Formal Heterogeneity And Ethical Acbivalence In The Ambassadors

This thesis reads The Ambassadors as a socially symbolic narrative of Henry James's Utopian impulse towards an ethical resolution to the cross-cultural conflicts in the increasingly commercialized and cosmopolitan world at the turn of the twentieth century To be specific,this thesis argues that James's formal strategies in this novel,including the intended yet actually-unaccomplished use of Strether's single narrative viewpoint,the dialectic enactment of the melodramatic,and the appropriation of Bildungsroman's generic conventions,effect a formal heterogeneity to go beyond the moral polarities of good and evil attributed to American puritan innocence and European sophistication.This narrative effect of ethical ambivalence,presented through a dense style that frustrates easy grammatical analysis,demands the reader's engagement into the fictional world,responding to the focal character's visual activities.This readerly responsibility further symbolizes the ethical responsibility of appreciating and honoring social difference.Such a narrative effect,as this thesis will argue,parallels Strether's journey of epistemological crisis in Paris.This transatlantic encounter requires him to undertake the responsibility to critically contemplate on the American Self and to make ethical decisions with a sincere concern for social otherness.Beginning the analysis from the perspective of narrative point of view,the first chapter gives weight to the political unconscious underneath James's unease and difficulty in maintaining the singularity of Strether's viewpoint throughout the narrative progression Such impossibility of singularity invokes an ethical ambivalence and affective uneasiness that envelops Strether's shame-inducing act of seeing in Paris.It not only generates a distancing position from Strether's Puritan codes and American commercialist values,but also makes manifest the optical illusion constructed by the potential deceptiveness of Parisian art.Free indirect discourse,as this chapter will show,constitutes a significant stylistic apparatus that coheres with such impossible point of view.Through the double voices of free indirect discourse,James integrates the narrator's/other character's/unknown subject's perspective into the narrative discourse,which serves as an ethical reader of Strether's psychological complexity and produces an engaging effect that motivates readers' contemplation of Strether's American mindsetJames's dialectic enactment of "the melodramatic" in The Ambassadors constitutes the second aesthetic dimension this thesis aims to explore.On the one hand,this novel downplays the melodramatic elements of external actions such as the suspenseful menace,pursuit and combat.On the other,James reinforces the melodramatic intensity by presenting Strether's mental deliberation evoked by the uncertain knowledge in Paris.Such a theatrical intensity is further increased through the incongruity between James's style of"excess" and the "lack" of narrative information.More importantly,James's enactment of theatricality shape all the fictional characters of this novel into an indivisible cast.This collective presence generates a de-personalizing effect,which frustrates the reader's easy identification with certain characters and hence contributes to the overall ethical ambivalence dominating in this novel.Besides,the scenic method reveals James's re-channeled passion for theatrical effect and his ambivalent desire to gain a popular success in theater.It also registers the conflicts between the high culture(the art of the novel)and the mass culture(the profitable drama industry)at the turn of centuryThe third chapter deals with this novel's complication of the reader's emotional responses and ethical judgments by appropriating generic conventions of Bildungsroman Regarding the characterization of male characters,Chad's growth is revealed as superficial and deceptive.Strether's femininized inaction and his reversed father-son relationship with Chad ironically risk his own financial security and future marriage.Such a plot progression goes against the narrative pattern in the conventional Bildungsroman.With respect to the Parisian woman Mme de Vionnet,the plot progression of The Ambassadors gradually complicates her characterological function by showing her feminine agency in enabling the male characters' aesthetic education,thus complicates the reader's ethical judgment toward her.In other words,Vionnet serves as a socially symbolic character that not only points to women's underrated affective labor in the American modernization and capitalism,but also helps present James's Utopian prospect that women can provide the aesthetic vehicle in the increasingly commercialized and cosmopolitan world.