Strether's Education in Paris: Henry James's The Ambassadors

Introduction: Strether as Ambassador

The Ambassadors, by Henry James, first appeared in 1903 as a serial in The North American Review and was published in book form a year later. Lambert Strether is an "ambassador" from puritanical Woollett, Massachusetts, who travels to Paris to investigate the relationship between young Chad Newsome and an unknown woman. Chad's mother, Mrs. Newsome, has commissioned Strether to learn more about her son amid the freedoms of Parisian life. Mrs. Newsome represents the highly strict mores of New England; Chad represents the new freedom of Paris.

Mrs. Newsome wants her son to come home, take over his business responsibilities, and find a respectable marriage — indeed, to return "in triumph as a kind of wedding present to mother." Mixed motives complicate this mission from the start: Mrs. Newsome has indicated she will express her gratitude by marrying Strether if he succeeds, promising financial stability for all involved. Strether, however, ignores the uncomfortable fact that he is not a fiancé — he is an employee.

Strether is the novel's central character and the focus of this analysis. Several questions guide the discussion: What does Strether learn in Paris? How does he learn it? From whom does he learn it? And what effect does that learning have on him?

Woollett vs. Paris: Contrasting Moral Worlds

Strether learns much about himself and his background as he moves through Paris. He reflects early in his stay that things in London "had struck him as requiring so many explanations.... But it was at present as if he had either soared above or sunk below them, he couldn't tell which; he could somehow think of none that didn't seem to leave the appearance of collapse and cynicism easier for him than lucidity" (James).

Paris is new to him — full of bright people, almost all of them Americans, who carry new ideas and hold unconventional views. He meets bohemian figures like the sculptor Gloriani and women considered morally questionable, like Madame de Vionnet, all of whom begin to reshape his understanding of mores and lifestyle. In Paris he learns to feel freer than he has ever felt before. The tight bonds of strait-laced Massachusetts loosen, and he opens himself to learning from the people he meets and the lives they lead. Paris is, in his perception, "a vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked" (James).

Miss Gostrey and the First Stirrings of Change

Among the first and most significant influences on Strether is Miss Gostrey. He is among people who "dine before the theatre," as he does with her. He constantly compares her to Mrs. Newsome, and while he does not admit it at the time, Mrs. Newsome does not come out ahead. "Miss Gostrey had dined with him at his hotel, face-to-face over a small table on which the lighted candles had rose-coloured shades; and the rose-coloured shades and the small table and 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" (James).

By contrast, he recalls never having dined with Mrs. Newsome — indeed, never having dined with any young woman before he was married. He also remembers Mrs. Newsome as anything but "rosy." She wears "handsome" (that is, conservative) dresses, while Miss Gostrey wears dresses "cut down" over the shoulders. This entire scene sets the stage for Strether's transformation. Miss Gostrey, who clearly cares for him, is the "questionable" woman — new and exciting. She dismisses Madame de Vionnet as "base, venal — out of the streets," and yet compared to Mrs. Newsome's New England severity, Miss Gostrey herself is a little daring, a little "naughty."

Throughout the novel, Strether often "soars above or sinks below" his own feelings; his emotions are in constant tumult because so much around him is different, new, and stimulating. At one point he confesses: "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" (James). At another moment he remarks to Chad: "It wasn't for you they came out, but for me. It wasn't to see for themselves what you're doing, but what I'm doing" (James). It is here that he grasps what the journey has been about all along. He had assumed it was about Chad — about saving him — but in reality it has been about his own salvation. He has learned that there is more to the world than the rigid values of Victorian New England Puritanism.

Conclusion: Between Two Worlds

In the end, Strether is neither a resident of Massachusetts nor a resident of Paris. At the novel's opening he has the boyish charm of a schoolboy, even though he is a grown man who has lost a wife and a son. By the close he has matured considerably and begun to feel his real age. He has surrendered his financial security — the reward Mrs. Newsome had dangled before him — and shed a great deal of his former innocence.

He has absorbed something of Paris's free-thinking society, but he remains caught in the middle. He still holds Puritanical reservations about some of the freedoms he has witnessed, even as he has abandoned many of his conservative beliefs. He articulates this suspended state himself: "I want... 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" (James).

Strether's education in Paris is therefore an education in ambiguity. He has learned that the world is richer, more complex, and more morally ambiguous than Woollett ever allowed him to imagine. Yet that knowledge does not deliver him into a new life — it leaves him alone, between worlds, wiser but without a clear home in either.