find his constant surveillance nerve-racking. The thought that passes through Strether’s mind, making him change colour, is that they are finding his surveillance nerve-racking because their ‘virtuous attachment’ is not virtuous, and they are getting tired of having to conceal this from him. Having pushed this disagreeable thought aside, he takes refuge in an alternative explanation of Maria’s cryptic remark: they want to get away from him because it oppresses them to think how they are ‘exploiting’ him in the interests of maintaining their relationship, and in particular what he has lost as a consequence of their ‘exploitation’ (Mrs Newsome, and all the benefits for him of marrying her). This is what they have ‘done’ to him; but it is Marie de Vionnet in particular, Maria reminds him, who had ‘done’ it, because her need of Chad is greater than his of her (a point already sufficiently established). In that case, Strether’s last remark (‘Ah but she hasn’t done it yet!’), the most cryptic of all, may mean that she hasn’t yet caused him to lose all, because he is still within the six-week’s period of grace allowed him by Sarah Pocock, and may yet decide to join them (with Chad, of course) at Liverpool for the voyage back to America—in which case ‘all losses are restored’ and it is paradise regained for Strether.

An alternative reading is to give Maria’s words a simpler, less portentous meaning. When she says ‘Don’t find me rude if I say I should think they’d want to [get away from you]’, what she means, and what Strether understands her to mean, is that he is simply becoming a bore to them with his perpetual hanging around them, and they just want to be on their own for a bit. This is the thought that makes Strether change colour: he finds it most disagreeable to suppose that the brilliant pair, and especially of course Marie de Vionnet, are beginning to be bored by him. So he pushes the thought aside, and suggests instead (as on the first reading) that they want to get away from him because of their bad conscience about what they have been the cause of his losing, this being what they have ‘done’ to him, and she, Madame de Vionnet, in particular. The meaning of Strether’s last statement, ‘Ah but she hasn’t done it yet!’, would then be the same as on the previous reading.

These are both possible readings of the passage. But one cannot be sure that either is correct— that there may not be another, quite different reading that ‘covers’ the elusive data at least as well or perhaps better; and it is significant that neither of the readings I have proposed appears to be decisively confirmed by anything—any act or speech— elsewhere in the book. Perhaps this passage, among others, ought to be treated as a Jamesian ‘crux’, analogous to a crux in Shakespeare, which will require time and the cumulative labours of many James scholars to discover its best reading.

I cite another passage which, as is stands, is equally obscure, baffling, and ‘ambiguous’. It is the dialogue in Book IX, Chapter 1 between Strether and Madame de Vionnet in the scene in which she tells him about the marriage that has been ‘arranged’ for Jeanne. It too comes at the end of the scene, and starts when Madame de Vionnet pronounces the words ‘And—willingly, at least— he [Chad] would never hurt me’. At this, there flashes upon Strether ‘a light, a lead’ that, together with the expression of her face, tells him ‘her whole story’ as never before. The light grows, becoming ever more luminous as the passage proceeds to its close, its revelation apparently reinforced by ‘the refined disguised suppressed passion of her face’. What is this light, this lead?— you ask yourself. What is the momentous revelation Strether has had by it? There is no clue, no hint, in the passage itself, and you gaze at it baffled, wondering whether the answer might be this, or that, or something else, without much confidence in any of your hypotheses.

But in this instance salvation is just round the corner. In the very next chapter, Strether briefly gives Maria Gostrey the gloss we need. Chad had helped to arrange Jeanne’s marriage as a proof to Madame de Vionnet of his unwavering ‘attachment’ to her following her cold treatment by Sarah Pocock: ‘The act is his answer to Mrs Newsome’s demonstration’, he tells Maria; ‘she [Madame de Vionnet] asked for a sign, and he thought of that one’. What Strether had seen in Marie de Vionnet’s face was presumably the intense happiness and relief it was to her to have had this ‘sign’ from Chad, and this had been for him the ‘light’, the ‘lead’, for understanding the depth of her feeling for Chad and the ‘suppressed passion’ behind and beneath it.

This is how Strether interprets Madame de Vionnet’s presumed happiness and relief, along with the ‘the refined disguised suppressed passion of her face’. But the reader, who knows—as Strether doesn’t yet—‘the deep deep truth’ about her relationship with Chad, may legitimately see more in and behind Chad’s demonstration. He may, more cynically, see the marrying off of Jeanne as a means also of getting out of the way an unmarried daughter whose presence in the house would be an impediment to the mutual pair’s complete freedom to pursue their relationship. And he may even see Jeanne’s departure as, in her mother’s eyes, the removal of a possible rival, even though Chad had plainly shown that it was the mother not the daughter he wanted. Nevertheless, if in her last scene with Strether Marie de Vionnet can call herself ‘old and abject and hideous’, even if only in the self-despising mood of that moment, she might well be happy and relieved—in the depths of her subconscious, of course—to have a beautiful young daughter safely removed by marriage from the possible role of temptress to a lover who happened to be closer in age to the daughter than to the mother.

The ambiguity I have so far talked about is mainly a function of James’s late style, which deliberately resorts to the cryptic, the elusive, the mystifying for its own special ends. There is however another kind of ambiguity to be considered, where ‘ambiguous’ has a more precise meaning than just obscure, puzzling, baffling, and so forth. It is to be found in only a limited number of James’s works, the paradigms being The Turn of the Screw (1898) and The Sacred Fount (1901). The remaining works are The Lesson of the Master (1892), The Figure in the Carpet (1896), and The Golden Bowl (1904). But there are patches or ‘pockets’ of this kind of ambiguity in (for example) The Aspern Pa- pers (1888), The Spoils of Poynton (1897) and The Wings of the Dove (1902); and, as we shall see, in The Ambassadors.

If the paradigm works, everything can be read in two and only two ways. The text—meaning, every key episode, dialogue, and even utterance— admits of two alternative and contradictory readings, each self-complete and wholly consistent with all the data. In The Turn of the Screw, one of the two possible readings is that of the first-person narrator, the governness. On this reading, the children are being hideously corrupted by the apparitions of the two depraved servants, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, and the governess is the Jamesian saviour figure trying to redeem them from the evil to which they have succumbed. The alternative and contradictory reading is that the governess is psychically disturbed (from ‘sex-repression’, or whatever) and has imagined it all; in which case the apparitions are hallucinations of her deranged brain, the children are totally innocent of the depravity she attributes to them, and the governess herself is hideously guilty—of pursuing and harassing the children with her pathological suspicions, leading the girl to a nervous breakdown and the boy to his death. These and only these are the two possible readings of the story; and there is nothing to tilt the balance decisively in favour of one or the other, thus leaving the ambiguity total and unresolved.

In The Sacred Fount the ambiguity is of the same kind, though the outcome is not tragic as it is in The Turn of the Screw. Either the first-person narrator’s observations and explanations are valid, in which case the strange changes he sees in the principals are real and his ‘vampire’ hypothesis to explain the changes is confirmed. Or the narrator is wholly and pathologically deluded, in which case the supposed changes are imaginary, and the narrator is an unsavoury voyeur who deserves his final exposure by the energetic Mrs Brissenden.

The Ambassadors as a whole is by no means ambiguous in this special sense. But it has one great ‘pocket’ of this kind of ambiguity; and it turns on Chad’s transformation. The matter of Chad’s transformation is obviously of key importance in Strether’s ‘process of vision’ and his transvaluation of values vis-a-vis Woollett. It is the foundation of his case for betraying his original mission, for pleading with Mrs Newsome to let Chad stay back with the wonderful woman who has wrought the transformation, for pleading with Chad never to abandon the wonderful woman, and for himself suffering the loss of Mrs Newsome and the security, the affection, the esteem he would have had by marrying her. If Chad was not transformed, or even less radically transformed than Strether supposed, all Strether had built on it collapsed—‘cracked’ and ‘crumbled’, in his own words.

So it is disconcerting to find the question suddenly arising in Strether’s mind: Is Chad’s transformation real; or is it a figment of his imagination (which we know to be highly developed)? Is he seeing something that is objectively there to be seen, or is he just ‘seeing things’? The momentous and potentially shattering question springs up for him on the day of the Pocock’s arrival (Book VIII, Chapter 2), on his drive from the station with Jim Pocock; and his intense reflections on it proceed by three stages.

First, having observed that neither Sarah Pocock nor Jim has remarked on the change in Chad that he himself had found so overwhelming from his first encounter with Chad in the theatre box, he firmly dismisses their ‘sightlessness’ as a function of their philistine lack of imagination or their bad faith or both:

It all suddenly bounced back to their being either stupid or wilful. It was more probably on the whole the former; so that would be the drawback of [Sarah’s] bridling brightness . . . Their observation would fail; it would be beyond them; they simply wouldn’t understand. Of what use would it be then that they had come?—if they weren’t to be intelligent up to that point.

Immediately, however, in the same breath, the great doubt about his own ‘observation’ leaps up in his mind, and grows and grows like a spreading fire from the moment he asks himself whether he himself might not be ‘utterly deluded and extravagant’:

Was he, on this question of Chad’s improvement, fantastic and away from the truth? Did he live in a false world, a world that had grown simply to suit him, and was his present slight irritation—in the face now of Jim’s silence in particular—but the alarm of the vain thing menaced by the touch of the real? Was this contribution of the real possibly the mission of the Pococks—had they come to make the work of observation, as he had practised observation, crack and crumble, and to reduce Chad to the plain terms in which honest minds could deal with him? Had they come in short to be sane, where Strether was destined to feel that he himself had only been silly?

Strether’s copiousness in drawing out the implications of his moment of self-doubt stands in sharp contrast to the spareness of the governess in The Turn of the Screw when, shortly before Miles dies, the terrifying thought crosses her mind that the child may after all be innocent: ‘If he was innocent, what then on earth was I?’ she cries to herself. And the narrator in The Sacred Fount, when he sees his wonderful ‘palace of thought’ crack and crumble (Strether’s terms exactly fit his case) in his showdown with Mrs Brissenden, is likewise more succinct: ‘What if she should be right?’ he murmurs inwardly. But the point is the same; it is the moment of radical self-doubt and self-misgiving, which is a crucial element in the pattern of the Jamesian ambiguity of the kind I am describing.

The third stage of Strether’s process of coping with the frightening thought that he may have been deluded about Chad’s transformation is also integral to the pattern. It is the justification, or rejustification, of his own perception by mentally reviewing the witnesses who have confirmed its validity:

He glanced at such a contingency [‘that he himself had only been silly’], but it failed to hold him long when once he had reflected that he would have been silly, in this case, with Maria Gostrey and little Bilham, with Madame de Vionnet and little Jeanne, with Lambert Strether, in fine, and above all with Chad Newsome himself. Wouldn’t it be found to have made more for reality to be silly with these persons than sane with Sarah and Jim?

So Strether concludes that he is, must be, ‘all right’ after all if his vision is supported by such a cloud of distinguished witnesses. But the reader experienced in the subtleties of the Jamesian method of ensuring that the ambiguity shall remain totally unresolved will recognise that Strether’s supposed witnesses are either not witnesses at all, or are not ‘reliable’ because not disinterested witnesses. Maria Gostrey is the first to be struck off Strether’s list. Maria never knew Chad before his supposed transformation—so how could she know whether he had or hadn’t been transformed? The answer is, she doesn’t know; she has only taken Strether’s word for it that there has been a transformation, and that it is as marvellous as he says. Madame de Vionnet and Chad, being the most interested ‘parties’ in the case, are ipso facto ruled out as objective witnesses. Little Bilham, as a close friend of Chad and wholly committed to his ‘cause’, is likewise ruled out; and it is surely significant that when he appears to be explicitly confirming the change in Chad, he immediately throws in the qualification: ‘But I’m not sure that I didn’t like him about as well in his other state’. And later again:

"He wasn’t so bad before [the transformation] as I seem to have made out that you think—"(says Little Bilham).

"Oh I don’t think anything now!" Strether impatiently broke in . . . "I mean that originally, for her [Madame de Vionnet] to have cared for him—"

"There must have been stuff in him? Oh yes, there was stuff indeed, and much more of it than ever showed, I dare say, at home."

These may be intended as hints to the reader that the change in Chad is not as great or remarkable as Strether sees it to be, and that little Bilham’s honesty obliges him delicately to correct Strether’s ‘exaggerated’ view. Or it may even mean that there is no change at all, and Bilham’s seeming confirmation of it is just another ‘technical lie’ in support of Chad, of a piece with his lie about the ‘virtuous attachment’.

As to ‘little Jeanne’: there is no mention anywhere of her having perceived a change in Chad; and Strether can be drawing on her as a witness only because he assumes that, being Madame de Vionnet’s daughter, she must necessarily ‘see’ what maman sees; or, alternatively, because he assumes that, if she is secretly in love with Chad, she could only be in love with him if he had been transformed. Finally, there is Mamie Pocock: whom Strether does not include in his list of witnesses because at this point he has not yet had his private meeting with her. The case of Mamie is particularly interesting. Strether tells Madame de Vionnet even before he has had his talk with Mamie that ‘she sees him [Chad] as different’. Then, at their meeting in Sarah’s hotel salon, he feels he has received all the confirmation he wants of Mamie’s ‘seeing’ what Sarah and Jim have failed to see; and afterwards, in his talk with little Bilham, inspires his young friend to develop his great theory, about Mamie’s being unable to be in love with Chad because she came out to ‘save’ him, but seeing him already ‘saved’ had nothing to do in that direction. However, when we re-read Strether’s long talk with Mamie in search of evidence for his conviction that she ‘sees’, we discover that Mamie has actually said nothing—not a word—about it. Strether has merely inferred from her behaviour that she must have seen the change in Chad; and is so certain about his inference that he treats it as a fact. But it is not a fact; and the disposition of a mind like Strether’s to mistake inferences and assumptions for facts and convince others of the factuality of the non-facts is exactly one of the psychological phenomena that Henry James cunningly exploits as a device for creating and sustaining his ambiguity.

What we discover, then, is that there is no reliable independent confirmation of Strether’s perception of the change in Chad, which is the start- ing point of his drama of consciousness, and, consequently, that a huge question-mark hangs over the validity of Strether’s vision. This does not mean of course that Strether’s perception has been proved to be false. On the contrary, his vision of a Chad transformed remains intact as one of the two possible true interpretations of the data. The transformation may be exactly as Strether sees it—as radical and portentous; Waymarsh and the Pococks who don’t see it may be exactly as ‘sightless’ as Strether says they are; the cloud of witnesses he invokes (Chad, Madame de Vionnet, little Bilham) may all be speaking the objective truth in confirming his vision; and about those who don’t speak (Jeanne and Mamie) his inference that they see the change in Chad may be totally correct. In short, just as in The Turn of the Screw the governess’ account of what happened at Bly may be completely valid, so may Strether’s of what happened to Chad.

This precisely is the design of the Jamesian ambiguity: to leave the reader faced with two and only two interpretations of the data, which are mutually exclusive (meaning, that if one is true, the other is necessarily false—Chad cannot both be and not be transformed); yet each of which is wholly consistent with all the available evidence—in this instance, the evidence of the witnesses, which may be read both ways, as confirming one interpretation (Strether’s) and disconfirming the other (the Pocock’s), or confirming the Pocock’s and disconfirming Strether’s. Nor is there a single piece of evidence that decisively tilts the balance in favour of one interpretation or the other; that there shall be none is another basic rule of the Jamesian ambiguity. Consequently, there are no grounds on the basis of the evidence—in other words, no ‘rational’ grounds—for choosing one interpretation as more valid than the other.

If you do choose—as Strether does, as the governess in The Turn of the Screw does—you can choose only on the basis of something other than the evidence. You can choose, in a word, only by an act of faith—‘blind’ faith—in the validity and integrity of your own vision. And this is the deep truth about human experience and human knowledge that the Jamesian ambiguity is designed to dramatise. When in life a crucial act of choice has to be made between two and only two possible lines of action, figured in the two and only two possible interpretations of the Jamesian fiction, and the facts or data constituting the evidence are intractably ambiguous in supporting with equal force and decisiveness both of the two and only two alternatives, the crucial choice can only be made by an act of faith—which in effect by-passes, ignores, and transcends the evidence, leaving you with your lone unsupported vision of things as the sole basis of your choice. . . .

Source: Dorothea Krook, “The Ambassadors: Two Types of Ambiguity,” in Neophilologus, Vol. LXXIV, No. 1, January 1990, pp. 194–97.