...Mildred E. Hartsock Copyright © 1965 by Duke University Press 1965 THE DIZZYING CREST: STRETHER AS MORAL MAN By MILDREDE. HARTSOCK Albert Camus said that the truly free man, perceiving the philosophic absurdity of the human condition, with its...

... strong hint in the Preface that The Ambmsadors is an elaborate and deliberate reworking of a theme he had explored earlier. Speaking of the opportunity to treat Lambert Strether as a man of considerable imagination, James remarks that “it was only...

...Elsa Nettels Copyright © 1970 by Duke University Press 1970 THE AMBASSADORS AND THE SENSE OF THE PAST By ELSANETTELS Lambert Strether, the central character of The Ambassadors, is Henry James’s most detailed...

...- ences on which it was based in depicting Lambert Strether’s arrival in the English town at the beginning of The Ambassadors.8 The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, I1 (London and Philadelphia, 1962), 175, 184. See “Chester,” Transatlantic Sketches (Boston, 1875), pp. 7-19...

... of the novel’s fictional world. According to James, readers do not “see” anything — not even “strange shadows” — through Lambert Strether.15 In a passage that continues a metaphor, established earlier, about the novel as “a child’s magic-lantern” through which a “moveable shadow” is “project[ed]” (364...

... habit, “the indexical”-all those nearly empty phrases in which the Jamesian character bypasses definition in order to gesture at the immediate (“it’sas I am,” “she’s Zih that,” “I’ve done this “Then there we are,” says Strether at last; after so much ambiguity and duplicity, the phrase...

... magination ,” “Fantasy and Dream,” “Memory and Memories,” “Abuses of Narrative”-and then uses each as an occasion for ranging very widely among ostensible examples. So Lambert Strether, Maggie Tulliver, Jane Eyre, Ivan Karamazov, Don Quixote, Joseph K., and Lewis Carroll’s Alice all appear...

... indicates whether that means further growth in the heroine or the treat- ment of other characters. She disqualifies Henry James’s Ambassadors, which most readers would call a novel of midlife progress, with the re- peated claim that it is too late for Lambert Strether and without acknowl- edging...

..., in the second poem of part 2, to the character of Lambert Strether. Indeed, Kenner finds the whole second part of Mauberley to be 5) To Felix A. Schelling, 8 July 1922, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), p. 180. 44...

...Paul Giles Jonathan Dollimore. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. x + 388 pp. $35.00 cloth, $14.95 paper. Copyright © 1991 by Duke University Press 1991 MILLICENT BELL 355 ence . . . one of its major thematic concerns” (p. 221). Strether...

..., Dowel1 and Ashburnham, Strether and Chad Newsome, Nick Carraway and Gatsby, Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay, among many other instances, provide variants on this form. In place of a conventional romantic tie, these characters are bound through relations of iden- tification and opposition...

.... 221). Strether, the hero of that great novel, enacts his creator’s pilgrimage of openness as he launches upon his adventure, “ready to drop the thread of principles already estab- lished” and seize “accidental opportunities off to the side of the direct path.” He must sever connection...

... Fount to the novel James began immediately after, The Ambassadors, shows that both the narra- tor and Strether seek out the truth about a hidden affair.* Most important, comparison of the narrator with Mr. Longdon...

.... Its positive examples are James’s Lambert Strether or Milly Theale, Charlotte Bronte’s hero- ines, or Pamela herself, characters who cause other lives to turn about their own because of their steadiness or their devotion to their interior 4 Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir...

... novel. They occupy a special place in modernist fiction, with its resistance to the hierarchies and teleologies of traditional narrative. Consider the many prominent modernist novels that are defined by the presence of a recessive-yet-obtrusive, dominant-yet-peripheral character: Lambert Strether...

... as 1944 by E. M. Wilkinson (“Toni0 Krogm: An Interpretation,” reprinted in Thomas Mann: A Collection of Critical I.3ssnys, ed. Henry Hatfield [Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 19641, pp. 22-34), and it was still being reaffirmed thirty years later by Christopher Hoile (“Lambert Strether and the Boaters...