Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity. Leland S. Person
“The Aspern Papers” (132). The 1833–34 relationship between the thirty-year-old Sand and a man six years her junior must have had an additional resonance for James between 1897 and 1902, when his first two long essays on Sand appeared, because he was basing a novel, The Ambassadors, on an analogous situation. Marie de Vionnet’s romance with Chad Newsome forms both the pretext for Lambert Strether’s return to France and the context for whatever “treasures of imagination” Strether gleans from his experience (NY 22: 224). Similarly, Sand’s romance with Musset provides James with the pretext for confronting issues of sexuality and writing and with the context for his own treasure hunting. Convinced that the Sand-Musset affair is the most “suggestive” in the “annals of ‘passion,’” James regards as “treasures of the human imagination” the “poems, the letters, the diaries, the novels, the unextinguished accents and lingering echoes that commemorate” that passion (“George Sand: The New Life” 769).
In turning to The Ambassadors, I wish not to argue for Sand’s influence on the novel or on the character of Marie de Vionnet but to demonstrate how James’s three Sand essays and The Ambassadors engage one another in a conversation about the suspense of masculinity suggested in “Hugh Merrow.” Both the essays and the novel represent a masculinity that must be reconstructed in the aftermath of a woman’s challenge, and when Strether finally realizes that Marie de Vionnet and Chad are lovers, he finds himself—like James in the essays on Sand—facing questions about his own gender and sexuality.20 James took Strether’s first and middle names from Balzac’s novel Lewis Lambert, and his solution to Strether’s suspense resembles Balzac’s solution to his own—putting a woman in her place in order to reestablish the masculine identity she has put in jeopardy. As with most of James’s ostensible solutions to subjective problems, however, Strether’s male identity does not rest easily in any single configuration.
Patricia Thomson has cited several parallels between Sand and The Ambassadors, arguing for example that Sand’s Stephen Morin in Mademoiselle Merquem serves as a model for Strether and as a source of his famous “Live all you can” speech to Little Bilham, and connecting Chad’s affair with the older Marie de Vionnet and Sand’s affair with Alfred de Musset (235, 242). James’s own description of Sand in 1914 as the “supreme case of the successful practice of life itself” (Review of George Sand 778) suggests that, like Madame de Vionnet for Chad and potentially for Strether, Sand served a paradigmatic function for James. One early reviewer for the Literary World complained that “no business men could find the time” to read The Ambassadors (Hayes 406), but the failure of Strether’s ambassadorial mission to retrieve Chad for the family manufacturing business and thus for conventional masculinity opens other possibilities for Chad and himself. Those possibilities center upon Marie de Vionnet. Strether’s desire to learn the “art of taking things as they came” (21: 83) means learning the very lesson that James had attempted to learn from Sand, for in James’s view, “making acquaintance with life at first hand” was the “great thing” that Sand achieved (“George Sand” [Galaxy] 716). In both cases, furthermore, the anxiety generated by the lesson is projected upon the woman responsible. James’s characterization of Marie de Vionnet as the “party responsible” for the “miracle almost monstrous” of Chad’s transformation (21: 167) echoes the “monstrous vitality” that James described in Sand in the same year (“George Sand: The New Life” 774). Both metaphors register the anxiety and the thrill that James felt as he contemplated the metamorphic effect that these women portended for men. As the “fate that waits for one, the dark doom that rides” (21: 167), Madame de Vionnet also suggests James’s ominous characterization of Sand as the “rather sorry ghost that beckons [him] on furthest” (“She and He” 746). Although Marie de Vionnet, like the earlier Claire de Cintré in The American, seems to epitomize French femininity and thus the fulfillment for men of rather conventional masculine ideals (within a heterosexual register), James still confronts Strether with unstable possibilities of gender and sexual identification as he worries over the riddle of what relation Chad enjoys with her.
Eric Haralson notes that Strether’s very lack of conventional masculine attributes makes him the “perfect bearer of the novel’s argument, its necessarily gentle dissent from uniform masculinity and compulsory sexuality” (“Lambert Strether’s” 182). As early as his third night in London, Strether’s sense of gender differences faces a significant test that places his ability to fulfill his manly reclamation project in serious jeopardy. To fulfill that mission without being wholly hypocritical or purely mercenary, Strether would have to find Chad himself in need of reclamation—that is, deformed or corrupted. As Strether gives himself over to “uncontrolled perceptions” (21: 50) and lets his “imagination roam” (21: 51) at the theater, however, he recognizes how difficult any such diagnosis will be. He comes face to face with a “world of types” and with a “connexion above all in which the figures and faces in the stalls were interchangeable with those on the stage” (21: 53). In short, he enters a carnivalesque world of performance that “penetrated” him as if with the “naked elbow of his neighbour” (21: 53):
Those before him and around him were not as the types of Woollett, where, for that matter, it had begun to seem to him that there must only have been the male and the female. These made two exactly, even with the individual varieties. Here, on the other hand, apart from the personal and the sexual range—which might be greater or less—a series of strong stamps had been applied, as it were, from without; stamps that his observation played with as, before a glass case on a table, it might have passed from medal to medal and from copper to gold. (21: 53)
Eerily, in view of the blurring between stage and stalls, when Strether turns his attention to the play, he discovers a “bad woman in a yellow frock” making a “pleasant weak good-looking young man in perpetual evening dress do the most dreadful things” (21: 53). Finding himself secretly sympathizing with the victim (whom he identifies with Chad), Strether indicates his own conflicted identification and desire. In analyzing this passage, Hugh Stevens concludes that the “spectacle of the London theatre creates for Strether a breakdown in certainty of sexual meanings, and this instability is experienced by him as not only intimidating, but also creative and exhilarating” (18).21 Despite its seeming conventionality, the play Strether watches places him in at least two subject positions. In identifying with the “good-looking young man” (Chad) and the position he occupies, Strether seems to acknowledge his own masochistic position in relation to Mrs. Newsome.22 Insofar as Strether differentiates himself from Chad in this scene, however, he occupies a female subject position as a “bad woman”—indicating, I think, the safest way he can imagine making Chad do “dreadful things” and placing him in a position uncannily similar to the one George Sand occupied for James in her relationship with Alfred de Musset. Marie de Vionnet, of course, plays the role of bad woman in the conventional melodramatic plot that Mrs. Newsome has projected upon her son, while Mrs. Newsome herself, in Strether’s imagination, plays that role for him. Strether’s imagination proves more subtle, however, as he imagines himself (gender) switching between roles in the play, and risking inversion as even a bad woman seems preferable to jeopardizing the heterosexual terms of subject-object relationship within the male imaginary that he embodies at this early point in the novel.
When he finally sees Chad in Paris, of course, Strether’s resolve proves weak indeed. James famously emphasizes Chad’s “sharp rupture” (21: 137) of identity and the “emotion of bewilderment” (21: 136) that Strether experiences as a result. “You could deal with a man as himself,” Strether thinks; “you couldn’t deal with him as somebody else” (21: 136). Paul Armstrong argues that “Chad’s difference from himself compels Strether to reconsider the whole issue of the stability and dependability of the world” (67), but the transformation James describes reflects more particular issues, because it pertains explicitly to the question of male identity and the relation between men. If Chad is no longer Chad, is Strether still Strether? Can one truly undergo what James later calls an “alteration of the entire man” (21: 167)? If so, than that potential alteration would include one’s gender and sexuality. As several critics have noted, moreover, Strether’s response to the first sight of Chad suggests a spontaneous eruption of desire that inverts his ambassadorial relation to the young man and forces him to confront