Returns: Youth, Time, and Maturity in The Ambassadors

In this essay, I study numerous spatiotemporal returns in The Ambassadors to make three points. First, youth is multitemporal and relational rather than chronological and individual in this novel. A chronological view of Strether’s lost youth and Chad’s precarious youth eludes the returns of Strether’s young self and his dead son to figure in Strether’s relationship with Chad. Second, Strether’s consciousness analytically moves forward by temporally moving backward: his progress has to be backward. And third, Strether and Chad are boyish characters not necessarily because they are immature by nature but because their representations botch the telos of maturity.