Henry James's The Ambassadors: A Critical Study (review)

Dorothea Krook’s reputation as a major James scholar was made in 1962 with the publication of The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James, a study that, as Daniel Mark Fogel reminds us in his foreword to the volume under review, initiated serious philosophical disquisitions on James’s novels. One somewhat curious gap in that work was the absence of any extended analysis of The Ambassadors, a novel Krook judged equal in greatness to the other late masterworks. Because it was in 1962 the most widely known of these and had already been thoroughly critiqued, Krook believed the novel required no further supplementary reading from her. Readers of James are most fortunate that she reconsidered this early stance, leaving at her death in 1989 this extended rumination on the novel she called “a masterpiece second to none in the history of the modern novel” (2). She brings to her close reading the full intellectual force of all her critical projects—her studies of tragedy, of intentionality, of the moral aspect in literature, of ambiguity and right reading. Published as the fifteenth volume in the AMS Studies in the Nineteenth Century series, it also stands as the inaugural volume in the Henry James Society series. Once again, Krook is in the first wave.

Her study begins, as one would expect, with plot summary and a brief overview of James’s development of the international theme. Having set the stage for her close reading, one which depends upon copious quotation from the novel, Krook then devotes the major portion of her discussion to what she now calls the drama of consciousness, that phrase serving as title for three of five chapters, a drama replete with suspense, surprises, sudden shocking physical gestures or acts, an unfolding play of light and dark, comic wit, and tragic self-realization. For Krook The Ambassadors is a drama of character first and foremost, one in which even Paris itself functions more as an agent than merely the location of certain acts. Of course, since the novel is centered in Lambert Strether’s consciousness, Krook’s nuanced readings of the other characters depend upon his shifting investment in the situations and acknowledgment of the limitations of his confidants and antagonists. Most provocative of these analyses is her very generous reading of Chad, the most inaccessible of characters to Strether, and, consequently, to the reader; she is generous in her evocation of his sexual power, his sheer energy, his youth, and the Americanness that drives him to an end to which his readers are not privy. Similarly astute are her readings of the infinitely various and yet profoundly abject Marie de Vionnet, with whom Strether fears falling in love, and Maria Gostrey, “the Jamesian instrument of instruments” in “the advancement of his hero’s drama of consciousness” (84), whom Strether loves but, Krook insists, with whom he is not in love and so must leave at the end.

Perhaps unique to Krook’s reading is her insistence on the comic trajectory of the novel. While most critics would agree that there are comic elements in The Ambassadors, such as the thing on which the Newsome fortunes depend, these elements do not for them abound. Krook, however, refuses to read the novel as a spectacle of suffering, drawing attention to how often Strether laughs and so defuses a potentially tragic moment, how often, in short, the comic predominates because James does not press each issue to a tragic conclusion. This is not to deny the renunciation, betrayal, and pitiful pain elaborated in the novel; indeed, Krook asserts that “the sustained bitterness of the self-reproach, self-contempt, self-disgust of Strether’s meditation, and the hopeless sense of failure that precipitates it, is something new in Henry James” (13). Nevertheless, taking as always her cue from James, Krook concludes that this is simply but beautifully “a story of the loss of human happiness told all comically, all tragically” (105).

One sees throughout this reading Krook’s intense...