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CGU Theses & Dissertations
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2017
The Other Plot in The Ambassadors
Martha Rapp
Claremont Graduate University
Recommended Citation
Rapp, Martha. (2017). The Other Plot in The Ambassadors. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 105. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/
cgu_etd/105. doi: 10.5642/cguetd/105
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The Other Plot in The Ambassadors
by
Martha C. Rapp
Claremont Graduate University
2017
© Copyright Martha C. Rapp, 2017
All Rights Reserved
APPROVAL OF THE DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
This dissertation has been duly read, reviewed, and critiqued by the Committee listed below,
which hereby approves the manuscript of Martha C. Rapp as fulfilling the scope and quality
requirements for meriting the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English.
Wendy Martin, Chair
Claremont Graduate University
Professor of English
Eric Bulson
Claremont Graduate University
Professor of English
Mark Eaton
Azusa Pacific University
Professor of English
Abstract
The Other Plot in The Ambassadors
by
Martha C. Rapp
Claremont Graduate University: 2017
This dissertation argues that Henry James deliberately and ingeniously wrote The
Ambassadors (1903) as a double-plotted novel. The well-known traditional plot follows a
middle-aged American man, Lewis Lambert Strether, who goes to Paris as Mrs. Newsome’s
ambassador with the agreement that she will marry him (and share her fortune) if he succeeds at
bringing her son Chad home in order take over the family business in Woollett, Massachusetts.
While in Paris, Strether observes Chad in this cosmopolitan setting and attempts to ascertain the
nature of his relationship with Madame de Vionnet – who is married yet estranged from her
husband. As a result of his sojourn, Strether recognizes the narrowness of his American
morality, defects from his ambassadorial duty, and finds personal ethics in renouncing the
advantages that would be had at the expense of Chad’s freedom.
I argue that this plot serves as cover for an additional, fully formed narrative in which the
protagonist is a middle-aged American homosexual – the same Lambert Strether. In this
alternative, or Other Plot, Strether sets out as Mrs. Newsome’s ambassador, but does so primarily
in order to fulfill his needs as a gay man – one of which is a temporary escape to Paris, where he
can satisfy his sexual yearnings in the safety of the homosexual subculture. Once there, Chad’s
affairs take a backseat to Strether’s romantic relationships, which wax, wane, and finally flourish
– resulting in an enjoyable climax and satisfying conclusion. In this story, Strether does not
renounce but instead fulfills his dreams, making for a delightful, and often humorous, read.
James creates the Other Plot with the intention of pushing psychological realism to new heights
in The Ambassadors – illustrating with sympathetic acuity the mental and emotional workings of
a mature American man trying to balance, if not ameliorate, the many conflicts – engendered
from within and without – that beset his life as a homosexual. Strether’s physical journey to
England and France is simultaneously an existential one; exposure to the homosexual subcultures
of Europe initiates personal growth, self-acceptance, and encourages a life freed from the closet.
James coveys the Other Plot by means of an ingenious code that includes references to
actual sites in the homosexual subcultures of London and Paris, informing the characters
motivations and actions. By employing the semiotic method as outlined by Roland Barthes,
readers can analyze James’s intentional polyvalence and recognize the connotations that
contribute to this code. Such recognition is necessarily based on intensive biographical and
historical research in order to determine a field of signifiers that James’s contemporary readers
would most naturally draw from.
As opposed to recent scholarship that identifies homoerotic elements in The
Ambassadors, my dissertation explicates a full plot that presents homosexual characters
realistically and with psychological insights on the conflicts inherent in living as “Other” in the
nineteenth century. The existence of the Other Plot is important because its positive
representation of homosexual identity allowed readers a discursive space in which they could
examine their own same-sex affinities that rarely existed at the fin de siècle.
Dedicated to John Halperin
Brilliant biographer, excellent teacher, inspiring mentor, and friend.
He takes James to heart: “Be kind.”
Acknowledgements
I want to thank my dissertation Committee: Dr. Wendy Martin, Dr. Eric Bulson, and Dr.
Mark Eaton. Their input on my project was invaluable. Dr. Martin’s patience, support, and
responsiveness brought my dissertation to fruition. She is amazingly adept at extending a warm
hand via email.
Donald E. Hall exposed me to Foucault and Queer Theory in the late 1990s, for which I
am tremendously grateful. An excellent teacher, Donald’s convictions and fortitude continue to
be inspiring.
I cannot adequately express the extent of my gratitude to Dr. Jack Solomon. My first
reading in 2003 of Signs of Life in the USA (which is now going into its ninth edition) changed
my life by exposing me to a new way of seeing the surrounding world and its many facets. He
taught me how to think – not what to think – and how to convey these thoughts clearly and
succinctly. The insights Jack has shared with me and his seemingly bottomless support of my
endeavors are gifts for which I will always be indebted.
Finally, I am deeply grateful to my mother, who brought a DOS based IMB clone
computer to my house in 1992 and taught me how to use a word-processor. I owe my teaching
career and scholarly accomplishments to her for this – and many, many other reasons. She was
exceedingly gracious in letting me talk about Henry James for hours at a time and even managed
to sound convincing when saying she wasn’t tired of listening to me.
vi
Table of Contents
Abstract
Dedication
Acknowledgements ………………..……………………………………..….. vi
Chapter 1: Introduction: Finding the Thread in the Other Plot ………………. 1
Structure …………………………………………………………….… 28
The Jamesian Code ……………………………………………………. 31
Strether’s Backstory ………………………………………...………… 36
Chapter 2: Strether and Waymarsh Learn How to Cruise ……………..…….. 43
Chapter 3: Love in Paris …………………………………………………….. 135
Chapter 4: Bringing Homosexuality Home ………………………………… 208
Conclusion: Henry James and the “Homosexual Canon” ………..…………… 285
Works Cited ………………………………………………………………….. 291
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Finding the Thread in the Other Plot
“‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!’”
Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” (1884)
Throughout the Preface to The Ambassadors (1903) – written for the New York Edition
in 1905 – Henry James suggests that more is going on in the novel than easily meets the eye.
Direct revelation is not his plan. Instead he lures readers into his “‘hunt’ for Lambert Strether”
(xxxiv): a shadow projected “upon that wide field of the artist’s vision – which hangs there ever
in place like the white sheet suspended for the figures of a child’s magic-lantern – a more
fantastic and more moveable shadow” (xxxiii). James toys with us, saying “Nothing is more
easy than to state the subject of The Ambassadors … The whole case, in fine, is in Lambert
Strether’s irrepressible outbreak to little Bilham on the Sunday afternoon in Gloriani’s garden”
(xxix). Yet it is a “licentious record” (xxxiv) we are provoked to seek out – an immodest or
lascivious tale. He guides us towards a particular interpretation: the “rightly-conceived” drama
rests “on the strength of any respectable hint. It being thus the respectable hint that I had with
such avidity picked up, what would be the story to which it would most inevitably form the
centre?” (xxxiii). James speaks as the reader here: if “I” found a clue, where would it lead me?
We get the sense that it is towards something scandalous due to the “splendid impudence” that
spurs the story, written with James’s “heart in his mouth” (xxxvi, xl). None the less, he is in a
sporting mood:
No privilege of the teller of tales and the handler of puppets is more delightful, or has
more of the suspense and the thrill of a game of difficulty breathlessly played, than just
this business of looking for the unseen and the occult, in a scheme half-grasped, by the
light or, so to speak, by the clinging scent, of the gage already in hand. No dreadful old
1
pursuit of the hidden slave with bloodhounds and the rag of association can ever, for
“excitement,” I judge, have bettered it at its best.” (xxxiii)
There is a whiff of danger here, the pursuit with bloodhounds adding intensity to the “hunt” for
Lambert Strether. James wants us to join him in this game of the occult – communicated only to
the initiated – although its “concrete existence … may more or less obscurely lurk” (xxxiii). As
the Preface advises us how to read The Ambassadors, James is not concerned at this point if we
do not know what to make of his scheme but wants to tell us “very delightfully and very
damnably, where to put one’s hand on it” (xxxiii). As we will see, James riddles the text with
hints meant to reveal an alternative understanding of the novel. However, if one is “in fact too
stupid for [his] clue,” she must be “of readiness to have dispensed with logic” (xxxvi-xxxvii).
On first reading The Ambassadors several years ago, I felt “too stupid” for Henry James.
The plot of this classic novel is well known: a middle-aged American man – Lewis Lambert
Strether – goes to Paris as Mrs. Newsome’s ambassador with the agreement that she will marry
him (and share her fortune) if he succeeds at bringing her son Chad home in order take over the
family business in Woollett, Massachusetts. While in Paris, Strether observes Chad in this
cosmopolitan setting and attempts to ascertain the nature of his relationship with Madame de
Vionnet – who is married yet estranged from her husband. As a result of his sojourn, Strether
recognizes the narrowness of his American morality, defects from his ambassadorial duty, and
finds personal ethics in renouncing the advantages that would be had at the expense of Chad’s
freedom. However, while reading I frequently stumbled over passages too obscure to support
this plot; in fact, many sentences were indecipherable in this context. Heeding the statement
James makes in the Preface – “the whole case, in fine, is in Lambert Strether’s irrepressible
2
outbreak to little Bilham” in Gloriani’s garden – I re-examined the scene. The two men repair to
a secluded bench, wanting a break from the other guests,
having nothing at all to say and finding it would do beautifully as it was; do beautifully
because what it was – well, was just simply too late. And when after this little Bilham,
submissive and responsive, but with an eye to the consolation nearest, easily threw off
some “Better late than never!” all he got in return for it was a sharp “Better early than
late!” This note indeed the next thing overflowed for Strether into a quiet stream of
demonstration that as soon as he had let himself go he felt as the real relief. It had
consciously gathered to a head, but the reservoir had filled sooner than he knew, and his
companion’s touch was to make the waters spread. (Ambassadors 152)
What happens (“after this”) that renders Bilham “submissive and responsive”? What has he been
waiting for that finally arrives, albeit late? What “thing” overflows? The two men are not sitting
adjacent to a fountain or any water source from which Strether could be filling up a pitcher. Is
whatever “overflowed for Strether” the “irrepressible outbreak” James refers to? What is going
on here? I know what puts me in a “submissive and responsive” mood. Having been the
“companion” in this scenario before, I’ve witnessed the results of a particular “touch.” I’m
familiar with a particular threshold that, once passed, makes it “simply too late” (to stop). Could
this be happening between two men in a cherished work of Anglo-American literature?
In Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Eve Sedgwick argues that critics, scholars, and
students have been trained by oppressive social ideologies to not see homosexuality in the
canons of American and English literature and lists a series of dismissals that allow us to
rationalize our denial of homosexuality in a text. For example: “Passionate language of samesex attraction was extremely common during whatever period is under discussion – and therefore
3
must have been completely meaningless.” Or: “Attitudes about homosexuality were intolerant
back then, unlike now – so people probably didn’t do anything.” Or: “There is no actual proof of
homosexuality, such as sperm taken from the body of another man or a nude photograph with
another woman – so the author may be assumed to have been ardently and exclusively
heterosexual” (52-3). Sedgwick suggests that passages in a text that seem to convey
homosexuality may have been written with that intention. Her work sanctions the recognition
and discussion of homoerotic/homosexual content in nineteenth-century English literature.
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) provides useful examples.
However, recognizing and accepting is not a strong enough analytical framework from which to
approach the complexity of The Ambassadors.
The semiotic method outlined by Roland Barthes in S/Z (1970) allows one to engage with
the text on lexical level while examining the text in terms of its relationship to the wider cultural
milieu through connotation determined by two analytical spaces. The first is “a sequential space,
a series of orders, a spaced subject to the successivity of sentences, in which meaning
proliferates by layering” (8). James layers connotations in the passage quoted above. The first
phrase that holds connotative potential is “well, [it] was just simply too late.” This statement
alone would not be enough to substantiate a sexual reading of what transpires on the bench.
However, each successive sentence in this space of text contains words or phrases that bear
sexual connotations: “submissive and responsive”; “consolation”; “indeed the next thing
overflowed”; “a quiet stream of demonstration”; “he had let himself go”; “the real relief”;
“gathered to a head”; “the reservoir had filled”; “his companion’s touch”; “make the waters
spread.” Meaning proliferates by this layering. James leads us to the understanding that a sexual
encounter resulting in the expulsion of seminal fluid occurs on the bench. Barthes explains that
4
connotation is also determined by a second space: “an agglomerative space, certain areas of the
text correlating other meanings outside the material text and, with them, forming ‘nebulae’ of
signifieds” (8). In order to recognize and amass additional connotations existing within a literary
text, one must look outside of the text for meanings that contribute to a cluster (“nebulae”) or
system. Within a system of related signifiers, meaning is found in the differences and/or
variations in how they signify, or sign.
Signs are historically fluid, however. Many that conveyed a particular meaning to
James’s contemporary reading audience signify something different to us today – if they are even
recognizable. Thus, a semiotic approach to The Ambassadors requires extensive
historical/social/cultural research. I wanted to look at the novel “from the ground.” James
himself is a good starting place. His personal writings (letters, autobiographies, notebooks),
critical texts, travel writing, and other works of fiction works offer a virtual galaxy of signifiers.
Biographies of Henry James are invaluable to understanding his work. Understanding the milieu
in which he lived and wrote is important. Most critical to my project has been an in-depth study
of the historical/cultural nature of homosexuality in America, England, and France – with
particular focus on the nineteenth century and fin de siècle. The work of historians of
homosexuality has been essential to my reading of The Ambassadors: Michael Bronski, Leslie
Choquette, Matt Cook, Louis Crompton, Jeffrey Merrick, Michael Sibalis, William Peniston,
Michel Rey, Graham Robb, Michael Sibalis, and Jeffrey Weeks.1 They made possible what
Barthes calls a topological “dissemination of meanings, spread like gold dust on the apparent
surface of the text (meaning is golden)” (9).
1
I focus primarily on male homosexuality because the protagonist is a man. This is not meant to suggest that female
homosexuals do not have a rich history; information on lesbian culture in Paris will be provided in a later chapter as
it pertains to a particular character. Although the term “gay” (referring to a homosexual man) is anachronistic to the
novel, it will be used throughout this project in an attempt to lessen repetition and provide some brevity.
5
My research was motivated by a strong sense of having grabbed ahold of a thread integral
to “the figure in the carpet”: an additional plot in which the primary characters of The
Ambassadors are homosexual. I argue that James intentionally and masterfully designed the
traditional plot as cover for a second, fully developed narrative in which the protagonist is a
middle-aged American homosexual – the same Lambert Strether. In this alternative, or Other
Plot, Strether sets out as Mrs. Newsome’s ambassador, but does so primarily in order to fulfill
his needs as a gay man – one of which is a temporary escape to Paris, where he can satisfy his
sexual yearnings in the safety of the homosexual subculture. Once there, Chad’s affairs take a
backseat to Strether’s romantic relationships, which wax, wane, and finally flourish – resulting in
an enjoyable climax and satisfying conclusion. In this story, Strether does not renounce but
instead fulfills his dreams, making for a delightful, and often humorous, read. James creates the
Other Plot with the intention of pushing psychological realism to new heights in The
Ambassadors – illustrating with sympathetic acuity the mental and emotional workings of a
mature American man trying to balance, if not ameliorate, the many conflicts – engendered from
within and without – that beset his life as a homosexual. Strether’s physical journey to England
and France is simultaneously an existential one; exposure to the homosexual subcultures of
Europe initiates personal growth, self-acceptance, and encourages a life freed from the closet.
The existence of the Other Plot does not disrupt nor discount the traditional one; those who
understand the novel as it is commonly read are not “wrong.” However, I aim to convince
readers that The Ambassadors was written with clever polyvalence, allowing two different
interpretations of the settings, the characters, the action – in fact, the very words of the text – to
exist simultaneously.
6
In the decades following the publication of Sedgwick’s major works, numerous critics
have turned their attention to homoerotic/homosexual elements in James’s late novels.
Currently, queer approaches to Henry James seem to be de rigueur. In Henry James and the
Queerness of Style, Kevin Ohi states: “acute critics, influenced by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and
by queer theory more generally, have at least made a question of sexuality, and particularly
homosexuality, unavoidable for any serious consideration of James’s works” (2). Ohi cites
relations between men and women, homophobic panic, “erotic energies that escape containment
in marriage or heterosexual romance” as “just a few of the elements that a criticism of James
attuned to questions of sexuality have made it impossible to ignore” (2). His chapter titled
“Lambert Strether’s Belatedness: The Ambassadors and the Queer Afterlife of Style” discusses
the narrator’s role in creating “the linguistic representation of a life, including James’s own”
(151). These lives are “queer” because of “discontinuities of consciousness” and the novel’s
“fundamental narrative of aesthetic development as discontinuity” – not necessarily because of
their sexuality. Ohi labels James’s style as “queer” due to the many ways it disorients, which
results in novels with surfaces of such “redoubtable complexity” that “‘realism’ … does
something other than represent reality” (2).
Scott St. Pierre’s article, “A Personal Quantity: On Sexuality and Jamesian Style” (2012),
proposes “a fresh intervention into what has in recent years been a popular subject for critical
thought—the relationship between Henry James’s sexuality and his spectacular literary style”
(110). Focusing on this relationship as seen in The Tragic Muse (1890) and The Wings of a Dove
(1902), St. Pierre finds associations between literary style and homosexuality problematic,
arguing that James intentionally “jams” such a connection by the choices his characters make
(111). However, St. Pierre approaches these novels with the “widely held assumption that style”
7
– in general, not solely literary – is a “symptom of homosexuality” (113). Style takes on a
different association in “Cruising Henry James: The Scene of Queer Society as a Critique of
Capital” (2015) by Michael D. Schmidt. He contextualizes his article as follows: “While it has
become nearly axiomatic to read James’s style as a privileged site for discussions of sexuality,
particularly his resistance to the representation of desire, I argue that in The American Scene
James develops a materialist literary style intimately related to homosexual desire and the
network of male-male cruising” (81). Schmidt presents Marxist and materialist analysis at
length, but is chary in providing specifics as to how these theories relate to style (literary?) and
representations of gay culture. Ostensibly an examination of how “differences between
homosexual desire and capitalist desire play out for James” (91), we come away with the sense
that the primary difference is the absence of the former.
Matthew Salway is the most recent contributor to the current trend. He prefaces the
argument presented in “Breaking the ‘Mould’ of The Ambassadors” (2017) by stating: “queer
readings of Strether … have emerged as a dominant critical strategy in interpretations of James’s
novel” (12). Salway locates The Ambassadors “at a particular transatlantic historical moment,
during which sexual desire became permanently embroiled in the same questions of fate and
agency that characterize the affective organization of U.S. Protestant culture and modern life” (23). He supports this connection through an explication of a metaphor Strether uses to convey the
confines of his homosexual identity to Bilham: it is as if his consciousness was poured into a “tin
mould” and “is more or less compactly held by it” (Ambassadors 153). Salway suggests that
Strether’s “experiences in Europe will constitute a new kind of consciousness” – despite the
predestined form imposed on it. His “sense of the present … would be relatively inconsequential
if he had not attributed to it the potential for shaping things to come” (16). This “potential”
8
comes from “an experientially Calvinistic mode of perception” (16) and the acceptance that he
was predestined to be homosexual. While contending that Strether never succumbs to his desire
to have sex with other men, Salway does not address whether this abstention is proof that “the
things to come” are our protagonist’s predestined salvation or the fires of hell.
Commonalities exist amongst these recent works of criticism outlined above, many of
which my dissertation does not share. While I write extensively about homosexuality as it was
lived in the eighteenth century through the fin de siècle, I consider my work to be based more in
cultural history than queer theory (a term I use loosely, as it is currently more correct to use the
acronyms LGBTQQIA or LGBT+ in reference to discussions/theoretical inquiries along these
lines). With the exception of Salway, the critics cited above make reference to Oscar Wilde –
and only Oscar Wilde – as the representative example of nineteenth-century homosexuality as a
whole. This narrows our perception of same-sex relationships considerably. Secondly, I want
to demonstrate how – specifically – homosexuality is conveyed in the text. What words/phrases
can legitimately be read as such? Most important to my project is the question of why James
presents homosexuality in his novel. Critics have been pointing at homoeroticism in James’s late
novels for over twenty years, which has led the most recent ones (uniformly) to opening their
arguments with a seemingly compulsory statement as to queer theory’s primacy in approaching
this novelist. If this is truly the consensus, then it is time to look beyond the established fact that
queerness exists in the late novels and address the questions of why it is there and what, if
anything, is the importance of its presence.
D. A. Miller gives us a useful platform from which to consider these questions in
“Bringing out Roland Barthes” (1992) by explaining why it was important for him to discern
“gay specificity” in Barthes’s work. Miller’s approach to understand Barthes was “on the
9
ground” to the point that he walked around Paris imagining how he would experience seemingly
mundane things such as going to the local drugstore. This resulted in a brief channeling of
Barthes’s Marxist leanings, during which Miller found himself repulsed by “evidence of
bourgeois myth” that the products in the store vividly signed. But he also found a deep personal
connection “fashioned within the practice s and relations, real and fantasmatic, of gay
community, and across the various inflections given to such community by, for example, nation
and generation” (par.3). Miller asks himself why it had come to interest him “to know that
Barthes – or any man for that matter – was gay.” One answer is the “imaginary relation” it
created between the two writers, alleviating Miller’s “erotic pessimism” and allowing him to
embrace a “sexuality that had become ‘ours.’” What Miller sought, and still seeks, in “the
evidence of Roland Barthes’s gayness, is the opportunity it affords for staging his imaginary
relation between us, between those lines on which we each in writing them may be thought to
have put our bodies – for fashioning thus an intimacy with the writer whom (above all when it
comes to writing) I otherwise can’t touch.” Sharing homosexuality with this writer whom Miller
deeply admires led him to infuse his own writings with aspects of homosexuality.
Miller’s primary interest in outing Roland Barthes stems from his belief that to not do so
“consents to a homophobic reception of his work” (par. 11). Critics who employ queer theory in
addressing a number of different cultural products share Miller’s reasoning:
Precisely when the discreet but discernible gay specificity of Barthes’s text is ignored,
does this text present the most propitious occasion for rehearsing an antigay doxology.
For in the guarding of that Open Secret which is still the mode of producing, transmitting
and receiving most discourse around homosexuality, the knowledge that plays dumb is
10
exactly what permits the abuses of an ignorance that in fact knows full well what it is
doing. (par. 10)
Miller acknowledges that not “playing dumb” involves risks. Bringing “gay specificity” to the
attention of others can, in turn, make them question the critic’s ability to recognize: the critic
inadvertently outs himself. Simultaneously, “there is hardly a procedure” for bringing out
homosexual meanings in a text “that doesn’t itself look or feel like just more police entrapment”
(par. 11).
So why am I outing Henry James? My interest is not in “entrapment” nor in seeking
community through an “imaginary relation.” I contend that recognizing James’s homosexuality
informs The Ambassadors. One writes the self. In doing so, various examples of how life is
experienced – the different ways and means by which people grapple with often unpleasant
realities – are conveyed to readers. The psychological and emotional benefits of reading
literature are vast. From the fin de siècle up to the recent past, homosexual readers who caught
the thread of the Other Plot were afforded the rare opportunity to engage with a protagonist who
shared their struggles – and lived. They experienced a positive reflection of themselves seldom
encountered in print. At the time the novel was written, the English popular press depicted
homosexuals as mentally ill criminals bent on destroying the moral values of society. This is
comparable to the portrayal of African-Americans in the nineteenth century: the sight of a black
face on the front page of a newspaper conveyed a story of theft, murder, escape, rape and the
resulting tragedies – even to those who could not read. Studies were done in the 1970s by
psychologists and sociologists which examined the effect that decades of negative
representations in the media had on the African-American sense of self. To watch a black child
choose a white doll over one equally attractive but of her own race – describing the white doll as
11
“better … she’s nicer and smarter” as justification for her choice – is truly heartbreaking.
Homosexuals were subjected to a similar onslaught of negative representations that affected their
feelings of self-worth.
For this reason it is important to recognize that The Ambassadors does not simply contain
glimmers of homoeroticism: it tells a complex story about a relatively average gay man, his
existential journey towards self-acceptance, and the maelstrom of psychological states that attend
it. The ability to conceal this narrative by conveying the traditional plot in convoluted,
obfuscating, disorienting prose – his queer stylistics – gives testament to the profundity of
James’s genius. The Master brings the literary form of the novel (disparaged for much of the
nineteenth century) up to the level of art – which serves society by providing glimpses of what it
means to be human.
Outing Henry James helps us answer how it was possible for him to convey a realistic
story about the adversities endemic to homosexual life. Logic leads us to biographies as
potential sources of meanings that correlate with those inside the novel and add to an
agglomerative space of connotation. Leon Edel’s five-volume master-work, The Life of Henry
James (1953-1972), is indispensable for its thoroughness and detail. Wisely recognizing its
audience, however, Edel sidesteps issues of James’s sexuality by means of sensitive editing and
purposeful omissions. For decades, biographers and literary scholars followed Edel’s lead. Eve
Sedgwick vents her frustration by decrying the “repressive blankness most literary criticism
shows” in regard to James, “in whose life the pattern of homosexual desire was brave enough
and resilient enough to be at last biographically inobliterable” (Epistemology 197). Fred Kaplan
takes a step forward in Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (1992) by providing important
details about James’s reaction to the work of John Addison Symonds, particularly his essay “A
12
Problem in Modern Ethics” (1896) which defended homosexuality on moral and aesthetic
grounds. Despite the candid nature of James’s letters to Symonds, Kaplan argues that James was
too threatened by his own sexuality ever to be more comfortable than ambivalent about it, living
instead through Symonds as an alter ego. Kaplan documents several of James’s “passionate
friendships,” stating that after the mid-1890s James “fell in love a number of times,” most often
with younger men (401). However, Kaplan maintains that these were erotically charged
friendships; physical consummation was too dangerous for James to entertain. Wendy Graham
evidently agrees. In Henry James’s Thwarted Love (1999), after presenting copious details
regarding the novelist’s relationships with other men, Graham comes to the following
conclusion: “Although I am not claiming that James was sexually active in the conventional
sense, I do maintain that James’s abstention from full genital contact did not deprive him of a
homosexual identity” (28).
Henry James: The Mature Master (2007), by Sheldon M. Novick, goes the furthest in
challenging James’s canonical image. Based on his study of letters written by James and his
contemporaries that have not yet been published, Novick contends that James was neither
passive nor detached: “he was an active and engaged man, passionate and energetic, for whom
relationships were the ground of life and the subject of his art” (x). His cosmopolitan habits and
aristocratic qualities made him at ease with “the closeted sexual relations among many of the
men that he knew.… James followed their migrations, as well as his limited [financial] means
would allow, to Paris and Rome, where love affairs might be conducted more openly” (7).
According to Novick, in 1895 James began a “romantic friendship” with Arthur Benson – a witty
and gregarious man who “had spent his happiest years at Eton and after King’s College had
returned to Eton to teach” (232-3). Through his friendship with Benson, James joined a
13
community of men – the majority of whom were former Eton students and/or present
housemasters – and “found an ideal of leisure, of intellectual life infused by gently restrained
affections” (233). Novick never directly states that James was homosexual; however, he puts
James in the company of men who did identify themselves as such and who did have sex with
young men – while also arguing that James was engaged and passionate, not a detached
observer.
Editors of James’s letters to young men diverge in their conclusions on the novelist’s
sexuality. In the Introduction to Beloved Boy (2004), a collection of letters from James to
Hendrik Andersen, Millicent Bell sidesteps the issue of James’s sexuality, finally concluding the
following: “it is worth noting that James’s two major biographers, Leon Edel and Fred Kaplan,
both insisted on James’s lifelong celibacy, for all his responsiveness to young masculine charm”
(xiv). In the same year, Gunter and Jobe published Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s
Letters to Younger Men (2004). They argue: “the homoerotic elements evident in [his]
correspondence, the loving relationships he maintained, surely contributed to the eroticism of his
last novels. Without himself loving, he could not have portrayed passion with such
masterstrokes” (2). The same biographical artifacts – James’s letters – engender varied
interpretations according the mind-set of the scholar.
An overview of biographies provides a consensus that James was homosexual, but not
necessarily sexually active. No evidence exists that proves James engaged in same-sex love.
Yet no evidence exists to prove that he did not. In the nineteenth century sex was most often a
private affair due to social decorum; gay sex was hidden due to its illegality. James was highly
protective of his reputation; one can surmise why he so assiduously burned his letters. However,
attributing a homosexual identity to Henry James is only important to this study to the extent that
14
it illuminates his work. One does not have to be homosexual in order to write a novel that
features male and female homosexual characters. One does not have to be homosexual in order
to recognize the Other Plot. However, in both cases familiarity with homosexual culture is an
advantage. The Ambassadors contains several sex scenes between men (conveyed in code, as we
will discuss). If James never experienced passionate emotional and physical love with other
men, the Other Plot of The Ambassadors – inspired only by observations, conversations, and/or
literary sources – is a testament to the role sympathetic imagination can play in the creative
process of a master of literary realism.
Examination of biographical material does reveal a key signifier, however – one that
appears repeatedly: Paris. Scholars have examined the relationship between artist and city with
varying emphasis. Adeline Tintner discusses the role that Paris played in making James a
cosmopolite. Charles Anderson recounts portions of James’s autobiographical entries on Paris
and compares them to Strether’s views in The Ambassadors. Edward Fussell claims that ever
since the future novelist viewed “a tall and glorious column” at the center of the stately Place
Vendôme from a carriage when he was two years old, James would think of “Paris as centre, that
secular shrine to which you repair, literally or in imagination, if you wish to be informed and
happy” (xi). Fussell finds it remarkable how few geographic or iconographic details of Paris
appear in The Ambassadors; Paris is only a vague backdrop to the perambulations of Strether,
who “is often unmindful where he is” (183). Deeming the novel as “the world’s great testimony
to the art of leaving things out” and remarking on how much information “is cunningly
withheld,” Fussell fills in the Paris assumed by “the Tourist Reader” by providing the names of
streets and public landmarks that are suggested by the text, filling in the background with general
knowledge “as surely every visitor to Paris has done.” Peter Brooks devotes Henry James Goes
15
to Paris (2007) to the two years James spent there in 1875 and 1876 at age thirty-two and thirtythree, arguing that James reaches back “to what he picked up in the city” when dealing with “the
demands of sexual relations” in his last three novels (154). Brooks briefly grapples with James’s
sexuality, suggesting that “the principal Jamesian fear seems to be outing, the overt exposure of a
homosexual identity” (173). However, none of these scholars “outs” Paris, which, throughout
James’s lifetime, was the veritable Mecca of the homosexual world.
James loved Paris. At age twenty-four he wrote a letter to his close friend Thomas
Sergeant Perry, dated 20 September, 1867: “‘I was happy to know you had come back to
Paris…. Whatever may be said about it, it’s one of the marvels of the universe. There one learns
to know men and things, and if only one gets to the point of feeling at home there, wherever kind
of life one leads later, one will never be an ignorant person, a hermit – that is, a provincial’”
(Letters 14). “Paris-as-home” is associated with “men and things”; he will never again be
“ignorant.” The letter continues: “‘Let me repeat in intelligible terms that I’m very glad to think
of you as being as much as possible in Paris – city of my dreams! I feel as if it would count to
my advantage in our future talks (& perhaps walks.) When a man has seen Paris somewhat
attentively, he has seen (I suppose) the biggest achievement of civilization in a certain direction
& he will always carry with him a certain little reflet of its splendour’” (Letters 14). Young
Henry wants to make clear that each having experienced Paris gives them a particular bond – a
potential “advantage” on future occasions. His reasoning for championing Paris in toto as “the
biggest achievement of civilization” rings as praise of classical civilization – or Greek culture.
In 1875 and now thirty-two, James approached the New York Tribune and asked to be hired as a
correspondent from Paris. While working in this capacity, he and a fellow correspondent, Bill
16
Huntington, became intimate friends. The two enjoyed the exotic entertainments the city, which
included
the infamous artists and models ball at Bullier’s, on Montparnasse, where a decent
woman could not allow herself to be seen, where men dressed as women, and women
were all but naked. The bachelor Huntington, it appeared, was quite an extreme
bohemian. James found his aesthetic circle of expatriate English and American young
men interesting; he was aware that this was what many young men came to Paris to find,
and he recorded its dissipations in his memory …. During the entertainments of carnival,
however, he met a young Italian painter who had taken a house at Versailles. The Italian
was a painter of talent and a gentleman; James confided to Elizabeth Boott that he
amused himself occasionally with this new friend. (Novick, The Young Master 333)
Novick fails to mention that the scantily clad women attending balls in Paris were few in
number. Balls were a feature of the male homosexual community: they “ranged from semiprivate dances to the regular masked balls attended by hundreds of men – and sometimes women
– in drag…. At carnival time [days immediately preceding the start of Lent], the usual ban on
transvestism was suspended” (Robb 166). In 1874, Gaillard’s wine bar, on the boulevard
Morland in the 4th Arrondissement, organized a ball that was held outside of this exemption,
fully knowing that the majority of participants would be in drag. The police raided this
“‘reunion of pederasts,’” but all of the thirty men arrested were set free after questioning and
were not charged with a crime (Peniston, Pederasts 180). This encouraged the Green Bar to hold
a similar ball in 1876 (Peniston, “Love and Death” 135).
The theaters, the boulevards, the galleries, the baths – recounting James’s escapades in
Paris could fill an entire chapter, which my dissertation cannot accommodate. His adventures
17
also lose their piquancy if not informed by the nature of the Parisian homosexual subculture
(which we will explore in Chapter Three). However, one cannot help but take pause on reading
a passage from Chapter XXV of A Small Boy and Others where the now seventy-year-old
novelist tells of an autumn walk taken at age fifteen and accompanied by his brother William.
That particular walk was not prescribed us, yet we appear to have hugged it, across the
Champs-Elysées to the river, and so over the nearest bridge and the quays of the left bank
to the Rue de Seine, as if it somehow held the secret of our future; to the extent even of
my more or less sneaking off on occasion to take it by myself, to taste of it with a due
undiverted intensity and the throb as of the finest, which could only mean the most
Parisian, adventure. (176)
The language James uses here is highly sexual. Readers may want to return to this passage after
learning what these specific sites connote.
Paris – in and of itself – is a “‘nebulae’ of signifieds” (Barthes 8). James refers to actual
sites in the city and harnesses the connotations they exude as code. The first example is the title
of the novel – his inaugural hint. Traditional readers interpret it as a reference to Strether as Mrs.
Newsome’s representative; when he is too tardy in delivering results, Sarah Pocock goes to Paris
as a second ambassador for her mother – hence the plurality in the title: The Ambassadors.
However, many of James’s cosmopolitan contemporaries likely associated the title with the Café
des Ambassadeurs, the most celebrated (and notorious) café-concert club in late-nineteenthcentury Paris. It signs high bohemia and sexual license. Located slightly north-west of the
Tuileries near the Champs-Elysées, and decorated in eighteen-century rococo style, the Café des
Ambassadeurs rose in popularity along with the prosperity of the bourgeoisie in the 1870s. The
Café was at its peak of fame through the 1890s and attracted a high-class crowd that included the
18
aristocracy, artists, and American expatriates – a mix that included homosexual men and women.
Drinks were inexpensive and the entertainment was “highly satirical and occasionally
subversive” (Peniston, Pederasts, 138). Edgar Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec were regular patrons
of des Ambassadeurs and captured the essence of the club in posters and paintings.
The police were frequent visitors as well. The Café des Ambassadeurs came to public
attention in 1876 due to the highly publicized trial for public indecency involving the Comte de
Germiny, a thirty-five-year-old aristocrat from a distinguished family, and Edmond-Pierre
Chouard, an eighteen-year-old jeweler’s apprentice (Peniston, Pederasts, 152-3). Over a decade
later, des Ambassadeurs came to the attention of an international audience due to its role in Henri
d’Argis’s novel Sodom (1888) – “a naturalist compendium of information on the Parisian
subculture, harnessed to a preposterous and moralistic tragic plot” (Choquette 156). The café’s
reputation grew with the sales of Sodom, which went through six editions in its first year, and des
Ambassadeurs became an icon of gay popular culture (157). James likely read d’Argis’s novel,
although no evidence remains of his having done so. Given his activities in Paris, it is hard to
image that he did not visited the Café des Ambassadeurs himself. We will continue to decode
these signifiers as we work through the alternative plot.
The work of Hugh Stevens turned my attention to of code. In Henry James and
Sexuality, he calls our attention to the society in which James wrote – one that was highly
antagonistic to homosexuality and required a cautious approach to his subject matter. This
environment gave rise to the use of code, which Stevens identifies as “camp.” Stevens argues
that by use of a nascent form of camp, his style became “a genre that asserts queerness without
needing to say ‘queer.’ It does not fear or repudiate this designation, but wants to get past the
bathos, the melodrama, the flatness of identify assertions. Camp concentrates on the stylistic
19
performance of a queerness it takes for granted” (173). Seeing “homoerotic thematics” as
readily discernable in The Ambassadors, he turns his focus on “the novel’s spirit of camp
affirmation in the face of prohibition and restraint” (166). The nouns “prohibition and restraint”
neatly sum up the nineteenth-century legal and social response to homosexuality, giving us an
indication of the conditions under which James wrote. Stevens argues that “camp” – a stylized
manner by which homosexuals communicated with each other – developed as a means of
defense. Moe Meyer attributes the first appearance of the term “camp” to the 1909 edition of
Passing English of the Victorian Era, a dictionary of nineteenth-century slang. The editor, J.
Redding, “defined Camp as ‘Actions and gestures of exaggerated emphasis. Probably from the
French. Used chiefly by persons of exceptional want of character’” (53).
Eric Haralson also looks at The Ambassadors in terms of camp as code. In Henry James
and Queer Modernity (2003) he states with chagrin: “academic readers of The Ambassadors
have all been ‘scooped,’ evidently, by the gay college students of mid-century New York
recalled in James McCourt’s novel Time Remaining (1993). Apparently a knowledge of James’s
work functioned as no mere intellectual credential among gay undergraduates of that period, but
also (and comically) as a pickup line for ‘get[ting] laid’” (102-3). One couldn’t get lucky
without recognizing that “Hattie Jaques” was a nickname for James himself, and “you couldn’t
get anybody to even … play you his [Edith] Piaf records” until a code reference was made to the
novel. “Besides rechristening (and feminizing) James as ‘Hattie Jaques – a corpulent, bawdy
British film actress – the students also renamed the homoerotically charged pair at the center of
The Ambassadors, converting the hunky Chadwick Newsome into ‘the sexpot… Chapstick
Nuisance’ and Lambert Strether, his aging admirer, into an ‘old poof’ named Lamebrain
Stretcher from ‘Asshole, Mass.’” (103). Haralson finds it ironic that the post-war college boys
20
(and, perhaps, McCourt) readily acknowledge the homosexual underpinnings of James’s novel,
while twenty-first century scholars are “still elaborating this protoqueer reading of The
Ambassadors owing to a critical oversight of (or resistance to) the combination of Strether’s
erotic infatuations, his slipperiness as a heterosexual love object, and his discovery of a ‘camp’
side to his personality with the help of John Little Bilham, the ‘little’ queer figure obscured by
Chad Newsome” (104). The students’ adoption of The Ambassadors as a source of code leads us
to think that they recognized the Other Plot.
A writer for the English Illustrated Magazine appears to have recognized it as well,
although his disclosure is more discrete. C. Lewis Hind wrote a review for the magazine titled
“Henry James” (1904). His prose has a notable Jamesian air to it and the passage layers
connotations:
If you agree with Maeterlinck that the soul does not flower only on nights of a storm, and
that the most interesting point of your existence is not necessarily when you flee before a
naked sword, then you are in the brother hood of Henry James. Adventures are to the
adventurous. The quality and quantity of the adventures depend upon the point of view
of the adventurer…. and if there is more shade than sunlight, when beams shine through,
they do reveal character, as witness Waymarsh in The Ambassadors.... [I]f in some of his
latter books we have glimpses of an unseen world, that is all in the family, and Mr. James
does it supremely well. Seen or unseen, he peers beneath the surface, sensitively,
sympathetically; ironically and humorously, narrates, shrugs his shoulders, and passes on
to another section of the Muddle…. (102)
A flowering soul exudes Decadence. One is not inclined to flee “before a naked sword.” The
“brother hood” and “family” are terms regularly used in the homosexual community in reference
21
to each other (Robb 150). Repeated variations of the word “adventure” reflect Strether’s first
days in Paris. The “unseen world” is the underground homosexual community. The adverbs
“sensitively, sympathetically; ironically and humorously” aptly apply to the manner in which
James approaches his protagonist in the Other Plot.
Unfortunately, Harper and Brothers may also have recognized the gay plot. In 1901,
James Pinker (who became James’s literary agent in 1897) submitted a prospectus of The
Ambassadors to the publishing house for serialization. According to Novick, “there it
mysteriously languished” (Mature 329). Pinker then sent twelve completed “books,” or monthly
installments: Harper and Brothers still did not move on it, although they did pay James the
balance of the advance for the serial (348). In the meantime, James wrote and published The
Wings of a Dove (1902). William Dean Howells intervened on the novelist’s behalf and The
Ambassadors was finally serialized in The North American Review (owned by Harper),
beginning in January 1903 (Novack, Mature 348).
When it comes to reading the novel with an eye out for a possible thread, however, the
reader’s mind is the first and best resource. I was led to this by Adeline Tintner, who makes a
case for a Jamesian gay novel in The Twentieth-Century World of Henry James (1991). The
preface to her argument: “Let us say that once the frontier of the new century has been crossed,
James allows himself to write certain things that he had not dare to write before, even in The
Turn of the Screw” (180). Tintner quotes the well-known biographer of Oscar Wilde, Richard
Ellmann, for his assertion that subsequent to the Wilde trials, “‘the taboo against writing about
homosexual behavior or other forms of sexuality began to be lifted in England. Opening our
eyes has been the principal labor of modern literature.’” Tintner reads The Sacred Fount as a
foray into depicting “‘the love that dare not tell its name,’” noting the excessive need for
22
concealment “since it carried with it the stigma of criminality” (180). The clues as to the
existence of homosexual material in the novel “are to be discovered through a process of
ratiocination,” which is, essentially, viewing it in terms of reasonable and credible motives.
Tintner asks: “What is there in The Sacred Fount that raises the possibility that the clue points to
a homosexual pairing off of the lovers?” After citing the views of other scholars, Tintner resigns
herself to saying: “it may seem too simple-minded for me to suggest another reading that does
not partake of the linguistic and postmodern systems of literary analysis but that might be
considered as belonging to the reader’s response school” (181). The manner in which Tintner
explicates the relatively simple homosexual plot in The Sacred Fount – a close reading of the
text informed by reasonable, personal connotations – reinforced what I had been doing with The
Ambassadors. I applaud her suggestion – made at a time when deconstruction was the rage –
that the less philosophically dazzling theories of Reader Response might enhance the
apprehension of gay story lines in James.
The Reader-Response theory of Wolfgang Iser provides insights as to how one reads
literature. In “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” Iser argues that a literary
text is a potential structure created by the author and then concretized according to readers’
norms, values, and experiences.
If this is so, then the literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the
esthetic: the artistic refers to the text created by the author, and the esthetic to the
realization accomplished by the by the reader. From this polarity it follows that the
literary work cannot be completely identical with the text, or with the realization of the
text, but in fact must lie halfway between the two.” (Iser 279)
23
The convergence of these two poles brings the work into existence. Each convergence differs
according to the uniqueness of the reader: “one text is potentially capable of several different
realizations, and no reading can ever exhaust the full potential, for each individual reader will fill
in the gaps in his own way, thereby excluding the various other possibilities; as he reads, he will
make his own decision as to how the gap is to be filled” (285). While impressions of a text vary
between readers, they can only do so “within the limits imposed by the written as opposed to the
unwritten text”; the text is fixed, not unlike the stars in the sky that one person makes out as “the
image of a plough,” while another sees “a dipper” (287). This does not mean, however, that the
author of the text may not “exert plenty of influence on the reader’s imagination.” In order to
limit the polysemantic nature of the text and increase the likelihood that the reader will create
along intended lines, authors construct texts with an implied reader in mind, establishing links or
allusions to social and historical contexts recognizable by a particular reading population “with
its own particular history of experience, its own consciousness, its own outlook” (289). The
implied reader co-creates the literary work: “By grouping together the written parts of the text,
we enable them to interact, we observe the direction in which they are leading us, and we project
onto them the consistency which we, as reader, require” (289).
James describes a similar relationship between author and reader in “The Art of Fiction”
(1884): “The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge
the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are
well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it – this cluster of gifts may almost be said
to constitute experience” (435). The power to guess, trace, and judge exists in the mind of the
reader; these acts create the experience of the story through the coalescence of the text and the
reader’s guided imagination. James explains the artistic “pole” from which he creates in the
24
Preface to The Ambassadors: “the business of my tale and the march of my action, not to say the
precious moral of everything, is just my demonstration of [the] process of vision” (xxx). Yet he
soon reminds readers: “Art deals with what we see” (xxxiii). The plural pronoun (“we”) includes
the author and the reader; the latter (as the esthetic “pole”) brings personal vision and perception
to the co-creation of art. James gets more specific:
I might seem here to have my choice of narrating my ‘hunt’ for Lambert Strether…. But,
I had probably best attempt a little to glance in each direction; since it comes to me again
and again, over this licentious record, that one’s bag of adventures, conceived or
conceivable, has been only half-emptied by the mere telling of one’s story. It depends so
on what one means by the equivocal quantity. There is the story of one’s hero, and then,
thanks to the intimate connexion of things, the story of one’s story itself. (xxxiv)
Strether’s adventure is only half told by James – who famously said “The whole of anything is
never told” (Notebooks 18). But he attempts to bear in mind (“glance” at) his readers’
sensibilities and the manner in which they will add to the story. “The equivocal quantity” refers
to the polysemous nature of the text; the narrative depends on which of the plausible or
appropriate significations the reader chooses. Through the “intimate connexion” between James
and his reader, the story of “one’s hero” that exists on the page and the “story of one’s story
itself” – the reader’s own life – come together to create the experience of the novel.
The over-arching philosophy that guides, if not tempers, my approach as a reader is that
developed in Truth and Method (1960) by Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002). Gadamer argues
that objectivity is unachievable in any hermeneutic method and instead suggests that meaning is
created through intersubjective communication. This is primarily due to each individual’s
historically effected consciousness: we are each embedded in the particular history and culture
25
that shapes us. Thus, “reconstructing the original circumstances, like all restoration, is a futile
undertaking in view of the historicity of our being” (166). Interpreting a text involves a fusion of
horizons where the scholar finds the ways that the text’s history engages the reader’s personal
background.
For the structure of the historical world is not based on facts taken from experience,
which then take on a value experience, but rather on the inner historicity that belongs to
experience itself. What we call experience (Erfahrung) and acquire through experience is
a living historical process; and its paradigm is not the discovery of facts but the peculiar
fusion of memory and expectation into a whole. Thus what pre-shapes the special mode
of knowing in the historical sciences is the suffering and instruction that the person who
is growing in insight receives from the painful experiences of reality. The historical
sciences only advance and broaden the thought already implicit in the experiences of life.
(225)
Ultimately, regardless of research and theoretic concepts, one understands a text according to the
existing schemata, formed by experience, which exists in the mind of the reader. While
completing my undergraduate degree – a double major of psychology and religious studies – I
performed as a member of the university dance company. I had been singing and dancing since I
was a child. After graduating I taught dance and performed with professional dance and musical
theater companies. This afforded me the opportunity to spend a lot of time with gay men. I
recognized what was happening on the bench in Gloriani’s garden because of this. My
“historically effected consciousness,” aided by research, has allowed me to see the Other Plot in
The Ambassadors.
26
Salway’s article “Breaking the ‘Mould’ of The Ambassadors” (briefly discussed earlier)
provides an excellent example of interpreting a text according to the historicity of one’s being.
He examines the same scene on the bench in Gloriani’s garden as I did previously and finds
“James’s language [to be] extraordinarily homoerotic” (11). However, as Salway appears to
approach the novel from his personal experience/knowledge of Christianity – more specifically
evangelical Calvinism – he sees what transpires on the bench “as obviously a scene of religious
enthusiasm, in which a ‘quiet stream of demonstration’ evokes the calm measured intonation of a
rhetorical display of sincerity, and in which ‘the waters spread’ recalls the Great Flood as a
signifier of judgment and renewal” (11). Salway interprets Bilham’s “‘touch’” as “a figurative
laying on of hands” which precipitates an “impending revelation or change. In Christian Biblical
exegesis, touch speaks to transformation, healing, and divine intervention…. [and] signifies
God’s ability to alter personal history and change one’s fate, which is precisely the phenomenon
that Strether appears to experience when he is stirred by an attractive young man” (11). Salway
and I interpret the same passage according to our individual paradigms, which have been formed
by “the peculiar fusion of memory and expectation” (Gadamer 225). Each reading experience
has validity. What can be argued, however, is the extent to which either of these interpretations
approaches James’s intentions. Salway might find value in reading biographies on James in
order to ascertain the novelist’s views on religion, whether he considered himself to be a
Christian, and what influence (if any) the Bible had on his thinking.
Structure
27
Analyzing a particular scene or passage is also informed by how it reflects and
contributes to the understanding of the novel as a whole. Barthes contends that analyzing a text
“down to the last detail” starts by taking up “the structural analysis of narrative where it has been
left till now: at the major structures” (12). My dissertation explicates the Other Plot using
Freytag’s Pyramid as a paradigm of organization.2 Although James presents unorthodox
material in the alternative plot, he employs conventional narrative structure. This format not
only gives readers a sense of bearing, but demonstrates the essential unity of the Other Plot.
Each of the three body chapters of my dissertation that follows this introduction are designed
with two goals in mind: to recount the homosexual narrative as fully, cohesively, and enjoyably
as possible while explicating the text in a manner that informs and substantiates it. To facilitate
the flow of the story, at times explanatory text and clues that appear later in the novel are moved
to where they best inform the present action. For example, the backstory of our protagonist will
be presented at the end of this chapter; it greatly informs our perception of Strether as he first
arrives in Liverpool at the beginning of the novel. The Other Plot will be presented as follows:
Chapter 2 – Strether and Waymarsh Learn to Cruise – tracks the alternative narrative
from the first page of the novel through Book Second, Chapter I: the characters are in England.
After providing a brief overview of English perspectives on homosexuality (legal and social), we
join Strether, Waymarsh, and Miss Gostrey as they explore the subcultures in Liverpool, Chester,
and London. This chapter explicates the exposition of the Other Plot: the unstable situation and
initial conflicts are identified; the characters and their primary traits are presented.
2
Gustav Freytag was a nineteenth-century German novelist whose theory of dramatic structure is symbolized by
“Freytag’s Pyramid.” According to Freytag, a story’s dramatic arc is divided into five parts: exposition, rising
action, climax, falling action, and dénouement.
28
Chapter 3 – Love in Paris – follows Strether and Waymarsh as they first arrive in the City
of Light. A detailed discussion of the history of homosexuality in France is presented; this
informs specific places Strether and Waymarsh frequent and the unique way Paris allows them to
express their same-sex desires. Strether meets Little Bilham, of whom Waymarsh quickly
becomes fitfully jealous. The conflicts established in the exposition become more defined and
drive the rising action.
Chapter 4 – Bringing Homosexuality Home – transports Woollett to Paris in the form of
the Pocock family, which exacerbates existing tensions. Explication of the plot is the primary
focus of this chapter, as relationships are intensified, broken, and re-formed. A brief history of
female homosexuality in Paris is presented, informing a lesbian character who joins the action.
Strether makes decisions and devises a plan that resolves the primary conflict: the climax ensues.
The dénouement takes us to the stable situation: Strether’s psychological wholeness as a gay
man.
The Conclusion contextualizes The Ambassadors within the history of the pornography
industry in nineteenth-century England and applies Foucauldian concepts to what I refer to as the
“Homosexual Canon.”
James employs an additional structuring devise in the Other Plot, the framework of which
builds more discretely. This is the romantic triangle. In his essay “The Present Literary
Situation in France” (1899), James discusses the contemporary state of French novelists,
complaining of the monotony with which concealed attachments are presented and wondering if
“there may, after all, be some strange and fatal disparity between French talent and French life”
(119). While conceding that “the complication, the perils, that wait on concealed attachments
29
play … an immense part in life,” James contends that the myriad mistresses and lovers may be
such a “general and indispensable” aspect of truth that interest is “lightly to be dispensed with”
(120). After stating that he has “no direct remedy to produce,” he offers a suggestion:
Might not, in general, the painter of French life do something towards conjuring away
that demon of staleness who hovers very dreadfully … by cultivating just this possibility
of the vision of more relations? There are others, after all, than those of the eternal
triangle of the husband, the wife and the lover, or of that variation of this to which we are
too much condemned as an only alternative …. Our real satiety lies, however, I think,
not even in our familiarity with this range of representation; it lies, at bottom, in our
unassuaged thirst for some more constant and more various portrayal of character ….
[T]he possibility of [passion] is, in the vulgar phrase, all over the place. But it lives a
great variety of life, burns with other flames and throbs with other obsessions than the
sole sexual. (120-1)
James’s point is that in reality – in “our bigger Anglo-Saxon life …. [in] any collective life that
is now being led on the globe” (119) – additional significant attachments exist between people
that warrant literary examination. More truths exist in human relations than French novelists
would lead one to believe. As we will see, James demonstrates this by using (while subverting)
the romantic triangle by forming it with three homosexual characters. Adoption of this French
plot device may have some bearing on why he chose to set The Ambassadors in Paris. Setting is
a critical element in this novel.
After structural analysis – according to Barthes’s method – the reader must then “assume
the power (the time, the elbow room) of working back along the threads of meanings, of
abandoning no site of the signifier without endeavoring to ascertain the code or codes of which
30
this site is perhaps the starting point” (12). The goal is to “substitute for the simple
representative model another model” by using “the step-by-step method”; the work of reading
goes in “slow motion, so to speak, neither wholly image nor wholly analysis” (12-13). I employ
this method – especially because it is what James himself suggests. In a letter written shortly
after the novel was published, James advises the Duchess of Sutherland: “Take, meanwhile pray,
the Ambassadors very easily and gently: read five pages a day – be even as deliberate as that –
but don’t break the thread. The thread is really stretched quite scientifically tight. Keep along
with it step by step – and then the full charm will come out. I want the charm, you see, to come
out for you – so convinced am I that it’s there!” (Edel, Letters 302).
The Jamesian Code
Historical knowledge is necessary for a twenty-first-century reader to follow the
alternative plot. However, because of the need to hide it from literary censors, the Other Plot
was obscure for James’s contemporary readers as well. Thus it is useful to examine specific
techniques of obfuscation used in the novel; I refer to them collectively as the Jamesian Code.
The most basic technique is vague semantics: some sentences do not take logical form. At times
they contain phrases that clash with the immediate context. James uses this technique for the
same purpose that a poet throws a trochee or two into a sonnet: it makes the reader stumble and
pause, causing him to look at the sentence more carefully. Pronouns are often obfuscating. In
The Later Style of Henry James (1972), Seymour Chatman spends chapters looking at them and
hones in on the “barest” of pronouns – “it” – noting that “James’ style is excessively –
sometimes bewilderingly – rich in that word” (55). Chatman posits that James uses deictic nouns
“so seriously and so ably” that their “general abstractness or intangibility” must serve a specific
31
purpose: ambiguity for “esthetic effect” (62). Examining this effect from the lens of New
Criticism, Chatman limits his focus to the novel as a closed semantic world. We must bear in
mind when reading the Other Plot that frequently “it” does not point directly to something in the
text but to aspects of the cultural milieu with which the reader becomes familiar. The masculine
pronouns – he, him, his – are often used as code when their referents are ambiguous. They force
us to re-read the passages in which they occur and consider alternative interpretations.
Like a poet, James chooses words for their polyvalence, allowing divergent meanings to
exist simultaneously (as previously mentioned). This polyvalence takes two forms in the text:
denotative (words that have different, yet equally valid, dictionary definitions) and connotative
(meanings assigned by cultural use and associations). Words with cultural connotations can be
seen as a form of “Gay Semiotics,” as defined by Craig G. Hutchison: “‘Gay semiotics’ refers to
the processes and signs which make homosexuality manifest and which render it potentially
visible to others. Or, in everyday language: the ways we ‘read’ someone as potentially gay or
lesbian.” When James was in Paris as a young man (1875 – 1876), he dined at least once a week
with Charles Sanders Peirce – the founder of pragmatism and inventor of American semiotics
(Brooks 16). Having become a close friend, James may have picked up the fundamentals of this
nascent science of communication from Peirce. For example, the novelist signs homosexuality
with details of characters’ physical appearance and manner of dress – a semiotic code read by
his contemporaries in the same way that boarder shorts, Vans, sunglasses, and a backwards
baseball cap sign “bro” or “surfer dude” to us today.
James also uses a linguistic code that can be compared to Parlyaree: “a secret language
mainly used by gay men and lesbians, in London and other UK cities with an established gay
culture” (Baker 2). This form of slang developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
32
amongst sailors, circus people, and entertainers whose work put them in contact with Italians and
Romanian gypsies; Parlyee comes from the Italian parlare, “to talk,” and was a mixture of
Italianate words, rhyming slang, cant terms, and other elements of vocabulary. For example:
“bona” = good; “omi-palone” = effeminate man or homosexual; “lacoddy” = body; “cackle” =
talk, gossip; “dish” = buttocks. Used as a means to construct homosexual identities, Parlyaree
excluded outsiders and served as a form of protection – like other vernaculars, or sociolects,
developed by oppressed groups. Playful, quick, and clever, it was also a way of expressing
humor; this “constantly evolving language of fast put down, ironic self-parody and theatrical
exaggerations” was comedy in the “face of adversity” (Baker 2). As strolling players and
performers moved to London in the nineteenth century for steady work in venues of
entertainment, Parlyaree (or Polari, as it was known by the early twentieth century) became the
language of the theater. “The most direct link between twentieth-century Polari speakers and
the nineteenth-century Parlyaree speakers would have been via London’s music halls and
theatres” (Baker 38). Henry James was in the theater world from 1890 to 1895 – his “dramatic
years” that began with the adaptation of The American for the stage and ended with the failure of
Guy Domville. Although undoubtedly exposed to Parlyaree, James does not use actually use this
patois The Ambassadors; the words would be nonsensical to readers of the traditional plot.
There are scenes, however, where the narrator makes it known to readers of the Other Plot that
characters are speaking in Parlyaree without providing the actual conversation. Aware of the
prevalent use of code by the homosexual subculture, we will see James making up his own slang
in a similar manner and for similar purposes.
Two key code words used regularly throughout the novel are pulled from the homosexual
milieu. The first is “comrade.” In the late-nineteenth century, the term “comrade” was used by
33
gay men to refer to a man loved or desired. This understanding is not a dictionary denotation,
but a cultural connotation: “comrade” – meaning two male lovers – was part of the contemporary
homosexual vernacular. Walt Whitman contributed to the popularity of this term through the
publication of his Calamus poems in 1860; these poems speak of “comrades” in terms of
emotional and romantic wholeness and sexualized citizenship (Bronski 79). The poem “For
You, O Democracy” is an example:
Come, I will make the continent indissoluble;
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever yet shone upon;
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of
America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies;
I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other’s necks;
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
….
James owned a copy of the 1900 edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass which included the
Calamus poems (Edel and Tintner 65). He was likely familiar with this poem. James also
encountered the term “comrade” in other sources.
Symonds, who was influenced by Whitman, appropriates the word “comrade” when
referring to a man’s masculine love object in A Problem in Modern Ethics. Symonds objects to
the legal system’s inability to distinguish between exploitive and consensual homosexuality,
34
stating: “The depraved debauchee who abuses boys receives the same treatment as the young
man who loves a comrade” (15). In an interview recorded in Modern Ethics, a young man states:
“‘I sat near a comrade rather older than myself; and how happy was I, when he touched me’”
(94). Here we see that “comrade,” connoting sexual attraction between two men, was not only
used by poets and intellectuals but had entered the lexicon of the late nineteenth-century
homosexual community. Edward Carpenter – influenced by both Symonds and Whitman –
begins his influential treatise, Homogenic Love, and Its Place in a Free Society (1894) with a
nod to the poet, arguing that “the special attachment which is sometimes denoted by the word
Comradeship” belongs on a level of importance with other forms of love (3). Carpenter equates
“Comradeship” with “the homogenic or homosexual love (as it has been called) that intense, that
penetrating, and at times overmastering character which would entitle it to rank as a great human
passion” (4). He consistently uses “comrade” to refer to a man who loves another man and
champions “the really indispensable import of the homogenic or comrade love, in some form, in
national life” (51). Works by Whitman, Symonds, and Carpenter were widely disseminated
among intellectuals in America and England; the term “comrade” increasingly became part of
the vernacular associated with homosexual men.
In addition to “comrade,” James also frequently uses the word “type”– a cultural signifier
that arose from medico/philosophical approaches to homosexuality. Between 1864 and 1879
Karl Ulrichs wrote twelve volumes under the title Researches in the Riddle of Love between
Men. His 1864 treatise argued for a “third sex” (or type of human) that was physically male
while psychically female: the Urning. Karl-Maria Kertbeny, a Hungarian journalist, also began
writing about homosexuality in the 1860s, publishing the term “homosexual” (in German) in an
1869 pamphlet. Kertbeny used “homosexual” and “heterosexual” as part of a system of
35
classification of sexual types intended to replace the historically pejorative terms “sodomite” and
“pederast.” In 1886, the Austro-German psychiatrist Richard Krafft-Ebing published one of the
first books on sexual practices that included homosexuality: Psychopathia Sexualis. In this
forensic textbook for physicians and psychiatrists, Krafft-Ebing separates homosexuals into
pathological categories of cerebral neuroses; these are referred to as “types.” Each of these
works by Ulrichs, Kertbeny, and Krafft-Ebing was translated into English soon after publication.
They were read widely and prompted myriad responses by nineteenth-century medical men,
scientists, and social reformers. James repeatedly uses the word “type” to signal a homosexual
man or woman in the Other Plot, knowing that his intended readers will bring this “scientific”
understanding to the term.
Strether’s Backstory
At the opening of The Ambassadors, Lewis Lambert Strether arrives in England, which,
in the traditional reading, serves as the vestibule of Europe and a place of transition that prepares
the protagonist for the experience of Paris. Variations of this theme are as far as any existing
critical writing goes in regard to the early chapters of the novel. Serving as the exposition of the
Other Plot, the opening book and the place in which it is set is vitally important and the subject
of the next chapter. However, in order to grab the thread from the onset and appreciate the
psychological transitions provoked by Europe, we must look at Strether’s starting point: his
backstory and the state of mind he brings to the opening of the novel (which is not revealed until
Book Second, Chapter II). A sense of Strether’s previous life in America provides dramatic
contrasts between where he has come from and where he is going.
36
He lives in Woollett, Massachusetts, as “one of the weariest of men. If ever a man had
come off tired Lambert Strether was that man” (Ambassadors 58). Much of his fatigue is the
result of negotiating his double life as a closeted homosexual: “He was burdened, poor Strether –
it had better be confessed at the outset – with the oddity of a double consciousness” (2). He
thinks and feels in accordance with his same-sex desires; the persona he presents to the public
must deny these thoughts and feelings. American ideologies of freedom and liberty exacerbated
the conflicts at the root of homosexual consciousness. “The presentation of a firm, masculine
authority as the face of the new American citizen exposed the tension of wanting to be free and
needing to assert control” (Bronski 28). Legal control of homosexuality varied by state. From
1834-1918, Massachusetts State Law defined sodomy as a “‘crime against nature with any man
or male child’” and sentenced those convicted to a maximum of twenty years in prison (Painter,
“Massachusetts”). Additionally, a separate statute enacted in 1887 defined “unnatural and
lascivious acts” as a crime, the commitment of which resulted in a fine of $100-$1,000 and/or a
prison term of up to five years. Specifics as to what acts one was accused of committing were
not provided to those indicted – however, “a defendant could ask for a bill of particulars”
(Painter). Records of convictions on charges related to homosexuality in the nineteenth century
are scant, perhaps because of the Puritan taboo that “had made homosexuality something it was
‘not profitable to know,’ ‘the crime not fit to be named among Christian men’” (Crompton,
“Homosexuals” 288). New England magistrates were unwilling to deal with anything so
distasteful. To make a sweeping generalization, America’s unofficial stance towards
homosexuality was “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Of far greater concern to the nation in the late
nineteenth century were national stability, imperialistic ventures, and capital success.
37
American masculinity at this time was bound to financial achievement; gaining and
maintaining capital success often went hand-in-hand with strong social connections and good
standing in the community. Strether hides his homosexual self primarily out of these concerns,
as opposed to the fear of being arrested – although the latter would certainly doom him. He is
editor of The Review – a position he holds due to the patronage of Mrs. Newsome (who publishes
the journal out of family money) – which appears to have homosexual overtones due to its
“green cover” (59). While Oscar Wilde’s green carnation brought the significance of the color
back into public awareness, “green had been a gay colour for centuries. Effeminate men in
Ancient Rome were called galbinati because of their fondness for the colour green” (Robb 151).
Strether earns a modest income but socializes with the educated upper classes of Woollett – due
in part to his close relationship with Mrs. Newsome, whom he escorts to social events such as the
opera (Ambassadors 34). In turn, she acts as a “beard”: her public appearances with Strether
suggest that they are involved in a heterosexual relationship. Although the slang term “beard”
did not come into use until the 1970s, the role had been played for centuries: “a person who
helps two people to conceal a clandestine love affair by escorting one of them in public; a person
who pretends publicly to be involved in a heterosexual relationship with a homosexual person in
order to help to conceal that person's homosexuality” (OED).
While appreciative of Mrs. Newsome, Strether is frustrated by this relationship. She not
only holds the purse strings but also has artistic control over The Review, which Strether resents
even while knowing he has no right to. More chaffing is the constant role-playing: the faux
heterosexual front that allows him to maintain his standing in society. This makes for a lonely
life: he has few occasions when he can be his actual self with others. He views his closeted
existence in Woollett “as if the backward picture had hung there, the long crooked course, grey
38
in the shadow of his solitude. It had been a dreadful cheerful sociable solitude, a solitude of life
or choice, of community” (Ambassadors 58). His “dreadful” association with Mrs. Newsome
makes possible a “cheerful sociable” life in hetero-normative Woollett, alleviating complete
“solitude.” The “community” he shares with members of the educated, artistic, comfortably
well-off classes comes with the cost of privatizing his real self; however, as long as he maintains
a heterosexual front the life he has managed to cobble together will not fall apart.
In his youth, shortly after the American Civil War, Strether traveled to Europe, spending
time in England and making a “pilgrimage” to Paris (Ambassadors 60). Europe and James’s
cosmopolitan approach to it has been written about at length by scholars, regularly pointing out
aspects of Old World culture and the American characters’ interaction with it. What has not
been recognized in James’s European settings is the existence of homosexual subcultures.
Distinct areas in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin and other major European cities are home to
thriving homosexual communities that took root in the eighteenth century. America was not
devoid of homosexual citizens at this time; however, the need for manpower overrode legal
statutes for the imprisonment of sodomists. The vastness of the young country made for large
areas of sparse population, however, and even in the densely populated cities homosexual
communities were in their nascent stages. While nineteenth-century New York had enclaves
where homosexuals congregated, it wasn’t until the 1910s and 1920s that Greenwich Village
constituted a visible middle-class gay subculture (Chauncey 10). In the 1840s San Francisco
was known as a town “with few social restrictions and a high tolerance for illegal behavior,
including same-sex sexual activity and deviation from gender norms. The roots of this
reputation can be found in the mostly all-male culture of the gold rush. Saloons, dance halls,
rowdy theaters, and brothels were plentiful and, except for a small number of female workers,
39
were patronized only by men” (Bronski 46). Yet not until after the mid-twentieth century would
San Francisco have a recognizable gay subculture. Living in American as a gay man is a
disadvantage for Strether in that the nation is not old enough, not sophisticated enough, to
support a homosexual subculture. Those in Europe had been established well over a century ago
and claimed urban space because of the thousands of men who defied the laws, risked the death
penalty, and met publically with like-minded men who provided friendship, support, sex, and
love.
Strether experiences the advantage of old-world culture on his early trip to Paris; there he
saw men living as he had not before thought possible. He remembers the trip as
a bold dash … but kept sacred at the moment in a hundred ways, and in none more so
than by this private pledge of his own to treat the occasion as a relation formed with the
higher culture and see that, as they said at Woollett, it should bear a good harvest. He
had believed, sailing home again, that he had gained something great, and his theory –
with an elaborate innocent plan … had then been to preserve, cherish and extend it.
(Ambassadors 60)
The “higher culture” refers to the relatively open lifestyle of homosexuals in Paris, made
possible by French law. Greek culture – or the spiritual and sexual love between men – is
alluded to by the term “higher culture,” particularly because Strether keeps “sacred” his relation
to it. The phrase “higher culture” also suggests a historical/social factor that augmented
European subcultures; historians of homosexuality point out the significant role played by
educated, upper-class men – particularly the aristocracy – in defining male homosexual culture in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They had key advantages: private space in which to
entertain lovers, the skill to write about and convey their sexual experiences, and the power to
40
keep legal authorities at arm’s length. Strether left Paris with a pledge to “preserve, cherish, and
extend” the “higher culture” to the best of his ability in Woollett, hoping to form a community of
homosexuals that could bear the harvest of companionship.
This proved more difficult than he had imagined: “As such plans as these had come to
nothing … it was doubtless little enough of a marvel that he should have lost account of that
handful of seed” (Ambassadors 60). Even for a young man in his twenties, making the
acquaintance of other gay men in a small town in the 1870s was problematic: American
homosexuality existed primarily underground at this time. Strether thinks back on his efforts,
which began without a real sense of how many of his fellow citizens might be gay:
He judged the quantity as small because it was small, and all the more egregiously since
it couldn’t, as he saw the case, so much as thinkably have been larger. He hadn’t had the
gift of making the most of what he tried, and if he had tried and tried again – no one but
himself knew how often – it appeared to have been that he might demonstrate what else,
in default of that, could be made. Old ghosts of experiments came back to him, old
drudgeries and delusions, and disgusts, old recoveries with their relapses, old fevers with
their chills, broken moments of good faith, others of still better doubt; adventures for the
most part, of the sort qualified as lessons. (59-60)
The number of men who recognized themselves to be homosexual – and went further by
accepting and revealing this aspect of themselves – was not only small, but finite. It is not as if
Strether was trying to convince men to join the Elks’ Club. He was unsure of his approach and
other men did not understand what he was trying to convey; he could not default to
demonstrating his same-sex desires in manners consider lewd and illegal. He experimented with
various signs, suggestive slang, perhaps following men – things he had seen done in Europe. He
41
had a few encounters, but they – for one reason or another – were not to his liking (“disgusts”).
He swore he would no longer try to find men – only to relapse under the pressure of loneliness
and desire, experiencing the fevers and chills that attend sexual longing in Victorian literature.
Men with whom he had a “moment of good faith” would break dates for future meetings, never
to be seen again. That Strether “tried and tried again” to make connections demonstrates his
perseverance, his commitment to the cause. Looking back, he feels he was delusional at times.
The failures come back to him as “ghosts.” But with time comes a degree of healing. Now
middle-aged, Strether sees his attempts to transplant the “higher culture” as “adventures.” He
had learned from them.
Strether had also cemented his intimate friendship with Waymarsh, whom he had known
all his life (Ambassadors 30). When trying to establish a community, Strether had found that
“though there had been people enough all round it there had been but three or four person in it.
Waymarsh was one of these…” (58). Homosexual men lived or worked in the area, but few felt
comfortable discussing their sexuality with others. Waymarsh was part of the community
because over the course of their friendship they had made their sexual proclivities known to each
other. Now both middle-aged, Strether and Waymarsh have decided to spend an undetermined
length of time together in Europe, where they can enjoy each other’s company away from the
prying eyes of New England. Before the action of the novel begins, Strether had agreed to meet
Waymarsh in Chester, England; from there they would proceed to London and Paris. We are
now ready to join Strether and his intimate friend.
42
CHAPTER 2
Strether and Waymarsh Learn to Cruise
“A community addicted to reflection and fond of ideas will try
experiments with the ‘story’ that will be left untried in a
community mainly devoted to travelling and shooting, to
pushing trade and playing football.”
Henry James, “The Future of the Novel” (1899)
The Ambassadors opens with Strether checking into the hotel at Chester and worrying
about when he will meet up with Waymarsh, who has been traveling in Europe for the past six
months. As he stands in the lobby, he thinks back on his voyage across the Atlantic and the
caution he exercised when disembarking in Liverpool. Strether is aware that, in contrast to
America, homosexuality in England is a subject of grave national concern. In the previous
century, a nascent homosexual subculture grew up around the “molly clubs” in London, the most
famous of which was Mother Clap’s Molly House in Holborn. Here men looking for other men
gathered, many of whom were dressed as women. At the time sodomy in England was a crime
under the Buggery Act of 1533, punishable by a fine, imprisonment, or the death penalty
(depending on who was arrested). In 1810 a group of men were apprehended at The White
Swan; of the eight convicted of sodomy, two were hanged and six were pilloried. This scandal,
known as the Vere Street Affair, triggered violent responses from the public, forcing many of the
molly houses to close or to become more discreet: “The mollies were content to entertain
themselves” (Kaplan 21). But not for long. By the mid-nineteenth century: “figures of flagrant
effeminacy and suspect desire emerged from protected enclaves and began walking the streets
openly. This ‘coming out’ challenged conventional assumptions about gender and sexuality,
domesticity and publicity, commerce and pleasure” (Kaplan 21). During this relatively liberal
43
period, the death penalty for sodomy was abolished and replaced with imprisonment for between
ten years and life by the modification of The Offences Against the Person Act in 1861.
Events in the latter-half of the century, however, created the hostile and repressive
atmosphere that Strether is met with. In 1870, two notorious cross-dressers, Ernest Boulton and
Frederick Park, took gender transgression and same-sex desire to a new level. The extensive
media coverage of their trials, which detailed their flagrantly public activities, appalled and/or
titillated the public while it emboldened homosexual men who longed to make their identities
more open. Police officials began to see Boulton and Park as representative of a large coterie of
cross-dressers, or a “hermaphrodite clique” (Kaplan 62). This triggered the Labouchere
Amendment of 1885, which made all male homosexual contact – both public and private –
illegal. “Nicknamed the ‘Blackmailer’s Charter’ as soon as it went on to the statute book,”
writes historian Joseph Bristow, “this pernicious piece of legislation until very recently created a
climate of secrecy and fear in the lives of men-loving me” (1). The Cleveland Street Scandal of
1889, involving telegraph boys who were paid for sex by well-heeled and aristocratic men
(including Prince Albert Victor, son of the Prince of Wales) further roiled English society.3
Then things got worse. In 1895 the three infamous trials of Oscar Wilde ran from 3 April to 25
May and continued to dominate the news for months afterward. Other cases reported during this
time encouraged the sensationalist popular press to expound on homosexual behavior and
networks. Increasingly demoralized, “all homosexual males as a class were equated with female
prostitutes” (Weeks, “Inverts” 118). Concern regarding activity on the streets resulted in the
Vagrancy Law Amendment Act – passed in 1898 with a clause “against men who ‘in any public
Lord Roseberry, one of Henry James’s first friends in London, was brought under scrutiny regarding the scandal.
According to Novick, James then “found it convenient to go to Paris for several weeks at the time of the boys’ trial,
supposedly to consult with Alphonse Daudet about his translation of Daudet’s novel” (143).
3
44
place persistently solicit or importune for immoral purposes.’ The crime carried a one-month
prison sentence, with hard labour” (Cook 43). While men were no longer being put to death for
homosexual acts, their behaviors had become highly scrutinized.
With this in mind, Strether operates on a “secret principle” when leaving the ship in
Liverpool: do not appear to be gay. This principle of survival is
wholly instinctive – the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find
himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade’s face, his business would be
a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the
nearing steamer as the first “note” of Europe. Mixed with everything was the
apprehension, already, on Strether’s part, that it would, at best, throughout, prove the note
of Europe in quite a sufficient degree. (Ambassadors 1)
Due to the Labouchere Amendment, Strether does not have Waymarsh meet him at the dock.
The “apprehension” that mixes into his emotions is polyvalent; it is his “understanding” of the
situation, as well as his “fear of what may happen; dread” (OED). “Apprehension” also refers to
“the seizure of a person, a ship, etc., in the name of justice or authority; arrest” (OED). This is
what Strether is apprehensive about: being apprehended, or arrested, for illegal contact with
another man. Were that to happen, his “business” – in short, his life – would be “a trifle
bungled” – to say the least.
To joke about this situation, however, is seemingly appropriate – despite the oppressive
legal environment. Landing in Liverpool generates “such a consciousness of personal freedom
as he hadn’t known for years; such a deep taste of change and of having above all for the
moment nobody and nothing to consider, as promised already, if headlong hope were not too
foolish, to colour his adventure with cool success” (Ambassadors 1). Strether is happy to take on
45
the necessary precautions in exchange for the escape from the necessary vigilance of his closeted
life in Woollett. From the first page of the novel we begin to see Strether’s double nature – the
conflicts at the core of his thinking. One is safety versus fulfillment. He exercises caution when
disembarking from the ship in Liverpool, planning to meet Waymarsh later in Chester and being
“indifferently aware of the number of persons who esteemed themselves fortunate in being,
unlike himself, ‘met’” (2). Yet he had let his guard down on the passage: “There were people on
the ship with whom he had easily consorted – so far as ease could up to now be imputed to him –
and who for the most part plunged into the current that set from the landing-stage to London;
there were others who had invited him to a tryst at the inn and had even invoked his aid for a
‘look round’ at the beauties of Liverpool” (2). Strether “consorted” (accompanied or associated)
with other passengers; an equally viable denotation for “consort” fits the Other Plot: “to have
sexual commerce with” (OED). Private cabins and staterooms afforded privacy on the ship,
allowing for sexual activity. On leaving the ship he is invited to a “tryst” at the inn – a meeting
that carries sexual connotations – in order to continue the frivolities enjoyed on the ship.
Shipmates ask for his help in finding “the beauties of Liverpool,” indicating that Strether has
been to Liverpool before (during his trip after the war) and is familiar with the city. However,
“beauties” are difficult to find in Liverpool at this time – unless one is looking for prostitutes.
Deemed “the black spot on the Mersey” in the mid-nineteenth century, Liverpool had
only been upgraded to the “bloody spot” by 1900 – despite the building of new civic structures
(Macilwee 7). Liverpool had not fully risen above the eighteenth-century squalor produced by
the whaling industry, privateering, and slave-trading – all of which laid the foundations for
crime, rampant alcoholism, and prostitution. According to historians of homosexuality, where
there are female prostitutes one will find male prostitutes as well – particularly in major port
46
cities: these are “the beauties.” Sailors had long been associated with buggary in the English
mind, due in part to the sensationalist eighteenth-century newspapers that detailed the trials, and
subsequent hangings, of members of the Royal Navy found guilty of unspeakable acts. “It is not
surprising that after London, Liverpool became the first major town to organize a modern,
efficient and professional police force” (Macilwee 10). While some of the passengers with
whom Strether consorted on the ship knew of the safe inns and taverns where one could meet
with other men, others “plunged straight into the current that set from the landing-stage to
London” (Ambassadors 2) – where the subculture was larger, more diverse, and easier to blend
into.
Strether does not go to London, but also eschews the tryst at the inn: “he had stolen away
from every one alike, had kept no appointment and renewed no acquaintance … and had even
independently, unsociably, alone, without encounter or relapse and by mere quiet evasion, given
his afternoon and evening to the immediate and the sensible” (Ambassadors 2). Operating from
the instinct of caution, he separates himself from the shipmates who now know him (and his
sexual proclivities) and does not “relapse” by trying to engage in encounters with men “in the
dreadful delightful impressive streets” (9). But this does not mean that Strether forgoes the
opportunity for sex. Having some knowledge of the city and the different venues where men can
be found, Strether chooses the “immediate and the sensible” and steals away for “an afternoon
and an evening on the banks of the Mersey” (2) – where he will find the like-minded along the
river. Not unlike the Seine in Paris, the Mersey attracted men looking for sex with other men;
the river provided a plausible excuse for having one’s pants down, should a police officer
inquire, as it was a place to bathe and urinate. “They formed a qualified draught of Europe, an
afternoon and an evening on the banks of the Mersey, but such as it was he took his potion at
47
least undiluted” (2). The men he encountered were the “draught” – sexual experiences that
revive like a deep breath or dose of medicine – and qualified as one of the primary reasons to go
to Europe. He took the healing “potion” of sex, companionship, physical contact in its richest
form, “undiluted” by the concerns that hamper such pleasures at home. Strether had taken
precautions on disembarking, but did not deny himself fulfillment during the afternoon and
evening spent on the banks of the Mersey.
His time there reveals another reason for the “secret principle … that had prompted
Strether not absolutely to desire Waymarsh’s presence at the dock” (Ambassadors 1). He wants
to spend time with other men. Not having been met at the ship by Waymarsh allows time for
this. While indulging in the healing draught that the men at the Mersey administer, Strether still
“winced a little, truly, at the thought that Waymarsh might be already at Chester” (2). He
twinges with guilt and chagrin at the thought of having to provide an immediate explanation as to
where he has been if his comrade arrives before he does. Thus Strether is “not wholly
disconcerted” to learn that Waymarsh will not arrive until that evening. “That he was prepared
to be vague to Waymarsh about the hour of the ship’s touching, and that he both wanted
extremely to see him and enjoyed extremely the duration of delay – these things, it is to be
conceived, were early signs in him that his relation to his actual errand might prove none of the
simplest” (2). At this early point in the novel, it is unclear what Strether’s “actual errand” is: to
come out and be with Waymarsh or to meet other men (Chad is not mentioned until Book
Second). The fact that the protagonist is unsure himself creates the unstable situation “to be
conceived” at the top of the novel and puts the Other Plot in motion. This conflict substantiates
the narrator’s insight: “He was burdened, poor Strether – it had better be confessed at the outset –
with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his
48
indifference” (2). Strether’s primary trait is duality. He wants “extremely” to see Waymarsh
and does not want to make him upset or jealous; simultaneously, Strether wants to cruise for
other men. This is tied to his vacillations between safety and fulfillment: he exercises the wise
precautions of middle-aged acumen at the Liverpool dock, yet ventures with youthful
abandonment along the banks of the Mersey. The inherent conflict of being homosexual in a
heterosexual world overarches all. Strether lives as a divided self. J.A. Symonds defines this
state of being: “the distinction in my character between an inner and real self and an outer and
artificial self” (Memoirs 95).
Strether’s physical appearance reflects his dual nature: “a marked bloodless brownness of
face, a thick dark moustache, of characteristically American cut, growing strong and falling low,
a head of hair still abundant but irregularly streaked with grey, and a nose of bold free
prominence, the even line, the high finish, as it might have been called, of which had a certain
effect of mitigation” (Ambassadors 2). This mitigating effect balances the youthful thick locks
flecked with grey, the clean-shaven cheeks divided by a moustache, the distinct pallor of face
that is somehow simultaneously ruggedly brown. This “lean … slightly loose figure of a man of
the middle height” is rather ordinary, although Waymarsh considers Strether to be “‘a very
attractive man’” (21). Most importantly, he is masculine looking (like the author himself).
James presents his protagonist as such in order to push back against the stereotype of effeminacy
disseminated in the newspapers. Jeffrey Weeks points out: “It is significant that it is
‘effeminacy’ that is the most stigmatized form of behavior, suggesting the deep underlying
gender-role strains emerging. By the nineteenth century the homosexual stereotype was clear:
‘lust written on his face … pale, languid, scented, effeminate, oblique in expression’” (Coming
49
Out 37). James uses an aspect of this stereotype – the “distinct pallor of face” – to suggest
Strether’s sexual orientation.
When Waymarsh finally arrives in Chester, we find him similarly masculine in
appearance. Long in leg and with a broad back (Ambassadors 16), he had “a large handsome
head and a large sallow seamed face – a striking significant physiognomic total, the upper range
of which, the great political brow, the thick loose hair, the dark fuliginous eyes, recalled even to
a generation whose standard had dreadfully deviated the impressive image, familiar by
engravings and busts, of some great national worthy of the earlier part of the mid-century” (17).
Mr. Waymarsh, the American lawyer, is described in terms that recall another American lawyer
– Abraham Lincoln: a “great national worthy” who lived at “mid-century” and whose dark, sooty
eyes are familiar to those who have seen the “engravings” (17). Waymarsh has an element of
“power and promise” that reminds Strether of this “American statesman, the statesman trained in
‘Congressional halls,’ of an elder day.” James admired Lincoln (Novick, Young Master 103) and
by the end of the nineteenth century the majority of Americans did also; the resemblance of
Waymarsh to Lincoln is positive, intended to encourage readers to like Waymarsh. Ingenious in
this comparison is James’s use of popular perceptions of Lincoln as a means to hint at
Waymarsh’s homosexuality.
The following sentence from the novel, made in reference to Waymarsh, simultaneously
applies to Lincoln: “The legend had been in later years that as the lower part of his face, which
was weak and slightly crooked, spoiled the likeness, this was the real reason for the growth of his
beard, which might have seemed to spoil it for those not in the secret” (Ambassadors 17).
According to popular legend, in 1860 an eleven year-old girl, Grace Bedell, wrote to Lincoln
suggesting that he grow a beard to improve the look of his thin face. Interviewed in 1878, Bedell
50
described Lincoln’s lower face as angular (compare to James: “slightly crooked”). Lincoln grew
a beard and credited his whiskers to the young girl. However, Republican delegates had been
urging Lincoln to grow a beard because they feared his weak face would discourage voters – “the
real reason for the growth” known to insiders who were in on “the secret.” Waymarsh also grew
a beard to cover his “weak and slightly crooked” face; this “spoiled the likeness” to
contemporary homosexuals who identified their leanings by shaving (17). During and after the
major trials of homosexuals in London, journalists “evoked, clarified and endorsed” stereotypes
of inverts which included the marker of the lack of facial hair: “the fact that defendants were
clean-shaven was invariably reported…. Facial hair functioned as a symbol of masculinity and
respectability [in] the late-Victorian ‘beard boom.’ Those without were associated with fashion,
bohemianism and an avant-garde – but also possibly worse” (Cook 61). Waymarsh fears being
identified as homosexual; he wears a beard to mask his “secret.”4
Strether fears revealing himself to other guests at the hotel in Chester and prepares
himself for greeting Waymarsh on his arrival; it will be nothing more than a “short stare of
suspended welcome” (Ambassadors 14). Actually, Strether awaits “their reunion … with
something he would have been sorry, have been almost ashamed not to recognize as emotion”
(15). The two men go up to the room Strether has engaged for Waymarsh; “at the end of another
half-hour he had no less discreetly left him.” Entering the room was, obviously, also discreet –
revealing a concern for appearances, but not one strong enough to override the desire to “enjoy at
once the first consequence of their reunion” (15) Strether leaves the room “excited; and his
4
It is interesting to note that James shaved his face on arriving in Paris in 1875: “Someone observing James on his
walks would have seen a young man with a fresh, somewhat pale, complexion. He had removed his whiskers, in
deference to French fashion” (Novick, Young 318). A youthful, clean-shaven face was the fashion in homosexual
culture. After the Cleveland Street scandal in 1889, James re-grew his beard and maintained it for ten years.
51
excitement – to which indeed he would have found it difficult instantly to give a name – brought
him once more downstairs and caused him for some minutes vaguely to wander.” Strether is
“excited” about the prospect of sodomy, which was unnamable by the Victorians. He is eager
“to have his more intimate session with his friend before the evening closed” (15). The word
“intimate” is polyvalent, with at least two denotations: “pertaining to the inmost thoughts or
feelings; proceeding from, concerning, or affecting one's inmost self; closely personal;
euphem. of sexual intercourse” (OED). The Oxford English Dictionary substantiates the second
definition with an example from the contemporary popular press: “1889 Daily News 23 Jan.
2/6 The defendant…did not however have intimacy with her. He had never been intimate with
her.” Strether wants to have sex, yet a relationship based on tender feelings. “Dinner and the
subsequent stroll by moonlight – a dream, on Strether’s part, of romantic effects” (Ambassadors
15-16) – suggest that the comradeship is not only about sex. However, the midnight stroll is cut
short on the pretense of “a mere missing of thicker coats” and the two men repair to Waymarsh’s
room.
Once there, Waymarsh worries that he will be unable to sleep: “he should have a night of
prowling unless he should succeed, as a preliminary, in getting prodigiously tired” (Ambassadors
16). Insomnia was an often-reported symptom of homosexuality in nineteenth-century medical
treatises and is what drives Jacques out of the house and to the baths in D’Argis’s novel Sodom.
Waymarsh considers the possibility of prowling for sex, unless Strether can make him sleepy
(the result of sexual exertion); however, a preliminary dialogue ensues. Waymarsh is unhappy.
He sits on the edge of the couch in trousers and shirt; “With his long legs extended and his large
back much bent, he nursed, alternately, for an almost incredible time, his elbows and his beard.
He struck his visitor as extremely, as almost willfully uncomfortable.” Strether finds
52
Waymarsh’s “despair of felicity” to be “in a manner contagious” and worries that if his
comrade’s mood doesn’t improve, “it would constitute a menace for his own prepared, his own
already confirmed, consciousness of the agreeable” (16). Strether has already confirmed the
agreeable nature of cruising; his hopes for more of this activity will be menaced if Waymarsh
becomes a wet blanket. Waymarsh has not had such luck: “‘Europe’” as a place of sexual
freedom “had up to now rather failed of its message to him; he hadn’t got into tune with it and at
the end of three months almost renounced any such expectation” (16). Waymarsh’s early
resignation frustrates Strether, as his comrade’s recalcitrance seems “inconsequent and
unfounded” (16). However, inasmuch as he “hadn’t seen him for so long an interval,” he tries to
apprehend Waymarsh in a new light: “The head was bigger, the eyes finer, than they need have
been for the career; but that only meant, after all, that the career was itself expressive. What it
expressed at midnight in the gas-glaring bedroom at Chester was that the subject of it had, at the
end of years, barely escaped, by flight in time, a general nervous collapse” (17). Waymarsh’s
career as a lawyer requires him to be expressive; his legal knowledge, and the fact that he is “the
subject” of laws that criminalize homosexuality, are expressed in his gloominess and “general
nervous collapse.”
Having practiced in Milrose, Connecticut, Waymarsh is well aware of the legal
legislation condemning homosexuality, which was especially aggressive in his state. In 1821,
the Connecticut State Legislature adopted a new criminal code that eliminated the death penalty
for homosexuality, but replaced it with a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.
The wording was changed to read that “every person who shall have carnal knowledge of
any man, against the order of nature” could be prosecuted. Although this raised the
question of whether a boy could be a victim, since he was not a “man,” it more clearly
53
created a much broader law that allowed the prosecution of fellatio as well as anal
penetration. Thus, Connecticut was, for nearly a half-century, the only state in the nation
to include fellatio as a criminal offense. (Painter, “Connecticut”)
These laws, which remained in place until 1909, were more threatening than those suffered in
Massachusetts, which Strether is aware of: “He had long since made a mental distinction –
though never in truth daring to betray it – between the voice of Milrose and the voice even of
Woollett. It was the former, he felt, that was most in the real tradition” (Ambassadors 19). The
Connecticut law that imprisoned men for life is more in line with the tradition of England; both
men are well aware of the history (“real tradition”) of persecution.5 However, because
Waymarsh has sworn a professional oath to uphold the laws of the United States, acting on his
homosexual desires is doubly egregious. This exacerbates his conflict of inner versus outer self.
For this reason, Waymarsh is uncomfortable now that he and Strether have the time and
place for intimate relations. “Thanks to the stress of occupation, the strain of professions, the
absorption and embarrassment of each, they had not, at home, during years before this sudden
brief and almost bewildering reign of comparative ease, found so much as a day for a meeting”
(Ambassadors 18). Now together in Chester – a place of “comparative ease,” in that they are far
from home and under less scrutiny – “there were marks the friends made on things to talk about,
and on things not to.” The two find common ground on the topic of “prostration” (18). The
word most likely to precede “prostration” in the nineteenth century was “nervous.” An article
regarding neurasthenia – a term often used as a synonym for nervous prostration – published in
an 1884 edition of the journal The Medical Summary defines the disorder: “a weakened condition
of the central nervous system … due to the lack of proper nervous energies derived from that
James refers to “the real tradition” several times in the novel without defining it. As we will see, it takes on
various connotations depending on the context.
5
54
system…. The terms nervous prostration, neurasthenia, spinal irritation and American disease,
have of late years been quite frequently met with in periodical medical literature” (33). KrafftEbing describes approximately eight cases of neurasthenia Psychopathia Sexualis (1894). Over
half of them are presented under the following headings: “Acquired Homo-Sexuality”;
“Congenital Homo-Sexuality”; “Urnings”; “Androgyny and Gynandry”; “Effemination and
Viraginity.” Ronald Pearsall maintains that Victorian bachelors (men who did not marry because
of a sexual aversion to women) “discussed their neurasthenic aches and pains with anyone who
would listen” (504).
Common ailments attributed to prostration are listed in a 1919 edition of the North
American Journal of Homeopathy: “The term [neurasthenia] came into use only a little over a
generation ago and has been applied to almost every conceivable condition due to prolonged
excessive expenditure of energy and marked by fatigue, pain in the back, loss of memory,
insomnia, constipation, loss of appetite, etc.… To effect a cure it seems necessary sometimes to
get down to the very foundations of his being – almost to that of his ancestors, who have no
doubt laid the beginnings of his troubles” (501). The author of this article seems to allude to
Ulrichs, who was the first to argue that homosexuality is in-born and due to the evolution of the
embryo. However, a letter received from “a man of high position in London,” included in a later
edition of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1894), suggests an additional cause of
prostration:
Among urnings, a far higher proportion of cases of insanity, of nervous exhaustion, etc.
may be observed than in other men. Does this increased nervousness necessarily depend
upon the character of urningism, or is it not, in the majority of cases, to be ascribed to the
effect of the laws and the prejudices of society which prohibit the indulgence of their
55
sexual desires, depending on a congenital peculiarity, while others are not thus
restrained? (411)
Waymarsh is acutely nervous about the “laws and prejudices of society”; not being able to
change their individual genetic makeup, he and Strether have come to Europe in order to indulge
their sexual desires and alleviate their nervous prostration. James couches the following scene in
this understanding, repeating the work “prostration” four times in proximity to the words “back”
and “behind” – both of which hint at symptoms of this condition.6
As they sit in the “glare of the gas” in the hotel room, Strether silently appraises
Waymarsh after their long separation and admires his friend’s financial achievements: “he was a
success … in spite of overwork, of prostration, of sensible shrinkage” (Ambassadors 18).
Waymarsh has also been judging his comrade and breaks the silence:
“I don’t know as I quite see what you require it for. You don’t appear sick to speak of.”
It was of Europe that Waymarsh thus finally spoke.
“Well,” said Strether, who fell as much as possible into step. “I guess I don’t feel
sick now that I’ve started. But I had pretty well run down before I did start.”
Waymarsh raised his melancholy look. “Ain’t you about up to your usual
average?”
It was not quite pointedly skeptical, but it seemed somehow a plea for the purest
veracity, and it thereby affected our friend as the very voice of Milrose.… There had
been occasions in his past when the sound of it had reduced him to temporary confusion,
and the present, for some reason, suddenly became such another. It was nevertheless no
light matter that the very effect of his confusion should be to make him again prevaricate.
James himself suffered from constipation and back pain for decades. See John Halperin, “Henry James’s Civil
War” for an innovative explanation of James’s back injury and “obscure hurt.”
6
56
“That description hardly does justice to a man to whom it has done such a lot of good to
see you.” (19)
Waymarsh asks Strether if he really needs Europe to appease his sexual desires, as the latter does
not seem to be suffering from depravation. Strether counters by saying that he had been sick
(before cruising in Liverpool), but feels better now that he has started – started on the trip (he
hopes to convey), not having sex. Waymarsh accusingly asks if Strether is up to his average –
not weight, but number of sexual pick-ups. This throws Strether off guard and he lies by
omission, turning the tables on Waymarsh and making a sarcastic retort to the effect of: “Well,
thanks for the accusation. I’m better because I’m seeing you!”
Strether tries to back this up by complimenting Waymarsh on his appearance, noting that
the effects of nervous prostration have abated somewhat since the last time they met: “‘I mean …
that your appearance isn’t as bad as I’ve seen it” (Ambassadors 19). Waymarsh stares at the
basin and jug in the room – “it was almost as if [his eyes] obeyed an instinct of propriety” – but
manages to return the compliment:
“You’ve filled out some since then.”
“I’m afraid I have,” Strether laughed: “one does fill some with all one takes in,
and I’ve taken in, I dare say, more than I’ve natural room for. I was dog-tired when I
sailed.” It had the oddest sound of cheerfulness. (20)
Strether laughs because he is making a pun on what he has “taken in”; in the several hours spent
on the banks of the Mersey, he likely took in quite a bit. It is odd that he sounds cheerful when
complaining about being “‘dog-tired when [he] sailed’” – unless one intuits what would naturally
follow: “but, I feel much better now!” Waymarsh counters with his contrasting experience:
57
“I was dog-tired,” his companion returned, “when I arrived, and it’s this wild hunt
for rest that takes all the life out of me. The fact is, Strether – and it’s a comfort to have
you here at last to say it to … the fact is, such a country as this ain’t my kind of country
anyway. There ain’t a country I’ve seen over here that does seem my kind. Oh I don’t
say but what there are plenty of pretty places and remarkable old things; but the trouble is
that I don’t seem to feel anywhere in tune.” (20)
Attempting to cruise in Europe has exhausted him. But Waymarsh is not necessarily being a
narrow-minded American here. The deep history of European countries allowed for the
formation of homosexual subcultures, but this was after centuries of ecclesiastic law put
countless homosexuals to death. The role that Christianity historically played in the legal
condemnation of homosexuality is the anathema that prevents Waymarsh from feeling that any
European country is his “kind of country”: “The Catholic Church for Waymarsh – that was to say
the enemy, the monster of bulging eyes and far-reaching quivering grouping tentacles – was
exactly society, exactly the multiplication of shibboleths, exactly the discrimination of types and
tones, exactly the wicked old Rows of Chester, rank with feudalism; exactly in short Europe”
(Ambassadors 28). The Church devised ways to identify homosexuals (“shibboleths”) and
hunted down these “types.” Waymarsh is sensitive to the horrors of Europe’s medieval past: “In
the Middle Ages fierce laws were passed, at clerical prompting, that led to the burning,
beheading, drowning, hanging, and castration of male ‘sodomites’ who, through the broadest
possible interpretation of the Sodom story and other biblical texts, were blamed for such
disasters as plagues, earthquakes, floods, famines, and even defeat in battle” (Crompton,
Homosexuality xii). The charming scenery and quaint “old things” are not enough to offset the
injustices represented by the Gothic cathedrals that dot the landscape. The United States – too
58
young to be darkly medieval – had separated Church and State at its inception; while both
institutions reviled homosexuals in 1900, they did not combine forces in persecuting them.
Again, Waymarsh’s legal knowledge exacerbates the internal angst of being homosexual: “‘the
trouble is that I don’t seem to feel anywhere in tune” (20). This confession is incisive
psychological realism. He tells Strether this because he wants to have sex – that’s why he asked
Strether to join him – but has been too uncomfortable on his travels to seek out a partner.
Waymarsh’s confession continues: “‘I haven’t had the first sign of that lift I was led to
expect.’ With this he broke out more earnestly. ‘Look here – I want to go back’” (Ambassadors
20). Too nervous to cruise with much success, Waymarsh would rather go back to his closeted
lifestyle in America. Strether has no intention of leaving Europe, but does not want to tell his
comrade of his hope to augment this time spent together by meeting new men. Thus, Strether
turns on Waymarsh with an accusation and a half-truth, “look[ing] at him hard”:
“That’s a genial thing to say to a fellow who has come out on purpose to meet
you!”
Nothing could have been finer, on this, than Waymarsh’s somber glow. “Have
you come out on purpose?”
“Well – very largely.”
“I thought from the way you wrote there was something back of it.”
Strether hesitated. “Back of my desire to be with you?”
“Back of your prostration.”
Strether, with a smile made more dim by a certain consciousness, shook his head.
“There are all the causes of it!”
“And no particular cause that seemed most to drive you?”
59
Our friend could at last conscientiously answer. “Yes. One. There is a matter
that has had much to do with my coming out.” (20-1)
Waymarsh is sensitive, unsure of how this rendezvous is going to go, and petulantly prods: “have
you” come out to see me? Strether’s response is less than comforting: “Well – ” … sort of. As
both men lead sexually stultified lives in America, Waymarsh assumes that Strether has come
out so that the two can alleviate their “back” problems caused by nervous prostration. Yet
Strether’s demeanor makes Waymarsh feel insecure about the extent to which he is desired.
Strether avoids revealing his interest in meeting other men by dismissing his purpose as
“complicated” (21). He then tells Waymarsh:
“Oh you shall have the whole thing. But not to-night.”
Waymarsh seemed to sit stiffer and to hold his elbows tighter. “Why not – if I
can’t sleep?”
“Because, my dear man, I can!”
“Then where’s your prostration?”
“Just in that – that I can put in eight hours.” (21)
James uses double-entendre here: that Waymarsh will have the “whole thing” refers to both story
and penis. The second understanding is reinforced by Waymarsh seeming “stiffer” (engorged)
and complaining that he can’t sleep: having sex will help with that. When Strether says “not tonight,” however, Waymarsh’s suspicions are renewed: why not tonight? How can you go to
sleep? I thought you had come out to see me because of “your prostration.” Strether stammers
when delivering his duplicitous excuse: he can put in eight hours of sleep because he is tired
from “putting in” as many hours of sexual activity the previous day in Liverpool. Strether
decides that he should at least give Waymarsh a hand-job:
60
the result of which was, in its order, that, to do the latter justice, he permitted his friend to
insist on his really getting settled. Strether, with a kind coercive hand for it, assisted him
to this consummation, and again found his own part in their relation auspiciously
enlarged by the smaller touches of lowering the lamp and seeing to a sufficiency of
blanket. It somehow ministered for him to indulgence to feel Waymarsh [sic] .… (21)
Strether permits Waymarsh to insist that he do him “justice” by giving him some sexual relief so
that he can get settled and go to sleep. Thus Strether assists Waymarsh to “consummation”: “the
action or an act of consummating a marriage or relationship. Also more generally: the action or
an act of having sexual intercourse” (OED). He achieves this by using his hand in manner both
gentle and “coercive” – “having the power of physical pressure or compression” – to masturbate
him. The three words James uses to describe this hand-job (“kind coercive hand”) mirror the
description of the manual stimulation the narrator receives in Teleny (1893): “‘This grasp was as
soft as a child’s, as expert as a whore’s, as strong as a fencer’s’” (Wilde 73). James transposes
these three modifiers. A child can be “kind”: “naturally existing or present; inherent in the very
nature of a person or thing; innate, inborn; not acquired” (OED). A whore can be “coercive”:
“compelling; convincing”. A fencer is a “hand,” or expert, with the hand that holds the foil. In
the process of masturbating Waymarsh, Strether “again found his own part in their relation
auspiciously enlarged by the smaller touches” (Ambassadors 21). He is now aroused, as he had
been the previous day (“again”); “his own part” (penis) is “auspiciously enlarged” by the smaller
touches (rubbing up against Waymarsh; reciprocal fondling). His excitement “ministered”
(prompted, provided) his indulgence (the capitulation to desire) to feel Waymarsh – to a greater
physical extent than he has so far.
This only distracts Waymarsh for so long, however. Again “his companion challenged
him out of the bedclothes. ‘Is [Mrs. Newsome] really after you? Is that what’s behind?’
61
Strether felt an uneasiness at the direction taken by his companion’s insight, but he played a little
at uncertainty” (Ambassadors 21). Waymarsh continues to target what he now perceives to be
the source of his jealousy:
“It’s generally felt, you know, that she follows you up pretty close.”
Strether’s candour was never very far off. “Oh it has occurred to you that I’m
literally running away from Mrs. Newsome?”
“Well, I haven’t known but what you are. You’re a very attractive man, Strether.”
… he rambled on with an effect between the ironic and the anxious, “it’s you that are
after her. Is Mrs. Newsome over here?” He spoke as with a droll dread of her.
It made his friend – though rather dimly – smile. “Dear no ….” (21-2)
Strether smiles at Waymarsh’s ironic suggestion, particularly because it gives him an out; he
would rather try to satisfy Waymarsh’s misgivings with a crumb of information about Mrs.
Newsome than reveal his secondary incentive for coming to Europe. At this point in the novel,
the reader knows no more about Strether’s relationship with Mrs. Newsome than Waymarsh;
Strether’s response leaves us equally in the dark:
“I’ve come in a manner instead of [Mrs. Newsome]; and come to that extent – for you’re
right in your inference – on her business…. Involving more things than I can think of
breaking ground on now. But don’t be afraid – you shall have them from me: you’ll
probably find yourself having quite as much of them as you can do with. I shall – if we
keep together – very much depend on your impression of some of them.”
Waymarsh’s acknowledgment of this tribute was characteristically indirect. “You
mean to say you don’t believe we will keep together?”
62
“I only glance at the danger,” Strether paternally said, “because when I hear you
wail to go back I seem to see you open up such possibilities of folly.”
Waymarsh took it – silent a little – like a large snubbed child. “What are you
going to do with me?” (22)
This is a bit underhanded on Strether’s part. Not only does he deny Waymarsh any real
information about the business he is undertaking, he changes the subject by insinuating that –
even though he ostensibly came to Europe to be with his comrade – he might go off on his own.
Understandably, Waymarsh is hurt by this. This is not the last time we will see the cruel streak
in Strether’s nature; the protagonist of the Other Plot is not a man of sweetness and light.
In order to find out what he is “going to do” with Waymarsh, however, we must first turn
our attention to another primary character: Miss Maria Gostrey. In the Preface James explains
that Maria Gostrey is more than just Strether’s friend: “She is the reader’s friend much rather –
in consequence of dispositions that make him so eminently require one; and she acts in that
capacity, and really in that capacity alone, with exemplary devotion, from beginning to end of
the book” (xliii). Maria Gostrey serves as a ficelle in both the traditional and the Other Plot;
despite her “exemplary devotion,” she should not be seen as a love interest. She serves
effectively as a ficelle in the Other Plot because she is aware of, and is comfortable with,
Strether’s sexual orientation: the deep dissimulation of his life as a homosexual man is revealed
through their conversations. Miss Gostrey is well prepared to counsel Strether in these matters;
in the Preface James tells us: “She is an enrolled, a direct, aid to lucidity; she is in fine, to tear off
her mask, the most unmitigated and abandoned of ficelles” (xliii). Because Miss Gostrey is
uninhibited, unconstrained, and “abandoned” – devoted to a way of life that society deems as
evil or immoral, such as homosexuality – she accepts Strether’s sexuality and candidly discusses
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with him the complications, successes, failures, and hopes involved in negotiating life as a gay
man. Miss Gostrey serves as more than a dramatic device in the Other Plot in that she impels the
action early in the novel. However, she is fully a ficelle by this denotation: “a trick, artifice”
(OED). Gostrey is a complex character and requires disclosure as well.
James “tear[s] off her mask” in a series of hints that begins with her entrance in the novel.
The clues are easier to decipher, however, if we begin with the most obvious one, delivered in
Book First, Chapter III. Strether gives his impression of Maria Gostrey: “He had quite the
consciousness of his new friend, for their companion, that he might have had of a Jesuit in
petticoats” (Ambassadors 28). In referring to Gostrey as a “Jesuit in petticoats,” James alludes to
a headline strewn across several London newspapers in 1870: “Men in Petticoats.” The articles
that appeared under this headline describe the trials of Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park – two
notorious cross-dressers known on the scene as “Stella” and “Fanny,” respectively. The account
of the proceedings recorded in Reynolds’s 29 May 1870 includes the first usage of the word
“drag” in reference to men wearing women’s clothing (OED). Nothing if not unmitigated and
abandoned, Boulton and Park had a penchant for high-profile display – touring the better districts
of London in open carriages, attending the Oxford-Cambridge boat race, frequenting the theaters
– while impeccably dressed as women of taste. A penny pamphlet titled “Men in Petticoats”
reprinted articles from Reynolds’s that describe a fancy-dress ball Boulton and Park attended at
the Royal Exeter Hotel (also known as Haxell’s). Thirteen of the forty-eight attendees were men
wearing women’s ball gowns, hairpieces, make-up, jewelry, perfume, and, of course, petticoats.
These were not Jesuits but gentlemen of the upper classes. James substitutes “Jesuits” for the
word “men” in labeling Gostrey in order to disguise the allusion while maintaining the
suggestion of homosexuality; Jesuits, often employed as tutors or instructors, had been routinely
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accused of pederasty in jokes and ribald songs since the early eighteenth century. Boulton and
Parks had been under surveillance for over a year before being arrested at the Strand Theatre in
1870 on charges of “public indecency” and “conspiracy to commit the felony of sodomy.” The
hearings at Bow Street, which began the following month, created a media frenzy. The major
London newspapers, awash in headlines such as “The Gentlemen Personating Women,”
subjected the lifestyle and intimate relations of these two young men (as well as those of their
friends) to “intense and protracted scrutiny [which was] reported in extensive detail” (Kaplan
24). Having generated so much titillating material, one is not surprised to see Boulton and Park
reappear as characters in The Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881). James harnesses these icons
of popular culture in characterizing Miss Gostrey, using allusions to Boulton and Park
throughout the novel as a means to convey her identity. Gostrey shares their audacity: “The
surprising thing, to us, is that Boulton and Park’s extrovert behavior should have gone unchecked
for so long as it did; they let things rip in no uncertain manner” (Pearsall 466).
With “Men in Petticoats” in mind, we now look at Strether’s impression of the
“abandoned” Maria Gostrey as they prepare to walk about Chester, having met earlier at the
hotel:
She affected him as almost insolently young; but an easily carried five-and-thirty could
still do that. She was, however, like himself, marked and wan; only it naturally couldn’t
have been known to him how much a spectator looking from one to the other might have
discerned that they had in common. It wouldn’t for such a spectator have been altogether
insupposable that, each so finely brown and so sharply spare, each confessing so to dents
of surface and aids to sight, to a disproportionate nose and a head delicately or grossly
grizzled, they might have been brother and sister. On this ground indeed there would
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have been a residuum of difference; such a sister having surely known in respect to such
a brother the extremity of separation, and such a brother now feeling in respect to such a
sister the extremity of surprise.” (Ambassadors 6)
Miss Gostrey is “marked” or gives signs of homosexuality; she is “wan” – pale and sickly – per
the stereotype. Like Strether, aspects of her appearance are at odds with each other. She is wan
yet “finely brown”; she appears young despite her grizzled hair. Her face is unbalanced, due to
the “disproportionate” nose. There are dents in her surface – the damage of being Other, a
square peg forced into a round hole. The most prominent clue to her homosexuality, however, is
the repetition of the words “brother” and “sister” – each appearing three times in the above
passage. “A French slang dictionary of 1874 listed over forty insulting terms for a male
homosexual. Gay men and women tended to use more neutral or more loving terms: ‘friend’,
‘brother’, ‘sister’, ‘father’, ‘mother’…” (Robb 150). Strether refers to himself and Maria
Gostrey as “brother and sister” because he recognizes that they are both homosexuals; one seeing
only the “residuum of difference” in their physical features might assume that they are biological
siblings. However, a keen-eyed “spectator” might gawk if he perceived the “extremity of
separation” between the two, as Strether does – a difference which gives him an “extremity of
surprise.”
Strether is surprised because Miss Gostrey is a man in drag. The “extremity of
separation” is created by Miss Gostrey’s manner of dress – theatrical to the point that an
imagined on-looker of the two is twice referred to as a “spectator” in the above passage.
However, the description of her dress belies anything outlandish: “She had, this lady, a perfect
plain propriety, an expensive subdued suitability, that the companion was not free to analyze, but
that struck him, so that his consciousness of it was instantly acute, as a quality quite new to him”
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(Ambassadors 5). It is not at all unusual for a lady of the social class in which Strether circulates
to be expensively dressed with subdued propriety; a woman tastefully attired for travel is not
“new to him.” A new experience for Strether is encountering a man dressed with such “perfectly
plain propriety.” Cross-dressing prostitutes on the streets of London not only tended to dress
more provocatively, but did not have the means for expensive clothes, often buying (or renting)
their costumes at used clothing shops near Leiscester Square. One of the many reasons Boulton
and Parks were so disturbing to bourgeois sensibilities was the fact that photographs show them
in women’s outfits that were both tasteful and expensive – looking the very model of middleclass propriety. During the trial “a large chest was brought into court; it was opened to reveal
sixteen silk dresses, twenty chignons, and a variety of boots and gloves” (Pearsall 463). Strether
is not “free to analyze” Miss Gostrey’s outfit, in that he doesn’t want to stare; however, the
narrator notes that she draws on “a pair of singularly fresh soft and elastic light gloves” (5). The
gloves are “elastic” by necessity: Miss Gostrey’s hands – like her nose – are disproportionately
large for a woman. Strether’s early appraisal of this “sister” – a friendly address from one gay
man to another – is that she is “insolently young.” At age thirty-five, to appear extravagantly,
immoderately young takes some doing yet is more “easily carried” when the face is painted and
powdered.
Strether first encounters Gostrey in the hall of the hotel shortly after learning that Waymarsh has
not yet arrived in Chester. The two recognize each other as having been in Liverpool the
previous day; yet Strether, considering his activities there, does not want “to name the ground of
his present recognition” (Ambassadors 3). Miss Gostrey is traveling alone (an audacious
undertaking for an unmarried woman at the turn-of-the-century) and brazenly strikes up a
conversation with Strether – a man to whom she has not been introduced. She asks if he is
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inquiring after Mr. Waymarsh of Milrose: “‘I had friends there who were friends of his, and I’ve
been at his house. I won’t answer for it that he would know me…’” (3). She pauses and the two
“vaguely” smile. “This, however, appeared to affect the lady as if she might have advanced too
far. She appeared to have no reserves about anything. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘he won’t care!’” (3-4).
There is a contradiction here: Gostrey appears as if she has gone “too far” in mentioning
Waymarsh, but then seems “to have no reserves about anything.” The cause for her slight
embarrassment will soon come to light, but her unreserved claim that Waymarsh wouldn’t
recognize her alludes to her practice of cross-dressing. Several witnesses at the trials of Boulton
and Park testified that they believed the two men to be women, as they always encountered them
when they were in drag. However, others who saw the two dressed as men, such as their
landlady and maid, knew them to be such. “Boulton and Park lived up to their appearance with
consummate skill, though they gave the game away to servants by turning up sometimes as men,
sometimes as women, creating confusion” (Pearsall 461). The most likely scenario is that
Gostrey was in masculine attire when with friends at Waymarsh’s house in Milrose; now adept at
creating the look of a woman, Gostrey accepts the fact that Waymarsh may not recognize her.
Given what she knows about her previous host, she also assumes that “‘he won’t care’” if he now
encounters her in drag. Gostrey then changes the subject: “She immediately thereupon remarked
that she believed Strether knew the Munsters; the Munsters being the people he had seen her
with at Liverpool” (Ambassadors 4). This puts Strether on the spot, as these are the people “of
his own ship’s company” who had invited him to a tryst at the inn (3). She knows the company
he keeps, and wisely employs code.
The plural noun “Munsters” is a play on the word “monsters”: a derogatory term
frequently used in the nineteenth-century popular press of England (along with “beasts”) to refer
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to homosexuals. For example, a widely distributed pamphlet intended to inform/warn/entice
“greenhorns” about the unsavory entertainments to be found in town, Yokel’s Preceptor or More
Sprees in London! (1855), includes a section titled “A Few Words about Margeries – The Way to
Know the Beasts – Their Haunts, &c.” It begins: “The increase of these monsters in the shape
of men, commonly designated Margeries, Pooffs, &c., of late years, in the great metropolis,
renders it necessary for the safety of the public, that they should be made known. … These
monsters actually walk the streets the same as whores, looking out for a chance!” (5-6). Robert
Hichens appropriates the term “monster” and uses it in The Green Carnation (1894) to indicate
homosexuality: Lord Reggie was “monstrously different” from all the men and boys Lady Locke
had ever known (10). Esmé Amarinth (a send up of Oscar Wilde) quips: “Bishops have declared
that I am a monster, and monsters have declared that I ought to be a bishop” (54).
James is more cautious in his appropriation, making a slant-rhyme on the word
“monsters” to form a code word for homosexuals: “munsters.” While “munster” is not known to
be an actual word of the Parlyaree lexicon, James creates the term in the same manner and for
the same purpose: to disguise homosexuals from hostile outsiders. “One of the most important
roles of the Polari lexicon is in providing the Polari speaker with numerous person nouns, e.g.
trade, queen, butch, naff, etc. many of which categorize according to gender, sexuality or sex….
[T]he lexicons’ common denominator is sexual availability” (Baker 61). In James’s code
lexicon, the person noun “munster” refers to a homosexual American man of the upper classes
interested in meeting other gay men.
By using gay slang, Gostrey achieves two things. She signals her identity and knowledge
of homosexual culture, and secondly, she tests her perceptions about Strether’s. “But he didn’t,
it happened, know the Munsters well enough to give the case much of a lift; so that they were left
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together as if over the mere laid table of conversation…. Their attitude remained, none the less,
that of not forsaking the board; and the effect of this in turn was to give them the appearance of
having accepted each other with an absence of preliminaries practically complete” (4). Strether
had intentionally separated himself from this group on disembarking and did not have details to
share that would give a “lift,” or be (sexually) exciting. Although he does not know this
particular group well, he does know what the term “Munsters” refers to. He is one. Thus the
topic of people seeking same-sex adventures was not forsaken and the two quickly find common
ground.
The use of homosexual lexicon reflects Gostrey’s avocation: the ferrying of wealthy gay
men from America to Europe, taking them to the homosexual hot-spots in England and the
Continent. According to Robb, in the late nineteenth century there was “a kind of gay Grand
Tour, the states of which remained more or less mysterious until the ‘pink’ guidebooks of the
late 20th century” (170). A tour guide of sorts provided the possibility of relief from “the acute
strains in the homosexual life of an upper middle-class man. For the dream of a liaison across
class lines, which by the class nature of the culture was highly problematical, is suggestive of the
guilt-ridden fear of relationships within their own class” (Weeks 41). Well-heeled American
men who were loath to reveal their homosexuality to friends, who needed and wanted an
emotional relationship, and perhaps spent a lifetime looking for a close “friend,” often found a
solution in going abroad. The “Munsters” represent men such as these; they are Gostrey’s
clients. She tells Strether: “‘I’m a general guide – to ‘Europe,’ don’t you know? I wait for
people – I put them through. I pick them up – I set them down. I’m a sort of superior ‘couriermaid.’ I’m a companion at large. I take people, as I’ve told you, about’” (Ambassadors 12).
James puts “Europe” in quotation marks here, as he does at other points in the text, to suggest
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that Gostrey uses this as a euphemism similar to the way that “Europe” represents sexual
opportunities, if not freedom, for Strether and Waymarsh. However, Gostrey looks at “Europe”
more in terms of the homosexual subcultures. Because her enterprise requires sailing back and
forth across the Atlantic, she naturally adopts a gay patois on occasion. Since the seventeenth
century, lexicons that would later be known as Polari were used extensively in the British
Merchant Navy. After the advent of ocean liners in the nineteenth century, many gay men went
to sea as waiters, stewards and entertainers. They often spoke to each other in this specific
patois, particularly in front of passengers about whom they wanted to share an observation while
confounding the subject’s understanding. (“Hello Sailor!”). Gostrey’s character is such that she
would overhear, understand, and join in.
Once on land, Gostrey guides her clients to safe havens, the most common of which were
clubs, coteries, and house parties. “Clubs corresponded with one another and operated as
consulates and tourist information bureau. Anyone travelling to another city could be given
introductions and geographical information of the sort that was supplied in a less precise form by
voyeuristic city guides” (Robb 169-70). However, knowing the location of a city’s homosexual
district is often not enough; thus Gostrey acts as a guide through the active streets, instructing her
clients on how to signal interest in men while maintaining a reasonable level of safety. She tells
Strether her credentials for such work: “‘It’s a dreadful thing to have to say, in so wicked a
world, but I verily believe that, such as you see me, there’s nothing I don’t know’”
(Ambassadors 12). And there was a lot to know, as subcultures in the late nineteenth century
varied according to the size of the city, its geographical features, languages spoken, etc. Gostrey
helps her clients negotiate these differences. According to Weeks:
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In the developing homosexual underground, individuals could begin to learn the rules for
picking up and watching for the law as well as the places to go. They could imbibe the
rituals of social contact and behavior, the codes for communicating, and the modes of
living a double life. The sub-culture was thus a training-ground for learning the values of
the world and a source of social support and information. For those in the know, sexual
contact was not difficult. (37)
However, not everyone is in the know, especially those from small towns such as Woollett and
Milrose. These are the men who need Miss Gostrey’s guidance; in turn, she must judge the
individual comfort levels of her clients and decide which venue would provide the most
enjoyment and success. She explains to Strether that it is not her way to “falter in the path” that
leads to sexual adventure, “though she freely enough declared, on reflexion, that there was
always in such cases a choice of opposed policies. ‘There are times when to give them their
head, you know ---!’” (Ambassadors 24). Gostrey recognizes that certain continuums (“opposed
policies”) exist in the protocols of meeting men and that her clients vary as to the point on each
scale that appeals to them. It is her job to ascertain the needs and desires of her clients, steer
them to the appropriate venue, and teach them how to dress, speak, and signal in a manner most
appropriate for their personal success.
Gostrey’s line of expertise has honed her ability to recognize homosexual men. On first
seeing Strether at the hotel in Chester, her eyes “tak[e] hold of him straightway, measuring him
up and down as if they knew how; as if he were human material they had already in some sort
handled. Their possessor was in truth, it may be communicated, the mistress of a hundred cases
or categories, receptacles of the mind, subdivisions for convenience, in which from a full
experience, she pigeon-holed her fellow mortals with a hand as free as that of a compositor
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scattering type” (Ambassadors 6-7). The Victorian penchant for “categories” and “subdivisions”
was demonstrated by members of the scientific/medical community who recorded the “cases” of
homosexuality that they encountered according “type,” as previously discussed. Gostrey
similarly categorizes Strether, sizing him up as easily as a printer tosses “type” back into the
respective boxes – not due to callousness, but experience with the “well-known urban types: the
bachelor, bohemian, theatregoer, actor, dandy, settlement worker, solider and telegraph boy”
(Cook 39). She pegs Strether as a tentative bachelor, having witnessed his arrival at the hotel, his
relief upon learning that Waymarsh had not yet arrived, and his hesitation as to what to do in the
meantime. “She knew even intimate things about him that he hadn’t yet told her and perhaps
never would” (7).
After finding commonalities in their initial conversation, “Strether’s companion threw off
that the hotel had the advantage of a garden. He was aware by this time of his strange
inconsequence: he had shirked the intimacies of the steamer and had muffled the shock of
Waymarsh only to find himself forsaken, in this sudden case, both of avoidance and of caution”
(Ambassadors 4). It is ironic: Strether had been cautious on leaving the ship, going only where
he would not be recognized, and had been lucky to arrive at Chester before Waymarsh. Now, as
fate would have it, he meets a man in drag who is so experienced with “Europe” he cannot help
but take up with the confrère. The text continues:
He passed, under this unsought protection and before he had so much as gone up to his
room, into the garden of the hotel, and at the end of ten minutes had agreed to meet there
again, as soon as he should have made himself tidy, the dispenser of such good
assurances. He wanted to look at the town, and they would forthwith look together. (4)
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The first sentence above is best understood by imposing a mental stop after “He passed.” One of
Strether’s concerns, as we have seen, is his difficulty in meeting other gay men and finding a
community of homosexuals, perhaps due to being so closeted that he does not give off the
necessary signs that would allow like-minded men to approach him. Somehow with Gostrey he
“passed” – in a manner tangentially similar to a quadroon passing as a white person in
nineteenth-century America. Gostrey sees him as part of the group, accepts him as homosexual,
and offers the benefits of being part of this community. While Strether’s concerns about passing
will return in Gloriani’s garden, for now he is so happy about having “passed” that the sentence
then takes off with frenetic energy in a string of activity: up to his room, in the garden, ten
minutes pass, making himself tidy. Gostrey is the “dispenser of such good assurances”; with her
help, he can cruise successfully in Chester. He had wanted to look at the town! Now he can do
so with her “unsought protection.” He hadn’t thought of seeking such aid, but Gostrey appeared:
“It was almost as if she had been in possession and received him as a guest. Her acquaintance
with the place presented her in a manner as a hostess” (4).
Gostrey provides “protection” by teaching men how to cruise. Cruising consists of
walking through and/or loitering in certain public locations with the hope of meeting a friendly
stranger – for sex, adventure, love, friendship, or a combination of these. In a sense,
heterosexual men and women have always “cruised,” gone out looking for that special someone,
but they have operated within socially sanctioned venues: ice cream socials, parties, political
rallies, discos, clam bakes, Starbucks, bars, shopping malls. The problem for all people
interested in having illicit sex is where to have it. Teenagers do it in cars; adulterers get hotel
rooms; strangers join the “mile-high” club on airplanes. “Like numerous heterosexual couples,
or like prostitutes, homosexuals did not hesitate to engage in sexual relations in any places which
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were somewhat sheltered from view – and scarcely that at times – behind ramparts, in thickets or
ditches, in alleys” (Rey 180). The constant challenge in cruising is to avoid the police, potential
blackmailers, and thugs. Strether had a sense of “what she knew. He had quite the sense that she
knew things he didn’t, and though this was a concession that in general he found not easy to
make to women, he made it now as good-humouredly as if it lifted a burden” (Ambassadors 7).
Strether recognizes that he has not been as successful in cruising as he would like. He knows
enough to head to the river bank in Liverpool, but that venue is limited in atmosphere and the
type of men it attracts. Strether concedes that Gostrey will protect him not only from making a
dangerous mistake but also, hopefully, from failure. The burden of admitting that a woman has
more expertise is lightened by the fact that Gostrey is actually a man. “It was positively droll to
him that he should already have Maria Gostrey, whoever she was – of which he hadn’t really the
least idea – in a place of safe keeping” (8).
The second form of protection comes from the fact that Gostrey looks convincingly like a
woman. This is highly plausible. To use Ernest Boulton as an example, several men at his trial
testified that they had always believed him to be a woman, which explained the gifts and mash
notes. Gostrey is not particularly attractive, her features being “not freshly young, not markedly
fine, but on happy terms with each other” (Ambassadors 3). However, she is feminine to the
extent that most of the characters in the Other Plot have no idea that Miss Gostrey is a man
(which makes for much of the humor). As a transvestite of perfect, plain propriety, Gostrey can
serve as a beard when the occasion warrants it; she provides the cover of heterosexuality to
clients who want to cruise but are too timid to overtly sign their homosexuality.
On leaving the hotel, Gostrey asks Strether if he looked up her name at the front desk. “He could
only stop with a laugh. ‘Have you looked up mine?’” (Ambassadors 7). The sentiment behind
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this laugh is best conveyed in modern vernacular: “Yeah, right. Are you kidding me?” Strether
does not want to be seen walking off with a complete stranger – especially a transvestite. He
asks if she looked his name up, wondering just how impudent she really is and whether he has
cause to be nervous about what he is getting himself into: “He had told her rather remarkably
many [things] for the time, but these were not the real ones. Some of the real ones however,
precisely, were what she knew.” Gostrey replies that she inquired at the office and suggests that
he do the same.
He wondered. “Find out who you are? – after the uplifted young woman [hotel clerk]
there has seen us thus scrape acquaintance!”
She laughed on her side now at the shade of alarm in his amusement. “Isn’t it a
reason the more? If what you’re afraid of is the injury for me – my being seen to walk
off with a gentleman who has to ask who I am – I assure you I don’t in the least mind.”
(7-8)
If this is not a man speaking, Gostrey certainly is an unconventional woman for the times, one
surprisingly cavalier about her reputation. This is far from the first time she has headed into the
streets with a man whom she has just scraped acquaintance.
But this is a first for Strether, and a familiar sensation of guilt returns. Outside the hotel,
about to look for men in Chester with Gostrey’s help, he thinks of Waymarsh –
asking himself if he really felt admonished to qualify it as disloyal. It was prompt, it was
possibly even premature, and there was little doubt of the expression of face the sight of
it would have produced in a certain person. But if it were “wrong” – why then he had
better not have come out at all. At this, poor man, had he already – and even before
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meeting Waymarsh – arrived. He had believed he had a limit, but the limit had been
transcended within thirty-six hours. (Ambassadors 8)
Again we see the unstable situation: Strether wants to be loyal to Waymarsh but is
simultaneously drawn to adventures outside of the relationship. No doubt, the “sight of it” – “it”
being trolling for men with a virtually unknown transvestite – would upset Waymarsh. If doing
so is “wrong,” Strether justifies, he should not have previously agreed to meet Waymarsh.
Before embarking on the trip, Strether believed that temptation to stray from Waymarsh
wouldn’t be too great: “he had a limit” as to how many sexual encounters he could handle. To
his surprise, this perceived limit had already been exceeded while in Liverpool. “By how long a
space on the plane of manners, or even of morals, moreover, he felt still more sharply after Maria
Gostrey had come back to him and with a gay decisive ‘So now – !’ led him forth into the world”
(8). His guilt sharpens as soon as Gostrey initiates the adventure.
True to Strether’s vacillating nature, as he walks down the street he is soon struck by the
sense that this is “his introduction to things. It hadn’t been ‘Europe’ at Liverpool, no – not even
in the dreadful delightful impressive streets the night before – to the extent his present
companion made it so” (Ambassadors 9). He had enjoyed sexual escapades at the Mersey, but
they were somewhat rough and furtive, taking place under docks and bridges. With Gostrey by
his side, Strether is about to cruise the public thoroughfare, hoping to learn the balance between
signaling his gay identity and courting disaster. Part of the allure of “Europe” is the freedom to
be more openly gay. Fear quickly returns, however, this time in the form of self-doubt. Strether
tells Gostrey “with an irrelevance that was only superficial: ‘I come from Woollett,
Massachusetts’” (9). His guide recognizes the significance:
“You say that,” she returned, “as if you wanted one immediately to know the worst.”
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“Oh I think it’s a thing,” he said, “that you must already have made out. I feel it so that I
certainly must look it, speak it, and, as people say there, ‘act’ it. It sticks out of me, and
you knew surely for yourself as soon as you looked at me.”
“The worst, you mean?”
“Well, the fact of where I come from. There at any rate it is; so that you won’t be able, if
anything happens, to say that I’ve not been straight with you.”
“I see” – and Miss Gostrey looked really interested in the point he had made. “But what
do you think of as happening?”
Though he wasn’t shy – which was rather anomalous – Strether gazed about without
meeting her eyes; a motion that was frequent with him in talk, yet of which his words
often seemed not at all the effect. “Why that you should find me too hopeless.”
(9-10)
Strether is embarrassed that he has no cruising skills. Woollett is his excuse. Likely
representative of one of the Massachusetts mill towns that flourished with the textile industry in
the 1860s, Woollett is reflected in Strether by his lack of sophistication and straight-laced
demeanor. Strether is afraid that decades of living in cultural barrenness has denied him the
panache necessary to be attractive or effectual in the face of a come-on. He warns Gostrey that
he may botch things up or may not be able to even try to connect with other men. If this
happens, he can at least say “I told you so.” Gostrey recognizes his concerns and reassures him
with her professional acumen, answering “as they went, that the most ‘hopeless’ of her country
folk [are] in general precisely those she liked best” (10).
The two continue into Chester – a medieval village that was popular with tourists in the
nineteenth century because of its proximity to Liverpool. In his travel-essay titled “Chester,”
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written in 1872 and later collected in English Hours (1905), James describes “the ancient wall …
which locks this dense little city in its stony circle” (Collected Travel Writings 54). From the
cathedral to the shop-fronts that face along the arcade, “there is a crowd and a hubbub in Chester.
Wherever you go the population has overflowed. You stroll on the walls at eventide and you
hardly find elbowroom. You haunt the cathedral shades, and a dozen sauntering mortals temper
your solitude. You glance up an alley or side-street, and discover populous windows and
doorsteps” (60). This description provides important information that sets the scene: Gostrey
and Strether are cruising through a crush of people. On a less crowded street, one can observe
with some distance; here one encounters individuals in rapid succession as tourists push past
clamoring for the cathedral. Strether needs to be on his toes. Yet as he takes in the throngs
around him, “pleasant small things – small thing that were yet large for him – flowered in the air
of the occasion; but the bearing of the occasion itself on matters still remote concerns us too
closely to permit us to multiply our illustrations” (Ambassadors 10). This sentence is arrestingly
strange. The narrator tells us that while Strether walks through Chester, unnamed “things”
metaphorically flower, but the future effect of this occasion is too important to explain. Readers
of the traditional plot take the narrator’s word for it and move on. Readers of the Other Plot
recognize that we must slow down, take hold of the thread, and start examining the clues.
Flowers are a theme of the Decadents, broadly used to suggest sexuality. Like flowers,
this sexuality is destined to wither and die; passions and appetites come up against laws and
social institutions, resulting in human suffering. Strether senses eroticism flowering in the air.
Within this amatory atmosphere he notes:
The tortuous wall – girdle, long since snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place
by careful civic hands – wanders in narrow files between parapets smoothed by peaceful
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generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled gate or a bridged gap, with rises and
drops, steps up and steps down, queer twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely streets
and under the brows of gables…. (Ambassadors 10)
In James’s essay “Chester” the ancient wall “wanders through its adventurous circuit” as it
encircles the city in a “long irregular curve” (56); in the Other Plot of The Ambassadors the wall
is “tortuous.” While this adjective denotes twisting, crooked form, it is easily misread as the
word “torturous” – excruciating, involving torture. In keeping with the Decadent atmosphere,
we are reminded of Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden (1899), in which the narrator and Clara
express their conflicting attitudes about sexual indulgence. Strether and Gostrey will soon mirror
this conflict in the continuing scene.
First, however, we return to the “tortuous wall” – described in a manner so convoluted, so
ambiguous, that it invites interpretation, particularly when compared to the travel-essay
description.7 Historically, homosexual sex took place outside; only the wealthy could afford the
luxury of interior accommodations not burdened with the presence of others. Thus subcultures
built up around outdoor sites that offered at least a modicum of privacy. The gates and bridged
gaps that interrupt the wall create nooks and barriers of sight where one can engage in sexual
activities performed while standing, bending over, or kneeling (mutual masturbation, fellatio,
and sodomy). The “rises and drops” and the up and down suggest the action of sex. The “queer
7
It is interesting to compare James’s description of the wall in “Chester”: “it wanders through its adventurous
circuit; now sloping, now bending, now broadening into a terrace, now narrowing into an alley, now swelling into an
arch, now dipping into steps, now passing some thorn-screened garden …. Its final hoary humility is enhanced, to
your mind, by the freedom with which you may approach it from any point in the town. Every few steps, as you go,
you see some little court or alley boring toward it through the close-pressed houses” (56). In this non-fictional
description, the syntax is clear and orderly. In the final sentences, the actions of approaching and seeing are given
over to human agency – “you” – making it clear that the traveler can “peep” at the wall from “any point in town.”
The reverse of this occurs in the description in The Ambassadors. By comparison, the syntax in the novel is highly
obfuscating, making room for sexual interpretation.
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twists, queer contacts” refer to the men in proximity, not to the barrier itself. The word “queer”
as it was used in 1900 denotes: “Strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric. Also: of questionable
character; suspicious, dubious” (OED). The “twists” and “contacts” are “queer” (strange,
suspicious) in that they involve two men. A couple might be entwined like a twist of yarn in a
nook of the wall, for example. The noun “twist” also refers to “The part of anything at which it
divides or branches; spec. the junction of the thighs, the fork” (OED). The Oxford English
Dictionary gives an example of this usage from Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights
(1882): “If I had my hand under your twist, I would send you flying.” This image likely amused
James, as his dear friend Stevenson was a semi-invalid and would never have had the strength to
pick a man up by the crotch and throw him, as his character does. The “twist” is also a point of
focus in Sins of the Cities of the Plains (1881). Jack Saul is “Dressed in tight-fitting clothes,
which set off his Adonis-like figure to the best advantage, especially about what snobs call the
fork of his trousers, where evidently he was favoured by nature by a very extraordinary
development of the male appendages” (Sins 3). The “queer contacts” can be male prostitutes,
like Saul, or men getting successful responses to their come-ons. The verbs used in the
description above change tenses and disrupt an attempt to anthropomorphize the wall, for it
cannot “peep” into the dark streets and under gables. This is the activity of our human agents:
Gostrey and Strether “peep” in dark, narrow, “homely streets” and into the shadows created by
“the brows of gables” to espy the encounters taking place in these obscure havens. As Gostrey
points these out, the air flowers for Strether. What he learns in Chester will come to bear on
“remote concerns”: Paris.
For now, he takes in an atmosphere similar to that of the narrator in The Torture Garden
when on the ship nearing Ceylon: “It exhaled the perfumes of a Utopian shore, a blossoming
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orchard and bed of love…. The deck was thronged” (Mirbeau 80). Unfortunately, Decadent
ecstasy can only die; Strether’s ecstasy is soon killed by guilt:
Too deep almost for words was the delight of these things to Strether; yet as deeply
mixed with it were certain images of his inward picture. He had trod this walk in the faroff time, at twenty-five; but that, instead of spoiling it, only enriched it for present feeling
and marked his renewal as a thing substantial enough to share. It was with Waymarsh he
should have shared it, and he was now accordingly taking from him something that was
his due. (Ambassadors 10-11)
Enjoyment dissipates as soon as Strether thinks of Waymarsh. It is as if he shares the same
consciousness of Mirbeau’s narrator: “I still occasionally heard the voice of duty and honor
which, at certain moments of nervous depression, rose from the troubled depths of my
consciousness” (84). This informs the ensuing dialogue with Gostrey, who in turn mirrors the
sentiments of Clara as she tries to convince the narrator to forgo his duty in Ceylon and continue
on with her to China – land of sexual delight – where there are “No other limits to liberty than
yourself […] or to love, than the triumphant variety of your desire” (Mirbeau 82-83).
Strether looks repeatedly at his watch, and after doing so for the fifth time Miss Gostrey
takes him up:
“You’re doing something that you think not right.”
It so touched the place that he quite changed colour and his laugh grew almost
awkward. “Am I enjoying it as much as that?”
You’re not enjoying it, I think, so much as you ought.”
“I see” – he appeared thoughtfully to agree. “Great is my privilege.”
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“Oh it’s not your privilege! It has nothing to do with me. It has to do with
yourself. Your failure’s general.”
“Ah there you are! He laughed. “It’s the failure of Woollett. That’s general.”
“The failure to enjoy,” Miss Gostrey explained, “is what I mean.”
“Precisely. Woollett isn’t sure it ought to enjoy. If it were it would. But it hasn’t
poor thing,” Strether continued, “any one to show it how. It’s not like me. I have
somebody.”
They had stopped …. (Ambassadors 11)
The two are snippy with each other. By telling Strether that he is doing something against his
conscience, Gostrey implies that he is a prude. She is somewhat insulted that he is not trying
harder: he is wasting her time. Strether responds with a sarcastic, “almost awkward,” laugh –
saying, in effect: “Oh, you can tell I’m not having a good time?” The sarcasm continues when
he appears – falsely – to agree with her that he should be having a good time, snidely remarking
that he is so lucky to be out with her (his “privilege”). Gostrey shoots back that it is not his
“privilege” – his due – and, moreover, it’s not her fault if he is not enjoying himself. He’s a
general failure: per modern vernacular, a loser. Gostrey takes a dig at him, and while she is not
as cruel as Mirbeau’s Clara, her thoughts are the same: “Poor baby! You thought yourself a
great debauchee […] a great rebel! Ah! your little remorse […] do you remember! And now
your soul is as timid as a little child’s!” (84).
Strether laughs, not with pleasure but as a rebuke: “Ah there you are!” – meaning, “Here
we go … now your claws are showing.” In defense, he blames Woollett – reminding her of his
previous warning that he might be too “hopeless.” He can’t enjoy cruising because his attempts
in Woollett were so unsuccessful; subsequently, he has resigned himself to a relationship with
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Waymarsh and internalized the bourgeois heterosexual value of monogamous duty. As an
embodiment of Woollett, he is not sure it would even be possible to think differently. On the
defensive, he then gets snotty and rejects her: “I have someone.” Intended but not said: “and
you, obviously, do not – otherwise you wouldn’t be picking up strangers in hotel lobbies. I don’t
need you.”
While the two had stopped several times in their stroll about town to “get the sharper
sense of what they saw,” Strether now leans back against the wall “with his face to the tower of
the cathedral” (Ambassadors 11) – a symbolic gesture towards social institutions of morality.
“Miss Gostrey lingered near him, full of an air, to which she more and more justified her right, of
understanding and effect of things. She quite concurred. ‘You’ve indeed somebody.” And she
added: ‘I wish you would let me show you how!’”
“Oh I’m afraid of you!” he cheerfully pleaded.
She kept on him a moment, through her glasses and through his own, a certain
pleasant pointedness. “Ah no, you’re not! You’re not in the least, thank goodness! If
you had been we shouldn’t so soon have found ourselves here together. I think,” she
comfortably concluded, “you trust me.”
“I think I do! – but that’s exactly what I’m afraid of. I shouldn’t mind if I didn’t.
It’s falling thus in twenty minutes so utterly into your hands. I dare say,” Strether
continued, “it’s a sort of thing you’re thoroughly familiar with; but nothing more
extraordinary has ever happened to me.”
She watched him with all her kindness. “That means simply that you’ve
recognized me – which is rather beautiful and rare. You see what I am.” As on this,
however, he protested, with a good-humored headshake, a resignation of any such a
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claim, she had a moment of explanation. “If you’ll only come on further as you have
come you’ll at any rate make out.” (11-12)
Gostrey is trying to talk Strether into becoming one of her clients. Although she had temporarily
lost her patience, she now “takes on an air, to which she … justified her right”: the air of a
professional who is also an accomplished salesperson. Noting Strether’s resistance, and fearing
the loss of a prospective client, she rises above his barb and uses it to promote her services: yes,
he indeed has someone – her, the consummate guide to the subcultures. Her tone softens as she
reiterates her offer to teach him. Strether responds in kind, saying with “cheerful” camp tonality:
“‘Oh I’m afraid of you!’” This cliché is a compliment in homosexual patois, made in
acknowledgment of something clever, witty, or incisive said by the other person. Yet Strether is
afraid of Gostrey, hence the “plead[ing]”: the insolence with which she takes on her identity is
unnerving. Gostrey counters this with pointed focus on her goal, cajoling Strether by insisting
that not only is he not afraid, but that he trusts her (inferring that he has a strong sense of self).
This brings out the endearingly wishy-washy aspect of our protagonist: he thinks he trusts her,
but is afraid of trusting her, although he wouldn’t mind if he did – gee, things are happening so
fast, you’re used to this, I’m not. Somewhat amused by this display, Gostrey appeals to
Strether’s ego, complimenting him on having immediately recognized her to be a transvestite (as
not everyone does): “‘You see what I am.’” While Strether modestly shakes off this
compliment, the unmitigated Miss Gostrey takes advantage of his bashful pause and forges ahead
with her sales pitch, encouraging him to “come on further” and championing his success.
As their conversation continues, we see that Strether and Gostrey are at odds with each
other in more ways than their manner of dress. In the following scene James alludes to
contemporary scientific and philosophical writings on homosexuality and has these two
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characters embody conflicting viewpoints. This begins with Gostrey’s change in tactics, as she
now reveals personal aspects of her past in an effort to gain Strether’s trust through empathy:
“‘My own fate has been too many for me, and I’ve succumbed to it. I’m a general guide – to
‘Europe’, don’t you know? … I’m a companion at large. I take people, as I’ve told you, about. I
never sought it – it has come to me’” (Ambassadors 12). Note the disagreement between the
noun and the predicate nominative: “fate” is singular, “too many” is plural. This forces us to
break the sentence down into units. Gostrey’s “fate” is being homosexual. This fate is renamed
as “too many”: same-sex lovers, homosexual thoughts, experiences, etc. These are too numerous
to her to deny that she is homosexual; having accepted this (“succumbed” to this fact), she in
turn accepts the homosexual lifestyle. Her many encounters have inadvertently made her a
knowledgeable and practiced “general guide” for others who would like to experience their
sexuality in a more open environment but are afraid to do so. She didn’t choose her sexuality,
nor the use she has put it to: it came to her. Her disclosures continue:
“It has been my fate, and one’s fate one accepts. It’s a dreadful thing to have to say, in so
wicked a world, but I verily believe that, such as you see me, there’s nothing I don’t
know. I know all the shops and the prices – but I know worse things still. I bear on my
back the huge load of our national consciousness, or in other words – for it comes to that
– of our nation itself. Of what is our nation composed but of the men and women
individually on my shoulders?” (12)
That Gostrey repeatedly refers to her sexuality as “fate” indicates her belief in homosexuality as
an inborn, biological trait. Her thinking reflects that of Karl Ulrichs (1825-1895), whose
“Urning” theory is based on the concept of a “third sex”: male homosexuals born with a female
psyche. Ulrichs’s theories contrast those of Auguste Tardieu (1818-1879) who regarded
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homosexuality as a criminal vice that one could choose to abstain from. But because
homosexual acts were illegal in the nineteenth century, they were pushed into the dark recesses
of society where criminality tends to lurk. Thus Gostrey has been exposed to the “dreadful,”
“wicked,” and “worse things still” – modifiers that refer to a number of different painful aspects
of being homosexual in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is dreadful and terrifying
to recognize that one is a homosexual, to have the world decry your wickedness; simultaneously,
one is subjected to the wickedness of others: cruelty, extortion, violence.
Gostrey knows “all the shops and the prices”: the gay brothels, the small businesses that
front prostitution. She may have been a prostitute herself, having borne “on [her] back the huge
load” of other bodies while being sodomized or the load of semen ejaculated there afterwards.
At the same time she carries the consciousness of all gay Americans. Her concern for the
psycho/sexual wholeness of individual men and women aligns her with Walt Whitman (18191892). Whitman felt America could only be great if each individual were allowed to fulfill his or
her true self and destiny, a prospect a long time in coming: “Universal as are certain facts and
symptoms of communities or individuals all times, there is nothing so rare in modern
conventions and poetry as their normal recognizance” (Democratic Vistas 136). It is Gostrey’s
Whitmanesque leanings that prompt her to compliment Strether by saying that he “recognized”
her (Ambassadors 12). She brings up “the nation” in an attempt to explain why she serves as a
guide to the subcultures while still trying to get Strether’s business. However, we must imagine
the look on Strether’s face at this point (bewilderment? fear? disgust?), for it compels Gostrey to
change tack – dropping politics and moving to the defensive:
“I don’t do it, for instance – some people do, you know – for money.”
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Strether could only listen and wonder and weigh his chance. “And yet, affected
as you are then to so many of your clients, you can scarcely be said to do it for love.’ He
waited a moment. “How do we reward you?”
She had her own hesitation, but “You don’t!” she finally returned, setting him again in
motion. (12)
Strether’s response is unkind, if not insulting. Because he feels uncomfortable around feminine
men, he assumes that others do and projects his aversion on to her clients, saying that they see
her as “affected”: “Assumed or displayed artificially; put on for effect; artificial, stilted, ‘got up’”
(OED). Certainly this applies to Gostrey, who is “got up” as a woman. But “affected” carries a
second definition: “Afflicted or tainted by disease. Daily Telegraph, 26 May 1864: ‘The accused
was mentally affected, her father and three of her aunts having all been insane’” (OED). In
essence, Strether responds to Gostrey’s candour by saying: “Most of your clients think you’re
crazy, dressed up like that, and are put off (at the least). Why do you even do this?” Strether
reflects the writings by members of the contemporary medico/scientific community, such as
Krafft-Ebing, who argue that same-sex desire is the result of mental degeneration or insanity.
This early characterization shows Strether’s ignorance and the limiting perspective he has
adopted in order to grapple with his own homosexuality. He is a “congenital unisexual.”
The term “congenital homosexual” was coined by Marc-André Raffalovich – with whom
James was personally acquainted. Born and raised in France, Raffalovich was sent to Oxford to
study medicine, but dropped out due to ill health. “Instead, he established himself in grand style
in London, publishing poetry and novels and hosting the literary stars of the time: Henry James,
Aubrey Beardsley, Pierre Louӱs, Stephan Mallarmé, and the most notorious of aesthetes, Oscar
Wilde” (Rosario 99). Gathering his theories in Uranism and Unisexuality (1896), Raffalovich
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defined “unisexuality” as what today is referred to as homosexuality: “a ‘form of sexuality in
which sexual attraction is directed towards a person of the same sex’” (100). He reinterpreted
Tardieu’s degeneracy model, claiming that “male ‘homosexuality’ could be present in apparently
normal men and was just a variant of human sexuality” (101). However, despite this claim for
the normality of the unisexual,
he argued that there were major distinctions between virile, congenital unisexuality and
effeminate, acquired inversion. Congenital unisexuality was purely sexual and in no way
tainted the moral sphere. On the other hand, effeminate inverts were the product of vice;
they tended to be dishonest perverts and seducers of the young, just like heterosexual
perverts…. While everyone could recognize the flamboyant, effeminate invert, the selfrespecting unisexual would never exhibit himself thus: “they detest women too much to
be effeminate.” (Rosario 101)
Strether meets this model due to his masculine appearance and his attraction to similarly
masculine men (Waymarsh); he is not an invert, as his male exterior matches his male interior.
According to Raffalovich, unisexuals are “the superior, interesting, honest, and moral
[homosexuals], and ‘one could say that (and this could be a general rule), the greater the moral
worth of a unisexual, the less he is effeminate’” (quoted in Rosario 101-2). Strether is a “good”
homosexual. He is afraid of Gostrey – and not at all sexually attracted to her – because her
extreme effeminacy is a sign of not only mental instability but moral degeneracy. Her inversion
has been acquired though the “dreadful,” “wicked,” and “worse things still.” She has
“succumbed” to homosexuality – not through self-acceptance of “fate,” as she claims – but
through abandonment to sordid pleasures.
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Understandably, Gostrey has “her own hesitation.” Pulled up by the insinuation that her
clients do not respect her, let alone proffer sentiments of “love,” she “finally” responds to the
question as to how one rewards her: “You don’t!” The exclamation point here indicates anger,
not enthusiasm, and “you” is singular – referring to Strether, not her clients. As Strether is
unappreciative of who she is, what she has gone through, and the service she provides, he does
not “thank” her. She points out his rudeness.
The two move on, returning to the hotel. “In a few minutes, though while still thinking
over what she had said, [Strether] once more took out his watch; mechanically, unconsciously
and as if made nervous by the mere exhilaration of what struck him as her strange and cynical
wit” (Ambassadors 12-13). Oblivious to what just transpired between them, he checks his watch
again, pushing Gostrey’s anger beyond containment:
“You’re really in terror of him.”
He smiled a smile that he almost felt to be sickly. “Now you can see why I’m
afraid of you.”
“Because I’ve such illuminations? Why, they’re all for your help! It’s what I told
you,” she added, “just now. You feel as if this were wrong.” (13)
Gostrey chides Strether as if he were a recalcitrant child, but her return to the topic of
Waymarsh, for whom the watch is fretfully checked, is touched with malice. By accusing
Strether of being afraid of him, she insinuates that he is weak, timid, unmanly – appropriate
retaliation for his suggesting that cross-dressing indicates insanity. She now sees that by taking
him out cruising and offering “illuminations” as to where the men are in Chester (giving him a
taste of her wares, so to speak, in order to gain his business), she has frightened him back into the
closet. In saying “‘You feel as if this were wrong,’” she challenges what she considers to be
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Strether’s meritless devotion to Waymarsh. Knowing that Strether wants to cruise, she blames
his reticence on his need for social acceptance: obsessed with appearances (as most Victorians
were), he maintains a sense of morality by not appearing to be homosexual and upholding a
monogamous relationship that mirrors that of respectable heterosexual couples. Gostrey’s
unspoken perception of Strether is the same of that held by Clara towards the narrator in The
Torture Garden:
“You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise,
condemn, and now lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your
ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization
which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all
joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and
restrain and check the free play of your powers.” (Mirbeau 83)
When Gostrey states that Strether feels “as if this were wrong,” she simultaneously refers to
homosexuality itself – especially homosexuality as she lives it. Strether has internalized the
social conventions of Woollett, which do not include overt signs of homosexuality; the
prevailing ideologies negate his own ideas of self and sexuality. Finding relief from this
intolerable conflict of inner and out self is his motivation for going to “Europe,” which he soon
recognizes:
He fell back once more, settling himself against the parapet as if to hear more about it.
“Then get me out!”
Her face fairly brightened for the joy of the appeal, but, as if it were a question of
immediate action, she visibly considered. “Out of waiting for him? – of seeing him at
all?”
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“Oh no – not that,” said poor Strether, looking grave. “I’ve got to wait for him – and I
want very much to see him. But out of the terror. You did put your finger on it a few
minutes ago. It’s general, but it avails itself of particular occasions. That’s what it’s
doing for me now. 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.”
She listened with charming earnestness. “Oh you oughtn’t to do that!”
“It’s what I admit. Make it then impossible.”
She continued to think. “Is it really an ‘order’ from you? – that I shall take the
job? Will you give yourself up?”
Poor Strether heaved his sigh. “If I only could! But that’s the deuce of it – that I
never can. No – I can’t.”
She wasn’t however, discouraged. “But you want to at least?”
“Oh unspeakably!”
“Ah then, if you’ll try! – and she took over the job, as she had called it, on the
spot. “Trust me!” she exclaimed…. (13-14)
Gostrey knows this “terror,” the “something else” that is always in the back of Strether’s mind
when he has tried to meet other men: what if this is an undercover policeman or a blackmailer?
What if this is a straight man who takes offense at my come-on? What if someone I know sees
me and spreads rumors that destroy my standing in the community, my business? In camp
coyness, she responds that he shouldn’t think of anything other than her; however, Strether is not
in a joking mood. If cruising is so easy, why doesn’t she “get him out of it” – the danger?
“Make it then impossible” – the terror formed by hideous realities. Strether believes she cannot,
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and says “No – I can’t” to further attempts at cruising. Gostrey is wise enough not to make
promises; instead she again offers her services (“the job”), but on the premise that he will “give
[himself] up” to his sexual needs and desires. She asks for his trust – something Strether is not
yet ready to give.
The two reach the hotel. “It was at all events perhaps lucky that they arrived in
sufficiently separate fashion with range of the hotel-door” (Ambassadors 14). Waymarsh stands
in the entrance. “[Strether] left it to Miss Gostrey to name, with the fine full bravado, as it
almost struck him, of her ‘Mr. Waymarsh!’ what was to have been, what – he more than ever felt
as his short stare of suspended welcome took things in – would have been, but for herself, his
doom. It was already upon him even at that distance – Mr. Waymarsh was for his part joyless”
(14). This tableau, which caps Book First, Chapter I, is a fitting and humorous conclusion to the
afternoon. Although Gostrey is wearing a dress, it is a man’s voice that booms out a greeting to
Waymarsh in “fine full bravado.” Easily putting two and two together, Waymarsh is less than
pleased.
After their long separation and careful planning for a reunion, Waymarsh is not happy to
see Strether accompanied by a man in drag, as this is indiscrete even for Europe. He is made
more uncomfortable by the fact that he knows Gostrey – although he refuses to admit it. “Even
with his memory refreshed by contact, by her own prompt and lucid allusions and enquiries, by
their having publicly partaken of dinner in her company … it was a blank that the resident of
Milrose, though admitting acquaintance with the Munsters, professed himself unable to fill”
(Ambassadors 14). This lack of recognition could be due to the dress, wig, and make-up that
Gostrey is wearing; she may not have been in drag while in Milrose. However, it becomes
apparent that Waymarsh is lying. Strether notes that all details of their past acquaintance come
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from Gostrey: “It interested him indeed to mark the limits of any such relation for her with his
friend as there could possibly be a question of, and it particularly struck him that they were to be
marked altogether in Waymarsh’s quarter” (14-15). Everything that Gostrey tries to bring to
Waymarsh’s recollection happened at his house: he should remember these things. It’s not as if
she had seen him at a large party in Boston or at the train station. Strether intuits the reason for
Waymarsh’s abject denial: if he has been entertaining Gostrey and the Munsters (other
homosexuals), he may not be as chaste, or deprived, as Strether had presumed. Suddenly,
Gostrey’s earlier suggestion to broaden his sexual horizons does not seem so immoral: “This
added to his own sense of having gone far with her – gave him an early illustration of a much
shorter course. There was a certitude he immediately grasped – a conviction that Waymarsh
would quite fail, as it were, and on whatever degree of acquaintance, to profit by her” (15). On
reflection, Strether sees that cruising with Gostrey is, perhaps, the easiest way (“shorter course”)
to enjoy Europe; however, he thinks it unlikely that the lawyer from Milrose (regardless or
because of what went on there) would give himself up to her direction.
Returning to the bedroom scene previously discussed, Strether finds himself “only more
excited” to be with Waymarsh because of his abstention early that day: “his excitement – to
which indeed he would have found it difficult instantly to give a name” (Ambassadors 15).
However, Waymarsh is brooding, suspicious, jealous and quickly begins interrogating him about
why he looks so healthy. This squelches Strether’s ardor; as the narrator in Teleny says: “the
phallus is not stiffened by taunts” (Wilde 43). As Waymarsh continues to bemoan his inability
to get a “lift” in Europe, Strether realizes how desperately he needs Gostrey’s help. She can
resolve the conflict between his desire to have sex with other men while still being faithful to
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Waymarsh: they will both cruise with her. Strether shrewdly prefaces this topic by warning his
comrade that they may not stay together on the trip:
“I only glance at the danger,” Strether paternally said, “because when I hear you wail to
go back I seem to see you open up such possibilities of folly.”
Waymarsh took it – silent a little – like a large snubbed child. What are you
going to do with me?”
It was the very question Strether himself had put to Miss Gostrey, and he
wondered if he had sounded like that. But he at least could be more definite. “I’m going
to take you right down to London.”
“Oh I’ve been down to London!” Waymarsh more softly moaned. “I’ve no use, Strether,
for anything down there.”
“Well,” said Strether good-humouredly, “I guess you’ve some use for me.”
“So I’ve got to go?”
“Oh you’ve got to go further yet.”
“Well,” Waymarsh sighed, “do your damnedest! Only you will tell me before
you lead me on all the way – ?” (22-23)
While Strether was the frightened child earlier that day, he now appropriates the “paternal” role,
telling Waymarsh that he must “go further yet” – just as Gostrey had said to him. Waymarsh
knows that going to London means cruising the subculture – and he’s not happy about the
prospect, having tried and failed earlier in his trip. But he concedes for fear of losing Strether’s
company and gives himself up to his friend’s guidance: to do his “damnedest” to ensure that
Waymarsh will find men whose company he enjoys. Waymarsh requests that Strether warn him
before being “led on all the way,” meaning set up with a prostitute or an engagement with a man
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that he cannot back out of. At the same time, now sensitive to the idea that Strether might leave
him, Waymarsh asks to be told if his friend becomes interested in someone else; he does not
want to be lied to, or kept in the dark.
The next morning Strether goes down for breakfast and finds Gostrey, who has just
finished hers; not having gotten any assurance that her services were wanted, she plans to take an
early train for “a tryst taken for a day of her company in London” (Ambassadors 25). Strether
intercepts her with a compliment, having come to the realization the previous night that the only
way he’ll be able to enjoy himself in Europe is if Waymarsh will cruise: “he was in time to recall
her to the terms of their understanding and to pronounce her discretion overdone. She was surely
not to break away at the very moment she had created a want…. And he detained her as
pleadingly as if he had already – and notably under pressure of the visions of the night – learned
to be unable to do without her” (23-4). His protestation the previous afternoon – “No – I can’t” –
is usurped by his reminder that he had wanted to try. She cannot give up on him now that “the
visions of the night” have shown him the manner by which he can negotiate a more workable
relationship with Waymarsh.
Strether then appeals to her knowledge while trying to ingratiate himself by using code:
She must teach him at all events, before she went, to order breakfast as breakfast was
ordered in Europe, and she must especially sustain him in the problem of ordering for
Waymarsh. The latter had laid upon his friend, by desperate sounds through the door of
his room, dreadful divined responsibilities in respect to beefsteak and oranges –
responsibilities which Miss Gostrey took over with an alertness of action that matched
her quick intelligence. She had before this weaned the expatriated from traditions
compared with which the matutinal beefsteak was but the creature of an hour…. (24)
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Strether’s anxious need for help with such a minor problem as ordering breakfast is a hint that
something more is going on here. One can only imagine what sounds Waymarsh was making
through the door, but Strether recognizes his desire: “beefsteak and oranges” is slang for the
male sexual organs. An “order” of food is slang for a “homosexual’s hot date” (Rodgers 144).
Strether wants Gostrey to at least tell him how to find someone to have sex with (“order
breakfast”) – especially someone with whom Waymarsh would feel comfortable – before she
leaves for London. Gostrey readily understands Strether’s request; her “alertness to action” is
not to go speak to the kitchen staff but to reiterate her expertise as a guide to the homosexual
subcultures. In her experience, greenhorns desperate for any sexual encounter order “beefsteak
and oranges”: engage a male prostitute. Weeks points out: “The subculture was overwhelmingly
concerned with sexual encounters and overwhelmingly male. … And in this world the cash
nexus determined most encounters. The most common form of the homosexual sub-culture
today is peer-group contact, but the nineteenth-century male homosexual underworld was
dominated by prostitution” (Coming 39). Gostrey is an innovator of what would become a peercentered community; however, dissuading her clients from defaulting to prostitutes – “wean[ing]
the expatriated from traditions” – is more difficult than changing their eating habits.
Gostrey explains to Strether that it is not her way to “falter in the path” that leads to
sexual adventure, “though she freely enough declared, on reflexion, that there was always in
such cases a choice of opposed policies. ‘There are times when to give them their head, you
know ---!’” (Ambassadors 24). She is aware that certain continuums (“opposed policies”) exist
in searching for other men and that her clients vary as to the point on each scale that appeals to
them. One strategy involves the extent to which the client is active or passive: initiating the
come-ons or only responding to them. Private versus public is a consideration: is the client shy,
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perhaps seeking a more personal encounter? Or does he enjoy the thrilling spontaneity of a tryst
behind a tree? Class is another field of consideration. Gostrey’s clients are gentlemen, some of
whom are only interested in other gentlemen; some are attracted to working class men or boys.
Many are interested in soldiers, the English guardsmen often being disposed to exchange sexual
favors for ready cash. Gostrey tries to steer her clients towards encounters that will serve their
best interests; however, at times this means encouraging a client in a direction that is not his
wont – for example, taking him to the theater to ogle men of the more refined classes, only to
have the munster duck out to have sex in the alley with a prostitute. Ultimately, it is his choice;
she has to “give them their head, you know.”
The two repair to the garden, where Strether is now more willing to allow Gostrey to
explain how she operates:
Strether found her more suggestive than ever. “Well, what?”
“Is to bring about for them such a complexity of relations – unless indeed we call
it a simplicity! – that the situation has to wind itself up. They want to go back.”
“And you want them to go!” Strether gaily concluded.
“I always want them to go, and I send them as fast as I can.”
“Oh I know – you take them to Liverpool.”
“Any port will serve in a storm. I’m – with all my other functions – an agent for
repatriation. I want to re-people our stricken country. What will become of it else? I
want to discourage others.”
The ordered English garden, in the freshness of the day, was delightful to Strether
…. “Other people?”
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“Other countries. Other people – yes. I want to encourage our own.”
(Ambassadors 24)
The topic of this discussion is men who love men: “them.” Strether jokes that the speed of their
return is aided by taking them to Liverpool – at that time the primary port for transatlantic
steamships. Gostrey’s reply is a humorous twist on the old adage – “any port in a storm” – in
that all major port cities attract homosexuals because of the regular influx of sailors. Yet
Gostrey is trying to explain her aspiration to “bring about” not only sexual experiences for her
clients (“them”) but “a complexity of relations”: friendships, men with whom one can be candid,
people of understanding and support – in short, a community. The concept is “a simplicity,” but
these relations can only be formed if the individual is willing to acknowledge and embrace his
gay self. Gostrey facilitates this by bringing American men to the subcultures of Europe where
homosexuality is more open and varied in the way it is lived. Once her clients have learned how
to approach other men, she wants them to return to America and use their new-found skills. She
doesn’t want Americans to get too comfortable in the European subcultures and decide to stay;
she doesn’t “discourage” communities in other countries, but Americans from remaining there.
Her patriotic mission is to “re-people our stricken country” with men who can live as their true
individual selves. Again we see Gostrey reflecting Whitman:
When Walt Whitman looked forward to a Uranian States of America, the existing forms
of homosexual community resembled the rest of society as much as Dodge City and
Tombstone resembled Boston and Philadelphia. None of the various homosexual groups
and milieu of the 19th century seems to present a model for the future. They tend to
confirm the popular impression that homosexuality was inseparable from prostitution and
crime. (Robb 156)
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Gostrey wants to change this.
Strether continues to draw her out. He wonders:
“Not to come? Why then do you ‘meet’ them? – since it doesn’t appear to be to stop
them?”
“Oh that they shouldn’t come is as yet too much to ask. What I attend to is that
they come quickly and return still more so. I meet them to help it to be over as soon as
possible, and though I don’t stop them I’ve my way of putting them through. That’s my
little system; and, if you want to know,” said Maria Gostrey, “it’s my real secret, my
innermost mission and use. I only seem, you see, to beguile and approve; but I’ve
thought it all out and I’m working all the while underground. I can’t perhaps quite give
you my formula, but I think that practically I succeed. I send you back spent. So you
stay back. Passed through my hands – ”
“We don’t turn up again?” The further she went the further he always saw
himself able to follow. “I don’t want your formula – I feel quite enough, as I hinted
yesterday, your abysses. Spent!” he echoed. “If that’s how you’re arranging so subtly to
send me I thank you for the warning.”
For a minute, amid the pleasantness – poetry in tariffed items, but all the more, for
guests already convicted, a challenge to consumption – they smiled at each other in
confirmed fellowship. “Do you call it subtly? It’s a plain poor tale. Besides, you’re a
special case.”
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“Oh special cases – that’s weak!” She was weak enough, further still, to defer her
journey and agree to accompany the gentlemen on their own, might a separate carriage
mark her independence. (Ambassadors 25) 8
Strether does not yet fully understand what Gostrey is trying to accomplish. He thinks that the
more she explains, “the further he always [sees] himself able to follow.” But he is perceiving
according to his fears. Gostrey says that she sends her clients back “spent,” meaning exhausted
of the need for Europe. Strether’s mind is more narrowly focused on sex; a nineteenth-century
slang term for ejaculated semen is “spendings”; to be “spent” means emptied of semen,
exhausted from so many sexual encounters. He balks at this, fearing that a “formula” designed
by an effeminate invert can be nothing less than abject wantonness, which will send him
irretrievably towards pruriency; he’s gotten too close to her “abysses” as it is. Again, Strether
constantly vacillates between what he wants and what he fears.
To be fair to Strether, Gostrey is vague about her “little system”; we will see this
implemented as we move through the novel. She is trying to convey to Strether – who has just
begged for the help that he previously refused – that the techniques are learned quickly, and
those she imparts are so successful that the process is “over as soon as possible.” She reassures
Strether with the concept of a “system” to offset the terrifying endeavor: loitering in public
places trying to convey to complete strangers that you are interested in something that some
Victorians considered so repugnant that they could not even refer to it by name. Gostrey does
not discourage cruising – she “beguile[s] and approve[s]” – because some men enjoy the danger.
But she knows from experience that not all do; she has other ways of “putting them through” or
8
Here again James alludes to Ernest Boulton, who frequently hired open coaches to drive him around the better
parts of London to show off his finery and attract interest, in order to continue Gostrey’s characterization as a crossdressing man. Gostrey is actually on foot in the Chester scene.
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introducing them to men through a network of house parties (such as those hosted by Waymarsh
in Milrose) and private clubs. Meeting others in this fashion often leads to lasting friendships
and romances, which some desire more than quick anonymous sex.
Gostrey and Strether smile at each other “amid the pleasantness,” but it is the garden that
is pleasant, not necessarily the exchange. Strether smiles because he thinks he is in the know;
Gostrey smiles out of pity, for Strether is a “special case”; he doesn’t know what he wants,
which Gostrey recognizes. She also smiles because she has just secured her clients. After saying
that she’ll take them on for being “special cases,” Strether retorts “‘that’s weak!’” He knows
she’s in it for the money. Gostrey is interested in helping Strether: “the fact that though there
was never a moment of her life when she wasn’t ‘due’ somewhere, there was yet scarce a perfidy
to others of which she wasn’t capable for his sake” (Ambassadors 25-6). She will lie in order to
get out of a previous engagement for his benefit; at the same time, because she goes to London
after luncheon, she loses only a morning of work after gaining the possibility of several more
with Strether and Waymarsh.
Now on the job, Gostrey is determined to do her best with the two men, particularly her
acquaintance from Milrose: “It became, on her taking the risk of the deviation imposed on him
by her insidious arrangement of his morning meal, a point of honour for her not to fail with
Waymarsh of the larger success too…. She had made him breakfast like a gentleman, and it was
nothing, she forcibly asserted, to what she would yet make him do” (Ambassadors 26). Gostrey
procures a prostitute for Waymarsh. That “his morning meal” is a euphemism for a sexual hookup is indicated by the word “insidious”: arranging for an inconspicuous, appropriately dressed
male prostitute to meet Waymarsh at the hotel is a secretive, artful, and cunning endeavor (unlike
ordering breakfast). Waymarsh has “breakfast like a gentleman” in that he is in the privacy of
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his room. This arrangement, of course, involves some risk on Gostrey’s part; the deviation
imposed on Waymarsh is the delay in joining his friends. Gostrey then spends the morning “in a
way that [Strether] was to remember later on as the very climax of his foretaste, as warm with
presentiments, with what he would have called collapses” (25). Falling to the temptations of
men on the street are “collapses” similar to the relapses Strether had in Woollett; the “way that”
he and Gostrey have spent their time together is cruising the streets of Chester. Warm with
expectations (“presentiments”) now that he trusts Gostrey’s guidance, having a successful tryst
with a man is the climax of his anticipation (“foretaste”).
Now that each protégé has been individually provided for, Gostrey takes the two
comrades out on the town. James devotes two full pages of the novel, uninterrupted by
paragraph breaks, to impart the initial cruising experience. In order to enhance the flow of this
dense narrative, we will first get a sense of the of means by which men signaled other men in the
late nineteenth century – techniques we are to imagine Strether and Waymarsh attempting under
the guidance of Miss Gostrey. Most basic and ubiquitous was the use of cigarettes to establish
initial contact: asking for a cigarette or light. Prolonged eye contact was standard. A flick of the
tongue. Carrying a phallic staff, such as a long stemmed rose, a folded fan, or an umbrella is a
signifier – especially when there is no chance of rain (Rogers 78). Strether knows enough to put
an umbrella under his arm on his first outing with Gostrey (Ambassadors 8). Yokel’s Preceptor
reports a technique of “sods”: “When they see what they imagine to be a chance, they place their
fingers in a peculiar manner underneath the tails of their coats, and wag them about – their
method of giving the office” (6). Waving a handkerchief under or between the coattails was also
done after passing a man of interest. If he followed, the initiator would turn around and walk
towards the man with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat. Loitering in front of a shop’s
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window was common. Sitting on a bench and tapping the backs of one’s hands together when a
desirable man walked by was a signal, as was the simple act of sitting down on a bench already
occupied by another man. At this point, conversation must ensue – with, of course, the requisite
eye contact. Mention of the weather or scenery was not uncommon, but could prove too
tentative. Intentions were better understood if one asked the other man where he lived and
whether it was comfortable, or, in a businesslike manner asked “Where will you be this evening
at 9 o’clock?” (Weeks 38). Once contact is initiated, by whatever means, “‘A conversation is
begun. Little by little it slips on toward confidentialities. Presently they take a walk together; or
go to some restaurant […] The two men also are pretty sure to pause at the nearest latrine, by
common consent’” (Weeks 38). Sex in public toilets was so popular it required a Parlyaree term:
“cottaging” (Baker 164). These examples are not exhaustive of the cruising behaviors of the
nineteenth century, but they are representative – and necessary to our understanding of the Other
Plot as James could not provide such details in the text of the novel.
As the three stroll through the town, Gostrey returns her attention to Waymarsh, whose
sexual horizons she is determined to expand:
She made him participate in the slow reiterated ramble with which, for Strether, the new
day amply filled itself; and it was by her art that he somehow had the air, on the ramparts
and in the Rows, of carrying a point of his own. The three strolled and stared and
gossiped, or at least the two did; the case really yielding for their comrade, if analyzed,
but the element of a stricken silence. (Ambassadors 26)
Strether is encouraged by his earlier success. He notices Waymarsh’s silence, but decides to
interpret it as “a sign of pleasant peace” – the result of his recent orgasm. He then focuses on the
mission at hand, wanting to put into practice the techniques he has learned from Gostrey: “He
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wouldn’t appeal too much, for that provoked stiffness; yet he wouldn’t be too freely tacit, for that
suggested giving up” (26). Strether is grappling with the “opposed policy” of active versus
passive cruising. If the active enticement, or come-on, is too aggressive (if he “appeal[s] too
much”), it provokes “stiffness” from the other man: coldness, or an aloof manner due to fear or
lack of interest. However, if his come-on is too tacit, or understated, he is unlikely to get a
response – which may prompt a scolding from Gostrey that he is not trying hard enough. If he is
“too freely tacit” in the passive role of responding to invitations from other men, he might find
himself in an encounter too rough for his tastes.
In the meantime, Waymarsh defaults to his long-used approach – that of inviting erotic
encounters by looking deep into another’s eyes: “he had a way, partly formidable, yet also partly
encouraging, as from a representative to a constituent, of looking very hard at those who
approached him. He met you as if you had knocked and he had bidden you enter” (Ambassadors
17). He now puts his approach into action while trolling with his companions at the galleries.
These covered walkways, often only open part way on the street side, back up to shops and are
popular with men on the prowl because they are dark, created spaces obscured from view, and
protect one from the elements. Cruising the galleries provides numerous sexual opportunities.
Waymarsh “adhere[s] to an ambiguous dumbness … and at times and in places – where the lowbrowed galleries were darkest, the opposite gables queerest, the solicitation of every kind densest
– the others caught him fixing hard some object of minor interest, fixing even at moments
nothing discernible, as if he were indulging it with a truce” (26). The narrator admits to not
knowing whether these fixed stares are due to his recognizing what he sees or just the opposite,
but the portrayal of this large, heavy-browed man with Lincoln-like, fuliginous eyes boring into
the men he passes while truculently trudging down the dark narrow streets is a hilarious piece of
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characterization. When Waymarsh occasionally meets Strether’s eye, “he look[s] guilty and
furtive” and falls “the next minute into attitude of retraction.” The look on Waymarsh’s face,
when meeting Strether’s judgmental gaze, is meant to convey something to the effect of: “What?
Me? No, I wasn’t trying to come-on to him.” He is defensive, and feels guilty about not trying
what Gostrey has suggested, relying on the old “looking hard” technique – which has not
achieved the wanted results.
Now the competition between the two begins. Inspired by his early successes of the day,
Strether begins to think like a precocious school boy: “Our friend couldn’t show [Waymarsh]
the right things for fear of provoking some total renouncement, and was tempted even to show
him the wrong in order to make him differ with triumph” (Ambassadors 27). Strether wants to
show off how well Gostrey’s techniques work, but doesn’t want to frustrate Waymarsh to the
point that he’ll give up. He then toys with the idea of suggesting a move that he knows won’t
work so that he can then show Waymarsh up, for example, suggesting the waggling of a glove
over the left shoulder. James gives his knowing readers ample room for comedy here.
Strether is having a wonderful time, “professing the full sweetness of the taste of leisure”
(Ambassadors 27). However, pleasure is closely followed by guilt:
The smallest things so arrested and amused him that he repeatedly almost apologized….
he repeatedly confessed that, to cover his frivolity, he was doing his best for his previous
virtue. Do what he might, in any case, his previous virtue was still there, and it seemed
fairly to stare at him out of the windows of shops that were not as the shops of Woollett,
fairly to make him want things that he shouldn’t know what to do with. (27)
Again, Strether feels as if he is doing something wrong, hence the inclination to apologize and
confess. He must justify his levity on the grounds that he had previously been chaste, i.e.
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virtuous, and is trying to make up for all the sex he missed. But “virtue” is a loaded term here.
It is synonymous with avoidance, denial, repression, and renunciation of his sexuality – the
means by which he could feel in concert with mainstream morality: virtue is the suppression of
sexual desire. Despite his attempts to enjoy his surroundings (“do what he might”), this “virtue”
is still with him in the form of internalized social judgment. It seems to stare at him from the
windows because he is projecting it there, even though he is away from the prying eyes of
Woollett. Simultaneously, “it” is desire that confronts him from the gallery shops of Chester
projected on to men who seem to stare at him and trigger his desire. This results in making him
“want things that he shouldn’t know what to do with” – “things” again referring to men. His
physical senses having been titillated as he trolled through the town, his imagination is now
piqued. The perceived attentions from the men around him make him desirous of sexual
activities that he had never allowed his imagination to entertain. This worries Strether:
It was by the oddest, the least admissible of laws demoralizing him now; and the way it
boldly took was to make him want more wants. These first walks in Europe were in fact
a kind of finely lurid intimation of what one might find at the end of that process. Had he
come back after long years, in something already so like the evening of life, only to be
exposed to it? (27)
Our protagonist is leery of a slippery slope. His walks with Gostrey have resulted in sexual
gratification and opened his mind to new possibilities. He wants to experience these, yet is
afraid this will lead to licentiousness. This “law” of moral gravity, so to speak, is unfounded;
however, he has already had more sex on his trip than he believed possible. Had he suppressed
his desires for decades in Woollett only to become a profligate old man?
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The wanting of “more wants” was experienced by J. A. Symonds, who captures this
progression of desires in his memoirs. James read a copy of Symonds’s unpublished
autobiography, “an explicit collection of memoirs of his sexual life,” which Gosse lent to him in
1895 (Novick, Mature 228). Symonds maintains: “Sins of the body are less pernicious than sins
of the imagination” (Memoirs 127). This truth was suffered by numerous homosexual men of his
generation:
In waking and sleeping dreams they run the round of desire, beginning with reveries that
hardly raise a blush, advancing towards pruriency, dallying with the sensual ware, at last
wading in chin-deep, deeper and deeper in, until no bottom is untried, and no part or
portion of the deflowered soul is pure. A day comes when they would rather bear the
remembrance of brothels than carry about with them the incubi and succubi of their own
creation – incestuous broods, defiling the spirit which begat them, despotic, insatiable,
that may no longer be denied. (Memoirs 127-8)
James’s protagonist reflects Symonds’s axiom that the mind is more pernicious than the act;
Strether has recurring feelings of guilt, due not to what he has done, but over things he imagines
himself capable of doing.
James heightens the veracity in this passage of psychological realism by portraying a
quick shift in Strether’s thinking. His mind abandons its focus on lurid potentials and returns to
the actualities of his environment:
It was at all events over the shop-windows that he made, with Waymarsh, most free;
though it would have been easier had not the latter most sensibly yielded to the appeal of
the merely useful trades. He pierced with his somber detachment the plate-glass of
ironmongers and saddlers, while Strether flaunted an affinity with the dealers in stamped
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letter-paper and in smart neckties. Strether was in fact recurrently shameless in the
presence of the tailors, though it was just over the heads of the tailors that his countryman
most loftily looked. (Ambassadors 27)
Historians of homosexuality point out the wide range of social classes represented in the
nineteenth-century subcultures; this crossing of class lines was almost as disturbing to moral
watchdogs as same-sex relations. “The Post Office messenger boys of the Cleveland Street
scandal and the stable lads, newspaper sellers, and bookmakers’ clerks in the Wilde trial
illustrate a few of the many sections of the working class involved” (Weeks 121). It was not
unusual for a man of the upper classes to be attracted to working men, whose physiques were
well developed by the demands of physical labor. Waymarsh eyes the “ironmongers and
saddlers” as they work, their shirts likely clinging to sweat-drenched bodies. Manly men
(including, if not especially, heterosexual men) are often desired by homosexual men; throughout
the nineteenth century and beyond, straight working class men often availed themselves for sex
with a gay gentleman in order to augment their paychecks. Strether prefers shop clerks, with
whom sexual transactions can be made while discussing the price of stationary. He often comes
on to tailors. This interface is advantageous in that one is touched while being fitted for a suit,
particularly when the inseam of a pair of trousers is measured. While other members of
Strether’s class loftily look “over the heads” of these tradesmen, their social superiority
disallowing familiarity, Strether is “recurrently shameless” in a camp sort of naughtiness –
perhaps flirting in Parlyaree, asking the tailor what time he quits work, or moving the tailor’s
hand to his genitals as he measures the inseam.
While the previous day Strether had been somewhat put off by Gostrey, the two now
freely remark “about passers, figures, faces, personal types, exemplified in their degree the
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disposition to talk as ‘society’ talked” (Ambassadors 28). The two speak in Parlyaree, as gay
“society” does, while people watching. “Passers” are those effectively dressed as the opposite
sex, or in drag. They speak of the “figures,” or bodies, of other men as “lacoddies”; “faces” are
“ecafs” or “eeks” (Baker). The “personal types” vary in age, degree of effeminacy, method of
approach, clothing, and level of drag (casual, comic, low or high).
How one speaks while cruising is of great importance – not only in the interests of a
successful encounter. Gostrey now focusses on the terms Strether uses and begins to rein him in.
James hints at this by breaking from his two-page paragraph and slowing the flow of the
narrative through a series of repetitions that now turn the reader’s attention to the monetary
aspects of cruising – a theme that persists through the end of this scene. At the start of this new
paragraph, Strether is pleased that “a woman of fashion [is] floating him into society” – even if
this means that Waymarsh will be “deserted on the brink” as Strether moves with “the current”
of the subculture (28). The text continues:
When the woman of fashion permitted Strether – as she permitted him at the most – the
purchase of a pair of gloves, the terms she made about it, the prohibition of neckties and
other items till she should be able to guide him through the Burlington Arcade, were such
as to fall upon a sensitive ear as a challenge to unjust imputations. Miss Gostrey was
such a woman of fashion as could make without a symptom of vulgar blinking an
appointment for the Burlington Arcade. Mere discriminations about a pair of gloves
could thus at any rate represent – always for such sensitive ears as were in question –
possibilities of something that Strether could make a mark against only as the peril of
apparent wantonness. (28)
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James identifies Gostrey as a “woman of fashion” three times in this short space, pushing the
reader to consider her in terms of this designation. The word “woman” is an early camp term for
a “mature, adult homosexual man” (Rogers 215). James uses a “woman of fashion” as a
euphemism for either a man in drag, a male prostitute, or both; again, he creates his own slang
expression (numerous existed for prostitutes, male and female, at the time) so as not to catch the
eyes of literary censors. James makes a reference to the Arcade – which is in London’s West
End, not Chester – because it is a virtual goldmine of connotations.
The Burlington Arcade was built in 1819 "for the sale of jewellery and fancy articles of
fashionable demand” for the aristocratic and upper-middle-class market (Geist 320). The twostory shops line up on each side of a paved walkway covered by a glazed roof in a straight
passage that runs between Piccadilly and Burlington Gardens – creating a dark interior not unlike
the gallery in Chester. In an effort to promote exclusivity, the shops of the Burlington Arcade
typically remained small and rarely advertised; maintaining a select clientele also required “a
private security staff working with police to exclude undesirable elements” (Kaplan 33).
Boulton and Parks shopped in the Arcade, sometimes while in women’s clothes, but often while
attired as men and wearing make-up. On one such occasion as this, “they were ejected by the
beadle after Stella [Boulton] was observed winking at a gentlemen [sic] and ‘turning his head in
a sly manner.’ Undeterred, the beadle testified, the pair returned several times” (Cook 15). This
same beadle, a man named George Smith, admitted during the trial of the infamous crossdressers that he had been fired from the Burlington Arcade for “routinely accepting payment
from female prostitutes to allow them to walk freely within the sanctuary. Smith, a former
policeman, defended his conduct as good for business. He insisted that the shop owners
themselves knew that ‘gay ladies’ were among their best customers…. ‘many of them he
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considered very respectable’” (Kaplan 33). Smith’s admission raised a suspicion that he had
ejected Bouton and Park from the Arcade “because they had tried to resist or charm him rather
than offer a bribe” (34).
With this in mind, we return to Miss Gostrey, who is “such a woman of fashion as could
make without a symptom of vulgar blinking an appointment for the Burlington Arcade”
(Ambassadors 28). One does not make “appointments” to shop at the Burlington Arcade, as this
is not necessary (if even possible). Gostrey bribes the beadles so that she can come in and ply
her trade. Dressing with “perfect plain propriety, an expensive subdued suitability” (5), she
discreetly pays off the beadles “without a symptom of vulgar blinking” and maintains a decorum
that aligns her with the other respectable ladies – unlike Boulton and Park, who wore garish
make-up while in trousers, cat-called men, and defiantly rebuked the beadle. Gostrey tells
Strether that she will “guide him through the Burlington Arcade” (28) for an urgently specific
reason: she is afraid that he is attracting the attention of blackmailers by being too verbose in the
shops of Chester. The “sensitive ear … such sensitive ears” that James refers to are those of
blackmailers. According to Cocks:
Blackmail, which was an integral part of the sodomite’s urban world, was a common
feature of the Victorian city. Threatening to accuse a man of being a sodomite in the
hope of extorting money from him even had a name: “the Common Bounce.”
Throughout the century, extortion was regarded as a possibly more serious crime even
than sodomy itself. A striking feature of such cases is the willingness of workmates,
acquaintances and strangers to make casual accusations of capital crimes on the flimsiest
of pretexts. (115)
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Blackmail is precisely one of the dangers Gostrey teaches her clients to avoid. She has likely
been on the lookout all day, particularly as the three walked through the crowded streets of
Chester: “For the blackmailer the attraction of crowds was clear. They provided an ideal cover
in which a casual brush of bodies could be used as either a sign of sexual interest or as a pretext
for an accusation of indecent assault” (Cocks 131). Now inside the shops, she permits Strether –
“as she permitted him at the most – the purchase of a pair of gloves,” but is strict about the
“terms” made. In essence: she allows him to procure the sexual favors of one shopkeeper,
achieved on the pretense of buying gloves, but stipulates the price, or “terms,” not wanting
Strether to get gouged. More importantly, the “terms” she makes about this transaction are the
words, or the language, she instructs Strether to use; if he expresses his desires in a way that “the
sensitive ear” of a stranger could recognize as a sexual come-on from one man to another,
trouble could ensue. Strether must learn to speak and act in such a way as to be “a challenge to
unjust imputations” (Ambassadors 28). His code must be obscure to the extent that it could not
justly support the charge of “the intention to commit sodomy.” Gostrey warns Strether: “Mere
discriminations about a pair of gloves could thus at any rate represent – always for such sensitive
ears as were in question – possibilities of something that Strether could make a mark against only
as the peril of apparent wantonness.” The more he tries to finesse a deal, and the more he
“makes a mark” or attains distinction with the shop clerks, the greater the peril of appearing
wanton to potential blackmailers.
Gostrey prohibits any more transactions, but appeases Strether with the proposal that she
will “guide him through the Burlington Arcade,” where he can then pursue “neckties and other
items”: code for picking up trade (Ambassadors 28). This suggestion may seem unwise.
According to H.G. Cocks, “Areas of London notorious for sodomites, especially the West End
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and the Strand, were also well-known places of blackmail” (121). Despite its location in the
West End, the Burlington Arcade offered a certain advantages in its exclusivity. Dedicated to
the upper classes, the Arcade hired security officers whose primary responsibility was to keep
the riff-raff out – ostensibly including tough characters from the lower classes who preyed on
wealthy homosexual men. Gostrey’s clients are wealthy men, and knowing that she has to
occasionally “give them their head,” the Burlington Arcade is a good destination in that she is
familiar with the prostitutes there and knows how to secure their services in the least
conspicuous way, lessening the chances that her clients will be overheard – or set up. Cocks
explains that the bouncers who stalked the surrounding streets “preyed on aged victims by
training ‘young lads, generally thieves whom they are bringing out,’ to follow respectable men
‘and endeavour to entice them to some out of the way place where the scoundrel who is watching
pounces upon the victim’” (121).
Meanwhile, Waymarsh has been “for a quarter of an hour exceptionally mute and distant”
as his sensitive ears have been taking in Gostrey’s advice (Ambassadors 28). Strether takes his
silence personally, assuming that Waymarsh is in quiet judgment: “‘He thinks us sophisticated,
he thinks us worldly, he thinks us wicked, he thinks us all sorts of queer things’” (29). These are
Strether’s self-assessments projected on to the mind of his friend, for our protagonist continually
looks at his actions in terms of virtue or vice. Suddenly it becomes clear that Waymarsh has not
been ruminating about his friends, as he makes “a sudden grim dash” across the street:
This movement was startlingly sudden, and his companions at first supposed him to have
espied, to be pursuing, the glimpse of an acquaintance. They next made out, however,
that an open door had instantly received him, and they then recognized him as engulfed in
the establishment of a jeweller, behind whose glittering front he was lost to view. The act
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had somehow the note of a demonstration, and it left each of the others to show a face
almost of fear. But Miss Gostrey broke into a laugh. “What’s the matter with him?”
“Well,” said Strether, “he can’t stand it.”
“But can’t stand what?”
“Anything. Europe.” (29)
Strether disparages Waymarsh’s attitude, suggesting that the morning of cruising has been too
much for him, but it soon becomes apparent that he has again misinterpreted his mute comrade.
Waymarsh bolts across the street and into the jewelry store because he has been beckoned – not
by “an acquaintance” but by a recognizable figure such as a sailor or guardsman. For example,
Jack Saul describes “the tobacconist’s shop next door to Albany Street Barracks, Regent’s Park”
where soldiers could be had by paying customers (Sins 35). This act is a “demonstration” that
the rivalry is still on, as Waymarsh quickly puts to use the knowledge imparted by Gostrey: don’t
say too much and stick to establishments that cater to the well-heeled. Strether begins to
understand what Waymarsh is doing; Gostrey is concerned that if Waymarsh “‘buys anything’”
she will “‘see something rather dreadful’” (Ambassadors 29). Knowing how sex-starved
Waymarsh is, Strether quips:
“He may buy everything.”
“Then don’t you think we ought to follow him?”
“Not for worlds. Besides we can’t. We’re paralyzed. We exchange a long scared
look, we publicly tremble. The thing is, you see, we ‘realise.’ He has struck for
freedom.”
She wondered but she laughed. “Ah what a price to pay! And I was preparing
some for him so cheap.”
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No, no,” Strether went on, frankly amused now; “don’t call it that; the kind of
freedom you deal in is dear.” Then as to justify himself: “Am I not in my way trying it?
It’s this.” (29-30)
Gostrey had previously pledged to do her best in teaching Waymarsh how to navigate the
subculture and she doesn’t want him to run into trouble on her watch; if he “buys” a tryst with
man who has lured him into the shop, it may be a set-up, resulting in “something rather
dreadful.” She wants to go in to help diffuse the situation, if necessary. But Strether points out
that their presence might make things worse because they appear to be frightened: they
“‘realise’” or give real existence to Waymarsh’s criminal act. If Waymarsh is targeted by a
blackmailer, the fear on his friends’ faces would only substantiate that he has done something
wrong. If they believed that Waymarsh had only entered the shop because of his interest in
jewelry, Strether and Gostrey would not “publicly tremble.”
While Strether had previously bemoaned Waymarsh’s fear of Europe, he now sees that
his comrade is getting into the spirit of cruising. Gostrey laughs in wonderment at how quickly
her two protégés have progressed, but is also sarcastic about the price Waymarsh is paying – not
only for the sex, but also by taking the risk of public procurement – especially as she is in the
process of “preparing some for him so cheap.” As Gostrey is no stranger to prostitution, we now
get the sense that one of her duties as “a general guide” is to act as a procuress. She was easily
able to get a prostitute up to his room that morning and likely ran into other similar
acquaintances while canvasing the town, imparting to them the potential for work that her
companions represent. Her “preparations” may also refer to her professed desire to wean men
off of prostitutes and instead develop coteries amongst those with Arcadian tastes. This is what
Strether understands her to mean, saying that her mode of freedom – the acceptance of one’s
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homosexuality to such an extent that one is willing to think and act in ways more consistent with
the true self – is “dear”: valuable, but also hard to come by. He wants her to see that he is
growing in that direction by “trying it.” He is there, out in public, with a cross-dressing man:
“It’s this.”
As their conversation continues, however, the theme of money becomes more overt and
more personal. Concerned by the fact that Waymarsh found a prostitute without relying on her
help, Gostrey tries to align herself with Strether by revealing her intention to get Waymarsh to
talk about him behind is back (Ambassadors 30). She claims that Waymarsh is “‘too stupid’” –
unlike Strether and herself. Strether immediately sticks up for his friend, saying: “‘He’ll never
say a word to you about me…. He’s a success of a kind that I haven’t approached.’” Because
Strether is challenging the accusation of stupidity, the “success” he refers to could be in legal
trials, political achievements, or intellectual accomplishments. Gostrey equates success with one
thing:
“Do you mean he has made money?”
“He makes it – to my belief. And I,” said Strether, “though with a back quite as bent,
have never made anything. I’m a perfectly equipped failure.”
He feared an instant she’d ask him if he meant he was poor; and he was glad she didn’t,
for he really didn’t know to what the truth on this unpleasant point mightn’t have
prompted her. She only, however, confirmed his assertion. “Thank goodness you’re a
failure – it’s why I so distinguish you! Anything else to-day is too hideous. Look about
you – Look, moreover,” she continued, “at me.”
For a little accordingly their eyes met. “I see,” Strether returned. “You too are
out of it.” (31)
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Strether worries that if Gostrey finds out that he doesn’t have money she will abandon them in
search of wealthier clients. Gostrey, however, in an attempt to woo a potential client, turns his
self-disparagement into a compliment on his adoption of the current mode of French thought: the
disparagement of money-making activities. In France, Fin de Siècle, Eugen Weber explains that
a gentleman exercises an “‘extreme, not to say insurmountable, repugnance’ for a job …
“Whoever takes it on, demeans himself’” (17). The prejudice against earned money (most
prevalent among those who enjoy it) that Gostrey falsely attributes to Strether distinguishes him
in her eyes. She attempts to bolster this backhanded tribute by encouraging Strether to look
around him at the bohemian “failures” that dally on the streets of Chester. But Strether doesn’t
fall for the false flattery. One of the characteristics of our protagonist that we will see throughout
the Other Plot is revealed in this exchange: he is loyal. He is a loyal friend to Waymarsh. His
acquaintance with Gostrey is a scant few hours; he has known Waymarsh all of his life. If he
can’t be “magnificent” with Waymarsh, at least he won’t betray him: “ – why, it’s rather base’”
(Ambassadors 30). Thus when Gostrey suggests that he take comfort in the fact that she, too, is
a failure, Strether cuts her with what he perceives to be true: she is a failure. She is “out of it” –
out of the money, out of step with society, too much, outré – echoing his previous contention that
her clients see her as “affected” (12).
When earlier explaining her ferrying service and its mission, Gostrey claims that she
doesn’t do it for money (Ambassadors 12). However, by this point we see that money is not her
primary motivation; despite her devotion to the great American homosexual subculture, she still
has to make ends meet. In an effort to keep his business, she counters Strether’s insult with two
opposing tactics – waxing melodramatic in the process:
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“The superiority you discern in me,” she concurred, “announces my futility. If
you knew,” she sighed, “the dreams of my youth! But our realities are what has brought
us together. We’re beaten brothers in arms.”
He smiled at her kindly enough, but he shook his head. “It doesn’t alter the fact
that you’re expensive. You’ve cost me already – !”
But he had hung fire. “Cost you what?”
“Well, my past – in one great lump. But no matter,” he laughed; “I’ll pay with
my last penny.”
Her attention had unfortunately now been engaged by their comrade’s return, for
Waymarsh met their view as he came out of his shop. “I hope he hasn’t paid,” she said,
“with his last.” (31)
This exchange is best enjoyed if we see Gostrey playing the role of a stereotypical queen. First
she pulls herself up, nose in the air, and snidely infers that she is of no use to them (futile)
because she is so above (superior to) what they can appreciate. She then deftly changes tactics,
moving from veiled insult to an appeal for commiseration. One envisions the back of the wrist
draped on her forehead as she bemoans her lost dreams – those envisioned (as a young man)
while in a boarding-school in Geneva (160). She tries to draw Strether in with pathos: “brothers”
in homosexuality, the hideous realities of the heterosexual world have beaten them down.
Instead of playing the violin to her melodramatic act, Strether goes back to business, pointing out
that he has already paid quite a bit for her time, advice, and connections – including Waymarsh’s
“beefsteak and oranges.” He hangs fire because he doesn’t want to reveal how much of his
travel monies he has already spent, artfully suggesting that he has lost his past (the “cost”). As
he has spent time with Gostrey he has started to relinquish some of the terror, guilt, shame, and
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loneliness that have plagued him for decades. This he is happy to pay out. However, Gostrey’s
drops her act at the sight of Waymarsh, saying the first thing that comes into her mind: I hope he
has money.
As Waymarsh approaches, Gostrey resumes her airs and attempts to cover her dropped
remark about money, saying obsequiously: “‘though I’m convinced he has been splendid’”
(Ambassadors 31). Waymarsh is now “near enough to show signs his friends could read, though
he seemed to look almost carefully at nothing in particular” (31). These signs are left to the
reader’s discretion while the narrator continues: “If Waymarsh was sombre he was also indeed
most sublime. He told them nothing, left his absence unexplained, and though they were
convinced he had made some extra-ordinary purchase they were never to learn its nature” (31).
Remaining quiet after a sexual exploit is consistent with Waymarsh’s character, and he is never
said to be wearing nor carrying this “extra-ordinary purchase.” This creates a vacuum which
allows the reader to co-create the Other Plot, surmising that his expenditure has been for a
prostitute. In turn, the “signs” we read on Waymarsh’s return may be a flushed face, disheveled
clothing, and a placid smile. However, James further encourages a sexual understanding of this
scene through the use of what Stephen Marcus identifies as “dissociation”: the “split or divided
consciousness” found in Victorian pornography (228).
Marcus gives an example of dissociation in a passage from Rosa Fielding, or, A Victim of
Lust (1867): “Mr. Bonham asks Rosa to expose herself to him, and Rosa ‘did as she was
requested and made a splendid exposure of her secret parts immediately’” (228-9). The
dissociation occurs between “splendid” and “exposure,” as the reader does not know what
meaning or what point of view should be attached to the noun being modified by the seemingly
incongruous adjective.
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“Splendid” may be intended as vague, general praise; it may be meant ironically; or it
may carry with it the meaning of being dazzling and impressive through brilliance or
luster. Or it may mean all three or none. In all events, such passages leave the reader
with a sense of radical disjunction between word and object, rhetoric and event, image
and emotion. We are in the presence of a severe dislocation in language which
corresponds to and expresses a dislocation in experience. (229)
James’s uses the adjective “splendid” to modify Waymarsh after a sexual encounter is likely
coincidental; on the other hand, he may have gained some of his techniques of obfuscation by
reading pornography. In the above scene dissociation is created through the use of the adjectives
“splendid” and “sublime” to modify Waymarsh. These modifiers are disjunctive in that they do
not fittingly describe the character whom we have come to understand at this point in the novel,
nor do they appropriate describe the action. Stating that someone is “splendid” for having left
his friends in order to spend time shopping – only to return mute and emptyhanded – is a radical
disjunction of experience (unless this person is a spendthrift with bad credit). This forces the
reader to envision what happens in the jewelry store in a way that will make the adjectives
“splendid” and “sublime” appropriate: Waymarsh is marvelous because he strikes out for
freedom and fulfills his desires on his own initiative.
Miss Gostrey assumes that Waymarsh has had sex with a prostitute and is not happy
about it, having lost a potential commission. Yet our consummate salesperson uses this
occurrence for further flattery, not only saying that Waymarsh has been splendid, but telling
Strether: he “‘has been so for you.’”
“Ah no – not that!”
“Then for me?”
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“Quite as little.” (Ambassadors 31)
Strether modestly denies that Waymarsh has acted on his benefit; there is still a boyish rivalry
going on between the two and the lawyer wants to show that he can hold his own. However,
Strether also recognizes that Waymarsh wants to prove his independence from Gostrey,
prompting his quick and direct response regarding the minimal chance that Waymarsh has been
“splendid” for her benefit. Subtle dramatic irony characterizes Waymarsh here. While Strether
reveals his loyalty in the recent dialogue with Gostrey, Waymarsh conveys his loyalty to Strether
in silent deeds. He is “splendid” for Strether’s sake – splendid in that he concedes to his
comrade’s desire to cruise and tries, in his quiet way, to enjoy it. Most of all, loyalty and
affection are conveyed by Waymarsh’s willingness to allow Gostrey to join their traveling party
– a person whom he will not even admit to having previously met. Waymarsh acquiesces to her
company out of deference to his comrade, who values her expertise, but also out of the fear of
being left behind, as Strether had previously hinted at the possibility of their being separated
(22). The two men reach affirming clarity in their relationship at this point, as we shall see.
However, Waymarsh will come to rue the day Miss Gostrey appeared on the scene.
At the top of Book Second, Chapter I, Strether, Waymarsh and “their constant counselor”
are in London (Ambassadors 33). This setting brings out changes in our protagonist that can
only be recognized if we understand the milieu in which he has been placed– about which James
provides scant detail. His intended readers were familiar with the West End and London’s
homosexual subculture. This was home to Boulton and Park’s escapades, the Cleveland Street
Scandal and the famed Telegraph Boys, and Oscar Wilde’s “feasting with panthers.” After the
Wilde trials in 1895 and the passing of the Vagrancy Law Amendment Act in 1898, mass social
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repression cast a pall over the homosexual community, which had been thriving in London since
the eighteenth century. In London and the Culture of Homosexuality, historian Matt Cook points
out that at the same time, private capital poured into the area: “Fashionable cafés, restaurants and
hotels appeared across the West End and between 1885 and 1911 the size of the listings section
in Baedeker’s successive guides to the city increased by a third” (23). Piccadilly Circus tripled
in size; Charing Cross Road was constructed, connecting the east side of Leicester Square with
the key entertainment and shopping areas of Oxford Street and the Strand. New theaters were
built; old theaters were refurbished (Cook 22-3). The West End flourished as a cosmopolitan
center of entertainment and consumption, with homosexuals easily mixing in with the throngs of
pleasure seekers. “The opportunities provided by the crowded streets, toilets, parks, stations and
trams could be taken up casually by men not initiated into a subculture”; those in the know
frequented “particular pubs, hotels and theatres, which formed an indoor social and sexual
network in the city” (26).
We join our three adventurers after they have been in London for two days, guided by
Miss Gostrey through the “rather frenetic life of the better-off homosexual world” (Weeks,
Coming 43). It now being the third and final day in London, Gostrey insists on taking Strether to
the theater: “transport[ing]” him there “without his own hand raised, on the mere expression of a
conscientious wonder” (Ambassadors 33). James sets this chapter in a theater, a site of disrepute
yet titillation for his conventional readers. In America, social moralists argued that “the theater
promoted instability and immortality by allowing deviation from sexual and gender norms to
materialize on the stage” (Bronski 105). In addition to Puritan theology that disapproved of
representations of what only God could create, nineteenth-century Americans had enough
interaction with England to be wary on other grounds.
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The theatre had long-standing associations with homosexuality and offered an additional
space for men to cruise and socialize with each other…. The Alhambra was a
particularly well-known meeting place and other theatres also presented opportunities,
including the Pavilion in Piccadilly, the gallery at the Empire on Leicester Square and the
bar at the St. James’ Theatre in King Street, just south of Piccadilly. (Cook 28)
Waymarsh is not interested in going to the theater, having “seen plays enough” (Ambassadors
33). This allows Strether to take advantage of Gostrey’s expertise without having to be
concerned about his comrade. He appreciates her discriminating tastes; despite her audaciously
seedy past and penchant for dresses, Gostrey is thoroughly cosmopolitan: “She knew her theatre,
she knew her play, as she had triumphantly known, three days running, everything else, and the
moment filled to the brim, for her companion, that apprehension of the interesting which,
whether or no the interesting happened to filter through his guide, strained now to its limits his
brief opportunity” (33). Strether now has a brief opportunity to put to use his new-found skills in
the opulent and ostentatious atmosphere of the West End: “a liberal and radical arena, where
sexual hypocrisy might be challenged and difference affirmed” (Cook 29).
As the evening begins, Gostrey dines with Strether at his hotel: “face to face over a small
table on which the lighted candles had rose-coloured shades” (Ambassadors 33). James’s
contemporaries might envision the Albermarle or the Savoy, as both hotels were named in the
Wilde trials, and “[George] Ives ate with Wilde and other friends ate at the latter on a number of
occasions” (Cook 27). The atmosphere, along with “the soft fragrance of the lady – had anything
to his mere sense ever been so soft? – were so many touches in he scarce knew what positive
high picture” (Ambassadors 33). In contrast to her previous plain propriety, Gostrey wears a
gown cut down to expose the shoulders and décolletage – the height of fashion in London and
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Paris (and a cause for blushes amongst conservative American travelers). The youthful aspect of
our protagonist has returned in full this evening with a zest for experiences not seen since
Liverpool. With youth, and a rose-colored view, comes open-mindedness and growth. The open
neckline of Gostrey’s gown accentuates “a broad red velvet band with an antique jewel” worn
around her throat (34).9 Captivated by “the effect of the ribbon,” Strether is led to an
“uncontrolled perception” that “complicate[s], as he now almost felt, his vision” in a way never
aroused by Mrs. Newsome – even if she “wore round her throat a broad red velvet band.” Mrs.
Newsome’s manner of dress had seemed to Strether “an alien order,” just as Miss Gostrey’s has.
Yet he now begins to accept Gostrey’s effeminacy as adding to all of her other values. This
brings him to question his own feminine nature:
What, certainly, had a man conscious of a man’s work in the world to do with red velvet
bands? He wouldn’t for anything have so exposed himself as to tell Miss Gostrey how
much he liked hers, yet he had none the less not only caught himself in the act –
frivolous, no doubt, idiotic, and above all unexpected – of liking it: he had in addition
taken it as a starting-point for fresh backward, fresh forward, fresh lateral flights. (34)
Strether is beginning to change. Still primarily constructing himself as an animus-driven
homosexual man – he is not an “invert,” but a man who loves men – he cannot go so far as to
complement Gostrey’s bit of finery, but accepts the surprising fact that he likes it. By
recognizing a glimmer of his anima (the female aspect of the male psyche, per Jung), he inches
closer to psychological wholeness. This growth provides a “fresh” perspective, allowing for a
new starting point from which to look back and re-evaluate his past, to move forward with a
fresh perspective, and to cross lateral boundaries that he had not before considered. Certainly he
Gostrey’s outfit – the “cut-down” dress and the velvet ribbon with ornament – is precisely what Frederick (Fanny)
Park wears in a well-known photograph from 1868.
9
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never thought he’d feel comfortable discussing with a companion the manner in which Mrs.
Newsome does her hair (46-7). This characterization shows that Strether is growing to see
himself differently, which, in turn, will change the type of man he is attracted to.
Looking at the antique ornament suspended from the red velvet band around Gostrey’s
neck impels Strether into a backward flight – a memory involving a similar ornament that he
identifies as a ruche:
He had his association indeed with the ruche, but it was rather imperfectly romantic. He
had once said to the wearer – and it was as ‘free’ a remark as he had ever made to her –
that she looked, with her ruff and other matters, like Queen Elizabeth; and it had after this
in truth been his fancy that, as a consequence of that tenderness and an acceptance of the
idea, the form of this special tribute to the ‘frill’ had grown slightly more marked.
(Ambassadors 35)
Strether has encountered transvestites before, most likely on his previous trip to Europe as a
young man. For this reason he was able to identify Gostrey as such. However, it appears he was
not always an astute judge, which made for an imperfect romantic encounter with “Queen
Elizabeth.” When young Strether accepted the idea that this was a man in drag, his appreciation
for homosexual culture grew – as did his attention to the “frill”: a slang term for the anus (which
puckers into folds).
While the word “queen” was used by speakers of Parlyaree to refer to any
gay man, the “Queen of England” and other titles of nobility were common sobriquets for
transvestites and male prostitutes. Strether realizes that in Woollett he would never have reason
to use such an address; however, in this moment: “It came over him for instance that Miss
Gostrey looked perhaps like Mary Stuart” (35). We know that Gostrey is not wearing a
sixteenth-century ruff, but she is a queen none-the-less.
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Where he is and what he is doing dawn on Strether: “It came over him that never before –
no, literally never – had a lady dined with him at a public place before going to the play. The
publicity of the place was just, in the matter, for Strether, the rare strange thing; it affected him
almost as the achievement of privacy might have affected a man of a different experience”
(Ambassadors 35). The West End in the late 1890s was a place of performance – to see and be
seen – and Strether is in the thick of it, dining with a transvestite for all to see! He is out in a
way he had never thought possible, his fears quelled not only by Gostrey’s femme du monde
attitude, but also by the likely fact that she is not the only transvestite in the room. Dining in
such a liberal arena is as rare and wonderful to him as having a private sexual encounter would
be for a man who has had no other opportunity to be with another man. “The business he had
come out on hadn’t yet been so brought home to him as by the sight of the people about him”
(35). Sitting in a public place surrounded by people who were accustomed to various
expressions of gender gives him a sense of belonging that cruising does not provide.
Once seated in the theater, Gostrey supports his wondrous sense of inclusion “simply by
saying with off-hand illumination, ‘Oh yes, they’re types!’” (Ambassadors 36). This statement is
as much for the reader’s benefit as for Strether’s: James again uses “types” as code for
homosexuals. In the theater, however, the focus on the broad spectrum of men who love men is
narrowed, as the stage generally attracts an educated, artistic, and often well-to-do gay clientele.
We are not surprised that Gostrey knows her theater, as Boulton and Park were regular patrons of
the Alhambra and the Strand Theatre (and were arrested at the latter). Some of these types are
likely transvestites, to whom the West End theatres were “especially accommodating” (Cook
17). Others are men in evening clothes, signaling their homosexuality by wearing green or red
cravats, perhaps a green carnation in the button-hole (á la Wilde), or “‘dressed in purple and fine
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linen’” (Cook 40). Many follow the fashion for shaving, “let their hair grow as it will, wear long
coats, and in many instances white hats” (Cook 35). Strether takes this in, “ma[king] to the full
his own use of it; both while he kept silence for the four acts and while he talked in the intervals”
(Ambassadors 36). This is an opportunity for Strether to study the various possibilities as to how
a gay man can present himself in public; he observes silently, but also takes note of how people
converse with him during the breaks. “However he viewed his job it was ‘types’ he should have
to tackle”: the “job” of negotiating the subcultures require his becoming familiar with the
different ways one can live and express his sexual identity. Woollett is the benchmark of
comparison:
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. (Ambassadors 36)
In Woollett, the public self is either a man or a woman; at home Strether maintains social
survival by assiduously presenting himself as the former. That Gostrey subverts gender norms to
the extent of fully appearing to be a woman has been disturbing to him. But as he surveys the
types that surround him at the theater, he sees the fluidity possible in gender identity and the
varying extent to which a man can take on marks (“stamps”) of femininity. It was not unusual to
see a man in top-hat and tails wearing rouge, powder, and lip-rouge while attending the theater in
London. Some men displayed a feminine touch by wearing a colorful scarf tied loosely around
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the neck instead of a cravat; others eschewed constrictive neckwear, opening their shirt collars to
expose a delicate throat. Perfume is a feminine stamp. Strether had never seen, gathered in one
place, such a collection of identities; the patrons are like valuable coins, their cultural currency
determined by external markings.
Strether takes in all the drama, including that on the stage: “It was an evening, it was a
world of types, and this was a connexion above all in which the figures and faces in the stalls
were interchangeable with those on the stage.… He had distracted drops in which he couldn’t
have said if it were actors or auditors who were most true, and the upshot of which, each time,
was the consciousness of new contracts” (Ambassadors 36). Acting has always been a popular
profession among homosexuals. Yokel’s Preceptor warns visitors to London about “sods” in the
theaters: “There have been also many [cock-bawds] in the theatrical profession, who have yet
been considered respectable members of society. We could mention the names of several, but
will, out of compassion only, with-hold them” (7). The actors and audience members are
interchangeable in terms of their same-sex orientation, but the audience members similarly
perform roles, just as the players do, with varying degrees of verisimilitude. The majority of
Strether’s life is spent playing the role of a masculine straight man, which does not authentically
portray his true self. Many in the gay audience live in the real world as if they were professional
actors by playing a role in public, donning a mask of heterosexual normativity while in the
workplace, at family social functions – anywhere that exposing the homosexual self would prove
problematic. As Strether begins to see the varying degrees to which the external masks the
internal – or not – he makes new mental agreements (“contracts”) with what it means to be
homosexual, or, more specifically, he becomes more accepting of how a homosexual can live.
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An example sits next to Strether: “He felt as if the play itself penetrated him with the
naked elbow of his neighbor, a great stripped handsome red-haired lady who conversed with a
gentleman on her other side in stray dissyllables which had for his ear, in the oddest way in the
world, so much sound that he wondered they hadn’t more sense” (Ambassadors 36). The
elbowing neighbor seated next to him converses with a gentleman in Parlyaree: the lexicon used
by theater people and many inhabitants of the West End. The “stray dissyllables” he overhears
might sound something like this: “Vada the sheesh drag on those dishes! Must charper a riah
zhoosher, however.” Translation: “Look at the classy clothes on those good looking men! They
need to go to the hair dresser, however.” This couple might read Strether as “naff” (dull,
tasteless, hetero) and thus distance themselves with patois, putting on a performance of identity.
The play “penetrates” Strether, not only by living vicariously through the actors on the stage but
by taking in the elbow and conversation of neighboring audience members.
As Gostrey and Strether converse during and after the play, the former now fully
engaging in the role of ficelle by drawing information out of the protagonist that is important to
both the traditional and Other Plot. She enquires about the Newsomes, repeating her first
question after not having gotten the answer quickly enough: “‘Have they money?’”
(Ambassadors 40). Strether tells her about the family business and The Review, which he edits
but has frustratingly limited control. He confides that Mrs. Newsome provides “all the money”:
“It evoked somehow a vision of gold that held for a little Miss Gostrey’s eyes, and she looked as
if she heard the bright dollars shoveled in” (46). Strether’s financial and artistic goals regarding
The Review are an important subplot in the alternative narrative, as we will see. Gostrey
continues to press Strether about the Newsomes, centering in on Chad’s relationship to the
family company and his potential fortune; Strether reveals that he is going to Paris in an effort to
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convince Chad to return to Woollett and come into his chance. Gostrey recognizes the great
service he is doing for Mrs. Newsome and asks what he stands to gain; Strether responds that he
has “‘nothing more to gain.”
She took it as even quite too simple. “You mean you’ve got it all ‘down’?
You’ve been paid in advance?”
“Ah don’t talk about payment!” he groaned. (52)
He tells Gostrey nothing about the arrangement to marry Mrs. Newsome on the successful
completion of his ambassadorial duty. It appears that Strether already has some qualms about
this agreement – and he has yet to arrive in Paris.
The following chapter of the novel (II.ii) opens in Paris. Before moving to this key
setting, however, we must note a leitmotif that runs through the Other Plot, which is introduced
in the exposition and illuminates the novel’s dénouement. This is the “sacred rage.” It is
responsible for Waymarsh having been “sublime” in the jewelry store. On returning to his
friends, he makes no comments about his absence or his purchase: “He only glowered grandly at
the tops of the old gables. ‘It’s the sacred rage,’ Strether had had further time to say; and this
sacred rage was to become between them, for convenient comprehension, the description of one
of his periodical necessities” (Ambassadors 31-2). Strether’s statement is directed at Gostrey,
who has not understood what “freedom” has to do with Waymarsh’s sudden indulgence.
Strether recognizes, however, that Waymarsh has acted on the “sacred rage” – a term that the
two of them adopt for easier reference to the complex emotions involved in homosexual
relationships. The “periodical” and often spontaneous sexual encounter is a necessity for each
man, indicated by the ambiguous pronoun “his.” After introducing the “sacred rage” as the
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means by which Waymarsh and Strether come together at the end of the Chester scene, this
theme opens the next chapter in London: “Those occasions on which Strether was, in association
with the exile from Milrose, to see the sacred rage glimmer through would doubtless have their
due periodicity; but our friend had meanwhile to find names for many other matters” (33).
James straddles the two chapters with the “sacred rage” to suggest what keeps these two men
together; yet what little we can ascertain about this bond at this point is its “periodicity.” As the
“sacred rage” is referred to throughout the novel, we will continue to examine its significance,
particularly its critical relationship to the climax of the Other Plot.
In preparation for the return of this theme, we will consider how the term “sacred rage”
might reflect the lives of our homosexual characters. According to Weeks:
The world of fleeting contacts, casual sex, the excitement of meeting people from another
class, was … accompanied both by guilt and the added possibility of public exposure and
disgrace, or blackmail and robbery. For many, the excitement and danger were an added
incentive; for others, they were the accompaniment of deep shame. In the ‘Uranian’
poetry of the 1890s, ‘shame’ in fact became the synonym for homosexuality. As Lord
Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’) wrote, ‘Of all sweet passions, Shame is loveliest.’ The two
were very often combined. (Coming 43).
Appropriating the negative emotion of shame as a synonym for homosexuality is a way of
defanging its sense, requiring one’s acceptance of both the experience of shame and that of
same-sex attraction. Lord Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s young lover (and the cause of his ultimate
doom) modify shame as “sweet” and lovely, reflecting a positive acceptance of the homosexual
self. But the yoking of disparate entities, such as shame and loveliness, is an artistic allusion to
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the mass of conflicts that plague homosexual consciousness. James alludes to a deep
psychological and spiritual conflict in the term “sacred rage.”
The noun “rage” means “Violent anger, fury, usually manifested in looks, words, or
action” (OED). When it is the second element in a compound, rage denotes “an outburst of esp.
pent-up anger and aggression triggered by a specific incident” (OED). This suggests
impetuosity; rage is often associated with madness. James modifies this state of rage with the
word “sacred” – an interesting choice, given that he was never particularly religious. He is adept
at choosing words that will ring in the minds of his contemporary readers, however. Edward
Carpenter repeatedly uses the word “sacred” in Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure (1889), in which
he praises Greek “comradeship, or male friendship carried into the region of love” for its
spiritual nature and cites an exemplary example from history: “[t]he heroic Theban legion, the
‘sacred band,’ into which no man might enter without his lover – and which was said to have
remained unvanquished till it was annihilated at the battle of Chæronæa” (105).10 Carpenter’s
emphasis on the spiritual side of homosexuality throughout his work challenges the socially
constructed notions of perversity and debauchery (Weeks, Coming 74). A patient whose
interview is included in Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1901) speaks of “rage” in relation to
sacredness. After watching an “unusually well-formed young fellow” go off with a female
prostitute, he feels himself to be
an unhappy witness to a sacrilege. It may be that my rage for male loveliness is only
another outbreaking of the old Platonic mania, for as time goes on I find that I long less
10
The Battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C., during which the “sacred band” of three-hundred Theban men were
slaughtered by the Macedonian cavalry, became the basis of the Order of Chaeronea – founded by George Ives in
the mid-1890s. The Order acted as “both a support group for its members and as the focus for homosexual
resistance and reform campaigns. Both its obsessive secrecy and its form and structure were products of the
heightened sense of oppression felt by its members” (Weeks 118).
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for the actual youth before me, and more and more for some ideal, perfect being whose
bodily splendor and loving heart are the realities whose reflections only we see in this
cave of shadows. (Ellis 65-6)
As the nature of living a homosexual life changes throughout Strether’s existential journey, we
will see the “sacred rage” take on further meanings and importance.
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CHAPTER 3
Love in Paris
“How do we know given persons, for any purpose of
demonstration, unless we know their situation for themselves,
unless we see it from their point of vision, that is from their
point of pressing consciousness or sensation? – without our
allowing for which there is no appreciation.”
Henry James, “The Lesson of Balzac” (1905)
Lambert Strether and Mr. Waymarsh are now in Paris (Book Second, Chapter II). Miss
Gostrey is not with them at this time, as she is off guiding other clients. However, after the
lessons imparted in Chester and London, she has left her comrades well prepared to explore
Paris. The historical development of this subculture is unique, due to French law and
temperament. Historically, homosexuality was both seen and unseen in France, making its
existence somewhat of a paradox. Socially, it was abhorred, yet accepted. Legally, it was
punishable, but often excused. Homosexuality was an act practiced by the few; it was an identity
shared by many. The dynamics of these dichotomies tilted in response to political and social
changes over the centuries. From the medieval era throughout the Ancien Régime, the Catholic
Church deemed sodomy – whether committed by men or women – a heinous sin and a crime
against Nature for being a nonprocreative form of sex. More than a capital crime, sodomy was
an act of heresy against the Church; per the Code of Justinian, convicted sodomists were burned
at the stake until 1750. The threat of meeting this barbaric end did little to curb same-sex
relations, perhaps because punishment was seldom carried out: “there were limits on the ability
of the church to regulate any behavior, sodomy included, especially in a country like France with
a strong anticlerical tradition” (Ragan 10). The French Royal Court had a long tradition of
licentiousness, and if Church officials dared to point a finger at the Court, abbés could quickly
find themselves locked up in the Bastille for their own sexual conduct. Thus, the Church
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adopted the position that sodomites were an aberration, mostly contained within the aristocracy,
and that the masses were ignorant of sexual deviations and should stay that way.
Sexual ignorance was not a hallmark of the French Court, although the sexual proclivities
en vogue varied depending on which king was in power. In 1720, “[o]ne philosophical lady –
the Duchess de la Ferré – noted the alternating taste of French kings, remarking that ‘Henry II
and Charles IX loved women, and Henry III mignon [pretty boys]; Henry IV loved women,
Louis XIII men, Louis XIV women’” (Crompton 445). Neither the Church nor civil authorities
had much power over what went on at Court and continued to see “nonconformist” sex as an
illicit pleasure exclusive to the aristocracy. “Dire punishment for the nobles, it was argued,
would only undermine the social order by revealing the derelictions of the ruling class, but would
corrupt the young and ignorant in the lower ranks of society” (444). After the death of Louis
XIV, who had demanded strict moral behavior at Versailles (despite his many mistresses and
unsanctioned second wife), the ensuing regency under Philippe d’ Orleans II rebounded to the
homosexual heyday of Louis XIII. Once again the “gentleman’s vice” of sodomy reigned, with
“‘all the young seigneurs ardently given over to it’” (445).
However, the sexual activities of the aristocracy soon got out of hand. By 1722, “even
the free-living Philippe felt compelled to act” after a group of young nobles (known as “le
confrérie” or “brotherhood”) threw the equivalent of a Greek orgy in the park at Versailles. A
council of noblemen conferred on the matter and agreed that le confrérie be disbanded and the
participants exiled for “‘not showing the best of taste.’” Discretion became the tacitly
understood rule. Peers who overstepped the boundaries were quietly deprived of royal favor,
exiled to their country estates, or (if foreigners) deported. But these were risks that many
noblemen were willing to take. As news spread that peers of the realm enjoyed a comparatively
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open homosexual lifestyle in Paris, the city soon became the destination for gay men from all
over the world. According to historian Michael Rey, the attitude at Court triggered a
“transformation” at the heart of the Parisian population: “male homosexuality be[came] a taste
that sets one apart from other men, being seen both as a refinement and a source of particular
identity” (179).
The means by which this transformation occurred involved an unusual crossing of class
lines, with the Royal Gardens playing an important role. Tuileries Palace, on the right bank of
the Seine; Luxembourg Palace, in the 6th arrondissement; the Palais-Royal on the rue SaintHonoré in the 1st arrondissement – all were built with extensive gardens for exclusive use by the
royal court. By the late seventeenth century, each garden had been opened to the public;
however, “in principle, the [guards] allowed into the royal gardens only persons of quality, or at
least those who dressed as such” (Rey 179-80). Gay men of the lower classes began to imitate
the dress and mannerisms of the aristocracy as well as they could in order to share a “particular
identity” with men of refinement. Noblemen who wanted to avoid scandals arising from trysts at
Court, which carried the possibility of banishment, walked in the gardens with an eye out for
men of interest – interesting because they were a refreshing change of face from those at Court,
because their enticingly well-built frames from years of labor showed through their faux
aristocratic garb, or because their extravagantly designed clothes, hair and makeup identified
them as male prostitutes who could be paid for sex with no strings attached. Interest was often
inspired by age. As one matures, a greater appreciation of youth and its attendant beauty often
develops. Heterosexual rock stars bed teenage girls; mature men divorce equally mature women
in favor of young trophy wives; older homosexual men often desire the taut bodies and energy of
younger men. Some noblemen sought the realization of Greek love in the gardens, a mentoring
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sexual relationship between a man and a youth. This mix of class and purpose made the
Tuileries garden the “temple of male love” by the mid-eighteenth century (Coward 47).
A pattern of behavior developed, one that would become a staple of the homosexual
lifestyle: cruising. In early eighteenth-century Paris, the Royal Gardens became the first
“socially sanctioned” space for cruising – primarily because of the preponderance of bushes and
trees. Naturally, the highly mannered aristocracy developed certain procedures that attended the
art of cruising. In the Tuileries and Luxembourg gardens “Most people seemed to circulate
between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., and from 8 to 10 p.m.” (Sibalis, “Regulation” 274); the gardens
were most crowded on Sundays and holidays (when lower-class men weren’t working) and in the
spring and summer (when the weather was fine). Making “a pick-up was a trade (métier) whose
techniques had to be mastered if one was to escape being considered a novice” (Rey 181). First,
the gentleman on the make tried to meet the eyes of another man standing alone. He indicated
interest by either asking what time it was or for a pinch of tobacco. “The conversation might
continue for some time, touching first on mere pleasantries, then slipping into the topic of
pleasures in general, before broaching any more specific pleasurable possibility.” From there,
the two men would move toward the foliage. “They commonly engaged in mutual masturbation
and anal sex but generally eschewed oral sex. They often made it clear that the idea of having
sex with women disgusted them” (Ragan 13). By the mid eighteenth century: “In the eyes of
certain practitioners, cruising distinguished homosexuals as a group similar to an important
social configuration of the period: la corporation” (Rey 181). One was part of a social order that
operated along a collectively devised protocol.
The aristocracy was not the only segment of society to enjoy freedoms previously
squelched by the sexually oppressive reign of Louis XIV; much of society reacted to the change
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in atmosphere. “There was a sharp rise in the incidence of spectacular sexual irregularity in
general” (Coward 40). Working-class men, stifled by the thin walls of closely packed apartment
dwellings, took to the open air for la Bonaventure. The Champs-Elysées, originally a promenade
that extended off the Tuileries gardens, quickly became a demotic site at which to rendezvous
because of the wooded parkland, or “Elysian Fields,” that lined both sides of the avenue (Sibalis,
“Paris” 17). Activity from the royal gardens increasingly spilled out into the neighboring streets,
particularly the rue de Saint-Honoré and Avenue Gabriel (just north of the Tuileries), and the
boulevard Saint-Germain (traversing la rive gauche). The grands boulevards, a vast semi-circle
linking the Bastille with the Place de la Concorde, “attracted pleasure seekers of every kind from
their very inception” (Sibalis, “Paris” 18).
In 1780, the descendants of Philippe d’Orléans II, having inherited the Palais-Royal on
his death in 1723, capitalized on the foot traffic by transforming the royal complex into Paris’s
premier center of leisure and commerce. They built a covered promenade on three sides of the
garden and rented out shops, restaurants, cafés, and gambling dens.
Idlers, gamblers, prostitutes, pickpockets, and casual strollers of every sort and all classes
were soon flocking there. … [T]he Palais-Royal was “the logical playground of the
highborn” and “equally seductive to the lowborn,” a place where popular culture and elite
culture converged. … [I]t was “the center in Paris not just of high politics and high ideals,
but also of low pleasure,” in whose cafés “distinctions of rank were obliterated and men
were free to exercise sexual as well as political freedom.” (Sibalis, “The Palais-Royal”
118)
In 1798, the police commissioner reported groups of pederasts congregating every
evening in the Palais-Royal gardens, which was “the gathering place of prostitutes of both sexes,
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many of them no more than twelve or fourteen years old” (Sibalis, “Regulation” 87). Members
of the nobility and middle-class found it easy to lose themselves amongst the masses. The
carnival-like atmosphere at Pont-Neuf – which featured street acts, various venders, and a wide
array of lewd behavior – was popular for the same reason. However, as the subculture expanded
into parts of the city inhabited by traditional sex workers, homosexual men found it necessary to
further develop the means to signal their identities to like-minded men.
Dress was the primary signifier. Appropriating the styles of the aristocracy, which were
considered effeminate by the masses, gay men wore colorful dressing gowns or frock coats of
rich and colorful fabrics, lace sleeves, ribbons, and shoes adorned with rosettes (if one was able
to afford these items). Hair curled or worn in a knot at the back of the head, and make-up – such
as powder, rouge, and black dots of crayon covering scars from syphilis – often completed the
look (Rey 189). Mannerisms such as curtsying and flourishing a silk handkerchief identified
men looking for men. Members of the subculture increasingly employed words and signs that
only other men in their network would recognize. “They typically used the familiar tu when
addressing each other” (Ragan 12), and referred to each other as “she” or “her” (Sibalis,
“Regulation” 88). They adopted feminine sobriquets such as the Mother of Novices,
l’Impératrice (the Empress), la tante (Auntie), and greeted one another as “Madame.” Because
the boulevards attracted nighttime traffic, suggestive gestures were more overt. In addition to
eye contact, or asking for time or tobacco, a man might expose himself in a pissoir or dark alley.
“These gestures in themselves were not unusual: only the ostentation which accompanied them
identified homosexuals, and they were quickly followed by a question – ‘Do you have an
erection?’ – and a rapid reach to find out” (Rey 181). Once a connection had been established,
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one man would take out his penis and stroke it or pretend to urinate; “sometimes he took off his
pants, showing this backside and then his front” (Ragan 13).
Pick-ups at the Seine and its attending quays tended to be quite bold. On the quays, or
river embankments, “one could relieve oneself (faire ses nécessités) and ‘expose oneself from
the front and rear’” (Rey 181). Here protocol was more direct: one would stare a man in the face
several times or gaze with affection while urinating in front of him. Instead of asking for the
time, the more common pick-up line was: “What time is it according to your cock? According to
mine, it is high noon.” Bathing in the Seine encouraged oglers and adventurers in the new
eighteenth-century era of sexual release. “One official complained in 1724, ‘It’s a horrible
scandal that a large number of libertine men swim in the nude in Paris in sight of so many
people, principally of the opposite sex…. They also commit abominations with those of their
own sex’” (Sibalis, “Paris” 18).
Some public acts were all too recognizable to outsiders. Parisians could not help but
notice the cruising and sexual activities taking place in the gardens, on the streets, on the banks
of the Seine. Bryant Ragan aptly states: “Sodomites seemed to be everywhere” (13). While the
Church Fathers and civic magistrates had long enjoyed the fallacy that same-sex sexuality was so
rare as to warrant little attention, denial was no longer possible. In the mid-eighteenth century
the Lieutenant général de Police, René Hérault, began “driving homosexuality back underground
where he thought it rightly belonged” (Coward 42). Agents provacateurs were stationed in the
Royal Gardens. “The people arrested in the Tuileries, Luxembourg, or Palais-Royal gardens, or
the Champs-Elysées, were … mostly of the nobility or middle class, but included some master
craftsmen, schoolboys, students, and household servants” (Rey 180). Undercover spies, or
mouches (flies), “roamed the streets inviting solicitations by loitering in known cruising places
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and giving the impression they were seeking partners. Many were handsome young prostitutes
whom the police dealt with leniently in return for cooperation in this kind of entrapment”
(Crompton 445). A new police-surveillance division was formed, the patrouilles de pédérastie
(pederast patrol), that monitored sexual activities in public areas, infiltrated the taverns in the
Saint-Antoine district, and raided inns that rented rooms to pederasts who had succeeded in
making a pick-up. Pederasts were harassed by the police and often brought in for questioning,
resulting in the generation of thousands of police reports. By 1783, the “beau vice” had become
so widespread that the register kept by the police commissioner listed 40,000 sodomites – almost
equal to the number of female prostitutes in the capital (Coward 47). These police records,
preserved in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal and the Archives Nationales, are the source of much
of what historians know about the early homosexual subculture of Paris.
The reports reveal inconsistencies in law enforcement. While members of the nobility
could, with relative ease, have sex in private, they often sought sex in public because of the
collateral thrill. In the few cases that aristocrats were taken into custody by the police, they were
quickly released without incident. Civil authorities were concerned about the reputations of
noble families and were as loathe as the Royal Court to incite scandal. As to the punishments
meted out to others, class generally determined the scale – yet, ambivalence ruled. Penalties
were inconsistent, varying from fines, terms of imprisonment (days to months), conscription into
military service, and/or rehabilitation in a prison-hospital (Saint-Lazare if one had money,
Bicêtre if not). Often it had to do with the past record of the apprehended. Most historians
believe that only three or four men were put to death for sodomy in the eighteenth century – all
of whom were of the lower classes, had previous convictions for other more serious crimes, and
happened to be arrested at a time when authorities felt an example needed to be made. Michael
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Sibalis captures the situation as follows: “The police deplored their inability to stem the rising
tide of licentiousness. In May 1789, one police commissioner denounced the ‘vile depravities’
of the pederasts … He regretted that the ‘laws … are inadequate … and the awkward situation of
the correctional courts assures the immunity of the guilty’” (“Regulation,” 87). The fact that
homosexuals in eighteenth-century Paris considered themselves part of a distinctive group
despite class differences made the subculture somewhat formidable. Legal authorities were
overwhelmed by the number of men who refused to squelch their sexual identities in the face of
death.
Ragan argues that police surveillance and arrests brought attention to the sodomitic
subculture, encouraging pornographers and philosophers to “discuss the nature of same-sex
sexuality and the extent to which that sexuality should be regulated” (13-14). Pornographers,
such a Mirabeau, wrote fantasy fiction that allowed readers to “think about any kind of sexuality
from a safe distance. This fiction often included philosophical discussions about same-sex
sexuality, which could shed light on any real sodomites they may have encountered in their own
lives, families, or communities” (17). Rousseau and Voltaire wrote negatively about
homosexuality – particularly in relation to the Church; this added to the discourses on sexuality
and created a discursive space where intolerance of same-sex love could be contested.
Condorcet, Montesquieu, and Diderot wrote from utilitarian perspectives and “denied that
society had any right to punish sodomy, provided that it occurred in private and between
consenting adults” (Sibalis, “Regulation” 82). Louis Crompton provides a sketch of Anacharsis
Cloots – a baron of Dutch descent and “one of the most colorful figures to occupy the public
stage during the French Revolution” – who wrote a defiantly utilitarian manifesto in March 1791
titled “The Spokesman for the Human Race,” which “mixed conventional liberal doctrines with a
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uniquely candid view of same-sex love” (526). Based on the premise that “‘everything useful to
society is virtue, everything harmful is vice,’” he argued that “there should be no sexual offenses
“‘apart from rape, abduction, seduction or adultery.’” Five months later, the French Constitution
of 1791 set into law radical reform measures that included the elimination of the death penalty
for sodomy and pederasty while indirectly alluding to homosexual relations. Chapter II, Article
8 declared: “Those accused of having committed a gross public indecency, by a public offense
against the decency of women, by unseemly actions, by displaying or selling obscene images, of
having encouraged debauchery or having corrupted young people of either sex, will be
immediately arrested.” In stating that “the only sex crime included in the Penal Code of 1791 is
rape,” Michael Sibalis interestingly points out that the victim is assumed to be female. Sodomy
was no longer a criminal offense, due to the “advanced opinions” of the philosophes
(“Regulation” 82).
Modern French gay activists credit Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès (1753-1824) with
decriminalizing homosexuality because of the important role he played in drawing up
Napoleonic law codes. Cambacérès, archchancellor under Napoleon Bonaparte, retained the
ambiguous language from the Code of 1791 that legalized sodomy when drafting the Penal Code
of 1810. It reads: “Whoever commits the crime of rape, or is guilty of any other act of public
indecency, consummated or attempted with violence against individuals of either sex, will be
punished by imprisonment.” Prison terms could be from three months up to a year with an
accompanying fine of 16 to 200 francs. Of course, what was considered an “act of public
indecency” was open to interpretation; Napoleonic officials used this ambiguity to take
repressive action against pederasts deemed a threat to public morals. Napoleon was not a
champion of homosexuality, and sought social stability based on the morality of the family unit.
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Yet he was not prejudiced against what he considered to be (like his eighteenth-century
predecessors) an odd proclivity of the upper classes; since same-sex love was not prevalent in
society at large, it should be a matter for the police, not the courts. Sibalis reveals that
Archchancellor Cambacérès was discreet about “‘his ‘tiny flaw’ [petit défaut] – a contemporary
euphemism for sexual attraction to one’s own sex – [which] provoked jibes, jokes, and
caricatures,” some even from Napoleon himself (“Regulations” 80). Joseph Fiévée, one of
Napoleon’s close advisors, was openly gay and boasted: “‘[w]hen one had a vice, one should
know how to wear it’” (91). Whether intended as advice or not, knowing “how to wear”
homosexuality in Paris would become increasingly important in the nineteenth century.
The eighteenth-century history of homosexuality in Paris is important to the Other Plot in
that the unique legal precedent decriminalizing homosexuality fostered the establishment of a
subculture larger and more open than anywhere in the world. In the 1850s and 1860s, Baron von
Haussmann radically transformed Paris, widening streets into open the boulevards, such as the
Bois de Boulogne, the Rue de la Paix, the stretch from the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre to the
Opera House, and several more that facilitated the activity of cruising. However, the FrancoPrussian War left the French Third Republic as a loose coalition of democrats, socialists,
communists, anarchists, monarchists, and republicans. In times of political uncertainty,
conservative ideologies emphasize family and “inherent” gender roles as a means to shore up
society. At the same time, when there is political uncertainty, there is room to move. The police
adopted a harsh stance against individuals and groups considered to be subversive or deviant and
kept a close eye out for “acts of public indecency” of any nature. Graham Robb cites a campaign
started in 1850 “launched to ‘clean up’ the streets or (as one police doctor put it) to take
soundings in the sea of ‘filth’” (28). Vernon Rosario is more specific as to what “filth” was
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cleaned up and why. Men dressing or acting in a feminine manner in public were be arrested on
indecency charges – not because they were homosexuals, but because they disrupted social
morals by gender deception: “The social concern for preserving clear gender distinctions was so
great that transvestitism was made a punishable offense in 1853, during the early, conservative
years of the Second Empire” (Rosario 152). This informs Miss Gostrey.
As opposed to the democratic and utilitarian philosophies that inspired the law regarding
homosexuality, the nineteenth century privileged the growing “scientific” or medical approaches
that were becoming popular in Germany, particularly the study of pathognomy: the signs of
passions and diseases. In 1857 Ambroise Tardieu published highly influential work: Etude
médico-légale sur les attentats aux moeurs. He argued that sodomists could be identified based
on physical traits and should be examined in because these traits were both markers of
homosexuality and a predisposition to criminality. Tardieu identified the primary physical traits
of a sodomists as having a pointy, dog like penis and a flaccid anus. Tardieu’s study “was ‘one of
the most widely read, and indeed just about the only work of its kind available on the subject of
homosexuality [in France] until the 1920s’” (Thompson 114). It also inspired the collection of
physical evidence used in the Boulton and Parks trials.
Tardieu’s rubric of the “exterior of pederasts” is a fairly objective portrayal when
compared with other literary and historic sources. Rosario presents the rubric: “‘curled hair,
made-up skin, open collar, waist tucked in to highlight the figure; fingers, ears, chest loaded with
jewelry, the whole body exuding an odor of the most penetrating perfumes, and in the hand a
handkerchief, flowers, or some needlework …. Hairstyles and dress constitute one of the most
constant preoccupations of pederasts’” (150-1). Rosario points out that Tardieu’s pathognomy of
pederasty heightened society’s fears because it gave a basis by which “pederasts of all classes
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could recognize each other even more easily than they could be recognized by doctors thanks to
secret signs. They thus formed a ‘shameful free-masonry.’ Fournier-Pescay, in the ‘Sodomie’
entry of the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, referred to the confrérie that recognized its vile
members through ‘something distinctive in their dress’” (151). This passage is fascinating for
the fear expressed by the status quo in reaction to members of a group recognizing like-minded
people by their manner of appearance. Unquestionably they were guilty of the same charge.
Everyone signifies themselves by appearance. It is not a matter that they signed, but what these
signified by them.
Signifiers became increasingly important as the subculture grew, particularly because it
lost much of the democratic nature that had previously given la corporation its strength, likely
due to commodification and the rise of the bourgeoisie. In the eighteenth century men of
divergent age and class socialized in the same venues; in the nineteenth century men began to
separate along these lines. Peniston’s research indicates that young men in their twenties and
thirties of bourgeois privilege and above were at the center of the new subculture, “and most of
them perceived their sexuality as different from that of other men” ( Pederasts 5). In what way
he does not say, unless it is that they often took lovers of the same age and class. Working class
men “were not rich enough to be able to pursue their leisure activities in the privacy of their own
homes…. Consequently, they frequently passed their leisure time in more public areas, such as
the bars, cafés, parks, squares, and streets of Paris” (88). Teenagers frequented the boulevards
and engaged in same-sex activity: some “solely for profit and others who engaged in it mostly
for pleasure” (Peniston, Pederasts 5). To some extent, the diverging path depended on
interactions with older men.
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The classical relationship between an older man and a youth has always held it allure
(particularly for the former partner), but this became more difficult to establish in nineteenthcentury Paris. According to Peniston, “Men in their forties, fifties, and sixties – particularly
those of the middle and upper classes – began to move away from the street culture where they
were most likely to meet young men (Pederast 83). Some may have lost the physical stamina for
cruising as the routes became widespread. Many were deterred by the risk of blackmail, which
was as prevalent in Paris as it was in London in the nineteenth century – particularly for gay men
wealthy enough to be targets for blackmailers without having the immunity of the aristocracy.
Because older, wealthy men were disinclined to take to the streets, business for teenage male
prostitutes declined, while preferable (safer) options developed within the subculture.
Some middle-aged men settled into same-sex domestic relationships. Others formed
small circles of friends – coteries or salons – with whom they could socialize in private. “Public
scandal and financial ruin, the consequences of homosexual sex, could only be avoided if
homosexuals created and maintained a way of differentiating between public and private life”
(Thompson 117). Robb tells a story about Louis Canler, head of the Sûreté, who left an example
in his memoirs of what he considered to be a model homosexual couple: a wealthy seventy-yearold foreign gentleman who had brought with him a boy of eighteen, whom he passed off as his
nephew. “‘They spent the daytime shut up in the apartment. The young man, dressed as a
woman, would devote himself to needlework, either embroidery or tapestry. At dinner time, the
“nephew” would put on male clothing again and, after dinner, the two inseparables would climb
into their carriage and go to the café for a cup of coffee and to read the newspapers. At ten
o’clock, they climbed back into the carriage and returned home’” (Robb 29). Canler praised this
lifestyle – not only because it preserved public decency, but protected pederasts “from the wiles
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of blackmailers and pimps.” Such domesticity was not financially feasible for all men, however,
nor was it necessarily desired.
The streets were open to all, however, and the Champs-Elysées not only retained its
popularity but overtook the Tuileries as the most frequented cruising area in the nineteenth
century. Sibalis quotes an agent with the vice squad who in 1868 explained “‘no spot in Paris
favors debauchery more than [the Champs-Elysées]’” (17). This was because of “the twisting
paths in the shadows of the tall trees which a feeble ray of light barely penetrates” and “the cafés
installed amidst the clumps of trees along both sides of the avenue and which remain open until
at least half past midnight” (Sibalis, “Paris” 17-18). The abundant foliage that provided quick
but limited privacy helped to skirt “public indecency” charges. Interestingly, the police stayed
true to their often ambivalent nature by accommodating the subculture’s appropriation of the
Champs- Elysées: “Cruising areas were sectioned off by ropes and park chairs, and sentries were
posted, as Victor Hugo discovered one evening. A polite voice came from the darkness: ‘M.
Victor Hugo is requested to pass this time on the other side of the avenue’” (Robb 159). If this
was not agreeable to the famous novelist, it was an easy stroll over to the grands boulevards,
which retained their previous popularity,
A significant aspect of street culture was unintentionally enhanced by Haussmann’s
reformation of the city, which included the construction of additional public urinals throughout
the city. The urinals (vespasiennes) were round or oval-shaped freestanding structures made of
sheet-metal that had three stalls inside. “Paris had 500 of them by the early 1840s, and within a
few decades they were ubiquitous along the streets and in the parks and squares” (Sibalis “Paris”
19-20). They were soon recognized as convenient places to have sex. “In certain public urinals,
also known as tea-houses or tea cups, solicitation was unrestrained…. one could discretely
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observe the activity [in the stall] next door and join in, if one wished. If you were caught, you
risked three months to two years in prison for offending public decency and a fine of 500 to
4,500 francs” (Tamagne 53). The most popular urinals around which homosexuals would gather
were on the grands boulevards, on the Boulevard Malesherbes, near the restaurants along the
Champs Elysées, and on the Quai de la Megisserie near the Pont Neuf. The urinals in districts
that were primarily inhabited by homosexuals, artists, and students – such as Montmartre,
Montparnasse, and the Latin Quarter – were regular sites of sexual interaction.
The construction of shopping galleries, which featured gas lighting, shops, cafés, and
restaurants, brought cruising into a new era. The well-to-do could now linger in the covered
arcades, facilitating pick-ups in inclement weather. Two popular galleries were the Passage des
Panoramas, built in 1799 on the south side of the Boulevard Montmartre, and the Passage
Jouffroy – a covered pathway built of iron and glass in 1847, which faced the Panoramas from
the opposite side of the street. The heirs of Philippe d’Orléans who inherited the Palais-Royal
capitalized on the notorious reputation of the gardens and the well-established foot traffic by
constructing the lavish Galerie d’Orléans in 1828-30. “Frances Trollope, who visited ‘the superb
Galerie d’Orléans’ in 1835, found it as ‘a gay and animated scene at any time of day…. Paris
itself seems typified by the aspect of the lively, laughing, idle throng assembled there’” (Sibalis,
“The Palais-Royal,” 121). However, letters to the prefect described the Galerie in less favorable
terms, complaining of boys (from eighteen to twenty) dressed in jacket and morning coat,
fondling and caressing each other, and carrying on the trade of accosting men: “‘These are male
whores who sell themselves to the inhabitants of Sodom. How can you let this disgusting traffic
go on every evening?’” (121-2). The police were aided by the fact that not everyone saw the
same thing.
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Of course there was the theater. Olivier Blanc states: “The world of the theater and opera
… has always attracted devotées of good-looking boys” (80). If the actors were known for their
marked taste in men, the corridors of the theater and opera were full of attractive males. Since
1799, the Comédie-Française has been housed in the Salon Richelieu, next to the Palais-Royal,
and has always attracted male prostitutes; in the nineteenth century the foyer of the ComédieFrançaise was a popular meeting place for men. James regularly visited the Comédie-Française,
at one point in his life as often as three to four nights a week. According to Sibalis, a few
theaters, such as the Odéon, had standing galleries (promenoirs) that provided cheap entry to
anybody who wanted inexpensive entertainment. Pederasts, however, looked on the standing
galleries primarily as crowded places where they could take liberties in the dark. A complaint to
the prefect of police in 1840 indicated that among the many theater-goers who bought the
standing room tickets “are some who, addicted to the vice of pederasty, come there to satisfy
their unnatural desires on the men next to them.” (“Paris” 26) Clearly what was being performed
was not as interesting to some patrons as who was watching the performance.
In contrast, those seeking relative privacy and relaxation repaired to the bathhouses.
Both public and private establishments, offering swimming pools, steam rooms, massages, and
private rooms, the baths have long been the cornerstone of homosexual culture. Several
bathhouses existed in Paris. The author of a mid-eighteenth-century pamphlet entitled Le
Cosmopolite describes a Turkish bath in Paris “where he took part in a ‘ceremony which will not
be displeasurable to partisans of socratic love: it is being handled and rubbed by young, nearly
naked boys, whose arousing touches would be capable of causing emotion in the most zealous of
conformists’” (Ragan 14). Robb captures the scenario of the bathhouse well: gay men “could
relax in a world where secret signs were no longer necessary. In the bathhouse, the normal
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situation was reversed: it would have taken more ingenuity to avoid a homosexual encounter”
(158). These encounters varied. Sometimes they involved prostitutes and their clients or two
men out for sexual adventure; some were brief and anonymous, while others were between good
friends and lovers. The more enterprising bathhouses offered customers an album of
photographs from which they could choose their attendant and his style of dress; “the price list
gave an additional measure of desirability.” The Bains de Gymnase, located on the Rue du
Faubourg-Poissonnière, was one of the most popular bathhouses in Paris. It also was the first to
be raided by the police. In 1876, “young men, most likely prostitutes, had been soliciting in the
Galerie d’Orléans and then taking men back to the Bains de Gymnase … over a mile away”
(Sibalis, “Paris” 25). The Bains de Penthièvre flourished in the 1890s and remained in business
until the late 1960s (Robb 158). It was the site of a notorious raid that resulted in the
apprehension and subsequent trial of “sixteen found-ins (twelve middle-class men, three
domestic servants and the son of a British baronet). The newspapers titillated readers with
pointed allusion to the goings-on in the steam room, where naked clients committed unspecified
acts ‘that would make a monkey blush’” (Sibalis, “Paris” 25).
Café and restaurant owners who catered to homosexual clientele often turned a blind eye
to “unspecified acts” taking place in their establishments for the sake of profit. There was
money to be made by purveyors of food and drink who could also offer couches, booths, and
even bedrooms to those seeking privacy (Rey 180). The Bamboulème Restaurant was a popular
meeting place for the subculture in the 1870s; “the proprietor, Mme Bamboulème, either ignored
the sexual interest of her clientele or openly tolerated and catered to them” (Peniston, “Love and
Death” 136). Barkeepers were particularly lenient and tended to either ignore or tolerate their
employees and customers of same-sex inclinations. “They were also rather guarded in their
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responses to the authorities, since they did not want their drinking establishments to become
targets of police raids” (Peniston, “Love and Death” 142). Some cafés went as far as
“employ[ing] female prostitutes to act as decoys in case the premises were raided” (Robb 166).
Some establishments dated back to the eighteenth century. “The Cabaret du Chaudron on the rue
Saint-Antoine, for example, was known as a popular establishment for sodomites as early as
1706. Other cabarets frequented by sodomites included the Petit-Trianon near the Palais-Royal,
the Tour d’Argent near Saint-Antoine, the Croix d’or on the rue de la Roquette, and the Roi des
Laboureurs on the place Maubert. Sometimes things got quite wild in such cabarets. A police
report from 1726 states that at the Franc Pinot, ‘they [the sodomites] dipped their pricks into
their glasses full of wine, before drinking’” (Ragan 12-3).
Of course, the Café des Ambassadeurs, previously introduced, was a frequent site of
uninhibited behavior. In 1874, a fifty-year old actor and a fifty-eight-year-old coachman were
arrested for mutually masturbating each other in front of a gathering of men outside the club – an
unusual activity at this site only because of the age of the participants. According to Peniston, in
1877, of the “forty-five arrests which took place in or around cafés, two-thirds of them occurred
near the Café des Ambassadeurs” (Pederasts 138). In 1878, the police had to break up “a
veritable orgy at the Café des Ambassadeurs” instigated by a public performance of mutual
masturbation outside of the club (139). An article from an 1888 publication entitled Le Vice á
Paris focusses on one particular tree outside of des Ambassadeurs known as “the tree of love” –
a renowned meeting place for lovers in the 1880s: “‘The headquarters of these pederasts in this
corner of Paris […] is called the tree of love […] and it is located near the Café des
Ambassadeurs [on the Avenue Gabriel]. Every evening around this tree, one can see vile rascals
wandering about, easily recognizable by their clean-shaven face, their lifeless gaze and
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especially the peculiar way they sway their hips as they glide rather than walk over the ground’”
(Sibalis, “Paris,” 18).
Michael Sibalis estimates that tens of thousands of Parisians observed for themselves at
least some of the conspicuously public homosexual activity that took place there during the
nineteenth century, and thousands more would have read about it in books and newspapers by
the mid-nineteenth century.
What the experts wrote about and what the public witnessed were effeminate and
flamboyant young men (often hustlers) and older, usually moneyed gentlemen who
sought their favors. These two groups became the stereotypical homosexuals – one group
shamelessly brazen, the other timidly secretive – and they gave shape to the notion that
homosexuality was most often venal and usually involved the corruption of idle youths
by cynical older men …. (“Palais-Royal” 127)
James works with and against this stereotype in Other Plot of The Ambassadors as he portrays
his protagonist’s relationships in Paris and the extent to which they change life.
In Book Second, Chapter II Strether and Waymarsh arrive in Paris and go to the bank on
Rue Scribe in order to retrieve letters – one of which, Strether assumes, will be a letter of credit
from Mrs. Newsome (Ambassadors 53). Unfortunately, no letters await him. As Waymarsh
wants to stay at the bank and read the newspapers, and Gostrey has not yet joined them, Strether
ponders how to spend his day, weighing his duty to Mrs. Newsome against his desire to go about
the business of looking for men. Being short on money, he feels “disconcerted” by the lack of
Mrs. Newsome’s pecuniary attentions and strolls “back to the boulevard with a sense of injury”:
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It would serve, this spur to his spirit, he reflected, as pausing at the top of the street, he
looked up and down the great foreign avenue, it would serve to begin business with. His
idea was to begin business immediately, and it did much for him the rest of his day that
the beginning of business awaited him. He did little else till night but ask himself what
he should do if he hadn’t fortunately had so much to do. (53)
Not having received the letter of credit serves as an excuse to immediately get down to the
business of cruising. “He did happen to have a scruple – a scruple about taking no definite step
till he should get letters”: he intends to do Mrs. Newsome’s “business” but has misgivings about
contacting Chad before he has received some money. His pondering on what he will do in the
meantime is laced with sarcasm and we are already seeing a different Strether from the man in
Chester. Luckily, there is much to do – or, there are many possibilities for sexual encounters:
“for hundreds of years, homosexual men have sought sexual adventure in the streets, squares and
parks of Paris…. ‘cruising’ is nothing new” (Sibalis, “Paris” 15).
Strether has new cruising techniques, however (thanks to Gostrey), and is anxious to put
them to the test. Any concerns about his ambassadorial duty are carried off by this reasoning: “A
single day to feel his feet – he had felt them as yet only at Chester and in London – was, he could
consider, none too much; and having, as he had often privately expressed it, Paris to reckon with,
he threw these hours of freshness consciously into the reckoning” (Ambassadors 53). He can
allow himself at least one day to cruise, as so far on his trip he has only felt his feet on the
pavement in England. He is in Paris! Strether heads off into “the vast bright Babylon” (63).
The “hours of freshness” – the forward come-ons from men – “made it continually greater, but
that was what it had best be if it was to be anything at all, and he gave himself up till far into the
evening, at the theatre and on the return, after the theatre, along the bright congested Boulevard,
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to feeling it grow” (53-4). As he traverses the main homosexual thoroughfares of Paris, the
fresh, impertinent attention from others on the streets makes his penis become engorged
(“continually greater”), which it had best be if someone reaches out and grabs it while asking
what time it is; if it is not, the man will not be interested and there won’t be “anything at all.”
However, Strether is having no problem getting multiple erections as he gives himself up (has
sex) far into the evening.
As if this is not enough activity for one day, Strether returns to the theater: “Waymarsh
had accompanied him this time to the play, and the two men had walked together, as a first stage,
from the Gymnase to the Café Riche, into the crowded ‘terrace’ of which establishment – the
night, or rather the morning, for midnight had struck, being bland and populous – they had
wedged themselves for refreshment” (Ambassadors 54). While readers of the traditional plot see
two busy site-seers, those following the Other Plot recognize an evening of bawdy pleasures. It
is interesting to note that Waymarsh now joins Strether – perhaps because the latter is low on
cash. They first go to the theater, where they are certain to find other men looking for men.
Afterwards they visit the Gymnase – a shortened reference to the Bains de Gymnase, which was
one of the most popular bathhouses in Paris. From there they cruise to the Café Riche. Put
delicately by a historian in 1912, “This café was in high favour with men of letters and musical
celebrities, and … was still the haunt of men who had greater interests in life than eating and
drinking…. It was the camp of literary dandyism” (Shelley 155). Considering the difficulty of
eating or drinking while “wedged” on the “crowded ‘terrace,’” the “refreshment” of health and
vigor likely comes in some form of physical contact. All of these potentially exhausting
activities, which James humorously packs into one sentence, take place after Strether has already
cruised the boulevards for hours. This camp excess comically portrays our sex-starved
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protagonist as a kid in a candy shop. However, the picture James conveys of Waymarsh is also
comic. While at the Café Riche, Waymarsh tells his comrade that he “had made a marked virtue
of his having now let himself go and there had been elements of impression … that gave him his
occasion for conveying that he held this compromise with his stiffer self to have become
extreme. He conveyed it – for it was still, after all, his stiffer self who gloomed out of the glare
of the terrace – in solemn silence” (Ambassadors 54). Now in Paris, where the lawyer from
Milrose is relieved from legal concerns, he “let[s] himself go” by getting turned on in a public
place: he stands there, silent, with a hard-on.
The next day the two return to Rue Scribe: letters have arrived for Strether, including the
letter of credit from Mrs. Newsome. Waymarsh again remains at the bank, where he will subtly
loiter: “He spoke of the establishment, with emphasis, as a post of superior observation”
(Ambassadors 54). He will let men come to him, setting himself up as a “station of relief” for
“confined American[s]” who come into the bank (55). “Strether, on his side, set himself to walk
again – he had his relief in his pocket.” Now infused with cash (“relief”), his “restlessness”
becomes “his temporary law”; the edict is to make up for all the sex he has been deprived of in
Woollett. This personal law also seems to address his inner conflicts, as Strether now lets
himself go to his furthest extent so far. Temporarily unencumbered by Waymarsh, “He had for
the next hour an accidental air of looking for it in the windows of shops: he came down the Rue
de la Paix in the sun and, passing across the Tuileries and the river, indulged more than once – as
if on finding himself determined – in a sudden pause before the book-stalls of the opposite quay”
(55). This sentence lists six key places in Paris to troll for sex. His youthful vigor now in full
attendance, Strether again embarks on a course of cruising that offers an outlandish number of
sexual opportunities. Having walked down the Rue de la Paix to the Tuileries, he begins by
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looking into the shops of the Galerie d’Orléans on the southern edge of the Palais-Royal, where
shopkeepers in the mid-nineteenth century repeatedly complained to the police about being
overrun by male prostitutes: “‘The Palais-Royal has been purged of the female prostitutes that
dishonored it, but today these vile beings whom we denounce to you are worse: they accost
men!’” (Sibalis, “Palais-Royal” 123). These persilleuses were generally young (twenty to
twenty five years of age), unemployed or workers in various trades, and “usually wore a peaked
cap, necktie, short frock coat or jacket to emphasize their (often corseted) waist, and tight-fitting
trousers” (Sibalis, “Palais” 125, 124). After making contact with clients, prostitutes would take
them to one of the “disreputable taverns or rooming houses that served as maisons de passe
(hotels commonly used for prostitution)” that were near the Palais-Royal; here they could find
“‘small private rooms, [while] the owners profit from selling bad wine at a very high price’”
(123).
Unfortunately, the Galerie d’Orléans was rife with potential blackmailers. Gangs of men
would work together, sending teenagers to accost potential clients while an equal number of
older men “then stepped in to blackmail anyone imprudent enough to succumb to temptation and
pick up a youngster” (Sibalis, “Palais” 125). For this reason, it is with an “accidental air” that
Strether peruses the shops, having been warned by Gostrey when in Chester the danger that
galleries present. As it is a beautiful morning, Strether crosses the street to the garden of the
Tuileries, where he lingers, “on two or three spots, to look; it was as if the wonderful Paris spring
had stayed [Strether] as he roamed” (Ambassadors 55). The iconic center of the Parisian
homosexual subculture since the eighteenth century, Sibalis contends that the Tuileries remain
one of the best-known places for cruising today. According to one recent guidebook, “all
gay life is here, whispering on the benches, leaning against the balustrades, reading under
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trees … – but all following a routine as mannered as anything out of Jane Austen’s Bath
society.” Parisian gays firmly believe that men have been coming here for centuries to
meet other men and sometimes to have sex with them at night in the bushes or under the
trees. (“Paris” 16)
Supported by the weather, Strether stops and notes the various people in the garden, but his mind
turns to history when coming upon the former site of the Tuileries Palace (demolished in 1871).
Gazing into “the “irremediable void,” he fills out “spaces with dim symbols of scenes; he caught
the gleam of white statues at the base of which, with his letters out, he could tilt back a strawbottomed chair” (Ambassadors 55-6). James here refers to an icon of Parisian homosexual
culture: an antique marble statue of a wild boar that stood on a pedestal in a circle of trees at one
corner of the Tuileries garden. In 1830 a writer referred to this spot as “‘the rallying point of our
modern Antinouses!’” A newspaper article of 1845 identified the white statue of the wild boar
as a meeting place of “‘those immoral creatures’” (Sibalis, “Paris” 16). While Sibalis states that
the statue had lost its significance as a meeting place by 1850 (it was moved to the Louvre in
1992), Strether at this point is thinking about the historical relationship between homosexuality,
community, and physical sites in Paris. He considers settling at the base of the wild boar, tilting
his chair against it as he reads his letters, perhaps as a way to connect those who have tread this
path before him. Their past was significantly different from his, however, and he decides to
move on: “But his drift was, for reasons, to the other side, and it floated him unspent up the Rue
de Seine…” (Ambassadors 56).
So far Strether is “unspent”: he is neither tired of walking nor sexually satisfied. He
continues his course, walking across the Tuileries south to “the river [and] indulge[s] more than
once – as if on finding himself determined – in a sudden pause before the book-stalls of the
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opposite quay” (Ambassadors 55). He finds comfort on the banks of the Seine, as he had
naturally gravitated to the banks of the Mersey in Liverpool. In contrast to the genteel history of
the garden, activities at the river are markedly less nuanced; one goes to the Seine for ready sex.
The book-stalls on the quays invited one to linger and thus were good places to pick up men;
whether Strether makes “a sudden pause” because of a book or person is a matter of
interpretation. He then crosses the river and continues south “as far as the Luxembourg”
(Ambassadors 56). While not as popular as the Tuileries, the Luxembourg Gardens as a cruising
site similarly had eighteenth-century aristocratic origins and offers Strether a bevy of choices in
prostitutes. “Here at last he found his nook, and here … he passed an hour in which the cup of
his impressions seemed truly to overflow” (56). This sentence lends itself to sexual
connotations.
Soon thereafter, Strether’s mind also fills to the brim. As he sits on a penny-chair
looking out on the gardens, James shows us at length (eleven pages) the fractured psychological
state of his protagonist: present perceptions, thoughts of the past, dreams held, dropped, and
groped for again. “What he wanted most was some idea that would simplify, and nothing would
do this so much as the fact that he was done for and finished” (Ambassadors 58). Yet throughout
this realistic tracing of the circuitous nature of thought, despair turns to hope, which connects to
a related angst, and so on: myriad topics arise, attended by wide vacillations in emotion. We will
tease out the skeins most important to understanding the love story in the Other Plot. Strether’s
development as to how he feels about his homosexuality is key to this. Not surprisingly, his
thoughts return to guilt: “More than once, during the time, he had regarded himself as
admonished; but the admonition, this morning, was formidably sharp. It took as it hadn’t done
yet the form of a question – the question of what he was doing with such an extraordinary sense
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of escape” (56). These admonitions had come from Gostrey, who chastised Strether in Chester
for his inability to enjoy his sexuality and the opportunity to explore it. However, he now
questions why he does not feel guilty: he is growing to accept himself. His extraordinary feeling
of freedom, of escape, heightens as he reads four long letters from Mrs. Newsome: “It was the
difference, the difference of being just where he was and as he was, that formed the escape – this
difference was so much greater than he had dreamed it would be; and what finally he sat there
turning over was the strange logic of his finding himself so free” (57). Logically, he feels free
because he is in Paris. The “difference” of his closeted life in Woollett comes back to him in
Mrs. Newsome’s letters. But the “difference” that is “so much greater than he dreamed it would
be” is not only due to the change of setting: his need for repression has changed as he begins to
escape his feelings of guilt. Gostrey has helped him to accept “being just where he was and as he
was”: he has just had sex (again) – with a man who is not Waymarsh! It is a “strange logic” that
he should feel free, however, as he has not escaped his dependence on Mrs. Newsome, nor his
obligation to do her bidding.
Recognizing this, he feels it “in a manner his duty to think out his state, to approve the
process ... He had never expected – that was the truth of it – again to find himself young…”
(Ambassadors 57). In this youthful frame of mind, he childishly reasons that Mrs. Newsome
wants him to be free from worry:
By insisting that he should thoroughly intermit and break she had so provided for his
freedom that she would, as it were, have only herself to thank. Strether could not at this
point indeed have completed his thought by the image of what she might have to thank
herself for: the image, at best … poor Lambert Strether thankful for breathing-time and
stiffening himself while he gasped. (57)
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Mrs. Newsome is paying for his trip, and in an effort to assuage his guilt about not yet having
done anything in her service, he reminds himself that she wants him to have a good time (and if
he has too good a time … well, it’s her own fault). Yet Strether cannot imagine that she would
thank herself for giving him the money to pay for prostitutes, for “stiffening himself while he
gasped” in yet another orgasm. Bolstering his new-found resistance to guilt, Strether concludes:
“There he was, and with nothing in his aspect or his posture to scandalize: it was only true that if
he had seen Mrs. Newsome coming he would instinctively have jumped up to walk away a little.
He would have come round and back to her bravely, but he would have had first to pull himself
together” (57). He assumes she would not want to find her ambassador cavorting amongst the
bushes.
And then there is the matter of Chad: how is Strether to enjoy the gay lifestyle of Paris
while acting as Mrs. Newsome’s ambassador?
This suggested the question … it was a point that suddenly rose – his peculiar
responsibility might be held in general to have on his choice of entertainment. It had
literally been present to him at the Gymnase – where one was held moreover
comparatively safe – that having his young friend at his side would have been an odd
feature of the work of redemption; and this quite in spite of the fact that the picture
presented might well, confronted with Chad’s own private stage, have seemed the pattern
of propriety…. Was he to renounce all amusement for the sweet sake of that authority?
(62)
Knowing that the Gymnase refers to the baths – the cornerstone of homosexual life – makes for a
hilarious vision here. But Strether has a valid concern. If he had met up with Chad in Chester,
Strether would have found it easier to maintain propriety. “His greatest uneasiness seemed to
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peep at him out of the imminent impression that almost any acceptance of Paris might give one’s
authority away” (63). Will he be able to present himself as a figure who can legitimately
condemn Chad for his supposed indiscretions? Strether defers answering this by mentally
cataloguing the bohemian adventures reported in Chad’s previous letters.
Strether’s mind continues to careen – a conscience that had been so “encumbered” that he
“had ceased even to measure his meagerness, a meagerness that sprawled, in this retrospect,
vague and comprehensive, stretching back like some unmapped Hinterland from a rough coastsettlement” (Ambassadors 61). His mind lands at the site of his emotional shipwreck: the early
pilgrimage “he had recklessly made with the creature who was so much younger still” (60).
Strether had fallen in love with a young man when first in Paris: “He had believed, sailing home
again, that he had gained something great, and his theory … had then been to preserve, cherish
and extend it. As such plans as these had come to nothing … it was doubtless little enough of a
marvel that he should have lost account of that handful of seed” (60). On returning to Woollett,
Strether’s plans were not solely focused on members of a community: “Beyond and behind them
was the pale figure of his real youth, which held against its breast the two presences paler than
itself – the young wife he had early lost and the young son he had stupidly sacrificed” (59). His
“pale … real” self is homosexual. The femininely pale “young wife” in the backstory marginally
serves the traditional plot and provides cover for the Other Plot (although it was not unusual for
gay men to marry women). The wife died conveniently early – convenient not only for the sake
of the gay plot, but for the grief that would provide an excuse for not remarrying. However, it is
the pale (homosexual) “son” for whom Strether continues to carry a torch:
He had again and again made out for himself that he might have kept his little boy, his
little dull boy, who had died at school of rapid diphtheria, if he had not in those years so
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insanely given himself to merely missing the mother. It was the soreness of his remorse
that the child had in all likelihood not really been dull – had been dull, as he had been
banished and neglected, mainly because the father had been unwittingly selfish. (59)
This passage is key to the Other Plot, as it points to the primary conflict. Strether had not been a
bad “father,” but had mishandled a relationship in the past. This is best understood in light of
James’s relationships with younger men, which are reflected in the boy referred to above.
Repetition in the passage above is our first clue, as it draws our attention to: “his little
boy, his little dull boy.” The phrase Strether uses to refer to his young lover is similar to James’s
regular form of address to his then-current lover, Hendrik Andersen. When in Rome in 1899, the
56 year-old James (approximately the same age of Lambert Strether) met Hendrik Andersen – a
tall, blonde, handsome American sculptor of Norwegian descent. “Andersen was twenty-seven
years old, sensitive and unsure of himself, and James gathered him up” (Novick, Mature Master
298). James bought a small bust of a young boy (“Bevilacqua”) on first meeting the artist, and
correspondence between the two men began as soon as he returned home to Lamb House, Rye.
While the exchange of letters continued until James’s death in 1915, we will focus solely on
those written concomitant with the writing of the novel (approximately 1900-1901). Beloved
Boy (2004), a collection of letters from James to Andersen, reprints fifteen letters from this
period – ten of which use the words “little” and/or “boy” in James’s address. Examples include:
“My dear Boy!” (3); “My dearest little Hans” (5); “My dear Hans Boy” (6); “My dearest boy
Hendrik” (19). It is hard not to think the novelist had Andersen in mind when referring to
Strether’s “little boy.”
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The content of these letters also informs the above passage from the novel, particularly
one written to Andersen on 7 September 1899, shortly after the sculptor has spent three day
alone with James at Lamb House (August 1899):
My dearest little Hans: without prejudice to your magnificent stature! Your note of this
morning is exactly what I had been hoping for, & it gives me the liveliest pleasure. I
hereby “ask” you, with all my heart. Do, unfailingly & delightfully, come back next
summer & let me put you up for as long as you can possibly stay. There, mind you – it’s
an engagement. I was absurdly sorry to lose you when, that afternoon of last month we
walked sadly to the innocent & kindly little station together & our common fate growled
out the harsh false note of whirling you, untimely, away. Since then I have missed you
out of all proportion to the three meagre little days (for it seems strange they were only
that) that we had together. I have never (& I’ve done it 3 or 4 times,) passed the little
corner where we came up Udimore hill (from Winchelsea,) in the eventide on our
bicycles, without thinking ever so tenderly of our charming spin homeward in the twilight
& feeling again the strange perversity it made of that sort of thing being so soon over.
Never mind – we shall have more, lots more, of that sort of thing! (Beloved Boy 5-6).
The feelings expressed here go beyond homosocial affection; these are the yearnings of a lover –
one whose original attraction has blossomed into passion after sexual intimacy. As we look
closely at the language used in the letters we engage our own knowledge and experience with
sexual relationships as a legitimate guide to interpretation.
James begins the letter to “little Hans,” quoted above, with an ironic gesture towards his
“magnificent stature.” Writing with the same ambiguity as in the novel, this may refer to two
different things: Andersen’s height or the impressive size of his penis. Remarking on the
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largeness of the latter is common foreplay for men and women. Like many people who have sex
with their adored for the first time, James is happy to hear from Andersen soon after – quelling
fears that he had gone too far, or that he is just a one-night stand. Naturally, James wants to
secure plans to get together again as soon as possible: “it’s an engagement.” He misses
Andersen “out of all proportion” to the three days they spent together; “it seems strange they
were only that,” due to the intensity that physical intimacy brings to a relationship. James then
waxes romantic, recalling “the little corner” where they “came up Udimore hill” on their
bicycles; he cannot pass it “without thinking ever so tenderly of [their] charming spin homeward
in the twilight & feeling again the strange perversity it made of that sort of thing being so soon
over.” Andersen knew what happened at the “little corner” and James is too much of a
gentleman (and too smart) to be explicit. It appears, however, that the corner afforded enough
privacy for an intimate, if not sexual, exchange – one that can only last so long. What we do
know is that James is looking forward to having “more, lots more, of that sort of thing!”
We can assume Strether had enjoyed “that sort of thing” as well; perhaps this is why
“[h]e had again and again made out for himself that he might have kept his little boy”
(Ambassadors 59). James also wanted to keep his boy; he wanted to house and care for
Andersen. His letter of 7 September 1899 continues: “If things go well with me I’m by no
means without hope of having been able, meanwhile, to take the studio so in hand that I shall be
ready to put you into it comfortably for a little artistic habitation. … [W]e shall be good for each
other; & the studio good for both us” (Beloved Boy 5-6). James wants Andersen to live with
him: “The isolation of Rye made passionate friendships all the more salient to James as
loneliness increasingly became the tenor of his life” (Gunter 2). Andersen was living near
Boston when, on 23 October 1899, James wrote a letter urging the sculptor to come back to Rye
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for a longer visit: “It was, last August – our meeting – all too brief, too fleeting & too sad” (6).
The letter is full of Whitmanesque affection: “I stand there with you & and hear you ‘draw your
breath in pain,’ & squeeze your arm, & pat your back – oh, so affectionately & tenderly!” (7).
James puts “‘draw your breath in pain’” in quotation marks, as this is a euphemism frequently
used in nineteenth-century pornography for the pleasurable/painful ecstasy that immediately
precedes an orgasm.
As this letter continues, however, a note of criticism sneaks in – criticism that would
intensify over the course of their relationship. James’s view of Andersen “had its qualifications.
He warned William that he would meet ‘a sincere and intelligent being, though handicapped by a
strange, “self-made” illiteracy and ignorance of many things’” (Bell xiii). To some extent, James
found the boy to be “dull” – not necessarily boring, but neither keen nor perceptive – particularly
in his understanding of art. Andersen was “obsessed with gigantic nude figures and with what
James soon thought of as overtly blunt, megalomaniacal, and commercially impractical statues”
(F. Kaplan 409). James assures Andersen that he can work at Lamb house, “boil[ing] the pot by
sorry art & every cunning you can contrive & cultivate. Of course you must do portrait-bust, &
mighty good things they will be to do, with the style & mastery that you will put into them”
(Beloved 6). In this back-handed compliment James suggests that “his dull little boy”
(Ambassadors 59) should focus on sculptures of a size and tenor that the well-heeled would want
to buy for their homes. In December 1899, James again offers unsolicited advice: “I don’t, I
can’t for the life of me see how such extraordinarily individual & distinguished portrait-busts as
you have the secret of shouldn’t be ferociously wanted as soon as people have begun to become
aware of them. Make them aware – & then wait” (8). In September 1900 Andersen returned to
Rye. One can only guess how often “that sort of thing” was displaced by disagreements about
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the direction the sculptor’s career should take. Commissioned in December of that year to make
a statue of President Lincoln to be placed in the State House of Buffalo, Andersen sent
photographs of the study to James in April 1901; the novelist responded in May with his most
overt and detailed criticism to date. That Andersen had made a seated Lincoln shocked James:
However, I like the head – think it on the whole very fine & right (although rather too
smooth, ironed-out, simplified as to ruggedness, ugliness, mouth, &c.;) & it is the figure,
especially as seen from the side, that somewhat troubles me.… It’s in general a softer,
smaller giant than we used to see … He is, in general, more placid than one’s own image
of him, & than history & memory…. But forgive this groping criticism, far from your
thing itself. (Beloved 20-21)
Those at the State House in Buffalo were similarly unimpressed: the commission was cancelled.
Letters written to Andersen after James had completed The Ambassadors continue to be a mix of
affection, praise, and criticism. In one of the few surviving letters from Andersen to James,
written on 31 March 1912, the sculptor expresses his desire to tell his mentor about his current
work, but then hesitates: “I am always afraid that you will take your son Hendrik and lay him
across your stout knee and spank him on both cheeks of his fat backsides … I want to get
through with what I am doing first so you may be better able to judge of just how hard you
should let your hand fall” (Gunter 128).
That Andersen saw James as a father figure is reflected in Strether’s musings about his
“little boy”: “the child had in all likelihood not really been dull – had been dull, as he had been
banished and neglected, mainly because the father had been unwittingly selfish” (Ambassadors
59). However, Strether is not “the father” in this passage: James is thinking about Andersen and
his father. Anders Andersen, Hendrik’s father, was an alcoholic day-laborer whom the family
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sent back to Norway (“banished”) in 1901. James surmises through his protagonist that Little
Hans may have been “dull” due to poor treatment by his father, who was “unwittingly selfish”
and “neglected” the family by spending any money he managed to earn on alcohol. We also see
Andersen’s mother in Strether’s thoughts: “He had again and again made out for himself that he
might have kept his little boy … if he had not in those years so insanely given himself to merely
missing the mother” (59). The pronoun “he” is ambivalent in its referents here. It is Strether
(“He) who might have kept the boy; it is not necessarily Strether (“he”) who missed the mother.
Hendrik Andersen missed his. “A child of immigrant poverty and of an alcoholic, unreliable
father, Andersen worshipped his hardworking mother, the financial and emotional center of the
family. ‘No matter how old I get or how far advanced I become,’ he had pledged on his twentyfirst birthday, ‘my mother will always be the first in my remembrance’” (F. Kaplan 450).
Although James had offered to keep his little boy at Lamb House, the studio never materialized
and the topic was dropped, perhaps because “his dull little boy” had “so insanely given himself”
to the idea that his gargantuan nude statures would establish him as a successful sculptor in
Rome and allow him “to send his mother not ten thousand kisses but ten thousand dollars”
(Gunter 20).
According to Fred Kaplan, “Andersen’s passion mostly went into his obsession
with his gigantic statues and his mother” (409). This likely taxed James’s patience. He did not
banish Andersen; they exchanged letters for over a decade. However, he did lose the boy to
distance and the ebbing of passion on each side.
While writing The Ambassadors, James was involved with a second man who was twelve
years his junior: Howard Sturgis. According to Bell, “Andersen came and went, and Sturgis was
at Lamb House right after” (xi). James had met Sturgis over twenty years before during his first
years in London “when Howard was still a boy” (Novick, Mature 233). When reacquainted at a
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dinner party hosted by Arthur Benson in 1899, James found the young man to have grown to be
six-feet tall, stout, and prematurely grey. “During the first few years of the twentieth century it
seems that Henry James fell briefly but passionately in love with Howard Sturgis, a love that
Sturgis may have reciprocated” (Gunter 115). If the love was not reciprocal, the sex appears to
have been so – based on the letter James wrote to “dear Howard” on 4 March 1900: “‘Henry’
quite basks & waggles his head to be scratched, in the pleasant warmth of it. He sends you
moreover the tattered record of aristocratic crime to keep as your very own, particularly desiring
as he does that you should, that you shall, not escape the adhesion or infiltration of some
material memento of our so happy little congress of two” (Gunter 125). The letter appears to be
in response to one from Sturgis: the first line refers to the pleasant warmth of “it” – a previous
subject mutually understood (sexual intimacy?). It is not unusual for a man to name his penis
after himself; “Henry” waggles his “head,” not his tail as a dog would. The “aristocratic crime”
refers to homosexual love, and/or sodomy; James is sending him pages (“the tattered record”)
from an erotic French novel as a memento of their happy “congress”: “sexual union, copulation,
coitus” (OED). This relationship is also reflected in Strether’s reveries discussed above. Sturgis
was a boy when James met him; like Andersen and the fictional boy, Sturgis missed his mother –
who died in 1888. Russel Sturgis, his father “neglected” him by having died a few years earlier
(although he provided for his son handsomely). Despite Sturgis’s considerable wealth, James
wanted to keep this younger man. After the two men had spent several days and nights together
at Rye, both working on and reading from their novels, James wrote to Sturgis on 25 February
1900: “You were a most comfortable … & delightful guest. I repeat, almost to indiscretion, that
I could live with you. Meanwhile I can only try to live without you” (Gunter 124). 11 According
11
Howard Sturgis wrote a gay novel in 1891 titled Tim: a Story of School Life. It was followed by All That Was
Possible (1895) – an epistolary novel about a retired actress.
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to Novick, this proposal “was gently rebuffed, but with assurances of a continued relation”
(Mature 320). The relationship suffered, however, due to James’s inability to keep himself from
freely criticizing Sturgis’s literary work – “criticism that must have been wounding” (Gunter
115). Sturgis was kind, generous, and affable – not dull, but not a skilled enough writer to
capture James’s admiration. In 1903, Sturgis pulled his third (and final) novel, Belchamber,
from publication due to James’s pointed criticism of the work.
Sturgis and Andersen were surely influences as James wrote The Ambassadors.
However, the passage under consideration from the novel imparts some of the protagonist’s
backstory. As he sits in the gardens, Strether remembers with remorse the young man whom he
had loved when he, himself, was young – and overly judgmental: “the child had in all likelihood
not really been dull” (Ambassadors 59). James, too, is thinking about the past and his love affair
with Paul Zhukovsky, blending his memories with current relationships to create Strether’s
memories. Pavel Vassilievich Zhukovsky was a handsome, aristocratic Russian painter whom
James met in Paris during the momentous two years he spent there (1875-6). The novelist was
thirty-three years old; Zhukovsky was two years older. Still, in a letter to William, James refers
to him as “‘the young man’” with whom he has “‘sworn an eternal friendship’”; he writes to his
sister Alice of his “dear young friend Zhukovsky, for whom [he] entertain[s] a tender affection’”
(quoted in Novick, Young 338). Zhukovsky was an orphan at an early age and grew up in the
Russian court; this might also play into an association with the parental abandonment that James
transfers to the boy Strether lost.
In this early relationship we see a pattern established. According to Novick, James was
critical of his friend: “Zhukovsky was a painter; he had had two large canvases accepted for the
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coming Salon, but he was a man of independent means, and in James’s eyes an amateur. He was
talented but he did not seem to James to be a man of genius …. There was an air of lassitude
about him” (Young 337). James found Zhukovsky’s work disappointingly uninspired – “dull” in
the sense that it lacked keenness, perception, and intensity. Because Zhukovsky was “reserved,
withdrawn, even solitary” (338), he might have been dull at times. James did not banish
Zhukovsky, but when the painter took up with Wagner and his acolytes, the novelist was not
amused: he found Wagner to be dull. When Zhukovsky left for Germany in 1876 to paint sets
for Wagner’s operas, the relationship changed. The two men remained friendly acquaintances,
but never renewed their romantic relationship. Writing The Ambassadors over thirty years later,
James projects his own regrets on Strether, who had “stupidly sacrificed” the love of a young
man because he had been “unwittingly selfish” in wanting his lovers to come up to his own high
standards for art.
Returning to Strether and his maelstrom of musings, this biographical information guides
us in picking out the pieces that define the protagonist’s primary conflict and direct the action of
the Other Plot. Strether still suffers from the loss of the young man he met in Paris when both
were young. Despite his present freedom and feelings of exhilaration, the past continually
clouds his outlook: “This was doubtless but the secret habit of sorrow, which had slowly given
ways to time; yet there remained an ache sharp enough to make the spirit, at the sight now and
again of some fair young man just growing up, wince with the thought of an opportunity lost”
(Ambassadors 59). His resurgent feelings of youthfulness have an effect, however: “Buried for
long years in dark corners at any rate these few germs had sprouted again under forty-eight hours
of Paris. The process of yesterday had really been the process of feeling the general stirred life
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of connexions long since individually dropped” (60). Strether wants to try again. He is
determined to find a young man in Paris who will be the last love of his life:
He at last lighted on a form that was happy…. Everything he wanted was comprised
moreover in a single boon – the common unattainable art of taking things as they came.
He appeared to himself to have given his best years to an active appreciation of the way
they didn’t come; but perhaps – as they would seemingly here be things quite other – this
long ache might at last drop to rest. (58)
After sitting in the Luxembourg gardens for an hour, Strether finally pulls himself together and
quits his chair: “The upshot of the whole morning for him was that his campaign had begun. He
had wanted to put himself in relation, and he would be hanged I he were not in relation” (66).
True to Strether’s double consciousness, this “campaign” involves two lines of attack. He will
attempt to do his best with Chad in order to marry, or be in “relation,” with Mrs. Newsome.
Simultaneously, he will look for his young man, as there is nothing he wants more than a lasting,
intimate relationship. He will take things as they come. However, the latter campaign
commands his primary focus: “He wasn’t [in Paris] to dip, to consume – he was there to
reconstruct … he was there on some chance of feeling the brush of the wing of the stray spirit of
youth. He felt it in fact, he had it beside him; the old arcade indeed, as his inner sense listened,
gave out the faint sound, as from far off, of the wild waving of wings” (66-7). Broadly,
“wing[s]” connote sexual passion. In homosexual culture, “wings” are associated with a man’s
first physical realization of his homosexuality (Rogers 215). The “wing … of youth” refers to a
young man in the early stage of sexual experience (as opposed to a practiced lover). The “wild
waving of wings” that Strether senses emanate from the nearby arches of the Odéon, where
“shock-headed, slouch-hatted loiterers whose young intensity of type, in the direction of pale
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acuteness, deepened his vision, and even his appreciation” (67) of the erotic atmosphere of Paris.
The “wild waving of wings” may also refer to Strether’s physical arousal, which the Italians
called a “birdie” or “merle.” Wilde uses this analogy in Teleny: “‘My fluttering bird – my
nightingale, as they call it in Italy – like Stern’s starling – was trying to escape from its cage’”
(131). The cage, of course, is the gentleman’s trousers.
It is now Strether’s feet that are in motion as he sets off for Chad’s apartment located on
the Boulevard Malesherbes. From the opposite side of the street, he looks up at “the third-floor
windows of a continuous balcony,” where he knows the apartment to be, and decides to linger
for five minutes (Ambassadors 67). Doing so allows him to observe the foot traffic, as the
Boulevard Malesherbes was home to a popular public urinal which attracted homosexual activity
(Tamagne 53). “Poor Strether had at this very moment to recognize the truth that wherever one
paused in Paris the imagination reacted before one could stop it. This perpetual reaction put a
price, if one could, on pauses” (Ambassadors 68). Seeing the sexual possibilities around him, he
imagines the various activities that he could get involved in; but this does not frighten him as it
had in Chester. He has lost the fear of abandoning himself to wantonness, and, in turn, moral
degeneration. His imagination takes a different course instead, now picturing himself as part of
the scene, wondering what it would be like to be observed in this scenario: “He had struck off the
fancy that it might, as a preliminary, be of service to him to be seen, by a happy accident, from
the third-story windows … such a case as he could only feel unexpectedly as a sort of delivered
challenge?” (68-69). If Chad looked out and saw Strether amongst the men on the street, the
challenge would be whether the former perceived the latter to be gay; Strether is still unsure as to
how his role as ambassador is going to play out.
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Meanwhile, however, the chance he had allowed for – the chance of being seen in time
from the balcony – had become a fact. Two or three of the windows stood open to the
violet air; and, before Strether had cut the knot by crossing, a young man had come out
and looked about him, had lighted a cigarette and given himself up to watching the life
below while he smoked. His arrival contributed, in its order, to keeping Strether in
position; the result of which in turn was that Strether soon felt himself noticed. The
young man began to look at him as in acknowledgment of his being himself in
observation. (69)
According to Thomas Waugh, “the gay preoccupation with social space constantly re-surfaces in
the clash of the public versus the private” in male erotic art (55). James beautifully creates a
permeable border between the two in this scene. First, the windows of the apartment (private
space) are “open to the violet air” – the public homosexual space of the boulevard (violet was
code for homosexuality in the nineteenth century). Next, a young man comes out on the
balcony, the border between private and public. From this liminal space he “gives himself up” to
watching the scene below, but also to the gaze of others. Strether sees him and is transfixed; the
young man looks at Strether and acknowledges their mutual gaze. In homoerotic culture, the
gratification in/of looking is especially important: “because looking not only stimulates and
organizes desire, but also legitimizes it” (Waugh 42).
James follows this mutual gaze with wry humor: “This was interesting so far as it went
…” (Ambassadors 69). And things go farther. Strether perceives that this young man – “light,
bright and alert” – is not Chad, but assumes he must be a friend of his:
He was young too then, the gentleman up there – he was very young; young enough
apparently to be amused at an elderly watcher, to be curious even to see what the elderly
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watcher would do on finding himself watched. There was youth in that, there was youth
in the surrender to the balcony, there was youth for Strether at this moment in everything
but his own business; and Chad’s thus pronounced association with youth had given the
next instant an extraordinary quick lift to the issue. (69)
The repetition of “young” and “youth” create a sense of yearning, and we cannot help but feel
that this is James himself as revealed through the thoughts of his protagonist – yearning not only
for youthful companions but to be youthful himself.12 Thus James infuses Strether with youthful
abandon – to the erotic delight of being seen and also to the rationale that this is Chad’s friend at
Chad’s house, where he is required to present himself as part of his ambassadorial duty: thus he
has no qualms. Strether is aroused (“an extraordinary quick lift”) and is “up” for action.
As the balcony scene continues, it almost calls out to be staged with dawning light and
swelling music:
The young man looked at him still, he looked at the young man; and the issue, by a rapid
process, was that this knowledge of a perched privacy appeared to him the last of
luxuries. To him too the perched privacy was open, and he saw it now but in one light –
that of the only domicile, the only fireside, in the great ironic city, on which he had the
shadow of a claim. (Ambassadors 69-70)
Here before him is Strether’s greatest desire: a young man in private domesticity – superior to
(“perched” above) the clamoring of the street. This pivotal moment in the plot is foreshadowed
by Strether’s earlier triumph in London: dining in public with Gostrey. The “publicity of the
place” was a “rare strange thing” that affected him “almost as the achievement of privacy might
12
After celebrating his fiftieth birthday in Paris in 1893, James made a brief entry in one of his notebooks defending
an unnamed young man accused of being selfish: “It isn’t himself he loves – it’s his youth – and small blame to him!
The most beautiful word in the language? – Youth!” (Notebooks 76).
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have affected a man of a different experience” (35). Now, after cruising in Paris – the gardens,
the boulevards, the theater, the bath house, book stalls – Strether is a man of “different
experience.” The “knowledge” that this luxury could even be possible gives him the “shadow of
a claim” on future happiness.
Yet we know our protagonist: hope is always met with doubt. The delight inspired by the
impressive house, the balcony, the fireside, the light, bright young man is quickly doused by
interior visions of the “secondary hotel” where he is staying:
which affected him somehow as all indoor chill, glass-roofed court and slippery staircase,
and which, by the same token, expressed the presence of Waymarsh even at times when
Waymarsh might have been certain to be round at the bank. It came to pass before he
moved that Waymarsh, and Waymarsh alone, Waymarsh not only undiluted but
positively strengthened, struck him as the present alternative to the young man in the
balcony. (Ambassadors 70)
Strether hesitates for at least as long as it takes to say “Waymarsh” five times. Should he strike
out for fulfillment or remain in the safe relationship with Waymarsh? “When he did move it was
fairly to escape that alternative. Taking his way over the street at last and passing through the
porte cochère of the house was like consciously leaving Waymarsh out.” He responds according
to the conclusion made in the garden: “Everything he wanted was comprised moreover in a
single boon – the common unattainable art of taking things as they came” (58). Learning from
the concierge that Chad is out of town, Strether “had nevertheless gone up, and gone up – there
were no two ways about it – from an uncontrollable, a really, if one would, depraved curiosity”
(72). There are, of course, two ways to understand the manner in which Strether is ascending.
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The young man on the balcony is John Little Bilham – the third member of the romantic
triangle inspired by James’s critique of nineteenth-century French literature. An American man
in his late twenties, Little Bilham is given no physical description other than “being small”
(Ambassadors 74). He has been in Paris for several years, at first studying painting at “the great
art-school” (a reference to École des Beaux-Arts), but later finding that “his productive power
faltered in proportion as his knowledge grew” (88). An impecunious bohemian, Bilham lives on
the Rive Gauche with another “ingenuous compatriot” and “comrade” in a “cold and blank little
studio … at the end of an alley that went out of an old short cobbled street”: he lives “a sort of
social shabbiness” (89). As Bilham is a great friend of Chad’s, he is free to live at the apartment
on Boulevard Malesherbes when Chad is away. Bilham has an amiable and relaxed outlook on
life, primarily because he does not work: “Little Bilham had an occupation, but it was only an
occupation declined; and it was by his general exemption from alarm, anxiety or remorse on this
score that the impression of his serenity was made” (88). Bilham is representative of a faction of
young men on allowance that Weber refers to as rentiers. At the fin de siècle, the leisured life in
Paris was becoming increasingly accessible, “especially to young men no longer bound to
exhausting work. Spared the need to earn a living, the latter spent longer in the indeterminate
and undemanding chrysalis state of student life. Their energies, unfocused by necessity, could
be dispersed in the pursuits of ‘decadence’ … pressing the search for a little fun to whatever
excesses they could afford” (18).
On meeting Bilham, Strether perceives that whatever allowance this young man had
brought from America has subsequently dwindled: “at the moment of his finding him in Chad’s
rooms he hadn’t saved from his shipwreck a scrap of anything but his beautiful intelligence and
his confirmed habit of Paris” (Ambassadors 88). Strether shares his own “confirmed habit of
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Paris … with an equal fond familiarity.” He notes “a charming scent” in the air (73) – the sign
of a decadent atmosphere. Perfume figures heavily in Huysmans’ A Rebours (1884); the “overheated atmosphere” of the orgy in Teleny is filled with the “intoxicating scent” of roses and
incense (Wilde 98). Strether and Bilham eventually repair to the “small salon” of the apartment,
afterwards returning to “the balcony in which one would have had to be an ogre not to recognize
the perfect place for easy aftertastes” (80).
John Little Bilham functions as Strether’s long-lost lover incarnate in the Other Plot.
Like Strether’s early young lover, Bilham is a composite of James’s early lovers; perhaps this is
why he is not described physically. The first tangential reference is his name; while the use of
two surnames (Little Bilham) is said to be “on account of his being small” (Ambassadors 74), the
choice of the name “Little” is intended to connect Bilham to the “little dull boy” in Strether’s
past. In turn, “dear little Hans” – James’s lover, Hendrik Andersen – becomes associated with
Little Bilham. James connects this character with a second lover though an intentionally strange
comment Strether makes to Waymarsh about his new friend: “‘he’s not from Boston…. he’s
“notoriously,” as he put it himself, not from Boston’” (74). This is a subtle reference to Paul
Zhukovsky. James describes Zhukovsky’s family in a letter to William dated 25 April 1876 as
being “‘of a literally more than Bostonian virtue’” – even though the Russian painter grew up in
Saint Petersburg (quoted in Brooks 38). Little Bilham is also a painter “notoriously” not from
Boston. While Bilham is a composite of men James knew, he also serves as wish-fulfillment of
what James wanted, as we will see.
After an exhilarating afternoon at Boulevard Malesherbes, Strether wants Bilham to come
to dinner, but wisely “obeyed another scruple” – that being Waymarsh’s feelings: “he hadn’t felt
sure his guest would please” (Ambassadors 71). Still, he can hardly contain his excitement while
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having dinner with Waymarsh at the hotel: “‘Oh … I’ve all sorts of things to tell you!’ – and he
put it in a way that was a virtual hint to Waymarsh to help him to enjoy the telling” (71). Yet
this scene is humorously ironic for how few things Strether does tell Waymarsh. He recounts his
visit to Chad’s apartment, saying that Chad is in Cannes, but he “‘found his friend in fact there
keeping the place warm, as he called it, for him’” – a “‘little artist-man’” named Little Bilham
(74). Waymarsh looks “gravely ardent” as Strether explains that he could have “‘beaten a
retreat’” after learning of Chad’s absence, but instead “‘did the opposite; I stayed, I dawdled, I
trifled; above all I looked round. I saw in fine; and – I don’t know what to call it – I sniffed. It’s
a detail, but it’s as if there were something – something very good – to sniff’” (73). Remaining
there “had been Strether’s pretext for a further inquiry, an experiment carried on, under Chad’s
roof, without his knowledge”: the experiment was sexual (72). Waymarsh asks several questions
– when Chad will return, if there are signs of a woman, if Bilham is involved in the affair – all to
which Strether answers: “‘I don’t know.’” This irritates Waymarsh, but Strether attempts to
explain: “‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask [Bilham]. I couldn’t. It was impossible. You wouldn’t
either. Besides I didn’t want to’” (75). Strether’s full attention was on the present occupant of
the apartment, not Chad. Waymarsh begins to lose his patience:
“Then what the devil do you know?”
“Well,” said Strether almost gaily, “I guess I don’t know anything!” His gaiety
might have been a tribute to the fact that the state he had been reduced to did for him
again what had been done … with Miss Gostrey at the London theatre. It was somehow
enlarging; and the air of that amplitude was now doubtless more or less – and all for
Waymarsh to feel – in his further response. “That’s what I found out from the young
man.”
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“But I thought you said you found out nothing.”
“Nothing but that – that I don’t know anything.”
“And what good does that do to you?”
“It’s just,” said Strether, “what I’ve come to you to help me to discover. I mean
anything about anything over here. I felt that, up there. It regularly rose before me in its
might. The young man moreover – Chad’s friend – as good as told me so.”
As good as told you you know nothing about anything?” Waymarsh appeared to
look at some one who might have as good as told him. “How old is he?”
Well, I guess not thirty.”
“Yet you had to take that from him?”
“Oh I took a good deal more ….” (73-4)
Strether hints that what he learned from Bilham that afternoon was how little he knows about sex
– at least comparatively speaking. Strether is reminded of the evening spent with Gostrey at the
theater in London because it was “similarly enlarging”: surveying the “types” showed him some
of the many ways a man can live his homosexuality. This was a significant step in Strether’s
personal growth. Bilham has now taken him a step further. In the salon his penis “regularly rose
before [Strether] in its might,” who then “felt that, up there”: with his hands, his mouth, perhaps
between his thighs. Waymarsh is the straight man here, setting up the double-entendre by
scorning the young man’s impertinence in saying that his middle-aged visitor didn’t know
anything: “you had to take that [guff] from him?” Strether took it [Bilham’s member] with
pleasure – and a lot more.
Strether continues to talk about Little Bilham; “Waymarsh looked already rather sick of
him” (Ambassadors 74). In an effort to change the subject, Waymarsh asks about the apartment.
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Strether responds: “‘Oh a charming place; full of beautiful and valuable things. I never saw such
a place’ – and [his] thought went back to it. ‘For a little artist-man – !’ He could in fact scarce
express it’” (75). Strether is thoroughly smitten. Waymarsh is intensely jealous and becomes
frustrated by his comrade’s ebullient, inscrutable comments. He looks at him hard, saying:
“Look here, Strether. Quit this.”
Our friend smiled with a doubt of his own. “Do you mean my tone?”
“No – damn your tone. I mean you nosing round. Quit the whole job. Let them
stew in their juice. You’re being used for a thing you ain’t fit for. People don’t take a
fine-tooth comb to groom a horse.”
“Am I a fine-tooth comb?” Strether laughed. “It’s something I never called
myself!”
“It’s what you are, all the same. You ain’t so young as you were, but you’ve kept
your teeth.” (76).
Waymarsh takes off the gloves, so to speak; he is ready for a fight. He wants Strether to “quit”
his involvement with Bilham, hence the barb about getting old. He hides his jealousy by telling
Strether to quit investigating Chad’s affairs; they are Mrs. Newsome’s problem, not his.
Waymarsh assumes that if Chad is no longer a concern, Strether will no longer cross paths with
Bilham – eliminating a potential rival.
As of yet, Strether’s motivation for convincing Chad to return to Woollett is known only
by him and Mrs. Newsome. But in the face of Waymarsh’s insult and jealousy, and buoyed by
having met Bilham, Strether decides to reveal why he will not leave off his pursuit of Chad:
“It’s really as indispensable as I say that Chad should be got back.’”
“Indispensable to whom? To you?”
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“Yes,” Strether presently said.
“Because if you get him you also get Mrs. Newsome?”
Strether faced it. “Yes.”
“And if you don’t get him you don’t get her?”
It might be merciless, but he continued not to flinch. “I think it might have some
effect on our personal understanding.” (76)
This is quite an understatement. Marriage to Mrs. Newsome – the first we learn of this “personal
understanding” – is contingent on Chad’s return to Woollett; there is no “might” about the
“effect.” Simultaneously, Strether mercilessly points out to Waymarsh that the marriage will
have an “effect on [their] personal understanding” – the relationship between the two men.
Strether continues:
“Chad’s of real importance – or can easily become so if he will – to the business.”
“And the business is of real importance to his mother’s husband?”
“Well, I naturally want what my future wife wants. And the thing will be much
better if we have our own man in it.” (76-7)
Strether’s bombshell renders Bilham as the least of Waymarsh’s concerns. Sounding like a shill
for the moral majority, Strether pronounces his “natural” desire to support the objectives of his
“future wife”; he simultaneously reveals that he lied in Chester when suggesting that he is
“‘literally running away from Mrs. Newsome’” (21). Waymarsh reacts strongly to the news of
this possible marriage, but this must be put into context.
The primary theme of the Other Plot of The Ambassadors is the role marriage plays in the
life of a homosexual man. James calls our attention to this theme early in the novel. At the end
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of the bedroom scene in Chester, Strether attempts to put off Waymarsh’s inquiry as to whether
he or Mrs. Newsome is the primary motivation for traveling to Europe:
Strether, in impatience, violently played with his latch.
“It’s simple enough. It’s for both of you.”
Waymarsh at last turned over with a groan. “Well, I won’t marry you!”
“Neither, when it comes to that – !” But the visitor had already laughed and
escaped. (Ambassadors 23)
Waymarsh tells Strether that he won’t marry him: what? This strange, if not arresting, statement
is likely (or should be) one of the most pondered-over phrases in The Ambassadors. First of all,
no one knows at this point in the novel that marriage has anything to do with Strether’s trip to
Europe – not even the inquisitive Miss Gostrey. Secondly, this statement is ludicrous, given the
historical context. James’s contemporary readers may have been disturbed, if not shocked, by
such a suggestion. But most important for our purposes is the fact that Waymarsh cannot marry
Strether (regardless of his professed disinclination) because he is already married. Waymarsh’s
marriage is a topic the two men assiduously avoid:
Married at thirty, Waymarsh had not lived with his wife for fifteen years, and it came up
vividly between them in the glare of the gas that Strether wasn’t to ask about her. He
knew they were still separate and that she lived at hotels, travelled in Europe, painted her
face and wrote her husband abusive letters, of not one of which, to a certainty, that
sufferer spared himself the perusal; but he respected without difficulty the cold twilight
that had settled on this side of his companion’s life. It was a province in which mystery
reigned and as to which Waymarsh had never spoken the informing word. (18)
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Clearly this is an acrimonious separation (one wonders if Mrs. Waymarsh “paint[ing] her face”
plays a role in this). That Waymarsh remained a bachelor until he was thirty gives us the sense
that he married out of necessity – not for money, but to cover his homosexuality. “One might
one’s self easily have left Mrs. Waymarsh; and one would assuredly have paid one’s tribute to
the ideal in covering with that attitude the derision of having been left by her” (19). The phrase
“tribute to the ideal” appears repeatedly in the novel in reference to things related to
homosexuality (“the ideal”). In this case the “tribute” is the marriage – ideal in “covering” the
fact that Waymarsh is gay. He could easily leave his wife, as he is not attracted to women, but
the cover she provides is worth the derision he might face from those who think she left him.
Marrying in order to achieve social acceptance, if not personal safety, is a concept
James’s readers were well acquainted with. However, James makes a significant point about
such marriages in the novel by juxtaposing a union made with a woman who knows she is
marrying a homosexual versus one made with a woman who does not. Per Victorian ideology, a
woman’s raison d’etre is to marry, bear children, and nurture them. To trap a woman in
marriage that – against her knowledge – will not be sexually consecrated, denying the possibility
of children, is a cruel and immoral act.13 This scenario is depicted in the sensational novel A
Marriage below Zero (1889) by Alan Dale. It recounts the story of a gay man, Arthur Ravener,
who marries a young and implausibly naïve woman in order to cover his love affair with another
man. When the wife finally discovers the truth, Ravener commits suicide: a cautionary tale,
indeed. Julia Ward, a long-time friend of the James family and author of “The Battle Hymn of
13
James conscientiously avoided marriage, despite how important he felt it was to conceal his homosexuality. He
had several intimate friendships with women, understood the social pressures they lived under, and likely felt it
would have been immoral to marry for his own protection. One cannot help but ponder the possibility that
Constance Fenimore Woolson plunged to her death in the Grand Canal in Venice in 1894 because she was unable
to recognize the deep kindness of Henry James.
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the Republic,” married Samuel Howe (twenty years her senior) in 1843: “for most of the
marriage Julia was emotionally estranged from her husband because of his attachment to
[Charles] Sumner” (Bronski 55). Julia Ward Howe wrote a novel titled The Hermaphrodite
(unfinished and unpublished) in an attempt to understand her husband’s love for another man. In
a book of poems, Passion-Flowers (1854), she “directly expressed what was wrong with her life”
(55): she had unknowingly married a homosexual. Mrs. Waymarsh appears to have fallen in the
same trap, based on her exodus from Milrose and the “abusive” letters she sends to her husband.
In an attempt to assuage his guilt, Waymarsh punishes himself by reading them.
Contrary to Victorian dogma, however, not all women wanted to have children. Some
feared dying in childbirth, while others were disconcerted by the thought of having sex with a
man. Yet marriage offered one of the few means of social survival. The anathema of
spinsterhood, making the rounds to homes of elderly aunts and married sisters, hoping to be
useful in order to garner a longer stay, made marrying a homosexual man a comparatively
agreeable option. Catherine Symonds (née North) did not marry John Addington Symonds until
she was twenty-seven; having no personal interest in sex, she was not disturbed by her husband’s
physical neglect. Symonds describes Catherine in Memoirs: “Having realized by a life in
common of twenty-six years how much better it is to be married than to remain single, having
found satisfaction in my society and a sphere of activity in her domestic cares, she is satisfied”
(186). Symonds’ lover, Cory (William) Johnson – former Eton headmaster whom James knew
of through his romantic friendship with Arthur Benson – married at age fifty-six and wrote: “‘I
have been married a year now and on reflection I think mine one of the most curiously romantic
marriages ever heard of in the bourgeoisie: it was a mutual rescue’” (quoted in Kaplan 147).
There are several reasons why a woman might choose to marry a man whom she knows to be
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homosexual; the key concepts that differentiate this scenario from the marriage-trap described
above are knowledge and choice. A woman who chooses to marry a gay man in order to help
him hide his sexuality functions as “beard.” In twentieth-century Hollywood, such an
arrangement made in order to conceal the homosexuality of famous actors was known as a
lavender marriage.
Returning to The Ambassadors, it appears that Mrs. Newsome knows that Strether is
homosexual. He includes her when listing the few people to whom he reveals his true self: in his
“solitude of life or choice, of community … there had been but three or four persons in it.
Waymarsh was one of these …. Mrs. Newsome was another, and Miss Gostrey had of a sudden
shown signs of becoming a third” (Ambassadors 59). Mrs. Newsome’s conditional agreement to
marry Strether, knowing that he is gay, makes her a beard. She is willing to take on this role
because she is fond of Strether, respects his literary talents, and is concerned for his well-being.
As a wealthy widow whose children are grown, there is much to be said for a male companion
who can escort her to social functions and fend off opportunists. Strether is thankful that she
accepts his homosexuality. When asked by Gostrey if Mrs. Newsome’s life is “‘very
admirable,’” Strether responds: “‘Extraordinarily.… she is – wonderful. But I wasn’t thinking of
her appearance … I was thinking – well, of many other things’” (38). While Strether is beholden
to Mrs. Newsome for her financial support, her willingness to engage in a bearding marriage is
an extraordinary boon – one that strongly appeals to the side of his nature that favors safety and
security. His alternate consciousness, however, views this arrangement as a testament to his own
personal failures; agreeing to it is abject resignation. On leaving Woollett he was “so distinctly
fagged-out”: “hadn’t it been distinctly on the ground of his fatigue that his wonderful friend at
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home had so felt for him and so contrived?” (58). He is able to be in Paris only because of Mrs.
Newsome’s generosity.
On hearing of the existing arrangement Strether has with Mrs. Newsome, Waymarsh
feels betrayed: “‘Yes, you ask me for protection – which makes you very interesting; and then
you won’t take it’” (Ambassadors 77). Strether has been able to sustain a lengthy relationship
with Waymarsh because of the protection his marriage offers. Although Waymarsh is seldom, if
ever, in the presence of his wife, the fact that he is known to be married creates the guise of
heterosexuality. When he and Strether are out in public together, their relationship is perceived
to be one of homosocial bonhomie – particularly because of their masculine dress and demeanor.
Waymarsh fears that Strether’s marriage will usurp the advantage his own marriage provides.
After Strether explains Chad’s importance to the family business, Waymarsh castigates him for
acting against his own financial interests, as he will lose what little control he has over The
Review: “‘you’ll marry – you personally – more money. She’s already rich, as I understand you,
but she’ll be richer still if the business can be made to boom on certain lines that you’ve laid
down’” (77). Waymarsh also calls him a “‘a humbug’”: marrying will lock Strether into a façade
that further necessitates the closet – which Strether has struggled to walk free from in Europe.
Strether attempts to defend himself: “‘Don’t you see,’ [he] demanded, ‘where my
interest, as already shown you, lies?’” (Ambassadors 77). He has shown Waymarsh that he is a
man who loves men, but he is in a predicament: he needs the security of a bearding marriage
with a wealthy woman. He must bring Chad home to avoid being a penniless social outcast: “‘If
I miss my errand I miss that; and if I miss that I miss everything – I’m nowhere.’”
Waymarsh – but all relentlessly – took this in. “What do I care where you are if
you’re spoiled ?”
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Their eyes met on it an instant. “Thank you awfully,” Strether at last said. “But
don’t you think her judgment of that – ?”
“Ought to content me? No.”
It kept them again face to face, and the end of this was that Strether again
laughed. “You do her injustice. You really must know her. Good night.” (77-8)
While Strether is not without his faults, Waymarsh’s are in full display here. Desperately
needing to be needed, his insecurity thwarts his ability to empathize. He then resorts to sour
grapes: Mrs. Newsome will rob Strether of his best qualities (he will be “spoiled”), and as a
result, Waymarsh will no longer want him. Strether points out that Mrs. Newsome should be
able to judge whether he is taking advantage of her; Waymarsh dismisses her judgment as
worthless. Strether is characteristically loyal – this time to Mrs. Newsome. But it is difficult at
this point in the novel to ascertain to what extent Strether’s loyalties are self-serving. He laughs
as he points out Waymarsh’s disservice to her – but as seen before, this is a laugh of derision, not
mirth.
The next morning Strether heads out to join Little Bilham, who had invited him to
breakfast the previous afternoon. Waymarsh decides to join him for what he refers to as “‘that
unholy meal’” because “‘damn it, he would as soon join him as to do anything else’”
(Ambassadors 74, 78). Of course, he goes to keep an eye on Strether. The two men stroll “in a
state of detachment practically luxurious for them, to the Boulevard Malesherbes” (78). Once in
the apartment, while sitting at Chad’s mahogany table with Bilham, Waymarsh, and a third
guest, Strether again luxuriates in the atmosphere:
… the great hum of Paris coming up in softness, vagueness – for Strether himself indeed
already positive sweetness – through the sunny windows towards which, the day before,
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his curiosity had raised its wings from below.… Strether literally felt at the present
moment that there was a precipitation in his fate. He had known nothing and nobody as
he stood in the street; but hadn’t his view now taken a bound in the direction of every one
and of every thing? (78)
Strether remembers the sexual excitement of the previous day (the raising of “wings”). Happy to
be in the presence of his lover, he marvels at the quick change in his fate and views with
magnanimity “every one” and “every thing” – the result of being in love.
Within the blink of an eye, his thoughts take an ominous turn: “‘What’s he up to, what’s
he up to?’ – something like that was at the back of his head all the while in respect to little
Bilham” (Ambassadors 78). Suspicions rise as he takes in the lady seated on his left, invited
“promptly and ingeniously … to ‘meet’ Mr. Strether and Mr. Waymarsh” (79). This is Miss
Barrace:
a very marked person, a person who had much to do with our friend’s asking himself if
the occasion weren’t in its essence the most baited, the most gilded of traps.… [She]
looked at them with convex Parisian eyes and through a glass with a remarkably long
tortoise-shell handle. Why Miss Barrace, mature meagre erect and eminently gay, highly
adorned, perfectly familiar, freely contradictious, and reminding him of some last-century
portrait of a clever head without powder – why Miss Barrace should have been in
particular the note of a “trap” Strether couldn’t on the spot have explained….” (79)
Miss Barrace is a transvestite – “freely contradictious” for being a man dressed as a woman. Her
name, when pronounced, is “bare ass.” It also sounds similar to the word “bardache,” a French
term for a passive sodomite (Merrick, Homosexuality in Modern France 14-15). In contrast to
Miss Gostrey’s “perfect plain propriety” (Ambassadors 5), Miss Barrace is “gilded” and “highly
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adorned”; she reminds Strether of an eighteenth-century prostitute, cleverly mimicking the fine
and effeminate attire of the aristocracy – without going so far as to powder her face white.
Strether doesn’t know what to think of his “new friends,” as Miss Barrace “hadn’t scrupled to
figure as a familiar object.” She begins to smoke “a succession of excellent cigarettes –
acknowledged, acclaimed, as a part of the wonderful supply left behind him by Chad”; however,
“her smoking was the least of her freedoms” (80-1).
Little Bilham and Miss Barrace repeatedly speak of Chad, “invoking his good name and
good nature, and the worst confusion of mind for Strether was that all their mention of him was
of a kind to do him honour” (Ambassadors 82). Yet Strether cannot help but feel that their
familiarity with him indicates “the fundamental impropriety of Chad’s situation” (81). He is
aware that the life of a struggling artist makes relying on the generosity of friends “a dreadful
necessity”; however, “It was the way the irregular life sat upon Bilham and Miss Barrace that
was the insidious, the delicate marvel” (82). Chad’s friends then begin to speak in Parlyaree.
Strether tries to follow their conversation:
But he was in fact so often at sea that his sense of the range of reference was guessed and
interpreted only to doubt. He wondered what they meant, but there were things he scarce
thought they could be supposed to mean, and “Oh no – not that!” was at the end of most
of his ventures. (81)
Strether begins to get the sense that their “insidious,” irregular lives include prostitution, but he
is “eager to concede that their relation to it was all indirect, for anything in him would have
shown the grossness of bad manners” (82).
While Strether thought he had become comfortable in the homosexual milieu, he is now
“in the presence of new measures, other standards, a different scale of relations, and that
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evidently here were a happy pair who didn’t think of things at all as he and Waymarsh thought.
Nothing was less to have been calculated in the business than that it should now be for him as if
he and Waymarsh were comparatively quite as one” (Ambassadors 79). In the presence of such
novelty, Strether’s old comrade does not seem so bad, after all. Waymarsh is “magnificent” – at
least in the opinion of Miss Barrace, who is oblivious to how “thick and hot” the air has become
with Waymarsh’s judgment (79-80). However, Waymarsh is making the best of the situation,
while Strether is not; this “was precisely what doubtless gave him his admirable sombre glow.
Little did Miss Barrace know that what was behind it was his grave estimate of her own laxity”
(80). Waymarsh’s glow also likely reflects his enjoyment of the discomfort of Strether, who is
concerned that this delightful little painter-man may be more than he had bargained for: “there
was a supreme moment at which, compared with his collapse, Waymarsh’s erectness affected
him as really high” (82). While walking to the troisième on Boulevard Malesherbes that
morning with romantic possibilities in mind, Strether felt “there was no great pulse of haste yet
in this process of saving Chad” (78). On leaving the apartment he is pressed by his more
cautious nature: “One thing was certain – he saw he must make up his mind. He must approach
Chad…” (82).
At the end of the week Miss Gostrey arrives in Paris. Understandably, Strether is anxious
to tell her about Little Bilham – the “blessing unsuspected” (Ambassadors 84). Her arrival is
also a blessing, as Strether has “lost himself”:
“What do you mean?” she asked with an absence of alarm …. “What in the name
of all the Pococks have you managed to do?”
“Why exactly the wrong thing. I’ve made a frantic friend of little Bilham.”
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“Ah that sort of thing was the essence of your case and to have been allowed for
from the first. … Should you mind my seeing him? Only once, you know,” she added.
“Oh the oftener the better: he’s amusing – he’s original.”
“He doesn’t shock you?” Miss Gostrey threw out.
“Never in the world! We escape that with a perfection – ! I feel it to be largely,
no doubt, because I don’t half understand him; but our modus vivendi isn’t spoiled even
by that.” (84)
We see Strether’s double consciousness at work here. He has “lost himself” either in love, in
personal direction, or both. He knows he is making a mistake (“the wrong thing”) in spending so
much time with Bilham, but wants to keep seeing him. Gostrey assumes Bilham is a prostitute,
as she has “allowed” her client to indulge in this path from the beginning. This notion is
substantiated by her asking whether Bilham “shock[s]” him. It’s one thing to procure a prostitute
for relatively anonymous sex, quite another to fall in love with one. Caution now seems to have
abandoned Strether. He is either in denial about Bilham’s irregular life (“I don’t half understand
him”) or he is lying to his confidant.
He wants Gostrey to meet Bilham and invites her to dinner. She responds:
“Are you giving dinners?”
“Yes – there I am. That’s what I mean.”
All her kindness wondered. “That you’re spending too much money?”
“Dear no – they seem to cost so little. But that I do it to them. I ought to hold
off.”
She thought again – she laughed. “The money you must be spending to think it
cheap! But I must be out of it – to the naked eye.” (Ambassadors 84-5)
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Gostrey is concerned that Strether is spending too much money on a prostitute – paying for
dinners or sex or both. That Strether does “it to them” makes Gostrey react “almost as if she had
developed an unexpected personal prudence” (85). Prodded again to join them, Gostrey
hesitates:
“Who are they – first?”
“Why little Bilham to begin with.” He kept back for the moment Miss Barrace.
“And Chad – when he comes – you must absolutely see.” (Ambassadors 85)
Strether hesitates to mention Barrace for fear that Gostrey will recognize the situation to be what
he fears: he is being used as a meal ticket. Yet he enthusiastically repeats his desire for Gostrey
to meet them, hoping that he will be proven wrong. She asks what Strether has learned about
Chad’s situation; he replies: “‘I haven’t yet found a single thing. … How do I know? And what
do I care?’” – having teetered back towards the drive for fulfillment. Strether bubbles on, hinting
as to the source of his new modus vivendi; yet Gostrey steers him back to the reality of his
situation, asking when Chad will come back to Paris. Strether answers: “‘When Bilham has had
time to write him, and hear from him, about me. Bilham, however,’ he pursued, ‘will report
favourably – favourably for Chad. That will make him not afraid to come’” (85). As we have
seen in previous circumstances, Strether has a tendency to project his thoughts, feelings, and
opinions on other people. He does it again here by suggesting that if Bilham writes to Chad, the
latter will not be afraid to come to Paris. But it is Strether who is afraid of Chad, not the other
way around; Strether has worried since arriving in Paris how to avoid revealing his
homosexuality to Chad. Strether was somewhat taken aback on meeting Barrace, but she is a
reassuring testament to Chad’s open-mindedness. As both Bilham and Barrace “commended
[Chad’s] munificence,” Strether acts in kind – treating the two to dinners with the hope that
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Bilham will speak favorably of him when writing to Chad (82). But Strether does not know how
Chad will react if Bilham writes about Strether’s homosexuality; as accepting as Chad seems to
be of sexual difference, he may not relish the idea of his mother marrying a gay man.
Gostrey agrees to join Strether and Bilham at the Louvre in order to meet the young man
and provide feedback. Strether is paying for this service, as he had arranged in Chester for a
morning of her guidance in the great gallery “of the splendid Titians” (Ambassadors 87) – an
excellent place to meet men because of the classical statuary of nude males. According to
Waugh, gay erotica in the nineteenth century (whether it be the plastic arts or photography)
allowed men to view images together as a shared stimulating experience (26). After her first
exchange with Bilham, Gostrey quietly tells Strether: “‘Oh he’s all right – he’s one of us!’” (87).
As Bilham is American, Strether understands this to mean than he is a Munster: an American
who goes to Paris for sexual freedom. “Strether knew that he knew almost immediately what she
meant, and took it as still another sign that he had got his job in hand. This was the more
grateful to him that he could think of the intelligence now serving him as an acquisition
positively new.… that they were intense Americans together” (87). Strether sees the two of them
as compatriots who have struck out for sexual freedom. But he also does not want to think that
Bilham is a prostitute: “he wanted to be able to like his specimen with a clear good conscience,
and this fully permitted it…. it now for the time put Strether vastly at his ease to have this view
of a new way” (88). He relaxes and enjoys the hour spent at the Louvre, as Bilham’s charms
become “an unseparated part of the charged iridescent air” (88).
The next day Bilham invites Strether and Gostrey to visit him at “his own poor place; and
his own poor place, which was very poor, gave to his idiosyncrasies, for Strether – the small
sublime indifferences and independences that had struck the latter as fresh – an odd and
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engaging dignity…. He liked above all the legend of good-humoured poverty, of mutual
accommodation fairly raised to the romantic …” (Ambassadors 89). Bilham shares a small
studio with two friends; as one prepares tea for Strether and Gostrey, two or three other members
of the coterie arrive. “Strether liked the ingenuous compatriots … they were quaint and queer
and dear and droll; they made the place resound with the vernacular, which he had never known
so marked as when figuring for the chosen language, he must suppose, of contemporary art.
They twanged with a vengeance the aesthetic lyre – they drew from it wonderful airs” (89). The
young compatriots are openly gay, chattering away in Parlyaree (“the vernacular” and the
“chosen language”) with a fullness and freedom Strether has never before witnessed.
Soon Strether receives an invitation from Gostrey to join her at the theater: “an excellent
box at the Français had been lent her for the following night” (Ambassadors 90). She suggests
that he offer Bilham a seat; Strether sends a message to this effect but receives no answer.
Meanwhile, Waymarsh is part of the theater party; Gostrey turns her attention to him and
consolingly explains Bilham’s absence by suggesting that he did not receive the note.
Waymarsh, of course, could not possibly care less: his face “showed a mixture of austerity and
anguish.”
She went on however as if to meet this. “He’s far and away, you know, the best of them.”
“The best of whom, ma’am?”
“Why of all the long procession – the boys, the girls, or the old men and old
women as they sometimes really are; the hope, as one may say, of our country. They’ve
all passed, year after year; but there has been no one in particular I’ve ever wanted to
stop. I feel – don’t you? – that I want to stop little Bilham; he’s so exactly right as he is.”
(91-2)
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In her capacity as tour-guide to the subcultures, Gostrey has interacted with many Americans in
Paris. However, Bilham is one of the few she feels should remain in the city instead of returning
home and furthering the cause of community. She continues to direct her opinions to Waymarsh:
“He’s too delightful. If he’ll only not spoil it! But they always will; they always do; they
always have.”
“I don’t think Waymarsh knows,” Strether said after a moment, “quite what it’s
open to Bilham to spoil.”
“It can’t be a good American,” Waymarsh lucidly enough replied, “for it didn’t
strike me the young had developed much in that shape.” (92)
Waymarsh previously disparaged Bilham for his unwillingness to go back to America and work
(74); the lawyer is cut from capitalistic, republican cloth. Yet Gostrey considers Bilham to be
“more American than anybody” (88). Theoretically, America is synonymous with freedom;
however, freedom is often taken away from marginalized groups by legal institutions and social
ideologies. Once negative perceptions of the self are taken in from the surrounding milieu –
altering one’s consciousness about what is acceptable and what is not – the individual robs
himself of freedom. Bilham is ironically “more American” than his compatriots for having
escaped the country’s geographical boundaries, and thus its rigid institutions. He embodies
freedom in the way he lives, thinks, and embraces his sexuality. If he occasionally has to rely on
the kindness of strangers, so be it. Gostrey has seen too often that “‘the name of the good
American is as easily given as taken away! … What I’ve seen so often spoiled,’ she pursued, ‘is
the happy attitude itself, the state of faith and – what shall I call it? – the sense of beauty. You’re
right about him’ – she now took in Strether – ‘little Bilham has them to a charm; we must keep
little Bilham along’” (92).
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Gostrey is aware that going back to America and trying to live openly as a homosexual is
treacherous, let alone attempting to form communities and gain social acceptance: “‘The others
have all wanted so dreadfully to do something, and they’ve gone and done it in too many cases
indeed. It leaves them never the same afterwards; the charm’s always somehow broken’”
(Ambassadors 92). If not their bones: it is not overly dramatic to say that American men have
been killed for attempting what Gostrey proposes. She doesn’t want to see this happen to
Bilham: “‘We shall continue to enjoy him just as he is. No – he’s quite beautiful. He sees
everything. He isn’t a bit ashamed. He has every scrap of the courage of it that one could ask.
Only think what he might do. One wants really – for fear of some accident – to keep him in
view.’” Bilham has the courage to express his sexuality and could be a great source of
inspiration and support for other homosexuals back home; however, she fears the possibility of
“accidents” befalling him should he encounter men who are violently opposed to his lifestyle.
She is concerned about his current safety, which again gives us the sense that Gostrey believes
him to be a prostitute. Addressing Waymarsh in the box at the theater: “Miss Gostrey spoke of
herself as an instructor of youth introducing her little charges to a work that was one of the
glories of literature.… the little charges were candid; for herself she had travelled that road …”
(91). Having herself been a prostitute, she now acts somewhat like the kindly procuress. Her
thoughts turn to Bilham, who still has not arrived: “‘At this very moment perhaps what mayn’t
he be up to? I’ve had my disappointments – the poor things are never really safe; or only at least
when you have them under your eye. One can never completely trust them. One’s uneasy, and I
think that’s why I most miss him now’” (92-3). The “poor things” are the prostitutes, and she
includes Bilham in her concerns about them. Waymarsh “knew more or less what she meant.…
What was he, all the same, to do? He looked across the box at his friend; their eye met;
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something queer and stiff, something that bore on the situation but that it was better not to touch,
passed in silence between them” (93). Gostrey’s intimations make Waymarsh nervous; although
he often gets jealous and snide, Waymarsh loves Strether and doesn’t want to see him get
involved with a prostitute; he may be taken advantage of – financially and emotionally.
While Little Bilham can be compared to the rentiers in fin de siècle Paris, his lifestyle is
similar to the hundreds of young French men from the provinces, approximately twenty to thirty
years old, who moved to Paris in the nineteenth century. Peniston describes them:
Struggling to make a living in a difficult, even hostile, urban environment… [i]n their
leisure time, these men sought to make friends and acquaintances as well as find
amusements and adventures in their new home, the city of Paris. Occasionally they
resorted to prostitution and thievery to support themselves, but most of the time they
were simply seeking diversions from their daily lives in the pursuit of sexual pleasure….
Their relationships with one another provided them with various means of emotional and
material support. These relationships were extremely complex.… Some were based on
money, others on anonymity and chance encounters, still others on friendship or longterm companionship. In some cases, these men lived together as friends or lovers … they
formed through their networks of relationships a community of mutual understanding.
(Pederasts 4-5)
Bilham’s mode of living is similar to that of these young Frenchmen in Paris; his relationships
with Barrace and Chad are based on complex forms of support that do not necessarily involve
sex. Chad is a munificent friend, not a lover. In exchange for his kindness, Bilham takes it upon
himself to serve as liaison for Chad, writing to him about Strether and the importance of his
returning to Paris. While Strether is concerned that Bilham has not showed up at the theater,
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Gostrey intuits the situation: “‘if I’m simply a woman of sense he’s working for you to-night. I
don’t quite know how – but it’s in my bones’” (Ambassadors 93).
The results of Bilham’s efforts are soon realized. Just as the curtain rises on the second
act, “the door of the box had opened, with the click of the ouvreuse, from the lobby, and a
gentleman, a stranger to them, had come in with a quick step”: Chad arrives (Ambassadors 95).
Strether greets him “with a quickly-deprecating hand and smile”; Chad “discreetly signed that he
would wait, would stand.” Strether is a nervous wreck: “It was truly the life of high pressure that
Strether had seemed to feel himself lead while he sat there, close to Chad, during the long
tension of the act” (96). He introduces Chad to the others; the young man greets them with
“something markedly like a smile, but falling for short of a grin, and to the vivacity of Strether’s
private speculation as to whether he carried himself like a fool. He didn’t quite see how he could
so feel as one without somehow showing as one” (97). He tries to steel himself, however: “‘If
I’m to be odiously conscious of how I may strike the fellow,’ he reflected, ‘it was so little what I
came out for that I may as well stop before I begin’” (97-8). As the play ends, so does Strether’s
excuse for ignoring Chad; his attention has been riveted to it “like a schoolboy wishing not to
miss a minute of the show” – although at the fall of the curtain he would not have been able to
give “the slightest account of what had happened” (98). Meanwhile, Chad has been patient and
“modestly benevolent”; Strether takes from this “that the boy was accepting something” (98).
The party departs the theater, Gostrey contriving to leave Chad and Strether alone
together by asking Waymarsh to escort her home (Ambassadors 100). The two men walk to a
café on the Avenue de l’Opéra. Once seated, Strether immediately tells Chad that he has come
out to make him “‘break with everything, neither more nor less, and take you straight home’”
(103). For a month Strether has turned over in his head what he was going to say to Chad, but
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now “everything was so totally different…. There was no computing at all what the young man
before him would think or feel or say on any subject whatever” (105). Strether had not known
that he would meet Bilham, who happens to be a friend of Chad’s. The latter seems to have no
qualms about letting gay men stay in his apartment. Did Bilham tell Chad that Strether is gay?
If so, how does he feel about his mother marrying Strether? The topic comes up quickly as the
men converse in the café: Chad asks if the engagement is a “fait accompli” (106). After getting
an answer in the affirmative, he jokes – sarcastically, yet playfully – thanking Strether for
bringing him home “‘in triumph as a sort of wedding-present to Mother.’” His manner is open
and easy – considerably different from what Strether imagined it would be: “Chad had been
made over. That was all; whatever it was it was everything. Strether had never seen the thing so
done before – it was perhaps a specialty of Paris” (105). That Paris has made Chad a more
tolerant person is highly plausible. Histories of the Parisian subculture consistently point out that
homosexual activity was routinely observed by inhabitants of the city. While outraged citizens
made reports to the police and wrote letters to public officials, they represented a small fraction
of the heterosexual populace. Exposure can breed knowledge, which allows for the possibility of
acceptance. Presumably, if Chad were not comfortable with homosexuals he would not associate
with Bilham and Barrace.
At one point in the conversation Strether wonders “if he weren’t perhaps really dealing
with an irreducible young Pagan” (Ambassadors 110). While the term “pagan” refers to a person
who does not subscribe to the dominant religion of a particular society, it also denotes: “a person
who has not been converted to the current dominant views of a society, group, etc.” (OED).
Chad does not believe that homosexuals are heretics, criminals, mentally ill, or a threat to moral
decency – the dominant view of society. Strether then wonders “if the boy weren’t a Pagan” but
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instead “a gentleman” (113). Chad is “a man of the world … a man to whom things had
happened and were variously known” (106).14 He asks what people at home think about his
living in Paris; Strether confesses the “‘imagined horrors’” involving a woman (110). The young
man argues that he is not “‘stuck’” and simply likes living in Paris (111). When Strether
continues to press him about entanglements, however, “It made Chad, after a stare, throw himself
back. ‘Do you think one’s kept only by women? … Is that,’ the young man demanded, ‘what
they think at Woollett? … I must say then you show a low mind!’” (112). While Chad is not one
to be kept by a man, he is familiar with some who are or have been (perhaps Bilham). The
accusation that Strether is of “a low mind” gives us the impression that Chad does not know that
Strether is gay – or, perhaps, he knows and wants to make clear his own viewpoint on sex. Chad
offers this much: “‘One doesn’t know quite what you mean by being in women’s ‘hands.’ It’s all
so vague. One is when one isn’t. One isn’t when one is. And then one can’t quite give people
away.’ He seemed kindly to explain” (111). Strether is in Mrs. Newsome’s hands, so to speak.
But hearing that Chad is loath to “give people away” can only be comforting at this point. The
conversation at the café comes to a conclusion with no real agreement having been made about
when or if Chad will return to Woollett. But Strether can now put to rest his fears of not being
able to enjoy Paris in Chad’s presence. Earlier in the conversation, Chad tells Strether: “‘Oh we
shall get on!’” On leaving him, Chad is reassuring: “‘Oh I’m all right!’”
14
Readers of the traditional plot assume that Madame de Vionnet has refined Chad through exposure to Old World
culture, art, and history. Not only is this never directly substantiated, but no details exist in the entire text of the
novel that inform, explain or identify the profound change Chad has gone through. Any and all references made to
Chad’s transformation are oblique. For example: “‘You’ve made of him what I see’” (195); Chad is the product of
Madame de Vionnet’s “genius, acknowledged so her part in the phenomenon and made the phenomenon so rare”
(287); “Mrs. Pocock had failed to give a sign of recognizing in Chad as a particular part of a transformation” (348).
Strether says to Chad: “‘what it comes to is that more has been done for you, I think, than I’ve ever seen done –
attempted perhaps, but never so successfully done – by one human being for another’” (364). Whatever has
happened to Chad happens in the mind of the reader.
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Chad proves good as his word: “he was full of attentions to his mother’s ambassador; in
spite of which, all the while, the latter’s other relations rather remarkably contrived to assert
themselves” (Ambassadors 114). The first is Miss Gostrey. Strether has mentioned her in letters
to Mrs. Newsome: “He had been fine to Mrs. Newsome about his useful friend, but it had begun
to haunt his imagination that Chad, taking up again for her benefit a pen too long disused, might
possibly be fine. It wouldn’t at all do…” (114). Thus, Strether tells Chad all about “his funny
alliance” with Gostrey; “He flattered himself that he even exaggerated the wild freedom of his
original encounter with the wonderful lady” (115). He leaves off asking any more questions;
Chad’s contention that he is free “was answer enough” (116). The easy friendship with the
young man enhances Strether’s experience of Paris. However, this throws him “a little out of
countenance. Strether was at this period again and again thrown back on a felt need to remodel
somehow his plan.… He had once or twice, in secret, literally expressed the irritated wish that
[Mrs. Newsome] would come out” and find the femme fatale herself (117). Over a succession of
days, his concerns about if and how he is going to fulfill his ambassadorial mission “elbowed out
of Strether’s consciousness everything but itself” (122).
This changes as he begins to spend his days at Chad’s “wondrous troisième, the lovely
home, when men dropped in and the picture composed more suggestively through the haze of
tobacco, of music more or less good and of talk more or less polyglot” (Ambassadors 123). Here
Strether is exposed
to so many opinions on so many subjects. There were opinions at Woollett, but only on
three or four. The differences were there to match; if they were doubtless deep, though
few, they were quiet – they were, as might be said, almost as shy as if people had been
ashamed of them. People showed little diffidence about such things, on the other hand, in
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the Boulevard Malesherbes, and were so far from being ashamed of them – or indeed of
anything else – that they often seemed to have invented them to avert those agreements
that destroy the taste of talk. (123)
Strether enjoys this coterie and the topics of discussion that would never be broached in
Woollett. These afternoons do nothing to encourage the ambassador to carry out his duty: quite
the opposite. Little Bilham is part of this group and becomes “even in a higher degree than he
had originally been one of the numerous forms of the inclusive relation; a consequence
promoted, to our friend’s sense, by two or three incidents with which we have yet to make
acquaintance” (122). Strether’s relationship with Bilham intensifies. However, the “two or three
incidents” that enhance this “inclusive relation” are never presented and thus are left to the
reader’s imagination and/or experience.
Waymarsh observes Strether in this social scene, knowing what his comrade is supposed
to accomplish for Mrs. Newsome. He is “drawn into the eddy”:
It absolutely, though but temporarily, swallowed him down, and there were days when
Strether seemed to bump against him as a sinking swimmer might brush a submarine
object. The fathomless medium [of Chad’s society] held them … [T]hey passed each
other, in their deep immersion, with the round impersonal eye of silent fish.
(Ambassadors 122)
Embarrassed by the situation he has gotten himself into, Strether imagines Waymarsh as a “fatal”
relative judging him as if he were a schoolboy performing in a play (122). Waymarsh wants to
say: “‘I told you so – that you’d lose your immortal soul!’” (122) However, because Strether
seems to be in the process of destroying his chances with Mrs. Newsome, he wisely holds his
tongue. “Chad knew by this time in profusion what [Strether] wanted”; however the two men
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come to a silent agreement: Strether will waste “no more virtue in watching Chad than Chad
wasted in watching him” (122).
One day Chad decides to offer tea “at the Boulevard Malesherbes to a chosen few”
(Ambassadors 124). As Strether leaves the party, Bilham joins him: “Little Bilham’s way this
afternoon was not Strether’s, but he had none the less kindly come with him, and it was
somehow a part of his kindness that as it had sadly begun to rain they suddenly found themselves
seated for conversation at a café in which they had taken refuge.” As previously discussed,
enterprising owners of cafés and brasseries encouraged homosexual patrons by fitting out their
establishments with couches and booths that allowed for comfortable canoodling – which the
staff either accepted or ignored. Bilham steers Strether to a café for this purpose and they find an
accommodating velvet bench set behind a table, where, “with a final collapse of all consistency,
[Strether] treated himself to the comfort of indiscretion” (125). The term “collapse” is regularly
used in the novel to refer to Strether’s capitulation to his sexual needs. Intimacy ensues, but
Strether is not relaxed in these surroundings. Aside from the “perched privacy” he enjoyed with
Bilham in the salon, his sexual activities have primarily taken place in outdoor nooks and bushes.
While he was thrilled to be out in London with Gostrey, free from the worry of appearing gay, he
did not have sex in any of the indoor public venues. Unfortunately: “He now showed his
companion soon enough indeed how inadequate, as a general monitor, this last queer quantity
could once more feel itself” (125). In this usage “queer” denotes: “out of sorts; unwell; faint;
giddy” (OED).15 Strether’s inadequacy is the inability to get a hard-on in this situation; his
giddiness is due to the nervous thrill of having sex in a café with other patrons in the room.
The Oxford English Dictionary quotes James to illustrate this usage: “1904 H. JAMES Golden Bowl I. xi. 197, ‘I
suppose people at the court of the Borgias may have watched each other begin to look queer after having had the
honour of taking wine with the heads of the family.’”
15
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“Little Bilham, in meditation, looked at him with a kindness almost paternal. ‘Don’t you like it
over here?’” (Ambassadors 125). The pronoun “it” is one of James’s favorite tools of
obfuscation. In this instance, “it” refers to where they are sitting. Simultaneously, “it” is the
place on Strether’s body where Bilham is putting his hands or mouth, as well as the action (“it”)
he is performing with them. “Strether laughed out – for the tone was indeed droll; he let himself
go” (125); he relaxes and lets his body respond. “‘The only thing I’ve any business to like is to
feel that I’m moving him.… Is the creature’ – and he did his best to show that he simply wished
to ascertain – ‘honest?’” The male sexual organ is referred to by a myriad of euphemisms,
several of which play off of the concept of a “creature” – the Cyclopes, sea-monster, snake, bird,
etc. Strether wants to know if his “honest”: “Worthy of honour, honourable, commendable;
(also) that confers honour, that does a person credit” (OED). Likely this refers to size. If
receiving a blow-job at the time, Strether may infer another denotation of “honest”: “Of a feast:
magnificent, sumptuous; stately, splendid. Also (of food): fine, delicious” (OED). Bilham then
asks: “‘What creature do you mean?’” – i.e. is “the creature” your prick or mine? “It was on this
that they did have for a little mute inter-change” (125). If the two men are on the sofa in the 69
position (lying together in opposite directions), somewhat hidden by the table in front of them,
they may be giving simultaneous fellatio – which would make for a “mute inter-change.”
Strether’s “coherence lapse[s]” (125).
After a half-hour, Strether pays the bill:
Little Bilham had got up as if the transaction with the waiter had been a signal, and had
already edged out between the table and the divan.… Strether had found himself
deferring to his companion’s abruptness as to a hint that he should be answered as soon
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as they were more isolated. This happened when after a few steps in the outer air they
had turned the next corner. There our friend had kept it up. (Ambassadors 127-8)
The syntax used above makes it difficult to ascertain who is hinting at what. But because “our
friend” leaves the café with a hard-on (he had “kept it up”), it appears that a different sexual act
has been suggested – one that is more easily performed while standing. While in the café,
Bilham says “with a quiet fullness: ‘Do take it from me…. You give too much.’”
“Oh I always give too much!” Strether helplessly sighed. “But you don’t,” he went on as
if to get quickly away from the contemplation of that doom (127).
What will be answered once the men are “more isolated” around the corner is whether Strether
will allow Bilham to sodomize him. In the classical tradition, the older man is the dominant
partner, sodomizing the younger man. The man receiving anal intercourse is considered passive,
and thus, somewhat effeminate – which is often looked down on, especially if the passive partner
is older. Because the term “bardache” refers to a passive sodomite, it is generally used in a
pejorative sense (or as an affectionate insult in Miss Barrace’s case). Yet giving and receiving
are both pleasurable acts, each physically stimulating but in different ways, just as heterosexual
coitus provides a different experience for the man and the woman. Bilham is not suggesting that
Strether “take it” from him because he wants to dominate; he is suggesting an alternative
experience. We are not told whether this happens. However, a question is settled “so effectually
for the time – that is for the next few days – that it had given Strether almost a new lease on life”
(128).
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CHAPTER 4
Bringing Homosexuality Home
“We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art, yours and
mine, what we are talking about – and the only way to know is to have
lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I
think I don’t regret a single ‘excess’ of my responsive youth – I only
regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t
embrace.” Henry James in a letter to Hugh Walpole, 21 August 1913
On Sunday of the following week, Strether attends a party, to which Chad has invited
him, at the home of “the great Gloriani” (Ambassadors 135). Chad tells his friend “that the
celebrated sculptor had a queer old garden, for which the weather – spring at last frank and fair –
was propitious; and two or three of his other allusions had confirmed for Strether the expectation
of something special” (135). Strether is about to experience a prodigious gathering that includes
notable members of the homosexual subculture and soon feels “rather smothered in flowers.” As
the guests begin to multiply, “their liberty, their intensity, their variety, their conditions at large,
were in fusion in the admirable medium of the scene”; Strether “positively rejoiced” (136). He
feels no “need for an excuse” as to his sexual inclinations. Gloriani’s garden – “a spacious
cherished remnant” – represents the history of the Parisian subculture, which grew out of the
royal gardens in the eighteenth century. Filled with “tall bird-haunted trees,” the garden “stood
off for privacy, spoke of survival, transmission, association, a strong indifferent persistent order”
(137). The “tall bird-haunted trees” remind us of the dense foliage of the Tuileries, where men
with erect phalluses (“tall bird[s]”) habitually rendezvoused (“haunted”). The gardens allowed
gay men to meet, associate, transmit the Greek culture and survive against an order that
persistently oppressed them. Strether perceives the open air of Gloriani’s garden as “all a
chamber of state. [He] had presently the sense of a great convent, a convent of mission, famous
for he scarce knew what, a nursery of young priests…” (137). A chamber of state, Gloriani’s
garden is a place of public celebration while also akin to a “convent” – a community formed by
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those who take sacred vows. Ironically (due to the Catholic Church’s condemnation of
homosexuality), monasteries were the earliest havens for gay men; young priests took a public
vow of celibacy which did not preclude having sex with other men in the privacy of the cloister.
The great impression of the garden becomes “almost formidable” when Strether meets
Gloriani himself. The sculptor has:
such perfect confidence, on Chad’s introduction of him, a fine worn handsome face, a
face that was like an open letter in a foreign tongue. With his genius in his eyes, his
manners on his lips, his long career behind him and his honours and rewards all round,
the great artist, in the course of a single sustained look and a few words of delight at
receiving him, affected our friend as a dazzling prodigy of type. (Ambassadors 137)
Gloriani is gay (a “type”) and gloriously so. His achievements are great, his person attractive,
and his confidence is “like an open letter” – an embodiment of homosexuality so “foreign” to
Strether that he is dazzled. Gloriani left his native Rome (a city that also attracted men who love
men) in mid-career to enjoy the freer state of existence in Paris: “where, with a personal lustre
almost violent, he shone in a constellation: all of which was more than enough to crown him, for
his guest, with the light, with the romance, of glory” (137-8). Strether saw marvelous “types” at
the theater in London, but no one like Gloriani! He knows he will never forget meeting him, but
wonders what it is that he finds most alluring: “Was it the most special flare, unequalled,
supreme, of the aesthetic torch, lighting that wondrous world for ever, or was it above all the
long straight shaft sunk by a personal acuteness that life had seasoned to steel?” (138). Readers,
at this point, can interpret the latter part of this sentence on their own. Oh, to be both a great
artist and openly – expertly – the lover of men!
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While taking in the atmosphere of the gardens, Strether feels connected to the
homosexual community “as he had never yet so intimately been, had the consciousness of
opening to it, for the happy instant, all the windows of his mind, of letting this rather grey
interior drink in for once the sun of a clime not marked in his old geography” (Ambassadors
138). The “old geography” refers to Woollett, the mention of which indicates that dark clouds
are on the horizon of Strether’s mind, as we will see. Strether is introduced to Gloriani, who –
having “remember[ed] something” – quickly excuses himself. Strether is left feeling “as if in the
matter of his accepted duty he had positively been on trial. The deep human expertness in
Gloriani’s charming smile – of the terrible life behind it! – was flashed upon him as a test of his
stuff” (138). The word “terrible,” used to describe Gloriani’s life, is polyvalent: awe-inspiring,
severe, painful, formidable, very difficult, and something disapproved of. His smile reflects the
“deep human expertness” – the dexterity and strength – he summoned in order to fulfill himself
as an artist and a sexual being. Strether cannot help but judge himself against this great man and
finds his “stuff” lacking. What would Gloriani think about the ambassador’s “duty”: to tear a
young man away from Paris in order to procure cover through marriage? “Our friend hadn’t
come there only for this figure of Abel Newsom’s son, but that presence threatened to affect the
observant mind as positively central” (Ambassadors 139). Strether had additionally come to
Paris for the subculture, but his “presence” there was due to Mrs. Newsome’s pocket-book – not
to any glorious achievement of his own. His mind fills with doubts:
One of them was the question of whether, since he had been tested, he had passed. Did
the artist drop him from having made out that he wouldn’t do? He really felt just to-day
that he might do better than usual. Hadn’t he done well enough, so far as that went, in
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being exactly so dazzled? and in not having too, as he almost believed, wholly hidden
from his host that he felt the latter’s plummet? (139)
Strether regresses to a state of mind similar to that which overtook him on first meeting Miss
Gostrey. Although happy that he “passed” with her (4) – that she recognized him to be gay – he
was afraid to join her in cruising Chester for fear that she would find him “too hopeless” (10).
Strether worries that Gloriani drops him for his lack of panache – of which he thought he had
gained a modicum, and thus would do “better than usual” at the party. Additionally, he projects
his own misgivings on Gloriani: “that he wouldn’t do” because of his arrangement with Mrs.
Newsome. However, Strether tries to shore up his self-esteem with the thought that he had
allowed himself to be dazzled (instead of frightened) and had held up a good front in the face of
Gloriani’s perceived dissatisfaction.
Luckily, Strether suddenly sees Bilham approaching from across the garden:
[I]t was a part of the fit that was on him that as their eyes met he guessed also his
knowledge. If he had said to him on the instant what was uppermost he would have said:
“Have I passed? – for of course I know one has to pass here.” Little Bilham would have
reassured him, have told him that he exaggerated, and have adduced happily enough the
argument of little Bilham’s own very presence; which, in truth, he could see, was as easy
a one as Gloriani’s own …. He himself would perhaps then after a while cease to be
frightened, would get the point of view for some of the faces – types tremendously alien,
alien to Woollett – that he had already begun to take in. Who were they all, the dispersed
groups and couples, the ladies even more unlike those of Woollett than the gentlemen?
(Ambassadors 139)
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The repeated word “alien” emphasizes Strether’s feelings of being out of his element. In the
throes of self-judgment (“the fit”), Strether assumes by just looking at Bilham that the young
man witnessed the encounter and has “knowledge” of his concerns. The narrator tells us that
“If” Strether had asked him whether he “passed,” Bilham would have told him in his easy
manner that he was fine. But “if” is the operative word. Strether does not tell Bilham that he is
anxious about Gloriani’s quick departure, and thus does not get the reassurance that the young
man “would have” proffered.
Instead, Strether asks about the other attendees of the party – these people so unlike those
in Woollett that they seem “alien.” As the question is conveyed through the narrator, the tone
Strether adopts in asking “Who were they all?” is open to interpretation. Given what we know
about his current concerns, our nervous ambassador seems to ask: “Who on earth are these
strange, uninhibited people?” As the easy-going young man is familiar with this crowd, Bilham
answers as if this is a simply inquiry:
“Oh, they’re every one – all sorts and sizes; of course I mean within limits,
though limits down perhaps more than limits up. There are always artists – he’s beautiful
and inimitable to the cher confrère; and the gros bonnets of many kinds – ambassadors,
cabinet ministers, bankers, generals, what do I know. even Jews [sic]. Above all always
some awfully nice women – and not too many; sometimes an actress, an artist, a great
performer – but only when they’re not monsters; and in particular the femmes du monde.
(Ambassadors 139-40)
Bilham describes the diverse nature of the subculture. There are “limits” as to who would be
invited to such a party as Gloriani’s, likely determined by reputation, class, and sexual
orientation. Those well established in the community (“cher confrère”) are in attendance
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regardless to what social depths they may have descended. The big-wigs (“gros bonnets”) of
society are well represented. Occasionally there are some “awfully nice women” at these parties,
but luckily “not too many” – usually performers who are not “monsters.” James gives an
accurate detail of homosexual culture here. Again, the term “monsters” refers to homosexuals,
but it is not that Bilham doesn’t like lesbians. He voices the allure that great heterosexual female
performers often hold for gay men. Sarah Bernhardt and Rachel of the Comédie-Française are
nineteenth-century examples; Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Barbara Streisand, and Madonna had
huge homosexual fan bases in the twentieth century. Some gay men envy the power these
performers have to attract men; others enjoy a form of self-fashioning that can result from living
vicariously through these stars (Brownstein 37).
As the party continues, Strether and Bilham encounter Miss Barrace, who quickly turns
the conversation to Waymarsh; she has left him in the house with Miss Gostrey (Ambassadors
143). Miss Barrace declares:
“He’s wonderful.”
“He is indeed,” Strether conceded. “He wouldn’t tell me of this affair – only said
he had an engagement; but with such a gloom, you must let me insist, as if it had been an
engagement to be hanged. Then silently and secretly he turns up here with you.” (144)
Strether is not happy about this, as it is evidence that the two comrades are becoming further
estranged. Barrace continues to crow about Waymarsh’s massive virtues, including how well he
looks in her carriage:
“He’s too funny beside me in his corner; he looks like somebody, somebody foreign and
famous, en exil…. I show him Paris, show him everything, and he never turns a hair.
He’s like the Indian chief one reads about, who, when he comes up to Washington to see
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the Great Father, stands wrapt in his blanket and gives no sign. I might be the Great
Father from the way he takes everything…. And the way he sits, too, in the corner of my
room, only looking at my visitors very hard and as if he wanted to start something!”
(144-5)
Her two listeners “looked at each other in intelligence, with frank amusement on Bilham’s part
and a shade of sadness on Strether’s. Strether’s sadness sprang – for the image had its grandeur
– from his thinking how little he himself was wrapt in his blanket …” (145). Bilham is amused
that his audacious friend has so latched on to the somber lawyer: perhaps opposites do attract.
However, Strether is hurt and somewhat jealous that Waymarsh is getting along so well without
him. Now feeling uncomfortable in the glittering apogee of homosexual culture, he misses
Waymarsh for his comfortable familiarity and is saddened to be no longer under the warm
blanket of their relationship.
Strether is introduced to the anticipated Madame de Vionnet, but soon begins to weary of
the party. He returns to the garden: “Far back from streets and unsuspected by crowds, reached
by a long passage and a quiet court, it was as striking to the unprepared mind, he immediately
saw, as a treasure dug up” (Ambassadors 137). He sits on a bench, and while his eyes follow the
goings-on of the guests, he again reflects “on Chad’s strange communities. He sat there alone
for five minutes, with plenty to think of” (151). Meeting Gloriani and observing his guests have
been an existential challenge for Strether, forcing him to examine who he really is. “He hadn’t
yet had so quiet a surrender; he didn’t in the least care if nobody spoke to him more.” He is tired
of trying to fit in. However, “this term of contemplation was closed by the reappearance of little
Bilham, who stood before him a moment with a suggestive ‘Well?’ in which he saw himself
reflected as disorganized, as possibly floored” (151). Strether is surprised to see this beautiful
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little painter man appear before him. Of all the people Bilham could be cavorting with at the
party, he seeks out the middle-aged man from Woollett. His “suggestive ‘Well?’” expresses his
desire for intimacy. Strether is flattered and gratified, as nothing could assuage his self-doubts
more than the attentions of this young man of whom he has become so fond. “He replied with a
‘Well!’ intended to show that he wasn’t floored in the least. No indeed; he gave it out, as the
young man sat down beside him” (151-2). Again the ambiguous, polysemous “it.” Strether
gives “it” out: his heart, his tongue, his penis, his trust. He gives himself up to the young man
and the decadent atmosphere of the garden.
We are now at the bench scene discussed in the Introduction to this study. Strether and
Bilham try to find a workable position for intimacy on the bench: “if, at the worst, he had been
overturned at all, he had been overturned into the upper air, the sublime element with which he
had an affinity and in which he might be trusted a while to float” (Ambassadors 152). The
repetition of “overturned” gives us the sense that the two roll around for a bit; while Bilham may
not have an “affinity” for being on top, he is younger and lighter and “might be trusted a while to
float.”16 Having found a comfortable position, Strether soon “assured his young friend he was
quite content. They wouldn’t stir; were all right as they were” (152). Strether finds that “it
would do beautifully as it was; do beautifully because what it was – well, was just simply too
late.” While it was too late to stop the progression of passion, “it” also refers to the relationship:
while it is “too late” for Strether to be young again, the bond between an older and younger man
will “do beautifully.” Bilham is “submissive and responsive” as he “easily threw off some
‘Better late than never!’” (152). This may express his relief that they are finally having sex; or,
Reginald Abbott gives us an interesting interpretation of the many times the words “float” and “floating” are used
in The Ambassadors in his article “The Incredible Floating Man: Henry James’s Lambert Strether.” See Works
Cited for publication information.
16
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perhaps it took some time before Strether became fully erect; or, maybe Strether is finally having
a sexual experience he had never before tried. Strether’s response – “a sharp ‘Better early than
late!’” – is appropriate to all three of these possibilities. The scene continues:
This note indeed the next thing overflowed for Strether into a quiet stream of
demonstration that as soon as he had let himself go he felt as the real relief. It had
consciously gathered to a head, but the reservoir had filled sooner than he knew, and his
companion’s touch was to make the waters spread. There were some things that had to
come in time if they were to come at all. If they didn’t come in time they were lost for
ever. It was the general sense of them that had overwhelmed him with its long slow rush.
(152)
Strether “overflow[s]”: fluid escapes its boundaries (his penis). The comings had “gathered to a
head,” filling his shaft (“the reservoir”) more quickly than he was aware of. Bilham touches him
in such a way as to “make the waters spread” (triggering ejaculation). This quiet stream of
semen demonstrates Strether’s orgasm, which occurs “as soon as he had let himself go” and
provides “the real relief” of post-coital relaxation.
The word “come” has been synonymous with “to experience sexual orgasm” since the
mid-seventeenth century (OED). James repeats “come” three times in the last two sentences in a
rhythmic pace similar to sexual thrusting. To “come in time if they were to come at all” suggests
the desire for the bonding experience of mutual orgasms. The phrase also refers to Strether’s
concerns about time; he has wasted a lot of it being unhappy in Woollett and sees Bilham as
perhaps his last chance at love with a young man. If the two don’t come to an understanding
soon, they will be “lost for ever” from each other. The romantic union (“the general sense of
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them”) and the possibility that his “long ache might at last drop to rest” (58) overwhelms Strether
with happiness and inspires the “long slow rush” of his orgasm.
As previously discussed, James almost immediately directs the reader to this scene in the
Preface: “The whole case, in fine, is in Lambert Strether’s irrepressible outbreak to little Bilham
on the Sunday afternoon in Gloriani’s garden, the candour with which he yields, for his young
friend’s enlightenment, to the charming admonition of that crisis” (xxix). In the Other Plot, the
“irrepressible outbreak” that Strether yields to, conveyed by James with polite caution
(“charming admonition”), is the sexual orgasm – for which the word “crisis” is a Victorian
euphemism. However, James conveys an additional understanding as his explanation continues:
“The idea of the tale resides indeed in the very fact that an hour of such unprecedented ease
should have been felt by him as a crisis, and he is at pains to express it for us as neatly as we
could desire” (xxix). The sex that occurred with “unprecedented ease,” resulting in an orgasmic
“crisis,” is then “felt by [Strether] as a crisis” – the word now denoting: “A vitally important or
decisive stage in the progress of anything; a turning-point; also, a state of affairs in which a
decisive change for better or worse is imminent.” (OED)
The polyvalence of the word “crisis” facilitates an additional understanding of what
transpires at the close of the lovemaking scene. Strether has reached a turning point; a decisive
change is imminent. In the final sentence – “It was the general sense of them that had
overwhelmed him with its long slow rush” (Ambassadors 152) – the word “rush” refers to
ejaculation, yet simultaneously means “haste or hurry.” Juxtaposed to the word “slow,” conflict
is represented: slow/rush. Strether (a man of double consciousness) has “long” been beset by
conflicts; the thought of a relationship with Bilham (“them”) unleashes mental struggles that
engulf, overpower, and “overwhelm” him. Strether has not yet decided how or if he is going to
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fulfill his duty to Mrs. Newsome. His feeling towards Waymarsh are conflicted: he is not
satisfied by their relationship but is hurt on learning that his comrade declined to mention
Gloriani’s party. His newly developed sense of self as a gay man has just been overturned by
meeting Gloriani. He has found his longed-for beloved, a dream he almost dared not entertain,
but … now what? He can’t stay in Paris without Mrs. Newsome’s money: the checks will not
arrive if he is not making progress in his ambassadorial role. If Chad goes home, Strether does
also and marries Mrs. Newsome. If he defaults on his agreement with Mrs. Newsome, will he
keep his job as the editor of The Review? If not, how will he earn a living – and be able to
support this beautiful young man? Would Bilham leave Paris for Woollett? How could he
possibly ask such a happy free spirit to do so? Overwhelmed by these concerns, Strether
experiences an emotional crisis.
James relates Strether’s crisis, stating: “he is at pains to express it for us as neatly as we
could desire” (Preface xxix). However, while Strether is “at pains” to express himself, the rest
of this claim is made with tongue in cheek. As we will see, our rattled protagonist is thoroughly
inept in communicating his thoughts to Bilham, and thus expresses himself far less neatly than
the reader may desire. Immediately after making love, he launches into his “Live!” speech –
which many readers consider to be the main point (if not the penultimate moment) of The
Ambassadors. However, per the Freytag Pyramid, it is too early in the rising action for a
conflict-resolving climax. The speech returns to topics mused upon as Strether sat in the
Luxembourg gardens (II.ii.), conflicts that will further propel the action as they are now being
voiced to an audience with the potential to react: Little Bilham. Strether has fallen in love with
him and is thrilled to think this love is reciprocated. Thus he wants to apprise the young man of
whom and what he would be dealing with – should he decide to engage in a serious relationship
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with the older man. Unfortunately, Strether begins thinking out loud without providing Bilham
any sense of context:
It’s not too late for you, on any side, and you don’t strike me as in danger of missing the
train; besides which people can be in general pretty well trusted, of course – with the
clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here – to keep an eye on the
fleeting hour. 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?” (Ambassadors 152-3)
In telling Bilham “‘It’s not too late for you,’” Strether expresses the fear that it is too late for him:
he cannot refashion his past and create the life he wish he had led. He counsels Bilham to mind
the fleeting nature of time and live his youth to the fullest. This advice is more appropriately
directed to Strether’s younger self. The middle-aged man is trying to convince himself of what
he is now learning: it doesn’t matter how one earns an income as long as one lives authentically.
Strether spent the majority of his life in America – where staunch capitalistic ideologies defined
masculinity in terms of the ability to make money. While previously sitting in the Luxembourg
garden, he reckons with the fact that he failed “in half a dozen trades” and yet still lived “an
empty present … a solitude of life or choice …” (58). Bilham, however, is not in “danger of
missing the train” that takes one to personal fulfillment: he is already on it. He had the initiative
to move to Paris as a young man and, despite his apparent failure as a painter, manages to eke
out a living while enjoying his life as a gay man in the bohemian community. Strether knows
this, having visited the shabby studio where Bilham and his friends twang with exuberance the
“aesthetic lyre” of their make-shift lives. It is Strether who missed the metaphoric “train” of life
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that had “waited at the station” for him without his “having had the gumption to know it was
there” (153). Strether exhorts Bilham to “live all he can” and not make the same mistake he did.
However, the manner in which he does so seems accusatory, as if Bilham is not glad of his youth
and is not living it to his full potential.
Mistakes are emphasized as Strether’s speech continues: “‘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 …. 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’” (Ambassadors 153).
Repetition of the word “affair” – “a romantic or sexual relationship, often of short duration,
between two people who are not married to each other” (OED) – suggests that Strether is
thinking about his early affair with the youth he “held against [his] breast” – but lost (59). This
is the great “mistake” of Strether’s life. Musing about this lost lover while sitting in the
Luxembourg gardens, he realized that the relationship might have been saved had he not been so
“unwittingly selfish” (59). He also recognized his failure at the “art of taking things as they
came” (58); he didn’t take advantage of opportunities when they arose. Presently, Strether is “a
case of reaction” against these mistakes. Bilham doesn’t replace the young man of the past –
“What one loses one loses” – but presents an opportunity for Strether to try again. He wants to
take up this young man who has come into his life, form a loving relationship, and curb his habit
of selfishness in order to make it last. Thus, in his present speech, Strether selflessly encourages
Bilham to live as he sees fit, not wanting to pull him into a committed relationship with a
middle-aged American man without being fully aware of his options. Strether instructs Bilham
that his “voice of reaction against the mistake” be taken with “an allowance”: he is rebounding
from his lost love and needs patience and tolerance as he expresses his thoughts. Unfortunately,
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Strether never identifies what “the mistake” is – leaving Bilham to ponder why he is speaking of
loss, affairs, and allowance. Naturally, Bilham can’t help but wonder if he is the mistake.
Strether’s speech then veers in a different direction, focusing on what might be an
impediment to the relationship between the two men: Paris.
“The 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.” (Ambassadors
153)
The “place and [the] impressions … have had their abundant message” for Strether and it is not a
positive one: he is too old. Bilham may find the stimulation of the homosexual milieu “mild,”
but it “winds” Strether up to an uncomfortable degree, making him feel “too old” to fit in. His
impression was shared by many older homosexual men in the Parisian subculture during the late
nineteenth century. According to Peniston, young men in their twenties and thirties – “who
engaged in homosexual activity mostly for pleasure” – were at the center of the subculture
“because they found within it a network of support with which they could identify” (Pederasts
5). Conversely, men older than forty “participated in the subculture less and less as they aged.
Although their sexual desires may not have changed, their interest in the subculture had …. A
few of them may have felt no longer welcomed in a social group that seemed to be fixated upon
youth” (5). Strether has participated in the gatherings at Chad’s and recognizes his need
community: he “see[s] it now” – and regrets not having spent much time in the subculture as a
young man (“done so enough before”). Now he feels “It’s too late.”
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Strether emphasizes this insight, saying “I see” four times in the passage and concludes
with the conjecture that he understands the working of the subculture “more than [Bilham would]
believe or [he] can express.” This drives a wedge between the two men. Strether has come to
see the impossibility of his moving to Paris. He doesn’t fit in socially and is too old to make a
new start – particularly in making a living. As Bilham is well-established in this social world
and unconcerned about money, Strether assumes that the young man cannot understand his
difficulty. Yet, again, Strether does not identify the “message,” nor what he has seen, nor the
premise that suddenly makes him feel old. Bilham gathers that there is a grave disparity in their
perceptions – one that Strether contends is irremediable. While Strether is honest about his
outlook, Bilham feels that his way of life is being disparaged.
Yet Strether barrels on, uninterrupted, now trying to explain life by means of a metaphor:
“it’s at the best a tin mould, either fluted and embossed, with ornamental excrescences, or 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 (sic)” (Ambassadors 153). One cannot help but be shaped by the society into
which one is born. American ideologies, which included a strong aversion to homosexuality,
shaped Strether’s self-perception before he was mature enough to recognize their impact. He
was “helpless” to control the “form” imposed on his life and took on the external characteristics
dictated by society in order to survive: he looks and generally acts like a heterosexual man.
While the American mould of masculinity did not eliminate his essential homosexual self, his
sense of who he should be is “more or less compactly held by it”: it shaped how he thinks and
feels about being gay. Fortunately, as an educated member of the upper class, his “tin mould” is
“fluted” or “embossed,” with at least a few “ornamental excrescences”: he can sublimate his
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desires into art and literature. Life could be worse, if not just “‘dreadfully plain.’” But it is too
late to significantly alter who he is. He is growing to accept himself, allowing himself to be
more open; however, he will never altogether escape his past. Strether resigns himself to living
as “fine in one can.”
His thinking then takes an inscrutable turn. While the mould is inescapable, “‘Still, one
has the illusion of freedom; 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 know quite which’”
(Ambassadors 153). The concept of “the illusion of freedom” has long been taken up by writers
who vary its definition according to philosophical/political/sociological/theological contexts.
Because of Strether’s focus on the fleetingness of time and the importance of living one’s youth
to the fullest, the “illusion of freedom” in this case seems to involve the false sense of
immortality commonly held by the young. It is not that one feels impervious to death but that
time seems infinite: goals can be deferred, opportunities passed over, mistakes made because one
has an endless amount to time act, and if need be, repair. Strether states that he is without the
“memory of that illusion”; however, this does not preclude an unconscious adherence to it, if
only temporarily. The fact that he let fifty-five years slip through his fingers without ever
attaining personal fulfillment leads us to believe that he did entertain the “illusion of freedom” –
although he states (confusingly) that he was either “too stupid or too intelligent” to do so. In
either case, Strether is now painfully aware that the past is irrevocable, time is finite, and the
ability to undo previous mistakes in a seemingly endless future is an illusion. Thus, his urging
Bilham to not be “without the memory of that illusion” – which requires at least some experience
of it – is strange. From his current vantage point of life, Strether’s exhortations to “Live!” would
be better expressed by carpe diem than the “illusion of freedom.”
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If we look more closely at the context in which this concept arises, however, a different
sense can be gleaned. Strether is thinking about having been shaped by social ideologies and
concludes that one lives as best one can. His next thought seems to answer an internally posed
question as to how he was able to bear up against the oppression: “Still, one has the illusion of
freedom.” Strether believed that he had some control over his destiny and was free to keep
searching for ways to live within the confines of society. He has tenacity. Although he regularly
flips back and forth between hope and despair, the former never is never abandoned – even
though Strether does not know if self-actualization is an illusion: “stupid or intelligent” to engage
in. While sitting in the Luxembourg gardens Strether resigned himself to “the fact that he was
done for and finished” (58). Minutes later he quits the penny chair with the drive to accomplish
his goals: “his campaign had begun. He had wanted to put himself in relation, and he would be
hanged if he were not in relation” (66). He soon encounters Bilham on the balcony at Boulevard
Malesherbes – a young man in a propitious place and time – and Strether acts on the opportunity
to at least try to be in relation. He now knows after the experience in Giuliani’s garden that he
wants Bilham to come with him to Woollett. The illusion of freedom is not so unrealistic that
Strether thinks this can happen solely by his own will. Instead, Strether urges Bilham to embrace
the “illusion of freedom” with the hope he will choose to be in relation with Strether and move to
Woollett. As much as he wants Bilham, Strether could only be happy in the relationship
knowing that the young man entered into it with eyes wide open. The older man could not live
with the guilt if he thought that he had somehow coerced Bilham into leaving Paris. This
selflessness, however, puts Strether in a precarious position: Bilham could choose a destiny that
does not involve him.
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As Strether’s speech reaches its conclusion, the joy of having made love with Bilham on
the bench meets the fear of losing him. His hope for the future mixes with regrets from the past.
The emotional storm raging in Strether’s mind makes for the harsh tone in which his final
exhortation is delivered:
“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!” (Ambassadors 153-4)
Strether is frustrated, if not angry, that he is no longer young. Envious of Bilham’s “luck” in
being so, Strether damns him for being “happily and hatefully young.” Despite the selflessness
he attempted to convey moments ago, Strether now regresses to his former self: the man who lost
his “little boy” for being “unwittingly selfish” (59). He becomes so egocentrically wrapped up in
his own mind and memories that he is unable to think about who is hearing this harangue and the
effect these words might have on him. Strether’s first young man “had been banished and
neglected” (59); Bilham is now neglected – unseen and abandoned while Strether continues to
berate his younger self. While his little boy had been dull, Strether was “stupid” in how he
handled the relationship. If he was a “fool” without the capacity to reign in his criticisms, he
would not have to be admonishing himself (“addressing [himself] thus awfully’). The final lines
sting with a sense of banishment. Not considering himself worthy of Bilham’s love, and wanting
to avoid being left again, Strether reiterates his contention that Bilham should do what he likes –
without Strether. The incitement to “Live!” can be interpreted as “Just go!”
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Bilham follows this surprising and lengthy lecture “from step to step deeply and gravely”
(Ambassadors 154). Understandably, he has “turned quite solemn.” The narrator facetiously
adds: “this was a contradiction of the innocent gaiety the speaker had wished to promote.”
Bilham is flummoxed. Finally Strether watches “for a moment the consequence of his words”
(154). Bilham’s face likely betrays feelings of shock and despair. In response, Strether changes
his approach, “laying a hand on his listener’s knee and as if to end with the proper joke: ‘And
now for the eye I shall keep on you!’” (154). Strether is interested in Bilham’s well-being;
however, he has just given the sense that he will be observing it from afar. Bilham attempts to
cajole him:
“Oh but I don’t know that I want to be, at your age, too different from you!”
“Ah prepare while you’re about it,” said Strether, “to be more amusing.”
Little Bilham continued to think, but at last had a smile. “Well, you are amusing
– to me.”
“Impayable, as you say, no doubt. But what am I to myself?” Strether had risen
with this …. (154)
Bilham’s intended compliment – that he wants to emulate Strether – makes clear that he missed
the point. To make matters worse, he touches on the older man’s sore spot: his age. Strether’s
rejoinder may be self-deprecating: try to be more amusing (than I am). However, given his
present mood, this may be a veiled insult: try (“prepare”) to be less dull (“more amusing”) as you
grow older (“while he is about it”). Bilham stops and ponders which way to interpret Strether’s
suggestion. Deciding this wasn’t an insult, his face brightens as he turns the phrase back on
Strether in the form of another compliment: he finds the older man “amusing,” in that he is
interesting and enjoyable to be with. However, Strether remains absorbed in his own failings
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and has no patience for attempts at consolation. He rebuffs Bilham: “‘Impayable, as you say….”
This expression emphasizes the difference in the two men’s ages. The adjective “impayable” is
youthful slang meaning “going beyond ordinary limits; ‘beyond anything’” (OED). Strether
tosses it at him with attending sarcasm, saying per modern vernacular: “Oh, you think I’m
awesome.” The ambassador knows that he is not impayable and does not want this delightful
little painter man’s life ruined because of getting tied down to a failure. Strether expresses his
self-disdain while standing in preparation to return to the party – a tacit suggestion that Bilham
might be better off without him.
Strether then looks across the garden and sees Gloriani speaking with Madame de
Vionnet. He wonders:
Were they, this pair, of the “great world”? – and was he himself, for the moment and thus
related to them by his observation in it? Then there was something in the great world
covertly tigerish, which came to him across the lawn and in the charming air, as a waft
from the jungle. Yet it made him admire most of the two, made him envy, the glossy
male tiger, magnificently marked. These absurdities of the stirred sense, fruits of
suggestion ripening on the instant, were all reflected in his next words to little Bilham. “I
know – if we talk of that – whom I should enjoy being like!”
Little Bilham followed his eyes; but then as with a shade of knowing surprise:
“Gloriani?” (Ambassadors 154-5)
Strether recognizes that he is not part of this impressive milieu, only tangentially related through
observation. In contrast to Paris as the “vast bright Babylon” on Strether’s first arrival (63),
Gloriani’s party is a “jungle” where one is either predator or prey. Strether opts for the former,
rebounds from despair, takes up the “illusion of freedom,” and sets his sights on the absurd goal
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of becoming more like Gloriani – moving in for closer surveillance. He heads off across the
garden without responding to Bilham’s question – which was likely posed in head-scratching
disbelief. Strether spends time in conversation with Chad and is introduced to Jeanne de
Vionnet; as the party winds down, he returns to the garden in search of his young man: “But
there was no little Bilham any more; little Bilham had within the few moments, for reasons of his
own, proceeded further: a circumstance by which, in its order, Strether was also sensibly
affected” (158). Bilham – hurt and confused – has apparently left. Strether is “sensibly
affected”: surprised, confused, disappointed. What happened? Due to his unwitting selfabsorption, he is oblivious as to how his speech has affected his lover.
As Little Bilham, for the time being, exits the action, Strether begins to grapple with the
immediate conflicts that thwart his sense of credibility and self-worth. He turns his attention to
his relationship with Waymarsh. At a dinner party at Chad’s Malesherbes apartment (VI.ii.),
Strether encounters Miss Barrace and inquires “what she had done with Waymarsh”
(Ambassadors 186). Knowing that the subject of their conversation is in the other room, Barrace
takes the opportunity to ask Strether if he appreciates the “care” she takes of Mr. Waymarsh:
“Oh immensely.” But Strether was not yet in line. “At all events,” he roundly
brought out, “the attachment’s an innocent one.”
“Mine and his? Ah,” she laughed, “don’t rob it of all interest!” (188)
Strether assumes that Barrace has taken over Gostrey’s former role and is innocently acting as
Waymarsh’s guide in Paris. Barrace teases Strether, playfully suggesting that if the relationship
is not scandalous, it is no longer exciting. She admits to spending a great deal of time with
Waymarsh – whom she refers to as “Sitting Bull” – but says: “‘I don’t mind him; I bear up, and
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we get on beautifully. I’m very strange; I’m like that’” (189). This gives the impression that she
spends time with Waymarsh as a duty or favor; but despite his heavy, silent demeanor, she finds
him interesting and sees “‘no end of things’” in him:
“He’s touching, you know,” she said.
“Know”? Strether echoed – “don’t I, indeed? We must move you almost to
tears.”
“Oh but I don’t mean you!” she laughed.
“You ought to then, for the worst sign of all – as I must have it for you – is that
you can’t help me. That’s when a woman pities.”
“Ah but I do help you!” she cheerfully insisted.
Again he looked at her hard, and then after a pause: “No you don’t!” (189)
As Bilham’s close friend, Barrace knows about the relationship he shares with Strether. She
assumes that she does the couple a service by keeping Waymarsh occupied and out of the way.
However, having inadvertently pushed Bilham away, Strether now re-assesses his relationship
with Waymarsh. Taking for granted his comrade’s continued devotion, he presumes this is what
Barrace finds “touching.” When Barrace makes clear that it is not the two men as a couple
(“you!”) whom she finds touching, Strether asserts that she “ought to”: he and Waymarsh are
still together and her help in keeping his comrade occupied is not needed. Barrace is unaware of
what transpired between Strether and Bilham at Gloriani’s party; thus she maintains that she is
providing a service. Strether looks at her “hard,” pauses, and states that she does not help: she is
unaware of the conflicts he is grappling with and – even if informed – is too dimwitted to
understand their significance.
Slow on the up-take, Barrace restates her importance:
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Her tortoise-shell, on its long chain, rattled down. “I help you with Sitting Bull.
That’s a good deal.”
“Oh that, yes.” But Strether hesitated. “Do you mean he talks of me?
“So that I have to defend you? No, never.”
“I see,” Strether mused. “It’s too deep.”
“That’s his only fault,” she returned – “That everything, with him, is too deep.
He has depths of silence – which he breaks only at the longest intervals by a remark.
And when the remark comes it’s always something he has seen or felt for himself – never
a bit banal. … And never about you. We keep clear of you. We’re wonderful.”
(Ambassadors 189-90)
As is his wont, Strether speaks/reacts as if the other person shares his thoughts. Rattled by
Bilham’s disappearance, he now misses their blanket of comradeship, assumes that Waymarsh
misses him as well, and that Barrace helps by consoling Sitting Bull. However, Barrace has not
been consoling Waymarsh; it has not been necessary. Thus she interprets Strether’s inquiry as
concern that he is being disparaged by Waymarsh because of having taken up with Bilham. On
hearing that she never has to defend him, Strether projects his belief that Waymarsh’s love is
“too deep” to ever malign him. As Barrace chatters on, however, reality dawns on Strether.
Waymarsh not only never speaks of his comrade, but to broach such a topic (in Barrace’s
opinion) would reduce the conversation to a level of banality he is incapable of.
Barrace prattles on:
“But I’ll tell you what he does do,” she continued: “he tries to make me presents.”
“Presents?” poor Strether echoed, conscious with a pang that he hadn’t yet tried
that in any quarter.
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…
“I’ve all I can do to prevent his buying me things.”
“He wants to ‘treat’ you?” Strether almost gasped at all he himself hadn’t thought
of. He had a sense of admiration. “Oh he’s much more in the real tradition than I. Yes,”
he mused; “it’s the sacred rage.”
“The sacred rage, exactly!” – and Miss Barrace, who hadn’t before heard this
term applied, recognized its bearing with a clap of her gemmed hands. (Ambassadors
190)
At first Strether is surprised – and dismayed – to learn that Waymarsh admires Barrace to such
an extent that he wants to buy her gifts. Thinking that this can’t be possible, he then surmises
that Waymarsh is paying for prostitutes as he cruises with Barrace: they are operating according
to the “sacred rage” – taking advantage of sexual opportunities. When in Chester and the
relationship between Strether and Waymarsh was most intimate, the two arrived at the term
“sacred rage” to convey their mutual agreement that they would each occasionally have sex
outside of their relationship when the spirit moved them. A polyamorous relationship such as
this is not uncommon in homosexual culture. Waymarsh’s spirit of adventure, and his generosity
in footing the bill for excursions with Barrace, inspire Strether’s “sense of admiration” for his
friend. Miss Barrace does not really know what the “sacred rage” refers to, but plays along as if
she does.
Barrace continues, proudly reporting that she stops Waymarsh from spending too much money:
“‘I do prevent him all the same – and if you saw what he sometimes selects – from buying. I
save him hundreds and hundreds. ‘I only take flowers.’”
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“Flowers?” Strether echoed again with a rueful reflexion. How many nosegays
had her present converser sent?
“Innocent flowers,” she pursued, “as much as he likes. And he sends me
splendours; he knows all the best places – he has found them for himself; he’s
wonderful.”
“He hasn’t told them to me,” her friend smiled; “he has a life of his own.”
(Ambassadors 190)
This is a smile of chagrin, not happiness. The romantic triangle is clearly seen here. Similar to
the husband in a French novel, Strether is distressed to discover that while enjoying the pleasures
of a paramour, his “wife” pursues a romantic interest in his absence. Waymarsh, like the
aggrieved wife, proves to have “a life of his own.” This upsets Strether, as shown by his
fractured response. He chastises himself, recognizing that he had never thought to proffer
flowers to his dear friend (how many nosegays had he sent?). Yet he is jealous (never has
Waymarsh spoken to him about flowers). “But Strether had swung back to the consciousness
that for himself after all it never would have done” (190): it’s his own fault for having abandoned
Waymarsh in pursuit of Bilham.
After a moment of consideration, our wishy-washy protagonist is pleased “to feel how
much his friend was in the real tradition. Yet he had his conclusion. “‘What a rage it is!’ He
had worked it out. ‘It’s an opposition’” (Ambassadors 191). Similar to the spirit of competition
that the two men shared when cruising in Chester, Strether thinks that Waymarsh has taken up
with Barrace in “opposition” – showing his comrade that he, too, has found another lover.
Strether assumes that Waymarsh is just having a fling and acknowledges the important function
of the “rage”: he doesn’t have to worry that Waymarsh is jealous or angry. Strether then tries to
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shore up the sense that his relationship with Waymarsh continues as usual, telling Barrace:
“‘Well, he thinks, you know, that I’ve a life of my own. And I haven’t!”” He hopes to convey
that Waymarsh has no reason to be jealous: Strether does not have a life on his own with Bilham.
Barrace responds:
“You haven’t?” She showed doubt, and her laugh confirmed it. “Oh, oh, oh!”
“No – not for myself. I seem to have a life only for other people.”
“Ah for them and with them! Just now for instance with – ”
“Well, with whom?” he asked before she had had time to say.
His tone had the effect of making her hesitate and even, as he guessed, speak with
a difference. “Say with Miss Gostrey. What do you do for her?
It really made him wonder. “Nothing at all!” (191)
That Strether lives primarily for other people is true at this point in the novel. He serves as Mrs.
Newsome’s ambassador (in theory); he allows Chad stay in Paris, for the time being; he has
facilitated Waymarsh’s experience of “Europe.” He has encouraged Bilham to think carefully
about his life and make choices that will serve him best; to Strether’s disappointment, Bilham
has chosen to spend time apart. When Barrace counters by saying that Strether has been living
“for them and with them” – going on with the intent of giving an example – Strether cuts her off
in anxious excitement, hoping to hear the name “Bilham.” The urgency of his voice confuses
her, however, and she changes the subject to Gostrey – for whom, of late, Strether has done
nothing at all.
The party at Malesherbes continues. Madame de Vionnet interrupts the conversation
between Strether and Barrace, asking the latter to go chat up Giovanni. She and Strether then
discuss a business matter involving books; the two have a disagreement, leaving Strether with
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the feeling that he has “been tripped up and had a fall” (Ambassadors 198). On composing
himself, Strether’s eyes meet those of another:
He recognized them at the same moment as those of little Bilham, who had apparently
drawn near on purpose to speak to him, and little Bilham wasn’t, in the conditions, the
person to whom his heart would be most closed. They were seated together a minute
later at the angle of the room obliquely opposite the corner in which Gloriani was still
engaged with Jeanne de Vionnet, to whom at first and in silence their attention had been
benevolently given. (196)
The timing of Bilham’s arrival is favorable. Having just had two uncomfortable conversations,
Strether is open to a possible respite. He and Bilham repair to a divan in the corner, but simply
sit – having no ready words for each other. They train their attention across the room, not out of
benevolence for Jeanne and Gloriani but for each other – forestalling a mutual gaze that might
cause or reveal tension. Strether breaks the ice by bringing up the subject of their view:
“I can’t see for my life … how a young fellow of any spirit – such a one as you for
instance – can be admitted to the sight of that young lady without being hard hit. Why
don’t you go in, little Bilham?” He remembered the tone into which he had been
betrayed on the garden-bench at the sculptor’s reception, and this might make up for that
being much more the right sort of thing to say to a young man worthy of any advice at all.
“There would be some reason.” (196-7)
The curious semantics of “the tone into which he had been betrayed” demands a close reading of
this phrase, particularly as it makes “he” an ambiguous reference. Bilham felt “betrayed” after
being subjected to Strether’s “Live!” speech: the “tone” and topic treacherously denied the
intimacy the two had just shared. The strident “tone” Strether fell into did not do justice to the
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loving concern that triggered the speech and also divulged his doubts and fears. Strether tries to
“make up for that tone” by advising Bilham to marry Jeanne de Vionnet, suggesting that the
young man is worthy of her. There is “some reason” for this suggestion in that it creates the
opportunity to talk about money. It also allows Strether to ascertain Bilham’s thoughts on
marriage.
Bilham responds instantly, having learned not to let Strether go too far in giving advice
before stopping him with questions:
“Some reason for what?”
“Why for hanging on here.”
“To offer my hand and fortune to Mademoiselle de Vionnet?” (Ambassadors 197)
Strether points out that she is lovely and sweet, yet Bilham counters with his lowly status:
“I’m unfortunately but a small farthing candle. What chance in such a field for a poor
little painter-man?”
“Oh you’re good enough,” Strether threw out.
“Certainly I’m good enough. We’re good enough, I consider, nous autres, for
anything. But she’s too good. That’s the difference.” (197)
In saying that he does not have enough money to be a match for Jeanne de Vionnet, Bilham
echoes Strether’s concern about his own pecuniary state. When Strether contends that the little
painter man is “good enough,” Bilham echoes the phrase in making his case: yes, he is good
enough – good enough for Strether, and the older man is worthy of him. Together they can do
anything. Bilham punctuates this bond with the phrase “nous autres.” “Nous” is the personal
form of “we” in French; “autres” is the plural form of “autre,” meaning “other” or “different.”
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The two men share the trait of being Others. There is an inflection of intimacy in using “nous
autres,” reinforcing Bilham’s conviction that the two men should be together.
Turning the subject back to Jeanne de Vionnet, Bilham explains an additional reason for
not wanting to marry her: “‘she’s too good.’” While this seems to contradict his previous
contention of self-worth, Bilham is not only inferring that Mademoiselle is too rich or high-born.
Earlier he describes her as “‘immense. I mean she’s the real thing’” (Ambassadors 197).
“Immense” is a nineteenth-century slang term: “Superlatively good, fine, splendid, etc.” (OED).
Bilham respects Jeanne as person; she is a fine, kind young woman whose life he would not want
to limit by being gay. Bilham argues: “‘She and her mother. And she had a father too, who,
whatever else he may be, certainly can’t be indifferent to the possibilities she represents’” (197).
Although Monsieur and Madame de Vionnet are estranged, as members of the landed aristocracy
they are not “indifferent” to the prospect of heirs. Monsieur de Vionnet has proposed “half a
dozen” possible suitors for their daughter, each of which Madame de Vionnet finds “more
impossible than the other” (296). The necessity that Jeanne de Vionnet bear children makes her
an improper choice even as a beard. Bilham points out: “‘There’s the difference’” (197).
This is all music to Strether’s ears. Lounging on the divan “with a vague smile –
Strether, enjoying the whole occasion as with dormant pulses at last awake and in spite of new
material thrust upon him, thought over his companion’s words” (Ambassadors 197). The “new
material” pressed upon him is Bilham’s sentiment of “nous autres”: Bilham does want to be with
him. This awakens Strether’s heart (“pulses”), which was temporarily shuttered for fear that he
had lost the young man. The most enjoyable aspect of the occasion is learning that Bilham cares
for him, yet Strether is also pleased by the young man’s concern for Jeanne de Vionnet’s wellbeing and his lack of mercenary interests.
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“Well, it’s very strange!” Strether presently remarked with a sighing sense of
fullness.
“Very strange indeed. That’s just the beauty of it. Isn’t it very much the kind of
beauty you had in mind,” little Bilham went on, “when you were so wonderful and so
inspiring to me the other day? Didn’t you adjure me, in accents I shall never forget, to
see, while I’ve a chance, everything I can? – and really to see, for it must have been that
only you meant. Well, you did me no end of good, and I’m doing my best. I do make it
out a situation.” (198)
Bilham has had time to ponder Strether’s speech in Gloriani’s garden. Strether had hammered
home the disparity in their ages, the difference in their life experiences, and how these affect
each man’s present perspective. These differences – the complementary nature of a relationship
between an older and younger man – are what Bilham finds so beautiful: “it must have been that
only you meant.” Bilham can learn from Strether’s experiences, allowing him to see – “and
really to see” – how to avoid the pitfalls and negotiate the challenges of homosexual life.
Knowing this does him “no end of good.” In turn, he will share his vigor and happy sense of
self, teaching Strether how to live according to personal principles and goals instead of
kowtowing to social ideologies. They will teach each other how to “Live!” Bilham may have
discussed Strether’s disquieting soliloquy with Chad, learning in the process the ambassador’s
arrangement with Mrs. Newsome. Bilham now better understands the conflicts that his lover
struggles with and will try to make a few personal changes accordingly: “I’m doing my best.”
He sees “a situation” that will enable the two men to be together.
After a moment of thought, Strether agrees: “‘So do I!’” – although the reader has no idea
what the men are thinking nor whether they envision the same plan (Ambassadors 198). The
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next minute Strether poses “an inconsequent question. ‘How comes Chad so mixed up (sic),
anyway?’”
“Ah, ah, ah! – and little Bilham fell back on his cushions.
It reminded our friend of Miss Barrace, and he felt again the brush of his sense of
moving in a maze of mystic closed allusions. (Ambassadors 198)
Strether feels the “brush” of youth, and by extension, its wings of sexual invigoration. Intrigued
that the fulfillment of his dream once again seems possible, he senses a solution lurking
somewhere in a closed maze of relationships. This is foreshadowing: someone in their social
network is the answer.
Strether is in love: “daylight was long now and Paris more than ever penetrating. The
scent of flowers was in the streets, he had the whiff of violets perpetually in his nose; and he had
attached himself to sounds and suggestion, vibrations of the air, human and dramatic”
(Ambassadors 220). Strether’s happiness has not been lost on Waymarsh. The two live at the
same hotel, make a point of dining together regularly, and Strether is consistently in a mood
more ebullient than that displayed at the dinner table after first meeting the little painter man –
news of whom Waymarsh so quickly tired of that he said: “‘Look here, Strether. Quit this’”
(76).
Oblivious to Waymarsh’s thoughts, and under the impression (per his recent conversation
with Barrace) that his comrade has a life of his own and their relationship is on an even keel,
Strether is floored on receiving a telegram from Mrs. Newsome – “‘Come back by the first
ship’” (Ambassadors 231). He immediately suspects Waymarsh’s hand in this. Contrary to
Strether’s presumptions, Waymarsh is hideously jealous of Bilham for having stolen Strether’s
affections. Previously concerned that Mrs. Newsome would take Strether away from him by
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providing the cover of marriage, he has pulled his comrade up by communicating with Woollett.
The content and frequency of Waymarsh’s letters – and to whom they have been addressed (Mrs.
Newsome or Sarah Pocock) – are untold. However, Waymarsh now signals his treachery. On
seeing Strether in the hotel lobby with a perturbed look on his face and a crumpled telegram in
his fist, he hides in “the salon de lecture without addressing him. But the pilgrim from Milrose
permitted himself still to observe the scene from behind the clear glass plate of that retreat”
(221). Waymarsh peers out from behind his ineffective refuge: “It was on this that their eye met
– met for a moment during which neither moved.” Strether finally stands, puts the telegram in
his pocket, and the two go to dinner. Nothing is said about the matter on either side: “even less
than usual was on this occasion said between them, so that it was almost as if each had been
waiting for something from the other. … Yet it befell, none the less, that he closed the door to
confidence when his companion finally asked him if there were anything particular the matter
with him. ‘Nothing ... more than usual’” (222).
Ice forms over the relationship: “with the drop of discussion they were solemnly sadly
superficial” (Ambassadors 244). As Strether’s regard for Waymarsh understandably lessens, a
new independence fills the void: “he had in truth at no moment of his stay been so free to go and
come. The early summer brushed the picture over and blurred everything but the near; it made a
vast warm fragrant medium in which the elements floated together on the best of terms, in which
rewards were immediate and reckoning postponed.” The decadent atmosphere induces Strether
to do “what he hadn’t before; he took two or three times whole days off – irrespective of others
… two or three taken with little Bilham” (245). They go to Chartres, Fontainebleau, and Rouen
– the latter “with a little handbag and inordinately spent the night.”
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The morning after Strether received the telegram, Chad arrives at his hotel room, notices
the telegram lying on the window sill, and proceeds to read it: “‘Ah,’ said Chad, ‘I must have
had the instinct of it. All the more reason then that we should start straight off’” (Ambassadors
224). Strether, however, does not want to head straight off; he is now deeply involved with
Bilham. If Chad had been ready to leave a month ago, one of Strether’s conflicts would have
been resolved; but he is now experiencing happiness, “‘enough to last me for the rest of my
days’” (229). Chad repeatedly states his willingness, if not intention, to go home to see his
mother – which Strether contests. At the end of his rope, Strether forces Chad to “‘see then all
the more what you owe me.’”
“Well, if I do see, how can I pay?”
“By not deserting me. By standing by me.”
“Oh I say – !” But Chad, as they went downstairs, clapped a firm hand, in the
manner of a pledge, upon his shoulder. (230)
Chad understands that Strether wants to stay in Paris because of Little Bilham. He also
recognizes that he cannot arrive in Woollett ahead of Strether without the ambassador’s activities
and intentions being subjected to close scrutiny by his mother. Chad agrees to stay, but warns of
the inevitable arrival of the Pococks: “‘Why if she sends out the Pococks it will be that she
doesn’t trust you, and if she doesn’t trust you, that bears upon – well you know what’” (230).
Chad wants to make sure that Strether recognizes the possible sacrifice he makes in not fulfilling
his charge as ambassador: security, both financial and social.
Strether then seeks counsel from Miss Gostrey – whom he has seen little of while in Paris
– at her apartment in Quartier Marboeuf. He tells her of the telegram, his suspicion of
Waymarsh’s hand in it, and the fact that the two have not discussed it. Gostrey thinks on this:
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“Because you’re too disgusted? You can’t trust yourself?”
He settled his glasses on his nose. “Do I look in a great rage?”
“You look divine!” (Ambassadors 232).
Surprised that Strether is not angry, Gostrey tells him that he is wonderful. Strether responds
“with an adequate spirit, a complete admission. ‘It’s quite true. I’m extremely wonderful just
now. I dare say in fact I’m quite fantastic, and I shouldn’t be at all surprised if I were mad.’” He
explains to Gostrey that, unfortunately, his being madly in love with Bilham “‘has upset
Waymarsh. He can bear it – the way I strike him as going – no longer. That’s only the climax of
his original feeling. He wants me to quit; and he must have written to Woollett that I’m in peril
of perdition’” (232). On hearing the content of the telegram from Mrs. Newsome, Gostrey “just
escaped changing colour. Reflexion arrived but in time and established a provisional serenity. It
was perhaps exactly this that enabled her to say with duplicity: ‘And you’re going – ?’” (231).
Gostrey flushes with excitement: she wants Strether to return to America and continue her
mission of re-peopling the nation with men who have gained the gay savoir faire of the
Continent. Her duplicity lies in suppressing her hope, asking as if this is only a possibility: she
does not want to force her agenda as “an agent for repatriation” (24). Gostrey is fond of Strether,
but he now stands before her as one of her most successful clients. The means and methods by
which she has brought him out of the closet and into a fulfilling relationship with another man
have worked:
“I’ve only to look at you to see. It was my calculation, and I’m justified. You’re not
where you were. And the thing,’ she smiled, ‘was for me not to be there either. You can
go of yourself.”
“Oh but I feel to-day,” he comfortably declared, “that I shall want you yet.”
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She took him all in again. “Well, I promise you not again to leave you, but it will
only be to follow you. You’ve got your momentum and can toddle alone.”
He intelligently accepted it. “Yes – I suppose I can toddle.” (231-2)
The verb “toddle” is a colloquialism, meaning: “to saunter, stroll. Hence: to proceed in a
leisurely or unhurried manner” (OED). James uses it as an allusion to cruising – the skill
Strether honed with Gostrey’s help. Her professional “calculation[s]” are indirectly responsible
for his present happiness, thus she feels “justified” in wanting him to return to America, share
what he has learned in Europe, and help build a homosexual community at home. Strether states
that he will still need her; however, this is a “comfortable declaration” of fondness, not a real
expression of concern for his future. He humbly agrees that he can fend for himself. Gostrey
will follow him to America – eventually – as her tour-guide services require frequent trips across
the Atlantic. Her goal (“the thing”) has always been to foster his independence – for her “not to
be there” – after training a “brother in arms” (31) who can help forward the cause.
Thus Gostrey is nonplussed when Strether tells her that he does not intend to leave: “‘I
don’t budge’” (Ambassadors 233). Never getting a clear answer as to why Strether wants to
stay, Gostrey is shocked to learn that he has kept Chad from departing. Her response is less
measured:
“But you can’t,” his companion suggested, “stay here always. I wish you could.”
“By no means. Still, I want to see him a little further. He’s not in the least the
case I supposed; he’s quite another case. And it’s as such that he interests me.” It was
almost as if for his own intelligence that, deliberate and lucid, our friend thus expressed
the matter. “I don’t want to give him up.” (234)
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Strether is purposely vague as to who “interests” him. Although they are talking about Chad, it
is Bilham whom he doesn’t want to give up. Gostrey surmises that Bilham is the subject; she
had previously expressed concerns to Strether that the young man might be a prostitute and thus
recognizes his motivation in eagerly reporting that this is not the “case”:
Miss Gostrey had a smile of the most genial criticism. “So your idea is – more or
less – to stay out of curiosity?”
“Call it what you like! I don’t care what it’s called – ”
“So long as you do stay? Certainly not then. I call it, all the same, immense fun,”
Maria Gostrey declared; “and to see you work it out will be one of the sensations of my
life. It is clear you can toddle alone!”
He received this tribute without elation. “I shan’t be alone when the Pococks
have come.”
Her eyebrows went up. “The Pococks are coming?” (234-5).
Gostrey’s well played line wittily distracts readers from Other Plot. The present concern is not
the Pococks: why won’t Strether be alone? Who will he be with? Gostrey knows that it is
Bilham and she is not happy about the fact. She admires Bilham and considers him to be “the
best” of all the Americans she has seen in Paris; she feels “‘he’s so exactly right as he is’” (91,
92). However, Gostrey does not want Strether to stay in Paris because of him. Her protégé
should return to America to act as a living advertisement for her business. When asked if he is
staying out of “curiosity,” Strether retorts as a man in love – essentially saying “I’m staying and I
don’t care what people think!” Gostrey replies what “fun” it will be to see what happens,
sarcastically adding that this will be the “sensation” of her life. Wanting to be honest with his
mentor, Strether approaches the subject again: “‘But the difficulty as to that is that if I do go
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home – ’” (236). The subject dropped “without sounding another name – to which however their
present momentary silence was full of a conscious reference” (236). Bilham is the elephant in
the room.
Waymarsh, meanwhile, is a massive presence in the corner of Miss Barrace’s salon,
where he spends much of his time avoiding Strether. “Sitting Bull” suspects that Strether
recognizes his culpability in bringing out the Pococks, but has “stiffened up his sensibility to
neglect” (Ambassadors 244). Strether attempts to grapple with Waymarsh through the haze of
benevolence that seems to have descended upon him as a result of being in love. He “amusedly”
sees the “depth of good conscience out of which the dear man’s impertinence had originally
sprung. He was patient with the dear man now and delighted to observe how unmistakably he
had put on flesh; he felt his own holiday so successfully large and free that he was full of
allowances and charities” (243). Believing that Waymarsh has acted out of care and concern for
his old friend – “with the best conscience” – Strether projects a positive resolution:
“He’ll recognize that he’s fully responsible, and will consider that he has been highly
successful; so that any discussion we may have will bring us quite together again – bridge
the dark stream that has kept us so thoroughly apart. We shall have at last, in the
consequences of his act, something we can definitely talk about.” (232)
Yet Strether simultaneously has “a dread of wincing a little painfully at what [the conversation]
might invidiously demonstrate” (244). This is one of the few occasions on which our
protagonist’s instincts are correct. Waymarsh has no intention of squaring things with his
companion – at least not until he sees what transpires after the Pococks arrive. If he plays his
hand right, Sarah will force Strether to give up either Little Bilham or Mrs. Newsome.
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Waymarsh hopes that, with luck, his machinations will dispose of both adversaries at once,
leaving Strether with no option other than to return to his comrade for comfort and support.
The Pococks arrive in Paris, having been transported there from the dock at Le Havre.
Picking up Strether at his hotel in order to meet them at the train station, Chad suggests that
Waymarsh come along. Strether finally speaks to his friend, wanting “to feel right” about their
relationship – but “at the best, for the time,” only feeling vague:
“I shall look to you, you know, immensely,” our friend had said, “to help me with them,”
and he had been quite conscious of the effect of the remark, and of others of the same
sort, on his comrade’s sombre sensibility. He had insisted on the fact that Waymarsh
would quite like Mrs. Pocock – one could be certain he would: he would be with her
about everything, and she would also be with him, and Miss Barrace’s nose, in short,
would find itself out of joint. (Ambassadors 247-8)
Waymarsh’s treachery is not acknowledged but alluded to by Strether’s insistence that his friend
help him with the arriving party. Strether plays up Mrs. Pocock’s likeability in order to suggest
where help is most needed. He expects Waymarsh to entertain Sarah Pocock to such an extent
that Miss Barrace will be miffed about his neglect.
Waymarsh complies out of guilt but also because he still loves Strether. His feelings are
soon revealed. At the top of Book Eighth, Chapter III, Strether makes an early call on Mrs.
Pocock at her hotel the morning after her arrival. Waymarsh is already on duty, his “broad high
back” easily recognizable as he looks out the window “in marked detachment … unaffected by
Strether’s entrance” (Ambassadors 268). Madame de Vionnet also preempts Strether, much to
his chagrin. The Comtesse is not well received, as Strether gathers from “something fairly hectic
in Sarah’s face.” In an effort to ingratiate herself with Mrs. Pocock, Madame de Vionnet praises
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her new-found American friends. The humor in the scene depends on the fact that Madame de
Vionnet knows that Strether and Waymarsh are gay and former lovers and have spent a
considerable amount of time with transvestites while in Europe – facts Sarah Pocock is unaware
of. The conversational four-ringed circus that ensues is brilliantly contrived and begs to be
staged; a summary cannot do it justice. However, within the confusion Strether and Waymarsh
have a serious discussion regarding their relationship which we will examine due to the bearing
it has on the trajectory of the Other Plot.
At one point in the conversation, Madame de Vionnet attempts to show Mrs. Pocock how
attentive the ambassador has been to his duty by addressing Strether in regard to Chad:
“You’ve renewed acquaintance with your friend – you’ve learned to know him again.”
She spoke with such cheerful helpfulness that they might, in a common cause, have been
calling together and pledged to mutual aid.
Waymarsh, at this as if he had been in question, straight-way turned from the
window. “Oh yes, Countess – he has renewed acquaintance with me, and he has, I guess,
learnt something about me, though I don’t know how much he has liked it. It’s for
Strether himself to say whether he has felt it justifies his course.”
“Oh but you,” said the Countess gaily, “are not in the least what he came out for –
is he really, Strether? – and I hadn’t you at all in my mind. I was thinking of Mr.
Newsome ….” (Ambassadors 271-2)
Waymarsh takes advantage of the opportunity to speak to Strether by speaking about him,
surmising that his companion has learned over the course of their trip (the “renewed
acquaintance”) the treachery he is capable of when jealous. Waymarsh feels justified in his
course of action because he has been jilted for Bilham. Madame de Vionnet wields a proverbial
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slap in the face when saying that it is not he – Waymarsh – whom Strether has come out to see.
She inadvertently substantiates what Waymarsh feared when first arriving in Chester – that
Strether has come to Europe for reasons other than spending time with him.
The Comtesse then teasingly chides Strether as to how infrequently he visits her,
expressing to Mrs. Pocock her hope that she will share this gentleman with her while she is in
town. Sarah responds:
“Mr. Strether and I are very old friends … but the privilege of his society isn’t a thing I
shall quarrel about with any one.”
“And yet, dear Sarah,” [Strether] freely broke in, “I feel, when I hear you say that,
that you don’t quite do justice to the important truth of the extent to which – as you’re
also mine – I’m your natural due. I should like much better,” he laughed, “to see you
fight for me.”
She met him, Mrs. Pocock, on this, with an arrest of speech – with a certain
breathlessness, as he immediately fancied, on the score of a freedom for which she wasn’t
quite prepared. (Ambassadors 274-5)
Waymarsh recognizes that he is being addressed through this guise, as Strether often refers to his
comrade as “dear.” Strether acknowledges his comrade’s jealousy, but counters with “the
important truth” that Waymarsh has never expressed his feelings for him, which – if he is loved –
is his “natural due.” Barrace has been lavished with flowers! Strether suggests that, if
Waymarsh really wants his love, he will have to fight for it.
Madame de Vionnet sees the situation careening into dangerous territory and brings up
the topic of Miss Gostrey (a potentially disastrous move), bemoaning the fact that Strether keeps
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Miss Gostrey to himself, only giving others the “‘crumbs of the feast’” (Ambassadors 276).
Waymarsh rises to the occasion and proves his love by attempting to counter:
“Well, Countess, I’ve had some of the crumbs,” … covering her with his large
look…. “I can post you about the lady, Mrs. Pocock, so far as you may care to hear. I’ve
seen her quite a number of times, and I was practically present when they made
acquaintance. I’ve kept my eye on her right along, but I don’t know as there’s any real
harm in her.… She knows her way round Europe. Above all there’s no doubt she does
love Strether.” (276)
Waymarsh previously proved his love by letting Gostrey join their party despite his desire to be
alone with his comrade: Strether has never been aware of this. Waymarsh concedes that there is
no “real harm in her,” but saying this infers the possibility that there could be. Stating that Miss
Gostrey is in love with Strether, however, calls Waymarsh’s intentions into question. He knows
that the two share nothing more than a close friendship born out of a business deal. He blurts out
Gostrey’s supposed love for two possible purposes. Waymarsh wants to give Sarah the idea that
Strether has found another woman in order to jeopardize his marriage to Mrs. Newsome. He also
professes his own love for Strether, maintaining a safe distance by projecting his feelings on
Gostrey.
The Comtesse immediately chimes in: “‘Ah but we all do that – we all love Strether: it
isn’t a merit!’” – again discounting Waymarsh’s relationship with Strether (Ambassadors 276).
Mrs. Pocock doesn’t know what to think. Strether turns “awkwardly, responsibly red” and feels
uncomfortable almost to the point of being in pain:
[H]e offered up his redness to Waymarsh, who, strangely enough, seemed now to be
looking at him with a certain explanatory yearning. Something deep – something built on
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their old relation – passed, in this complexity, between them; he got the side-wind of a
loyalty that stood behind all actual queer questions. (277)
Strether’s predicament is beautifully put here; in “offer[ing] up his redness,” our protagonist
bares his soul by the expression on his face, which Waymarsh yearningly takes up. Strether is
embarrassed by the discussion of Gostrey – and even more so by his comrade’s profession of
love. Illustrating the “actual queer questions” that must be addressed by a gay couple –
questions between themselves as well as those posed by society – is the purpose of the Other
Plot. How do two men at this time navigate the complexities of homosexual life in tandem?
Waymarsh resents the fact that Gostrey indirectly took Strether from him by forcing herself into
the party at Chester and encouraging the ambassador to expand his horizons. In turn, he attempts
to inspire jealousy on Strether’s part by divulging his own romantic escapades:
Waymarsh’s dry bare humour – as it gave itself to be taken – gloomed out to demand
justice. “Well, if you talk of Miss Barrace I’ve my chance too,” it appeared stiffy to nod
and it granted that it was giving him away, but struggled to add that it did so only to save
him. The sombre glow stared it at him till it fairly sounded out “to save you, poor old
man, to save you; to save you in spite of yourself.” (277)
Returning to the spirit of competition the two men share, Waymarsh asserts that he, too, has
dallied with a transvestite who has abetted his chances with other men. As his concession trails
off, we get the sense that it would continue as follows: “but you didn’t see me throwing you over
for some young thing!” However, Waymarsh expresses far more in his “sombre glow.” It
conveys his desire to “save” Strether from the constrictions he would return to. Strether reads in
this stare Waymarsh’s desperation and devotion: “to save … to save … to save…” his friend
from the grievous mistake of marrying Mrs. Newsome.
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Strether shares such a deep connection with his dear comrade that he is able to read his
face. “Yet it was somehow just this communication that showed him to himself as more than
ever lost. Still another result of it was to put before him as never yet that between his comrade
and the interest represented by Sarah there was already a basis” (Ambassadors 277). Strether is
lost. The power to choose his own destiny – to decide for himself whether to marry Mrs.
Newsome – seems to have fallen into the hands of other people.
Beyond all question now, yes: Waymarsh had been in occult relation with Mrs. Newsome
– out, out it all came in the very effort of his face. “Yes, you’re feeling my hand” – he as
good as proclaimed it: ‘but only because this at least I shall have got out of the damned
Old World: that I shall have picked up the pieces into which it has caused you to
crumble.” (277)
Waymarsh meets the challenge that Strether set out for him, fighting for his love while revealing
the unscrupulous grounds on which he is willing to do so. While the comrades had originally
planned to meet in Europe in order to dispel their mutual prostration, Waymarsh now contends
that the only thing he has gotten from the Old World is the opportunity to wield power over
Strether, ostensibly in his best interests.
This almost occult communication clears the air for Strether: “Our friend understood and
approved; he had the sense that they would wouldn’t otherwise speak of it. This would be all,
and it would mark in himself a kind of intelligent generosity” (Ambassadors 277). Strether
decides to end his relationship with Waymarsh: “This would be all.” Having previously turned
his redness to his comrade, Strether now shutters himself: he would show “no more than he
absolutely had to” (277). He demonstrates “intelligent generosity,” however, by accepting the
hand that Waymarsh has dealt him and playing it to his own advantage. Returning the
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conversation to Miss Gostrey, Strether addresses Sarah with affected gaiety: “‘Oh it’s as true as
they please! – There’s no Miss Gostrey for any one but me – not the least little peep. I keep her
to myself’” (277-8). Strether has decided not to not marry Mrs. Newsome. If Sarah tells her
mother that there is more to the relationship with Miss Gostrey than Strether’s letters have
indicated, so be it. Now potentially freed from his obligation to Mrs. Newsome, Strether can
turn his full attention to Little Bilham and search for a situation that will provide the means by
which they can be together. Waymarsh’s plan has backfired.
A week passes without further contact between Strether and Sarah Pocock. The former
decides to break the chill and stops by for a visit (IX, iii). A servant ushers Strether into the
parlor of Mrs. Pocock’s hotel room, even though no one appears to be home. He soon sees
Mamie standing on the balcony – her back turned to him, leaning over the balustrade and
watching the activity on the street. He is surprised to find the girl “alone at home, Mamie
passing her time in her own innocent way, Mamie in short rather shabbily used, but Mamie
absorbed interested and interesting” (Ambassadors 309). Instead of letting his presence be
known, Strether steps back into the room “for several minutes, quite as with something new to
think of.” Something about her arrests him; her “solitary possession” touches him “to a point not
to have been reckoned beforehand, something that softly but quite pressingly spoke to him, and
that spoke the more each time he paused again at the edge of the balcony and saw her still
unaware.” He finds it odd that she is not out with the others on such a fine day; it then occurs to
him that Mamie “might in fact have extemporized, under the charm of the Rue de Rivoli, a little
makeshift Paris of wonder and fancy” (309). It appears she wants some time on her own. But
for what purpose?
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When Strether first saw Mamie at the train station, he was impressed by her “high and
established adequacy as a pretty girl” (Ambassadors 257). He then wondered, however, “if
Mamie were as pretty as Woollett published her; as to which issue seeing her now again was to
be so swept away by Woollett’s opinion that this consequence really let loose for imagination an
avalanche of others.” It appears that she, too, is an ambassador: “a Woollett represented by a
Mamie. This was the sort of truth the place would feel; it would send her forth in confidence; it
would point to her with triumph; it would take its stand on her with assurance; it would be
conscious of no requirement she didn’t meet, of no question she couldn’t answer” (257). The
family is confident that Mamie – as Woollett incarnate – will entice Chad to marry her and come
home to do so. Strether knows Chad to be a genial young man and imagines that he will be
attentive in taking her around the city. “She would look extraordinarily like his young wife – the
wife of a honeymoon, should he go about with her; but that was his own affair – or perhaps it
was hers; it was at any rate something she couldn’t help” (258). While watching Mamie prepare
to descend from the train platform, Strether remembered seeing Chad walk up with Jeanne de
Vionnet in Gloriani’s garden. A “conviction” then “flickered up” in Strether’s mind – “not a bit
the less for his disliking to think of it”: the Pococks have charged Mamie with the responsibility
of obstructing an entanglement with Jeanne de Vionnet (or any other woman with whom Chad
may be dallying). The importance of the role she plays for the family bestows “something
indescribable in Mamie, something at all event straightway lent her by [Strether’s] own mind,
something that gave her value, gave her intensity and purpose, as the symbol of an opposition”
(258). From the moment Mamie shook out her skirts on the platform, touched up the “immense”
bows of her hat, and settled her travelling bag on her shoulder, “little Jeanne was opposed.”
Gostrey had previously prophesized the Pococks’ strategy on first hearing of their impending
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arrival: “‘It’s Mamie – so far as I’ve had it from you – who’ll be their great card…. I think I’m
sorry for her’” (235). Strether confessed concern for her as well, but concluded: “‘It can’t be
helped…. The only way for her not to come is for me to go home’” (235). However, Strether
now sees the situation differently: “Mamie in short rather shabbily used” (309).
Continuing to observe Mamie the balcony, Strether begins to sense a flaw in the Pococks’
scheme. “Our friend in any case now recognized – and it was as if at the recognition Mrs.
Newsome’s fixed intensity had suddenly, with a deep audible gasp, grown thin and vague – that
day after day he had been conscious in respect to his young lady of something odd and
ambiguous, yet something into which he could at last read a meaning” (Ambassadors 309).
Mamie is “ambiguous”: “Admitting more than one interpretation, or explanation; of double
meaning. Of doubtful position or classification, as partaking of two characters or being on the
boundary line between” (OED). The “meaning” Strether interprets in her odd ambiguity
suggests “the possibility even of some relation as yet unacknowledged” (Ambassadors 309-10):
they both share the oddity of a double consciousness. Mamie is a lesbian.
James characterizes Mamie in terms of opposites, hinting at her homosexuality in the
same way he does with Strether and Gostrey. Strether remembers her as a child who was “as
first very forward, as then very backward” (Ambassadors 310). Although she is “a young lady of
twenty-two,” she has the “rather flat little voice … of a girl of fifteen” (257, 312). Still, she is
“robust and conveniently tall; just a trifle too bloodlessly fair” (257). Paleness is a stereotypical
sign of homosexuality; being tall and robust is “convenient” if one wants to appear masculine.
She is “pretty” yet simultaneously “bland” (310, 311). Her face is imbalanced, like Gostrey’s,
due to the disproportionate size of her nose; while Gostrey’s is too large, Mamie has a “very
small, too small, nose” (257). Strether describes her as “charming … in spite of the fact that if
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he hadn’t found her so he would have found her something he should have been in peril of
expressing as ‘funny’” (311). James puts “funny” in quotation marks in order to suggest a
denotation other than humorous: “Curious, queer, odd, strange. colloq.” (OED). “Funny” is used
here in the same way “queer” is used earlier in the novel: to suggest homosexuality. Despite
being “charming” and “funny,” Mamie intimates something “as might make her something of a
bore toward middle age” (311). Although a young woman, she has “a mature manner of bending
a little” and appears to be “almost more than matronly” (311, 312).
Her manner of dress contributes to this: “She was dressed, if we might so far
discriminate, less as a young lady than as an old one … the complexities of her hair missed
moreover also the looseness of youth” (Ambassadors 311). Her clothes are “voluminous, too
voluminous” (312). According to Leslie Choquette, the “prescribed costume” of lesbians,
regardless of class, “consisted of short, curly hair worn with a stiff collar, man’s jacket, wool
frock coat, and dress of ‘androgyne’ cut” (“Homosexuals” 155). While the description of
Mamie’s hair is too vague to give us a clear image, her “voluminous” clothing suggests
masculinity: large, bulky in cut and heavy in fabric, designed to mask the female form in
androgyny. She also has a habit of “holding her elbow perhaps a little too much out” (315) – a
masculine tendency engendered by the desire to take up space and appear larger, as opposed to
the diminutive stance ingrained in women to appear smaller and less threatening by keeping their
arms close to the body (with hands folded in the lap).
In case readers are unable to identify Mamie’s same-sex proclivities by her physical
description, James adds a pointed clue. His narrator states: “Mamie saw, herself, everything; but
she knew what she didn’t want, and that it was that had helped her. What didn’t she want? –
there was a pleasure lost for her old friend in not yet knowing, as there would doubtless be a
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thrill in getting a glimpse” (Ambassadors 313-4). James goads his readers here, promising a
“thrill” if we are able to “glimpse” the meaning behind – per the Preface – his “respectable hint”
(xxxiii). The clue is Mamie’s last name: Pocock. Pocock easily sounds like “no cock”: it is a
man’s penis that Mamie doesn’t want. However, as he does with the other homosexual
characters in the alternative plot, James relies on his reader’s familiarity with the cultural milieu
as a means to inform Mamie. Medical journals, police reports, and the popular press paid
considerably less attention to sapphists than their male counterparts. According to Leslie
Choquette, however, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century – “as gender anxiety reigned
and naturalism gained force in art and literature” – lesbians became a popular subject
(“Homosexuals” 152).
In 1875 Paul Alexis, a young disciple of Émile Zola, published a short story titled “The
End of Lucie Pellegrin” about a lesbian prostitute:
This fifty-page story was an enormous critical success, and it did not seem to fade with
time. In 1888 it was adapted for the stage, prompting no less an artist than Vincent Van
Gogh to write, “Lucie Pellegrin is very beautiful. . . . Why should it be forbidden to treat
these subjects, sickly and overexcited sexual organs seeking sensual pleasures and
affections a la Da Vinci?" (Choquette, “Degenerates” 208)
The success of “Pellegrin” might have been due, in part, to Zola’s widely read novel Nana
(1880) – which “confirm[ed] lesbians as legitimate, if distasteful, subjects of the literary gaze”
(Choquette, “Homosexuals” 152). Visual artists – including painters such as Degas, Emile
Bernard, Manet, and Toulouse-Lautrec – also featured lesbian prostitutes in their work.
Choquette argues that the focus on lesbian-as-prostitute belied the true nature of the
subculture; like masculine homosexual society, the lesbian community crossed all classes.
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In 1885, the new society lesbian entered the popular novel, cruising in public places and
crashing the gates of the lesbian demi-monde. Parisian Women: Two Friends by René
Maizeroy featured voracious ladies in wool jackets, starched collars, and straight, tweed
skirts, who pick up women in the theater, the Rat-Mort, arcade boutiques, the flower
market, even the church of the Madeleine. Their assignations are as likely to take place in
the private rooms of expensive restaurants as in the brothels and tables d’hôte of the
Bréda Quarter. (Choquette, “Homosexuals” 155)
According to Choquette, Journalist Jean Lorrain, in a column published in 1887, reported on the
“boundaries of lesbian Paris,” centering the subculture in Montmartre and suburban Asnières and
contending that “along with prostitutes and entertainers, [the subculture] now attracted authentic
ladies from the fashionable quarters, and even stolid bourgeoisies from the city” (155). In the
1890s many images of lesbians, both verbal and visual, were set in the major entertainment
venues of Paris, such as the Folies-Bergère, Moulin de la Galette, and Moulin-Rouge (160).
These music and dance halls attracted bohemians, artists, writers, and wealthy thrill-seekers who
wanted to slum in Montmartre for an evening. While the lesbian subculture in Paris originated in
the table d’hôtes and brasseries of Montmartre, much of the homosexual space throughout the
city was shared by men and women. 17,
Strether has had “experience of remarkable women – destined, it would seem, remarkably
to grow” with the inclusion of Mamie Pocock (Ambassadors 310). Henry James had experience
with “remarkable women” – if we perceive this designation to refer to women who love other
women. His novel The Bostonians (1886) is based on the relationship between his sister Alice
17
For a detailed account of the origins of the lesbian subculture, see the article by Leslie Choquette: “Gay Paree:
The Origins of Lesbian and Gay Commercial Culture in the French Third Republic.” Contemporary French
Civilization, vol. 41, no. 1, April 2015, pp. 1-24.
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and her lover Katherine Loring. The “Boston marriage” – romantic friendships or lifelong
partnerships between women – became increasingly visible in late nineteenth-century New
England and raised a social concern regarding the New Woman: she may be unconventional
beyond her desire for financial independence. James also circulated in the upper realms of
Parisian society at a time when wealthy and aristocratic women flaunted their flamboyant
homosexuality at élite salons and stylish parties: “They created a sensation… Sapphic love
affairs were the fashion of the day” (Talmagne 20). By the fin de siècle, several expatriates
joined the ranks: “Chic lesbians, mostly Americans, made Lesbos-on-Seine their paradise.” The
salon of Winaretta Singer – daughter of the American sewing machine magnate, Isaac Singer –
was one of the homosexual centers of Paris. Having moved to the city after her father’s death in
1875, at age 22 Winaretta married a French prince; her same-sex inclination led to an annulment
five years later. Her friends “advised her to marry Edmond de Polignac, who was also
homosexual, in order to preserve her social position. She was soon receiving the best society and
attracted many writers…. A friend of Henry James, she brought Oscar Wilde and Lord Douglas
to the attention of the Parisian elite” (Talmagne 20). The princesse de Polignac enjoyed what
James would have considered to be a virtuous attachment.
Strether begins to get the sense that marriage between Mamie and Chad would not be a
virtuous attachment. Regardless of her formidable outfit, Mamie seems “handsome and portly
and easy and chatty, soft and sweet and almost disconcertingly reassuring” to Strether
(Ambassadors 311). The paired opposites (“disconcertingly reassuring”) reinforce Mamie’s dual
nature. If “quiet dignity, almost more than matronly, with voluminous, too voluminous clothes,
was the effect she proposed to produce, that was an ideal one could like in her when once one
had got into relation” (312). This makes for a comfortable relationship between a man and a
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woman who have no sexual interest in each other. Mamie does not project an image Strether can
easily connect with Chad walking down the matrimonial aisle. After standing in the parlor of the
hotel room observing her for several minutes, Strether eventually moves toward the balcony
“with a step as hypocritically alert, he was well aware, as if he had just come into the room. She
turned with a start at his voice; preoccupied with him though she might be, she was just a scrap
disappointed. ‘Oh I thought you were Mr. Bilham!’” (310-11) While momentarily taken aback
by this, Strether “presently recovered his inward tone and that many a fresh flower of fancy was
to bloom in the same air” (311). Always happy at the prospect of seeing Bilham, Strether is glad
that he is “somewhat incongruously, expected” as he would like to see these two young people
get to know each other.
Mamie and Strether move from the balcony to the “crimson-and-gold elegance” of the
parlor; with “all others still absent, Strether passed forty minutes that he appraised even at the
time as far, in the whole queer connexion, from in idlest” (Ambassadors 311). He and Mamie
have a strange, Other, homosexual connection. It is not long before the two feel comfortable in
talking. As Mamie exudes openness, Strether gains “the signal growth of confidence” (312) –
which allows him to listen to what his interlocutor has to say instead of projecting his own
perceptions.
She had in fine more to say to him than he had ever dreamed the pretty girl of the
moment could have; and the proof of the circumstance was that, visibly, unmistakably,
she had been able to it to no one else. It was something she could mention neither to her
brother, to her sister-in-law nor to Chad; though he could just imagine that had she still
been at home she might have brought it out, as a supreme tribute to age, authority and
attitude, for Mrs. Newsome. (310)
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Mamie is relieved to have found an empathetic friend to whom she can reveal her
homosexuality. She gives physical (visible) evidence of her unburdening – likely facial
expression of joy and relief, perhaps clasping her hands to her breast. She takes ownership of
her new-found sexual self to such an extent that Strether “imagine[s]” – or perhaps fears – that
were the young lady at home she would reveal it to Mrs. Newsome. The sexually open
atmosphere of Paris has facilitated Mamie’s recognition of her same-sex inclinations.
“Especially sharp in Strether meanwhile was the conviction that his companion really knew, as
we have hinted, where she had come out. It was at a very particular place – only that she would
never tell him; it would be above all what he should have to puzzle for himself” (313).
Publically revealing one’s homosexuality was not referred to as “coming out” until the midtwentieth century; however, this modern usage is only slightly more specific than the manner in
which the term “come out” was used in the late-nineteenth century: “To show oneself publicly
(in some character or fashion); to declare oneself (in some way)” (OED). Strether is convinced
that Mamie declared herself (“had come out”) at a particular place in Paris – a “puzzle” we will
return to later in the plot.
Strether “become[s] aware of the little drama” that exists within the Pocock family when
Mamie reveals her inability to be honest with them (Ambassadors 312). Her willingness to play
the heroine has waned considerably: “Finally placed, in Paris, in immediate presence of the
situation and of the hero of it – by whom Strether was incapable of meaning any one but Chad –
she had accomplished, and really in a manner all unexpected to herself, a change of base; deep
still things had come to pass within her” (312). Mamie realizes that marrying Chad is not a
sacrifice she wants to make. The two continue to talk: “The hour took on for Strether, little by
little, a queer sad sweetness of quality; he had such a revulsion in Mamie’s favour and on behalf
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of her social value as might have come from remorse at some early injustice” ( 313). Strether
recognizes the hardship, if not trauma, of women being married for their “social value”: the
family’s financial and/or political benefit. The pain of this situation is amplified when a woman
who is not sexually attracted to men is made to marry. Strether is revolted by the thought that
Sarah Pocock and her mother are dangling Mamie in front of Chad as a prospective wife as an
enticement to come home.
Our protagonist and the young lady talk of Woollett, which “had virtually the effect of
their keeping the secret more close” (Ambassadors 313). Yet this makes Strether “homesick and
freshly restless; he could really for the time have fancied himself stranded with her on a far
shore, during an ominous calm, in a quaint community of shipwreck. Their little interview was
like a picnic on a coral strand; they passed each other, with melancholy smiles and looks
sufficiently allusive, such cupfuls of water as they had saved” (313). This passage is bleakly
Modernist, the loneliness almost Prufrockian: the community is formed out of despair. A coral
strand is sharp, cutting, and dangerous – a place to picnic only if one has been denied access to
the sandy beaches. The image of passing each other with “such cupfuls of water as they had
saved” is hauntingly beautiful: it captures the will to sustain each other with what little life they
have been able to collect in a treacherous environment. “It was the mark of a relation that he had
begun so quickly to find himself sure she was, of all people, as might have been said, on the side
and of the party of Mrs. Newsome’s original ambassador. She was in his interest and not in
Sarah’s; and some sign of that was precisely what he had been feeling in her, these last days, as
imminent” (Ambassadors 312).
Strether finally turns to the topic of marriage, now feeling more at ease for having “found
[Mamie] nicer than he had really dreamed” (Ambassadors 315). He takes an indirect approach:
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“‘Mademoiselle de Vionnet is to be married – I suppose you’ve heard of that.’” Mamie quickly
responds:
“Dear, yes; the gentleman was there; Monsieur de Montbron, whom Madame de
Vionnet presented to us.”
“And was he nice?”
Mamie bloomed and bridled with her best reception manner. “Any man’s nice
when he’s in love.”
It made Strether laugh. “But is Monsieur de Montbron in love – already – with
you?”
“Oh that’s not necessary – it’s so much better he should be so with her: which,
thank goodness I lost no time in discovering for myself. He’s perfectly gone – and I
couldn’t have borne it for her if he hadn’t been. She’s just too sweet.” (315)
When asked her opinion of Monsieur de Montbron, Mamie responds in a conflicting manner –
“bloomed and bridled” – which reflects her double consciousness. She blossoms yet restrains
herself. She also blooms, or blushes: love from Monsieur de Montbron is “not necessary” and
also unwanted. Her comment regarding Jeanne’s fiancé – “any man’s nice when he’s in love” –
is a backhanded compliment, suggesting that he and every other man may not be nice in other
circumstances. Mamie is concerned about Jeanne de Vionnet, however, and wants to become
friendlier with her in order to tell her so. She confides in Strether:
“I shall tell her the matter with her is that she wants only too much to do right. To do
right for her, naturally,” said Mamie “is to please.”
“Her mother, do you mean?”
“Her mother first.”
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Strether waited. “And then?”
“Well, ‘then’ – Mr. Newsome.”
There was something really grand for him in the serenity of this reference. “And
last only Monsieur de Montbron?”
“Last only” – she good-humouredly kept it up.
Strether considered. “So that every one after all then will be suited?”
She had one of her few hesitation, but it was a question only of a moment; and it was her
nearest approach to being explicit with him about what was between them. “I think I can
speak for myself. I shall be.” (316)
It seems ironic that Mamie is disconcerted about the conditions under which Jeanne de Vionnet
is getting married, being in a similar situation herself. Yet the two young women have different
attitudes. Jeanne wants “only too much to do right”; she feels the need to please and comply.
This means not only appeasing the wishes of her mother but those of Chad – who introduced
Monsieur de Montbron to Jeanne and Madame de Vionnet (296). That Mr. Newsome has taken
on the role of husband – at least in this capacity – is not lost on Mamie: “Mamie, unlike Sarah,
unlike Jim, knew perfectly what had become of him” (313). She tells Strether: “‘Oh yes, I know
everything’” (315) – including the fact that Chad is likely uninterested in marrying her, as his
affections lie elsewhere. Mamie has no desire to force Chad to go home. In her case, “to do
right” is not to comply but to resist her mother’s plans. After Strether asks if all parties
concerned will “be suited,” Mamie pauses. Speaking for and of herself in regard to being suited,
she states “I shall be” – insinuating that “if …” is to follow. Mamie knows that she and Chad are
not suited for each other. However, another young man is shortly expected: Little Bilham.
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We sense that Strether understands what (or whom) Mamie alludes to, given his thoughts
that immediately follow: “It said indeed so much, told such a story of her being ready to help
him, so committed to him that truth, in short, for such use as he might make of it toward those
ends of his own …” (Ambassadors 316). Strether’s primary goal at this point is to find a
situation by which he and Bilham can be together. If he can convince his young man to marry
Mamie, the “circumstance” would be one by which several people would “profit” (311). Mamie
would not have to marry Chad nor any other heterosexual man who would expect conjugal sex.
She would relieve her parents of the burden and embarrassment of having a spinster at home.
While said to be pretty (by Woollett standards) “Mamie would be fat, too fat, at thirty” (316).
Bilham would move to Woollett where he and Mamie would legally be man and wife but live
together as friends and mutual beards: the best of virtuous attachments. A published
announcement of the marriage would enhance the cover, suggesting to the public that Bilham is
heterosexual. Strether intends to move back to Woollett, and – as a close friend to the young
couple – spend much of his time at the Bilham household without raising suspicions.18 Gostrey’s
mission is served by adding two compatriots to the nascent homosexual subculture of Woollett.
Mamie appears to be game for this arrangement. Her personality comes out when Strether teases
her about the enticements Paris offers to lesbians:
“Ah but things, here in Paris,’ Strether observed, “do happen to little girls.” And
then for the joke’s and the occasion’s sake: “Haven’t you found that yourself?”
In Alan Dale’s novel A Marriage below Zero (1889), Arthur Ravener marries and moves into his wife’s inherited
home of Tavistock Villa near Kew Gardens. His lover, Captain Dillington, moves in shortly thereafter. After his
wife finally objects to this arrangement, Ravener rents a house for his lover in Notting Hill, London, where he
spends the majority of his nights. While the novel illustrates the unfortunate results of a unvirtuous attachment – as
Elsie Ravener was unaware of Arthur’s homosexuality when she married him – it gives examples of the means by
which two men can be together with the aid of a beard.
18
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“That things happen – ? Oh I’m not a little girl. I’m a big battered blowsy one. I
don’t care,” Mamie laughed, “what happens.” (314-5)
What could be a better attitude for a beard?
Mamie’s intimation that she and Bilham would be suitable for each other is met by
Strether “in his own spirit by the last frankness of admiration” (Ambassadors 316). Recognizing
the “Quiet dignity that pulled things bravely together” for Mamie, he wants for her “the
appreciation to which she was entitled – so assured was he that the more he saw of her process
the more he should see of her pride” (312, 313). Our protagonist has engaged in a process of
growth since arriving in “Europe” – one “toward those ends of his own with which, patiently and
trustfully” are reinvigorating his life (316). He finds Mamie’s “pride” in recognizing and
accepting her sexuality as admirable: “Admiration was of itself almost accusatory, but nothing
less would serve to show her how nearly he understood” (316). Admiring this twenty-two-yearold woman almost turns Strether to self-incrimination for having waited so long before coming
to terms with his own homosexuality. Instead he focuses on what Mamie expresses: he “nearly”
understands. Infused with new knowledge and transcendent thoughts of possibilities, Strether
departs and “put[s] out his hand for good-bye with a ‘Splendid, splendid, splendid!’ And he left
her, in her splendour, still waiting for little Bilham’” (316).
Now all Strether has to do is convince Little Bilham to marry Miss Pocock. He has
broken with Waymarsh, decided against marrying Mrs. Newsome, and bought books in Paris that
will allow him to start his own business in Woollett. He intends to speak of marriage to Bilham
that evening at the large, lavish party given by Chad at his home on Boulevard Malesherbes
(X.i.). The scene turns back to that in Gloriani’s garden (V.ii.) in several ways. It is set at a
dazzling gathering of eclectic friends: the apartment is filled with “a mass of brilliant strangers of
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both sexes and of several varieties of speech” (Ambassadors 320). While Strether had felt
overwhelmed at Gloriani’s, he now feels “somehow part and parcel of the most festive scene”
and enjoys the “number and mass, quantity and quality, light, fragrance, sound, the overflow of
hospitality” that is “pressed upon his consciousness” (317). Having gained a greater sense of
acceptance – of himself and others – Strether no longer feels estranged from the community
which Chad affably includes as part of the “large concourse” of people: “he had never seen so
many in proportion to the space, or had at all events never known so great a promiscuity to show
so markedly as picked” (317). As he did at Gloriani’s party, Strether again seeks out a place
with a modicum of quiet where he and Bilham can be together; they ensconce themselves on the
divan in the corner – the same divan where they reunited after Strether’s ill-conveyed and
misunderstood speech in the garden. As the scene builds to the climax, conflicts are resolved
that previously beset our protagonist after making love on the bench.
Strether had feared he would never be able to break the mold that had closeted him.
While Gostrey initiates the process by which Strether grows into selfhood, Bilham does the most
to affect these changes. The middle-aged man ponders this as he sits with his young paramour:
He had felt of old … rather humiliated at discovering he could learn in talk with a
personage so much his junior the lesson of a certain moral ease; but he had now got used
to that … whether or not directly from little Bilham’s example, the example of his being
contentedly just the obscure and acute little Bilham he was. It worked so for him Strether
seemed to see; and our friend had a private hours a wan smile over the fact that he
himself, after so many more years, was still in search of something that would work.
However, as we have said, it worked just now for them equally to have found a corner a
little apart. (Ambassadors 320)
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Previously considering himself to be a “good homosexual” and initially frightened by the moral
decrepitude Gostrey seemed to represent, Strether learns from Bilham a “moral ease” based on
recognizing the existing continuum (“bad” versus “good” homosexual) and deciding as an
individual what precepts or ideologies one wants to live by or apply to one’s self. Now Bilham
is described in terms of opposites: “obscure and acute.” He is obscure in that he is yet to be
correctly identified, or defined, by society. He is not a “type” as categorized in medical journals,
newspaper articles, and police reports. He is neither pale, mentally ill, nervous, sleepless, given
to prostration, self-loathing, outrageously flamboyant, nor criminal. He is happy and
comfortable with who he is. Bilham is acute in understanding that one defines himself. Strether
is working towards the balance of society and self; having arrived at a new, auspicious place of
self-respect, he sees “something that will work” if he can continue to follow Bilham’s example.
For now they have a corner to themselves. Strether wants to extend this “corner” to a more
substantial, more enduring, situation.
Strether’s financial concerns and the necessity, as he saw it, of marrying Mrs. Newsome
also motivated the disparaging speech in the garden. This conflict comes to present attention as
Strether wonders what Sarah Pocock makes of the distinguished singers entertaining at Chad’s
party. “Unmistakably, in her single person, the motive of the composition and dressed in a
splendour of crimson … affected Strether as the sound of a fall through a skylight”
(Ambassadors 320). Sarah had been seated at dinner on same side of the table as Strether –
“perhaps a little pusillanimously arranged with Chad” – to avoid eye contact (320-1). Bilham
observes her during the party and asks his friend if he has noticed her demeanor: the narrator
depicts it as “a person seated in a runaway vehicle and turning over the question of a possible
jump” (319). Sarah’s unease is apparent to Bilham:
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“I give you my impression for what it’s worth. Mrs. Pocock has seen, and that’s to-night
how she sits there. If you were to have a glimpse of her face you’d understand me. She
has made up her mind – to the sound of expensive music.
Strether took it freely in. “Ah then I shall have news of her.”
“I don’t want to frighten you, but I think that likely. However,” little Bilham
continued, “if I’m of the least use to you to hold on by – !”
“You’re not of the least!” – and Strether laid an appreciative hand on him to say
it. (321)
Bilham fears that Strether will be insolvent, as Sarah appears to have “made up her mind” that
the original ambassador has failed miserably in putting the reins on Chad and is an unworthy
second husband for her mother. Bilham is unaware that his lover no longer intends to marry
Mrs. Newsome. Thus he is concerned by Strether’s blithe assumption that he will hear from
Mrs. Newsome (“her”) – most likely to the “expensive” tune that the marriage is off. Bilham
attempts to console Strether by offering himself as support in the event of his financial loss.
Bilham’s professed devotion resolves another concern that previously forced Strether to
push the young man away. Our aging protagonist was thrilled to get attention from such a
delightful free spirit but doubted that a young man happily afloat in the subculture of Paris would
ever want to settle down – let alone in a small town in America with an older man of meager
means. Strether wants Bilham to milk his youth for all of its possibilities – thus the insistence to
“Live!” Yet he also knows from experience that youth is fleeting and the world is harsh.
Bilham’s financially precarious position could put him in dangerous situations; Strether doesn’t
want to clip the youth’s wings, but fears that he may come to harm. However, earlier in the
novel while discussing Chad’s involvement in the business back home, Bilham incongruously
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states: “‘I ought, I dare say, to go home and go into business myself’” (Ambassadors 126). This
has never been lost on Strether. Bilham may be interested in working with him in his new
publishing business. There is also the possibility that Bilham’s interest in business might make
him a suitable son-in-law for Jim Pocock. Jim loves Paris and “gurgled his joy” as he and
Strether toured the city on the Pococks’ first arrival. “Jim Pocock declined judgment” of Chad’s
affairs, but tells Strether that were he to switch places with the young man he would never
“‘Give up this to go back and boss the advertising!’” (263). Instead, “the most a leading
Woollett businessman could hope to achieve socially, and for that matter industrially, was a
certain freedom to play into this general glamour” (261). Jim would be able to tap into this
“glamour” if Mamie were to marry Bilham – who studied painting in Paris (on an allowance
from his family) and gained worldliness and panache from his years spent in the City of Light.
“Despite his being normal” – in Strether’s opinion – Mr. Pocock likes to think that he is not: “He
seemed to say that there was a whole side of life on which the perfectly usual was for leading
Woollett business-men to be out of the question” (262). Bringing Bilham into business with him
might appeal to Jim’s desire for the unconventional.
By attempting to facilitate a marriage between Mamie and Bilham, Strether addresses one
of the shortcomings that antagonized him in Gloriani’s garden. On arriving in Paris he identified
what has habitually thwarted his happiness: “Everything he wanted was comprised moreover in a
single boon – the common unattainable art of taking things as they came. He appeared to
himself to have given his best years to an active appreciation of the way they didn’t come”
(Ambassadors 58). Strether’s “Live!” speech to Little Bilham bemoans the fact that he did not
act when he had the chance: he did not get on the train even though it waited at the station.
Mamie’s candid revelations reveal a propitious opportunity: it is “a single boon” with the
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potential to secure Strether’s happiness and put his long ache to rest. He is going to act on this
idea, take what has come, and commit to Mamie’s interest “for such use as he might make of it
toward those ends of his own” (316).
With this plan in mind, Strether secures the divan in the corner at Chad’s party. He
“desired five quiet minutes with little Bilham, whom he always found soothing and even a little
inspiring, and to whom he had actually, moreover, something distinct and important to say”
(Ambassadors 320). Strether is going to propose to his little painter man by means of asking him
to marry Mamie: “there was no use in having arrived now with little Bilham at an unprecedented
point of intimacy unless he could pitch everything into the pot” (321). This is a gamble: Bilham
may say no – if only because he doesn’t want to leave Paris. Strether throws his heart and his
future into the pot with the hope of winning a life of intimacy that not only surpasses his earlier
experiences but goes far beyond that experienced on the bench in Gloriani’s garden. He is
nervous. Unfortunately, despite our protagonist’s growth over the course of the novel, Strether
has not yet learned how to communicate with Bilham. The following exchange mirrors that in
Gloriani’s garden: Bilham does not understand what Strether is suggesting, and the latter does a
poor job of conveying it.
Bilham offers himself as someone “‘to hold on by’”: he wants to be Strether’s devoted
helpmate. Strether responds while patting his companion on the knee: “‘I must meet my fate
alone, and I shall – oh you’ll see!’” (Ambassadors 321-2). Bilham is stunned, taking his
comrade’s words at face value. But Strether is not referring to his personal plans, rather his
financial fate – which he will rally independently of Mrs. Newsome (“alone”). Instead of
explaining this, Strether changes the subject to Chad’s possible marriage. Bilham takes this as
somewhat of an affront.
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“Oh!” said little Bilham with some sharpness.
“Oh precisely! But he needn’t marry at all – I’m at any rate not obliged to
provide for it. Whereas in your case I rather feel that I am.”
Little Bilham was amused. “Obliged to provide for my marrying?”
“Yes – after all I’ve done to you!”
The young man weighed it. “Have you done as much as that?”
“Well,” said Strether, thus challenged, “of course I must remember what you’ve
also done to me. We may perhaps call it square.” (322).
Bilham responds sharply, finding this to be a strange and sudden change of topic. Strether
introduces the subject of marriage in the same oblique way he had done previously with Mamie –
bringing up Jeanne de Vionnet’s engagement in order to hear Mamie’s views on her own
situation: it worked to his advantage in that instance. Now going on to dismiss any obligations to
Chad, and then saying he wants to “call it square” with Bilham, conveys the sense that he is
wrapping things up in Paris. Bilham is sardonically amused at the suggestion that he marry,
wondering if this is how Strether plans to get rid of him. Strether’s attempt at humor – making a
twist on the old cliché delivered by a heterosexual man to the woman he has deflowered (“Well,
I guess I’d better make an honest woman out of you.”) – does nothing to alleviate the confusion.
The two have done things “to” each other (connoting sexuality where “for” each other does not),
but Bilham rightly (and humorously) asks if they have “done as much” as would require such a
drastic consequence. Strether continues:
“But all the same … I wish awfully you’d marry Mamie Pocock yourself.”
Little Bilham laughed out. “Why it was only the other night, in this very place,
that you were proposing to me a different union altogether.” (322)
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Bilham laughs in disbelief: Strether’s previous suggestion about a sexual “union” would never
have been made to a man who was interested in women. Strether rattles on:
“This is practical politics. I want to do something good for both of you – I wish
you each so well; and you can see in a moment the trouble it will save me to polish you
off by the same stroke. She likes you, you know. You console her. And she’s splendid.”
Little Bilham stared as a delicate appetite stares at an overheaped plate. (322)
The reader easily imagines the look on Bilham’s face. Not only is marriage to a woman not to
Bilham’s taste, but the term “overheaped” reminds us of Mamie’s bulky appearance. There is
nothing romantic about “practical politics.” We cringe with Bilham when Strether cavalierly
states the “trouble” he will be saved by polishing off the two “by the same stroke.” Is he going
to take both of their heads off with one swoop of the sabre? We know that Strether cares deeply
for both Mamie and Bilham; what he proposes is both loving and ingenious. But he is either
oblivious to the emotional state of his immediate audience or is so cowed by Bilham’s youth that
he thinks his proposal must seem nonchalant. Strether wants this too much, is too afraid, to be
sincere.
Bilham balks at the suggestion that he could be “consoling” to Mamie – at least in the
traditional manner. This “just made his friend impatient. ‘Oh, come, you know!’”
(Ambassadors 323). But Bilham doesn’t know. He hasn’t been told anything about Strether’s
conversation with Mamie at the hotel and has no idea what makes her so “‘splendid.’” Strether
begins to lose his patience. Frustrated by what he perceives to be recalcitrance – if not dullness –
on the boy’s part, he regresses to his former, younger self. He becomes critical and demanding:
“Oh if what I’ve just mentioned isn’t enough to make you do it, you’re a stonyhearted little fiend. Besides” – Strether encouraged his fancy’s flight – “you showed
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your inclination in the way you kept her waiting, kept her on purpose to see if she cared
enough for you.”
His companion paid his ingenuity the deference of a pause. “I didn’t keep her
waiting. I came at the hour. I wouldn’t have kept her waiting for the world,” the young
man honourably declared.
“Better still – then there you are!” And Strether, charmed, held him the faster.
“Even if you didn’t do her justice, moreover,” he continued, “I should insist on your
immediately coming round to it. I want awfully to have worked it. I want” – and our
friend spoke now with a yearning that was really earnest – “at least to have done that.”
“To have married me off – without a penny?” (323)
Although Strether has not explained how or why marrying Mamie would be advantageous to all
three of them, he expects Bilham to intuit the scenario and is angry that he doesn’t – calling him
a “stony hearted little fiend.” Including the word “little” in this indictment recalls the “little boy”
of the past. Strether attempts to clarify the arrangement by acknowledging that Bilham will not
do Mamie “justice” in terms of satisfying her sexual desires; the young man interprets this as
being told that he is not good enough for Mamie and defends his honorable behavior. Strether,
“charmed,” holds Bilham tighter – but not because he is delighted. He is under the spell of his
past, controlled by the former self who lost a boy, and now clutches the one at his side. This
embrace does nothing to quell Bilham’s anxiety. Wanting to reduce the pain and embarrassment
of again being rejected, he defaults to pecuniary concerns – showing his wallet instead of his
heart. This, however, reminds Strether of the sketchy means by which the bohemian painter was
putting a roof over his head when the two first met: Bilham sounds more like a prostitute than a
lover. Strether pulls himself up and waxes dramatic: “‘Well, I shan’t live long; and I give you
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my word, now and here, that I’ll leave you every penny of my own. I haven’t many,
unfortunately, but you shall have them all’” (323). While his wrist does not hit his forehead, it
appears that Strether has taken a page out of Gostrey’s playbook. He opts for melodrama instead
of explaining to Bilham that he has a plan for mutual solvency.
Yet the novel is a study in psychological realism and the mind does not always adhere to
logical progression – especially when one is trying to convey a matter of emotional urgency.
Strether drops the farce and his mind jumps, talking off in a direction seemingly far afield from
his proposal:
“And Miss Pocock, I think, has a few. I want,” Strether went on, “to have been at least to
that extent constructive – even expiatory. I’ve been sacrificing so to strange gods that I
feel I want to put on record somehow, my fidelity – fundamentally unchanged after all –
to our own. I feel as if my hands were embrued with the blood of monstrous alien altars
– of another faith altogether. There it is – it’s done.” (Ambassadors 323)
Nothing kills romance like images of bloody hands and Christ hanging on the cross (the last
words of Jesus after his sacrifice: “It is finished.”) But the emotional state caused by the
precariousness of his position and the proximity of his ultimate goal push Strether to his deepest
confession. Of all his mistakes, his greatest one was sacrificing his true self and psychological
wholeness in order to appease the “strange gods” of society that damned homosexuality as a
perversion of nature. Much blood has been shed on the altars of faiths that deem same-sex love
and non-procreative sex as alien to God’s purpose. Strether has metaphoric blood on his hands
due to his complicity: hiding his sexuality, avoiding challenges to the status quo, and taking on a
sense of moral superiority over homosexuals whose lifestyles do not fit his own (such as
Gostrey’s). His epiphany is not only the recognition of having worshipped a false god – societal
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approval – but that by doing so he turned his back the homosexual community at large. Decades
of closeting himself in Woollett – out of self-preservation – inadvertently kept others trapped in
dark lonely places. He had been unable to see this until Gostrey led him through the subcultures
of Europe, exposing him to the necessity of community in homosexual life. The “sacred rage” is
about more than sex, even when it precipitates spirituality. The love shared by the Sacred Band
of Thebans and their fidelity to each other provided the strength to rage against the Macedonians
in the Battle of Chaeronea (338 B.C.) despite their certain annihilation. If not for the countless
Frenchmen who battled the State, Church, the Law, and social norms – sacrificing jobs, families,
social standing, freedom, and life itself – Strether would not have had the opportunity to find
love, joy, and freedom in Paris.
He now hopes to do at least something constructive and expiatory. To “expiate” means:
“To avert (evil) by religious ceremonies” (OED). If Strether can convince Bilham to marry
Mamie – partake in this religious ceremony – specific evils will be averted: Mamie avoids being
forced to do the bidding of her mother and a heterosexual husband; Bilham is deterred from a
possible descent into prostitution. He explains to Bilham: “‘It took hold of me because the idea
of getting her quite out of the way for Chad helps to clear my ground’” (Ambassadors 323). If
Mamie does not marry Chad (having been taken “out of the way” by Bilham) the path to the
fruition of Strether’s plan is cleared. The marriage would provide cover for the intimate
relationship between Strether and Bilham; with the help of his two young friends, Strether could
live as a gay man to the furthest extent possible in Woollett. He plans to return to Woollett and
“put on record” his fidelity to the nascent homosexual community by living authentically.
Bilham, unfortunately, does not see the light: “The young man, at this, bounced about,
and it brought them face to face in admitted amusement. ‘You want me to marry as a
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convenience to Chad?’” (Ambassadors 324). The reader envisions Strether’s eyes rolling at this
point. While he has done a poor job of articulating his proposal, it appears that Bilham is loved
for things other than his mental acuity. Strether explains that Chad has nothing to do with the
arrangement:
“It’s a thread we can wind up and tuck in.”
But dear little Bilham still questioned. “You can – since you seem to want to. But
why should I?”
Poor Strether thought it over, but was obliged of course to admit that his
demonstration did superficially fail. “Seriously, there is no reason. It’s my affair – I
must do it alone. I’ve only my fantastic need of making my dose stiff.”
Little Bilham wondered. “What do you call your dose.”
“Why what I have to swallow. I want my conditions unmitigated.”
He had spoken in the tone of talk for talk’s sake, and yet with an obscure truth
lurking in the loose folds; a circumstance presently not without its effect on his young
friend. (324)
Strether tells his young man to forget about Chad; it is an affair that the failed ambassador must
address on his own. He then changes tactics and finally speaks in terms that Bilham can
understand: sexual ones. Bilham makes Strether’s cock fantastically stiff; he needs to “swallow”
the young man’s “dose,” and wants unmitigated access to him. Strether’s honesty about his
physical desire for Bilham – the “obscure truth” – is borne out by what “lurk[s] in the loose
folds” of his trousers. This affects his beloved in the manner most hoped for:
Little Bilham’s eyes rested on him a moment with some intensity; they suddenly, as if
everything had cleared up, he gave a happy laugh. It seemed to say that if pretending, or
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even trying, or still even hoping to be able to care for Mamie would be of use, he was all
there for the job. “I’ll do anything in the world for you!”
“Well,” Strether smiled, “anything in the world is all I want.” (324)
As Bilham says “I do” to his lover’s proposal of marriage, the emotional climax of the Other Plot
is reached.
Strether goes on to say how happy he was when visiting Mamie to find that she had been
waiting for his young man. Bilham reveals that Chad had asked him to call on her.
“But do you know,” Strether asked, “if Chad knows – ?” And then as his interlocutor
seemed at a loss: “Why where she has come out.”19
Little Bilham, at this, met his face with a conscious look; it was as if, more than
anything yet, the allusion had penetrated. “Do you know yourself?”
Strether lightly shook his head. “There I stop. Oh, odd as it may appear to you,
there are things I don’t know. I only got the sense from her of something very sharp, and
yet very deep down, that she was keeping all to herself. That is I had begun with the
belief that she had kept it to herself; but face to face with her there I soon made out that
there was a person with whom she would have shared it…. I got hold of the tail of my
conviction. Half an hour later I was in possession of all the rest of it….”
Little Bilham after an instant pulled half round. “I assure you she hasn’t told me
anything.” (Ambassadors 325)
19
This conversation includes the second mention made in the novel as to where and to whom Mamie came out.
James would not repeat this if it did not have significance. He tell us in the Preface: “the point is not in the least
what to make of it, but only, very delightfully and very damnably, where to put one’s hand on it” (xxxiii). Bereft of
anything textually tangible, one might put her fingers on the Café des Ambassadeurs. Alive with music and artists,
bohemians and bon vivants, an evening at des Ambassadeurs was de rigueur for any American tourists who wanted
to think they were part of the scene. Mamie would have found genial company there – a picturesque setting for a
coming-out story.
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Strether’s proposal would have gone more smoothly if the topic of Mamie’s sexuality had been
discussed earlier. Assuming that Bilham knew that Mamie is a lesbian, Strether had called him a
“stoney-hearted little fiend” for recoiling at the thought of marrying her (323). The fact that
Bilham agrees to marry Mamie even while under the notion that she is heterosexual – “I’ll do
anything in the world for you!” – is a testament to his love for Strether.
But Bilham finally understands what Strether is talking about when he says “‘You remain
for [Mamie] to save, and I come back, on so beautiful and full a demonstration – that of your
showing distinct signs of her having already begun’” (Ambassadors 327). Mamie will save
Bilham financially and Strether will return (“come back”) to Woollett in a beautiful and full
demonstration of his love for him. “Little Bilham, taking his course back to the music, only
shook his good-natured ears an instant, in the manner of a terrier who has got wet” (327-8). He
goes to tell Barrace the happy news: “the genial lady, suggesting more than ever for her fellow
guest the old French print, the historic portrait, directed herself with an intention that Strether
instantly met. He knew in advance the first note she would sound, and took in as she approached
all her need of sounding it. Nothing yet had been so ‘wonderful’ between them as the present
occasion” (328).
Yet before Barrace descends on him with her congratulations, Strether has a moment
alone on the divan to take in the wonder of what has transpired:
… he was free to believe in anything that from hour to hour kept him going. He had
positively motions and flutters of this conscious hour-to-hour kind, temporary surrenders
to irony, to fancy, frequent instinctive snatches at the growing rose of observation,
constantly stronger for him, as he felt, in scent and colour, and in which he could bury his
nose even to wantonness. (Ambassadors 328)
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Our protagonist has done it! Strether will live the life he has so long yearned for. Having gained
the love and devotion of a beautiful young man, Strether is now “free to believe anything.” His
mind “surrenders” as if he is heading towards Mirabeau’s Utopia, the ship rocking in positive
motions, the sails fluttering. Waxing Romantic, his panchronistic senses touch color and
perfume. He abandons himself to joy, burying his nose in the “wantonness” he had previously
feared to experience.
Now that a new romantic triangle has been formed – Strether, Bilham, and Mamie – the
dénouement clears away the broken pieces of the previous one. Waymarsh begins moving to a
new configuration; Strether speaks with him for the last time in the “small slippery salle-àmanger” of their hotel (Ambassadors 335). As Strether drinks his coffee, Waymarsh enters
wearing a white suit and waistcoat, topped with a wide-brimmed Panama hat: he is the image of
“a Southern planter of the great days” – a distinctly American look (336). While Strether’s
physical appearance in Chester “belied his plea of prostration,” Waymarsh’s aspect now, too,
shows no concern “with the menace of decay.” Strether is glad for this and feels his efforts in
leading his companion through “Europe” have paid off: “He remembered how at first there had
been scarce a squatting-place he could beguile him into passing; the actual outcome of which at
last was that there was scarce one that could arrest him in his rush” (335). The need for sex had
brought the two men together: “Waymarsh wouldn’t be his friend, somehow, without the
occasional ornament of the sacred rage, and the right to the sacred rage” (340). Now “at Mrs.
Pocock’s elbow,” the sacred rage is something Waymarsh seems “to have forfeited,” as the pièce
de resistance of his outfit is the red rose in his buttonhole, put there by “her fine fingers” when
the two attended the Marché aux Fleurs that morning (340, 337).
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The rage of jealousy had provoked Waymarsh to contact Sarah, but he had not thought
through the consequences of her arrival: “It was no part of [his] wish … to help to receive Mrs.
Pocock” (Ambassadors 338). Once in the presence of the Woollett perspective, and aware of its
proximity to the place and people of Milrose, Waymarsh resumes his outer heterosexual persona
in order to protect his reputation. Without her knowing it, Sarah becomes a beard for Waymarsh.
He takes her to dinner, the flower show, and the circus in order to look like a straight American
man on holiday – and enjoys it: “this was the truth that was embarrassing for him” (340).
“Europe” has been too much for him. After pushing himself to the limit with Miss Barrace, the
closet feels comfortably familiar: “the old boy bloomed in this bland air of his own distillation”
(339). Strether sees “a genial new” Waymarsh: “a Waymarsh conscious with a different
consciousness from any he had yet betrayed, and actually rendered by it almost insinuating”
(338). While Strether has made a “sharp turn of the wheel” in a different direction (336), he
accepts the course Waymarsh is taking: “He looked his old comrade very straight in the eyes,
and he had never conveyed to him in so mute a manner so much kind confidence and so much
good advice. Everything that was between them was again in his face, but matured and shelved
and finally disposed of” (338-9). Their relationship has “matured” past its expiration date and
now must be disposed of. By looking deeply into his old friend’s eyes, Strether counsels
Waymarsh to live his homosexuality to the best of his own ability and in his own manner, having
come to accept that it is up to the individual to set the fulcrum on which to balance the inner and
outer selves. However, Strether is concerned about how heavy a thumb Waymarsh is putting on
the side of his façade. The lawyer from Milrose is “having a good time … and he was having it
then and there, he was having it in Europe, he was having it under the very protection of
circumstances of which [Strether] didn’t in the least approve; all of which placed him in a false
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position, with no issue possible – none at least by the grand manner” (340). An “issue” by the
“grand manner” is a child resulting from heterosexual sex. As the intensions behind the
extensive amount of time Sarah devotes to Waymarsh are unknown, this ruse may be unfair to
her. When Waymarsh informs Strether that he is leaving for Switzerland with the Pococks, the
latter feels “ashamed for him” and advises him to be kind: “‘Live up to Mrs. Pocock’” (343).
Waymarsh makes one last play for his former lover, saying that he hopes he’ll come with
them: “his implications and expectation” loom up for Strether “as almost pathetically gross”
(Ambassadors 342). Strether insists that they have already met the “degree of success [their]
adventure was pledged to” and that they are “all right” as they are (343). A shared recognition of
“great goodwill” prevails until Waymarsh gives one last look from beneath the panama – one of
“darkness and warning” (342, 344):
“See here, Strether.”
“I know what you’re going to say. Quit this!”
“Quit this!’ But it lacked its old intensity; nothing of it remained; it went out of
the room with him.” (344)
Strether is left with the sense – “for the first time in his life” – of having “carried it off” (340).
Despite the temptation to stay in a relatively safe relationship that had provided him comfort
over the years, it lacked the passion Strether knew he was capable of and wanted so desperately
to experience. For the first time in his life, he managed to find it.
The threads of the Other Plot are wound up and tucked in during Strether’s final visits to
Gostrey. While busy with other people in Paris, Strether was ever conscious of his mentor:
She had been wonderful to him … always as a person to whom he should never cease to
be indebted. It would never be given to him certainly to inspire a greater kindness. She
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had decked him out for others, and he saw at this point at least nothing she would ever
ask for. She only wondered and questioned and listened, rendering him the homage of a
wistful speculation. She expressed it repeatedly; he was already far beyond her, and she
must prepare herself to lose him. (Ambassadors 240)
Strether knows he can go to Gostrey and crow of his success. In Book Eleventh, Chapter Two,
he is excited to announce that “‘they’re all off … at last’” on a trip across the continent. Gostrey
asks if this includes Chad:
“Ah not yet! Sarah and Jim and Mamie. But Waymarsh with them – for Sarah.
It’s too beautiful,” Strether continued; “I find I don’t get over that – it’s always a fresh
joy. But it’s a fresh joy too,” he added, “that – well what do you think? Little Bilham
also goes. But he of course goes for Mamie.”
Miss Gostrey wondered. “‘For’ her? Do you mean they’re already engaged?”
“Well,” said Strether, “say then for me. He’ll do anything for me; just as I will,
for that matter – anything I can – for him. Or for Mamie either. She’ll do anything for
me.”
Miss Gostrey gave a comprehensive sigh. “The way you reduce people to
subjection!” (366)
Gostrey teases about “subjection,” but sighs with pleasure to hear that her comrade’s plan to be
with Bilham through marriage to Mamie is in motion. Strether goes on to explain that he hasn’t
reduced Sarah to subjection, but he has “‘succeeded in seeing her again’”:
“The others, however, are all right. Mamie, by that blessed law of ours, absolutely must
have a young man.”
“But what must poor Mr. Bilham have? Do you mean they’ll marry for you?”
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“I mean that, by the same blessed law, it won’t matter a grain if they don’t – I
shan’t have in the least to worry.”
She saw as usual what he meant. “And Mr. Jim? – who goes for him?”
“Oh,” Strether had to admit, “I couldn’t manage that. He’s thrown, as usual, on
the world; the world which, after all, by his account – for he had prodigious adventures –
seems very good to him.” (367)
Law is a concern that runs throughout the Other Plot, albeit subtly. Mamie “absolutely must” get
married according so social law. Due to the upper-class standing of the Pococks, Mamie likely
has been attending cotillions and débutante balls since the age of eighteen. By age twenty-two,
she is not yet a spinster, but if she has already run through the limited number of bachelors in
Woollett she threatens to become one. While the Pococks can afford to continue to support her,
an unmarried daughter at home reflects badly on a major businessman such as Jim Pocock. The
attempt to marry her off to her cousin may have been motivated by more than the family’s
interest in getting Chad to come home to the family business. That not having come to fruition,
the Pococks are forced to entertain other alternatives. Jim Pocock is the wild card that enhances
Strether’s hand. He is free-wheeling and likely not too discerning as to whom his daughter
marries, as long as the young man is reasonably respectable and, more importantly, presentable.
On Strether’s last meeting with Sarah, he may have put forth Bilham’s admirable qualities.
Regardless, John Little Bilham was invited to join the travel party – ostensibly at the Pococks’
expense. It was not unusual at this time for a family to arrange an opportunity where they could
chaperone and observe two young people who had the possibility of making a favorable match.
While Strether’s plans are optimized by a marriage between Mamie and Bilham, he points out to
Gostrey that the same “blessed” (or euphemistically “cursed”) law regarding marriage – social or
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actual – still condemns his relationship with Bilham but it will not stop him from committing to a
loving, lasting relationship with another man.
On visiting Gostrey for the last time, he looks around at all the treasures she has gathered
over the years: “the place had never before struck him as so sacred to pleasant knowledge, to
intimate charm, to antique order, to a neatness that was almost august” (Ambassadors 433).
However, Strether looks forward to returning home. Gostrey encourages him to consider her
home, and Paris, as a “‘haven of rest.’” But the city is now for Strether “‘a haunt of ancient
peace’” (433). Paris is filled with the souls of courageous men who made a home for the ancient
culture of Greek love. Strether will take this inspiration, for the second time, back to America
with greater chances of seeing it “bear good harvest” (60).
Finally, Strether wants to see Chad: “it was the need of causing his conduct to square
with another profession still” (Ambassador 422). He did not pressure Chad to go home. Yet
Chad plans to return to Woollett at some point and is willing to help Strether with his business:
“Advertising scientifically worked presented itself thus as the great new force. ‘It really does the
thing, you know’” (431). Knowing that “he must see Chad, but he must go,” Strether approaches
the Boulevard Malesherbes on his last evening in Paris:
Present enough always was the small circumstance that had originally pressed for him the
spring of so big a difference – the accident of little Bilham’s appearance on the balcony
of the mystic troisième at the moment of his first visit, and the effect of it on his sense of
what was there before him. He recalled his watch, his wait, and the recognition that had
proceeded from the young stranger, that had played frankly into the air and had presently
brought him up – things smoothing the way for his first straight step…. He stopped short
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to-night on coming to sight of it: it was as if his last day were oddly copying his first.
(422)
Again Strether sees the windows of the apartment opened to the balcony and the vast bright
Babylon that pulsates around it. He recognizes that, this time, it is Chad smoking a cigarette on
the balcony. It was Chad’s life that had dragged him “at strange hours, up the staircases of the
rich”; it had kept “him out of bed at the end of long hot days; it [had] transform[ed] beyond
recognition the simple, subtle, conveniently uniform thing that had anciently passed with him for
a life of his own” (423-4). But now Strether approaches the staircase “in what might have called
taking up his life afresh. His life, his life!” (423). The next day Strether buys his railway ticket
knowing that – on his first visit to Boulevard Malesherbes – he had “come up four flights
counting the entresol” (424) that had led to freedom and fulfillment.
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Conclusion: Henry James and the “Homosexual Canon”
As the Other Plot nears its climax, Strether tries to explain to Little Bilham why he wants
him to marry Mamie Pocock: the protective union would provide the aging man with a sense that
his life has been “at least to that extent constructive – even expiatory. I’ve been sacrificing so to
strange gods that I feel I want to put on record somehow, my fidelity – fundamentally unchanged
after all – to our own. I feel as if my hands were embrued with the blood of monstrous alien
altars – of another faith altogether” (The Ambassadors 323). This passage also provides an
answer as to why James wrote an alternative plot into The Ambassadors: he wanted to put on
record his fidelity to the homosexual community that had been increasingly threatened and
maligned over the last decades of the nineteenth century. Edel refers to 1895 as the beginning of
“The Treacherous Years” in James’s life. His play Guy Domville was failing miserably and
salacious accounts of Oscar Wilde’s legal battles screamed from every newspaper. Novick
recounts James’s mounting anxieties:
The hooting of rowdies at Wilde’s and James’s plays now seemed an ominous precursor
of larger upheavals. A crowd gathered at night outside the Bodley Head offices, where
The Yellow Book was published, and the windows were smashed. Beardsley’s drawing
for The Yellow Book had created an impression that the magazine was somehow
connected with Wilde. (Mature 226)
James was a major contributor to The Yellow Book and feared that his association with it would
“mark him publicly as a member of the suspect circle” (227). He had promised The Yellow Book
one more submission, which he delivered, but was relieved when the journal folded two years
later. James remained unnerved, however, as the subsequent trials of additional men who
refused to deny their homosexuality kept the burning fires of castigation alive in the press.
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James was sympathetic – horrified – but had worked too hard for too long for too little money to
risk losing his career by foisting his identity on a reading public not ready to accept it. His
remorse for having remained in the shadows – serving the “strange gods” of mainstream
ideologies – elicited a perceived need for expiation: the Other Plot serves as reparation. We see
this in the Preface. He imagines the reader’s inquiries as to why Strether goes to Paris and what
he is doing there: “To answer these questions plausibly, to answer them as under crossexamination in the witness-box by counsel for the prosecution, in other words satisfactorily to
account for Strether and for his ‘peculiar tone,’ was to possess myself of the entire fabric”
(xxxv). Not having been subjected to a trial, he confesses his homosexuality by means of the
alternative narrative.
Residue of the fears from 1895 and the relief from guilt achieved by writing The
Ambassadors are revealed as conflicts in the Preface (written two years after the novel was
published). James pronounces what a “delightful … thrill” it is to be “the handler of puppets”;
yet it is “a game of difficulty breathlessly played” (xxxiii). He is not breathless due to exertion
but because of the fear-tinged suspense this difficult game provokes. The comparison James
makes to his enterprise is disturbing:
No dreadful old pursuit of the hidden slave with bloodhounds and the rag of association
can ever, for “excitement,” I judge, have bettered it at its best. (xxxiii)
Logically, nothing described as “dreadful” – especially the pursuit of a slave – “can ever” be
better than the telling of his tale. But the word “excitement” appears in quotes, signaling the
need for interpretation. The clue in this analogy is “the rag of association.” Throughout the
Other Plot, James alludes to contemporary homoerotic writings with which his readers were
likely familiar as an additional source of code. He frequently turns to is the highly erotic,
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sexually explicit novel by Oscar Wilde: Teleny (1893). This “rag” gives off the scent that leads
readers to the Other Plot. However, while Teleny is an effective source of code, references to it
put James in danger. Like The Yellow Book, Wilde’s novel is evidence of an “association” that
might “mark him publicly as a member of the suspect circle” – an incrimination that could incite
the bloodhounds (censors, critics, unsympathetic readers) to track him down. The “excitement”
in this situation is better labeled as fear. Like many (if not most) homosexual men of this era,
James is a “hidden slave” – not bound by visible chains but concealed in a closet of false
heteronormativity from which it is difficult to escape. Yet he has enjoyed telling the story of his
gay protagonist: “truly, I hold, one’s theme may be said to shine, and that of The Ambassadors, I
confess, wore this glow for me from the beginning to end. Fortunately thus I am able to estimate
this as, frankly, quite the best, ‘all round,’ of my productions” (xxxi). He is pleased with his
subversive, “licentious record” (xxxiv).
Foucault argues that pleasure is derived from exercising power. “The pleasure that
comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates,
brings to light” is experienced by those who mandate and enforce the prevailing social ideologies
of sexuality. “On the other hand, [there is] the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this
power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it. The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it
is pursuing; and opposite it, power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, or
resisting” (45). James is showing off – crowing in the Preface about “the delightful
complications he can smuggle in” and his “splendid impudence” (xxxiv, xxxvi). It would be
imprecise, however, to consider James’s novel to be an example of what Foucault identifies as “a
valorization and intensification of indecent speech” produced in reaction to “the tightening up of
the rules of decorum” (18). According to Foucault’s rule of the tactical polyvalence of
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discourses, we cannot divide societal discourses into categories of what is accepted and dominant
as opposed to those excluded and dominated. Instead they must be seen as “a multiplicity of
discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies…. Discourses are tactical
elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even
contradictory discourses within the same strategy (101- 02). This informs our consideration of
the Other Plot when placed within the context, or system, of other works of homoerotic fiction
that were read at the time The Ambassadors was published (1903).
The pornography industry was well established in London by 1820, existing primarily in
the district of Wych and Holywell Streets off the Strand. The pamphlets, magazines, and cheap
books produced (costing a penny to three shillings) were primarily heterosexual in orientation.
However, it was not unusual for a scene or two depicting men engaged in sodomy to be included.
These fictitious men invariably deny deriving any pleasure from the act and are often ashamed
and/or confused about their depravity. By the 1870s a handful of up-market pornographers
turned their attention to the upper classes, offering exclusive English gentlemen tastefully
clandestine subscriptions to book clubs and private publishing lists. Of higher quality, both
materially and aesthetically, these books and serialized journals were printed in small runs and
sold for considerably higher prices (£ 1-3). Many of these publications were overtly homoerotic.
Over the years some of these texts became “classics,” forming what I loosely call “the
homosexual canon.” A few selections: The Phoenix of Sodom (1813), The New Republic (1877),
The Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881), Arabian Nights (1885), The Perfumed Garden (1886),
My Secret Life (1888), A Marriage Below Zero (1889), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and
The Green Carnation (1894).
288
This “canon” is “a subtle network of discourses, special knowledges, pleasures, and
powers” (Foucault 72). While Foucault argues that discourses on sex do not necessarily tell us
“what strategy they derive from, or what moral divisions they accompany,” we must question
them on “what reciprocal effects of power and knowledge they ensure” (102). While the works
of the “canon” employ varying discursive strategies, the effects on the reader are uniformly
questionable, if not negative, both in terms of knowledge and power. While this is a future topic
I hope to explore, I present these examples here in order to reinforce what I see as the primary
value of James’s gay narrative. With the exception of The Green Carnation and Sins of the
Cities, these text connect homosexual identity to social isolation, arrests, suicide, murder,
madness, and a disposition towards sodomy due to barbarism. Sins of the Cities of the Plains is a
fictionalized collection of the sexual exploits of an actual male prostitute – Jack Saul – a happyhooker left waiting at the end book for his next over-the-top tryst (in real life he was swept up in
the Cleveland Street Scandal). The Green Carnation is a silly send-up of The Importance of
Being Earnest in which the only misfortune the two gentlemen suffer is their inability to get the
boys from the church school to do anything more than sing for them. On comparing the Other
Plot to the other works within this system, we see the meaning that lies in the difference: it is a
realistic, positive portrayal of homosexual lives, allowing an identification that contributes to a
constructive sense of self.
In The Mature Master, Novick records an incident from 1897 when Arthur Benson sent
his intimate friend a notebook in which he had recorded his personal experiences as a gay man –
sensitively omitting “the confessions of his love for James” (277). The novelist welcomed it “‘as
a document, a series of data, on the life of a young Englishman of great endowments, character
and position at the end of the 19th century.’” This may have also inspired the Other Plot. On
289
receiving the returned notebook, Benson added a post-script: “‘Henry James … has gallantly
read it & writes me a priceless letter…. I don’t know anyone like H.J. for throwing a halo,
restoring one’s sense of dignity’” (277). The Other Plot in The Ambassador lends a “sense of
dignity” to homosexual identity and throws a “halo” over same-sex love.
290
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