NAMING AND IDENTITY IN HENRY JAMES'S THE AMBASSADORS by Victoria Leigh Bennett A ...

305 Pages·2012·1.29 MB·English

by  Patricia G. Bennett

NAMING AND IDENTITY IN HENRY JAMES’S
THE AMBASSADORS

by

Victoria Leigh Bennett

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of English
University of Toronto

 Copyright by Victoria Leigh Bennett 2012
Abstract
NAMING AND IDENTITY IN HENRY JAMES’S
THE AMBASSADORS

© Copyright 2012
by Victoria Leigh Bennett
Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of English
University of Toronto

In Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors, James uses axiological language in tropes
and in substantives, periphrastically replacing proper names. He also includes valuations
in miscellaneous data contained in such differences as the one he makes in The
Ambassadors between "Europe" (place) and "'Europe'" (concept). As well, James puts
adjectival assessments of people and situations in the midst of these constructions and in
the mouths of his characters, assessments which vary from those which contradict the
value systems posited in the novel by various characters, through those which seem
quizzical or ambiguous, to those whose meaning seems obvious under the circumstances.
The argument of this critical work is that these attempts at naming tie in fundamentally
with the ways in which James means for readers to interpret the identities of the
characters and the events and are not merely ornamental.
Even when James says that a character "didn’t know what to call" someone or
something or when "identity" or a verbal equation for identity occurs in an odd context,
James answers his own implied rhetorical question; he is not as problematic to read as is
ii
sometimes suggested. Our own valuations are encouraged to be close to the experience
of Lambert Strether. Leading the reader through the maze of Strether’s experience,
James gives many clear signals from the simplest elements of his complicated language
even into the fabrication of his complex metaphors that he, though an explorer of the
moral universe, is no relativistic iconoclast.
In the examination of these issues, a choice has been made to draw eclectically upon
various sources and techniques, from traditional “humanistic” modes of interpretation,
rhetorical studies, structuralist and deconstructionist remarks, to existentialism,
narratology, and identity studies. This choice is the result of an intention to access as
many different "voices" as possible, in the attempt to be comprehensive about the voices
of James and The Ambassadors.

iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For his unfailingly perspicacious, kind and patient guidance and for his many
suggestions regarding reading and research material, I thank Professor Greig Henderson
of the University of Toronto Department of English, my supervisor for the thesis.
Professor Henderson also offered many pertinent and useful bits of advice about editing
my thesis, as well as actual editorial help, and was generous with time and counsel.
For her kind consideration in allowing me to continue my Ph.D. as a reinstated
student, I thank Professor Heather Murray, the Graduate Director of the Department of
English at the University of Toronto.
My gratitude goes to Mr. Michael Currier and the Library Privileges Office at Harvard
University for permission to use Widener Library for my research.
I should also like to acknowledge the aid of Ms. Laura Farwell Blake and the
librarians of Widener Library, Harvard University, for their assistance with my thesis;
they helped familiarize me with the selection and use of the electronic sources lists in
English and American literature.
The Graduate Secretary Ms. Carol Gordon and the Graduate Administrator and
Counsellor Ms.Tanuja Persaud at the University of Toronto Department of English were
of great help in reducing the technical complications of being a reinstated student.
For funding of my study and my thesis I should like to thank Patricia Bennett, for her
ardent support and generosity.
Last, but far from least, Frederick Douglas Bennett has been my computer consultant
through more than one stage of my thesis, and deserves my thanks for the job he has done
in aid of my weaker formatting abilities.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Tables vi
List of Appendices vii
Introduction 1
Chapter I—Antonomasia/Periphrasis in Connection with Style, Voice, 9
and Mimesis

Chapter II—The Labelling of Antonomasia/Periphrasis As It Extends into 56
the Metaphor of the Quest and Beyond

Chapter III—Grounding the Dichotomy of Knight versus Burgher in 101
Metaphorical Periphrasis, and the Metaphor of Sight

Chapter IV—Antonomasia/Periphrasis in Explicit Naming and Identity 151
Language

Chapter V—Some Penultimate Comments on the Jamesian Aspects 200
of Identity

Chapter VI—Conclusion 230

Appendix 234

List of Works Consulted 291

v
LIST OF TABLES

TABLE I—Major Kinds of Periphrasis 11-12
TABLE II—Metaphors of The Ambassadors: What and How Thought 235-36
Is Expressed

vi
LIST OF APPENDICES
APPENDIX—Eight Categories of Metaphor (Clichéd and Other Miscellaneous 234
Ones and Some More Usual Metaphorical Forms)

vii
INTRODUCTION
Though in Figures in Literary Discourse Genette charges the pleonasm (redundancy),
with being a "bad sign" because it is "bloated," his description of a sign which "wants to
be true,..both a sign and a thing" (36), Henry James’s periphrasis, sometimes seen as
unnecessary or a redundancy, partakes of the negative quality of this desire only from a
partial perspective. Though like Genette’s "bad sign" James’s auctorial signature may
"try to deceive by adding to [its] conventional value the oblique power of natural
evocation," I argue that it does so out of a generosity of spirit and a desire to thoroughly
involve the reader, to implicate, entangle and entrap the reader, so that the reader’s easy
moral assumptions are challenged and thus the reader is driven in turn towards generosity
of spirit. This generosity seems lacking in labelling signs "bad" and "good" (in a
distortion of Sartre’s "bad faith"1) which are supposedly so remote from moral issues per
se , and then affiliating them, as Genette says Barthes does, with "the naturalization of
culture, and therefore of history…the major sin of petty-bourgeois ideology" (FLD 36).
This is simply to prefer one aesthetic—the extirpation of "expression" from art (FLD 37-
38)—to another, and to tie it to a political agendum with which it may not actually be
connected. Readers and writers and their opinions and preferences are various, and in

1 Though Sartre warns that the attempt to be sincere will almost willy-nilly result in bad faith, at the same
time he suggests that we must accept the doubleness of our state. In his famous example of the waiter in
Being and Nothingness, the waiter must not only accept his "objectification" by others—though Sartre
would perhaps not use that word. As a waiter qua waiter this is his "being-in-itself." He must also strive to
achieve his freedom as an individual other than that contained in the selective role of waiter (his "being-for-
itself"). Sartre indicates that this dichotomy must be accepted, striven for even, in both its parts, or at least
that the dichotomy is inevitable in the human situation (Sartre qtd. in Guignon and Pereboom 309-322).
What Genette (as derived from Barthes) seems to do is to reject the "expressive" value of the individual
sign and value only the other half of the dichotomy, the "arbitrary" value of the sign qua sign. If Sartre is
correct, then both the expressive value and the arbitrary value of the sign have their place, and it is not
accurate to label one half a "bad" sign because it is expressive and the other a "good" sign because it is
arbitrary. Calling the expressive value (the redundancy, or "pleonasm," as Genette names it in FLD)
"vulgar" and "petty-bourgeois" by this explanation seems like just so much posturing.
1
2

order not to reduce James’s overall pyrotechnics only to the question of non-demotic
language, one must still read for meaning, even sometimes for moral perspective.
James’s aesthetic reaches toward the ideal expressed poetically in Byron’s Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage: "Words which are things, hopes which will not deceive,/And
virtues which are merciful nor weave/Snares for the failing…" (114.161-63). He seeks
"words which are things" not in the sense of the disagreement over referentiality, but in
the sense of paring down the "bloated" quality itself insofar as it ever referred to the
Romantic, a quality that James perhaps justly may be seen as guilty of in some of his
early works. (Though I am aware that a quote from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is
automatically suspect from the point of view of introducing a seemingly typical evocation
of “expression,” it is well to remember that though that poem lacks the full development
of the more classical, "cleaner," less "bloated" spirit of Don Juan, in a reduced backward
perspective from the latter it is still a rhetorical work, sharing like elements of balance,
contrast and antithesis.) One is thus in search in The Ambassadors for the quintessential
and at the same time barest possible claim that can be made for the morality, aesthetics,
and axiology used to reveal the characters' identities.
James's late style is characterized by periphrasis from extended antonomasia, from
tropes, from other texts, from recurring miscellaneous words and expressions, and from
the particular adjectival combinations which occur in the antonomasia, tropes, and
expressions his characters use. These incidents of periphrasis contain, name, and express
James's axiological, ethical concerns in the text, particularly as the ethical is met and
interacted with by the aesthetic. The blossoming forth of James's periphrasis is in fact the
aesthetic of a search for adequate and comprehensive moral ground.
3

Accordingly, with my view of James’s most frequent or indicative forms of
periphrasis, I must test the reader’s patience by repeating examples as I layer the
analytical discussion of rhetorical effects, just as James layered his revisions from edition
to edition originally (Rosenbaum 361); presumably the most authoritative version appears
in the 1994 Norton Critical Edition of the New York Edition of The Ambassadors. Such
a reading of the book is in this case a step toward methodology if not toward theory.
Though it is debatable whether one can get at these last for James by the example of this
one literary text (as Genette does for Proust so notably in Narrative Discourse), it is at the
same time true that this one work is an example of James’s late style par excellence,
especially with reference to periphrasis related to naming and identity and how it affects
other items, such as point of view and metaphor.
In addition to this sometimes repetitive, close, layered analysis, some space must be
dedicated for the appeal to various styles and sources of literary analysis: a certain
eclecticism of procedure, drawing now from one critical agendum, now from another
seems apropos, if only to honor in spirit, if not in slavish adherence to the methodological
letter, the preference Genette gives, again quoting Barthes, to "'peaceful coexistence'" of
approaches and a "'"parametric" criticism'" to suit the work (Barthes qtd. in FLD 28).2
For Genette and Barthes, the "fundamental 'ideological principles'" concerned in
parametric criticism are those of "existentialism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, [and]
structuralism" (FLD 28). I propose to borrow the term "parametric" not with an emphasis
on its role as a limit or boundary of these particular perspectives, however, but with an

2 Though Genette and Barthes are consistent in their statements of this principle and Barthes was previous
in his statement of it, I reference Genette because his discussion follows up an idea formulated in Barthes's
works in general. See in particular Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, Richard Howard tr. (Evanston, Ill:
Northwestern UP, 1972).