Grasping the Golden Strand in James's The Ambassadors

In Book Twelve of The Ambassadors, Lambert Strether likens the time that he has spent in Paris to floating through Coleridge's "caverns of Kubla Khan" (329). The hero's decision to equate his adventure to Coleridge's poem does not represent the only moment when Strether creates an analogue between events in his life and a renowned piece of literature. Throughout the text, Strether re-peatedly relates the people and scenes that dazzle him in Paris to incidents and characters found in famed literary texts. ¹ These references to other works cause the narrative to be imbued with a sense of déjà vu, for The Ambassadors often seems haunted by its predecessors. ²

Like James's quixotic hero, readers of The Ambassadors also tend to grasp at the many allusions scattered throughout the text in the hope that these works might provide some insight concerning the meaning of James's difficult, dense novel. In a letter written to the Duchess of Sutherland, December 23, 1903, James seems to encourage his readers to engage in this type of discovery, for he enjoins the Duchess to search for the narrative's "thread." James hints that finding the thread will enable the Duchess to uncover thematic patterns woven throughout the novel, which will, in turn, enhance her understanding of the text (HJL 302). ³

As Adeline Tintner notes in The Book World of Henry James, Appropriating the Classics, James reveled in reworking renowned pieces of literature: "Throughout his life, Henry James made it quite clear to his intimates and his readers that his devouring interest in fiction lay in measuring his mind against the works of others and that his pleasure arose from rewriting them in his own way" (xix). Thus, James's literary allusions provide one strand that readers may pull in an attempt to unravel the skein of The Ambassadors and, consequently, to better grasp the work's significance.

Critics of The Ambassadors have expended considerable effort in uncovering and analyzing several of the sources upon which James relies in composing The Ambassadors. ⁴ One renowned literary masterpiece that resonates throughout The Ambassadors, has, however, remained concealed from the critical gaze. Critics searching for associations between James's novel and extant pieces of literature have not recognized James's reliance in composing The Ambassadors upon Book Two of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. James's novel follows Book Two of Spenser's romance-epic in both story line and form, and the novelist carefully creates a counterpart for nearly every figure associated with Spenser's enchantress Acrasia's delightfully decadent Bowre of Bliss, the final destination of the faerie knight Guyon. James reworks Spenser's depiction of the Bowre of Bliss and its annihilation by the supposed knight of temperance, Guyon, in order to take issue with his Renaissance predecessor, deploring the encroachment of the active ugly world of his work's omnipotent presence, Strether's fiancée, Mrs. Newsome, upon the artfully contrived passive world of James's modern bower, Paris. James considers the destruction of the Bowre by Guyon to be deplorable, and, in Strether, he creates the antithesis of Spenser's knight, for Strether emerges as a man who understands the value of the Parisian realm and who struggles to preserve it. Viewed in relation to their Renaissance counterparts, the characters and incidents found in The Ambassadors appear much less confounding; The Faerie Queene, like the other literary works employed by James, serves as a valuable gloss to James's novel.

By separating his novel into twelve "books," the novelist follows the epic tradition adhered to by Spenser, who divides his masterpiece into six books of twelve parts each. Each book concerns a different knight's quest, and these quests represent the knights' individual attempts to attain one of the six virtues that Spenser considered necessary for the ideal civilized man (Heninger, Sidney 385). The idea of fashioning...