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The Novel in John Gabriel Borkman: Henry James's The Ambassadors by Quay Grigg, Hamline University As the data piles up, it is becoming the more necessary to distinguish between the originality of The Ambassadors as a development of modern fiction and the sense of deja vu that will be felt by a thoughtful reader of the books and plays Henry James himself was reading in the 1890's. Long ago Oscar Cargill observed not only that The Ambassadors is one of James's most original works but also that "no novel is so much the result of all his 'past accumulations' as this one."' Cargill looks both to James's own past work and to other authors in pointing out these "past accumulations." Since then American Literary Scholarship has filled a section annually with studies of sources and parallels of this and other James novels. Nevertheless, one more major source for The Ambassadors must now be i dent i fIed : Ibsen's ϕ I ay John Gabriel Borkman. James himself seems to have acknowledged this source, as he sometimes does others, in the text of the novel, even though he does not mention it in the New York Edition Preface or elsewhere. He sometimes does "signal a source" in this way alone. For instance, In Book First of The Ambassadors, he has Maria Gostrey point out that "Lewis Lambert Strether" reflects the name of a Balzac novel ("few authors indeed have ever signalled a 'source' more clearly," writes Leon Edel).2 Some twenty pages later, Book Second begins with the initial "awakening" of Lambert Strether during an evening at dinner and the theater with Miss Gostrey. Ibsen's play is not mentioned by name in the text of the novel, but the play they attend is strikingly similar to part of the action of Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman, as we shall see later. The evening brings Strether's first shock of recognition of the attractions of the worldly and perhaps wicked woman. Whatever else, unmentioned, might have been in that play, it is the parallel between the alluring worldly woman on the stage and the magnetic and worldly Maria Gostrey beside him that leaps out at Strether. He perceives that the characters in the audience—Maria Gostrey among them—are "interchangeable with those on the stage." His every pore seems to absorb the drama of the audience, and the elbow of the large red-haired woman on his other side transmits the drama from the stage to him: "He felt as if the play itself penetrated him with the naked elbow of his neighbor. . . It befell that in the drama precisely there was a bad woman in a yellow frock who made a pleasant weak good-looking young man in perpetual evening dress do the most dreadful things. Strether felt himself on the whole not afraid of the yellow frock, but he was vaguely anxious over a certain kindness into which he found himself drifting for its victim."3 This summary of the play they attend in London certainly relates only a part of what happens In Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman, but we must note that we are being told only what Strether himself notices. And whatever else that play might have been about, this is the part (as Miss Gostrey may have anticipated) that would have gripped Strether because of the close parallel with the real-life problem with a wicked woman he has come to Europe to solve, as well as because of the striking worldly woman at his side. As we shall see, the play that so grips Strether is very like John Gabriel Borkman. In fact, the Innocent young man and the wicked older woman in the play they see are so astoundingly like Ibsen's Erhart and Mrs. Wilton that we are justified in assuming that they walked from Ibsen's play into the 1. The Novels of Henry James (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 303. 2. Henry James: the Master, 1901-1916 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972), pp. 70-71. 3. The Novels and Tales of Henry James, XXI (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909), pp. 53-54. Parenthetic references In my text...

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