Untitled Document

Strether’s path

1) Strether Mrs. Newsome’s ambassador; shares her impression of Chad as willful, childish, reluctant to take up familial responsibility and in the thrall of a decadent, Parisian woman.

2) reaching England, he is conscious of himself as in ‘foreign’ territory where the familiar rules do not apply:

“Nothing could have been odder than Strether’s sense of himself as at that moment launched in something of which the sense would be quite disconnected from the sense of his past and which as literally beginning there and then” (I.i.20).

signals that he will be forced to confront a new world and we don’t know how he will react.
repeatedly shown his confusion; he tells Waymarsh: “You can’t make out over here what people do know” (III.1.75).
rules are different on all levels – social, moral, political

“It was interesting to him to feel that he was in the presence of new measures, other standards, a different scale of relations….” (III.1.79).

3) His weakness is that he cannot be in the moment; he looks at his watch while speaking to Miss Gostrey and then says of himself:

“I’m always considering something else; something else, I mean than the thing of the moment. The obsession of the other thing is the terror. I’m considering at present for instance something else than you (I.1.26-7).

Miss Gostrey asks “’Will you give yourself up?’ and he replies, “’If only I could! But that’s the deuce of it – that I never can. No – I can’t’” (I.1.27).

Reader sees Strether’s desire for a different kind of awareness, a different life

4) But present life is shaped by Mrs. Newsome’s needs and wishes. Waymarsh says to him:

“It’s generally felt, you know, that she follows you up pretty close” ( I.2.33).
When Maria asks him what kind of review he edits, he describes the colour of the cover, not the content of the review.

5. Paris marks the beginning of coming to himself

waiting for his letters of credit from Mrs. Newsome, he finds it difficult at first to do “nothing”
then suddenly taken with the notion of walking around, as if on a pilgrimage; he takes in Rue de la Paix, Tuileries, river, Luxembourg gardens, the bookstalls

· in a moment of reflection recalls his honeymoon trip to Paris after the Civil War, paid for with money that was set aside for something tangible and ‘serious’. He remembers promises he made to himself that he didn’t keep, the books he took home that represented his “initiation” but instead came to be mere symbols of his ‘good taste’

· sees how his vision for his life shifted from being in the moment to goal-oriented, from “being” to static achievement

· now identifies with Chad and his friends who are painters, sculptors, architects, medical students (II.2.67)

· recognizes that he is wandering around “on some chance of feeling the brush of the wing of the stray spirit of youth” (II.2.69).

6. Sees that Chad has changed; where he was “too vulgar for his privelege” (II.2.69), he is now:

"brown and thick and strong; and of old Chad had been rough. Was all the difference therefore that he was actually smooth? Possibly; for that he was smooth was as marked as in the taste of a sauce or in the rub of a hand. The effect of it was general – it had cleared his eyes and settled his colour and polished his fine square teeth – the main ornament of his face; and at the same time that it had given him a form and a surface, almost a design, it had toned his voice, established his accent, encouraged his smile to more play and his other motions to less. He had formerly, with a great deal of action expressed very little; and he now expressed whatever was necessary with almost none at all. It was as if in short he had really, copious perhaps but shapeless, been put into a firm mould and turned successfully out. The phenomenon – Strether kept eyeing it as a phenomenon, an eminent case – was marked enough to be touched by a finger" (IV.1.100).

7. Growing awareness of Paris milieu

Becomes indifferent to Chad’s ‘problem’ and to the task of “saving” him. When Maria Gostrey asks him whether Chad is involved with a woman, Strether replies: “’How do I know? And what do I care?’” (III.2.83).
becomes apparent that more than a woman’s attentions holds Chad in Paris (104).
Strether wants to “pass” at Gloriani’s party, to be acceptable to the artist community (V.1.126). Clear that Strether no longer identifies with the attitudes of Boston which he was sent out to Paris to represent and enforce

8. His epiphany:

In a conversation with Bilham, Strether says:

“All the same don’t forget that you’re young – blessedly young; be glad of it on the contrary and live up to it. Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? This place and these impressions – mild as you may find them to wind a man up so; all my impressions – of Chad and of people I’ve seen at his place – well, have had their abundant message for me, have just dropped that into my mind. I see it now. I haven’t done so enough before – and now I’m old; too old at any rate for what I see. Oh, I do see, at least; and more than you’d believe or I can express. It’s too late. And it’s as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the gumption to know it was there. Now I hear its faint receding whistle miles and miles down the line. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. The affair – I mean the affair of life – couldn’t no doubt, have been different for me; for it’s at the best a tin mould, either fluted and embossed, with ornamental excrescences, to else smooth and dreadfully plain, into which, a helpless jelly, one’s consciousness is poured – so that one ‘takes’ the form, as the great cook says, and is more or less compactly held by it; one lives in fine as one can. Still, one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t be, like me, without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it; I don’t quite know which. Of course at present I’m a case of reaction against the mistake; and the voice of reaction should, no doubt, always be taken with an allowance. But that doesn’t affect the point that the right time is now yours. The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have. You’ve plenty; that’s the great thing; you’re, as I say, damn you, so happily and hatefully young. Don’t at any rate miss things out of stupidity. Of course I don’t take you for a fool, or I shouldn’t be addressing you thus awfully. Do what you like so long as you don’t make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!”… (V.2.137-8).

9. Arrival of Sarah, Jim and Melanie reveals the change in Strether; he now sees:

· Boston is a “society of women” (VIII.2.224)

· Jim is an annoying tourist

· the ‘black and white’ morality of Boston vs. the shades of Paris

· endures Sarah’s vicious diatribe; sees her perceptions of him (X.3. 292); his behaviour is perceived as a humiliation, his conduct an “outrage to women like us”.

10. The irony

The boat scene (XI.3.324) – realizes that he has misperceived the situation between Chad and Mdm de Vionnet
has sacrificed his life of financial security with Mrs. Newsome for Chad on a mistaken pretence
the relationship between Chad and Madame de Vionnet is, by Boston standards, not ‘virtuous, as Bilham has claimed
Chad isn’t going to ‘stay on’
Ending challenges the notion of linear progress as revealed in the building of Strether’s character.