268 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–19006 years old when her parents are divorced. The strategy enables James to achieve
economy, intensity, and irony as he combines and implicitly compares what Maisie
sees with what the narrative voice intimates.
Toward the end of his second period, James confirmed his reputation as a writer
of short stories with tales many of which were about writers and writing, like “The
Lesson of the Master” (1888), “The Middle Years” (1893), and “The Figure in the
Carpet” (1896). Again, many of these tales are fired into life by James’s ingenious,
inspired use of narrative viewpoint. In “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), for example,
the entire narrative depends for its intensity of terror on the fact that everything
occurs in the mind of a governess, who desperately needs corroboration that she is
not mad in attributing supernatural experiences to her young charges and seeing
dead people. The reader is left in doubt, thanks to the possible unreliability of the
narrator, as to whether or not she sees ghosts or hallucinations – and as to whether
this is a Gothic story of evil or a psychological tale about repression and projection.
In its own modest fashion, “The Turn of the Screw” prepares the way for the
emotional and psychological subtleties, the sense the reader has of wandering
through the labyrinth of the human mind, that characterize the three major novels
of the third and final period of James’s career: The Ambassadors, written in 1901 and
published in 1903, The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). In all
three, James returns to the international theme. In The Ambassadors, for instance,
Lambert Strether is sent by a wealthy widow, Mrs. Newsome, to persuade her son
Chad to return to Massachusetts. Gradually, however, he grows less enthusiastic
about his mission, as he becomes more and more receptive to the charms of England
and France. Abandoning his aims, and with them the prospect of an advantageous
marriage to Mrs. Newsome – which is his promised reward, if he fulfills them – he
even encourages the liaison between Chad and a charming Frenchwoman, Madame
de Vionnet. It would be “the last infamy,” he tells Chad, if he forsook her. “Live all
you can,” Strether declares to another character, when he is provoked by a sense of
his own tentative life, “it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in
particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?”
Nevertheless, Strether remains detached, content to observe rather than participate,
eventually returning to his inconsequential life as a widower in Massachusetts. As he
searches for the reality of Chad’s motives, and the truth of his own relationship to
life, living, and the conflicting cultures of America and England, there is speculation,
meditation, but fundamental irresolution. Europe has its own secrecies – the liaison
of Chad and Madame de Vionnet, he eventually discovers, has been an intimate
one – just as America has its absurdities. Life is for living, it may be, but not for him.
This story of transatlantic encounters acquires some clarity by an elaborate balanc-
ing of scene and character: there are four major scenes set in a plainly allegorical
garden, for instance, in which knowledge is slowly acquired and, in the course of the
action, Chad and Strether change moral places. But it also acquires a certain mystery,
even opacity from James’s determination to follow the smallest refinement of
emotional detail, the slightest nuance of social gesture – and from a style that, in the
service of this pursuit, often becomes formidably, impenetrably intricate.GGray_c03.indd 268ray_c 03 .indd 268 8 8/1/2011 7:54:21 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 21 AM