Maria Gostrey’s apartment, cluttered with the bounty of numerous shrewd shopping expeditions in a variety of European cities and towns, is located in the Quartier Marboeuf, described in a footnote in the Norton Critical edition of the novel as “[i]n 1900 a modern and handsome section of Paris”
(The Ambassadors [1994] 79), although she has decorated it with the debris of other people’s histories (342). Her collection of antiques is, ironically, testament to her modernity. Unlike Strether, Gostrey is a successful participant in the global economy, who can initiate him, without “vulgarity,”
into the border-crossing currents of consumer goods. The past which is present in her apartment is not her own or her family’s: it is an imaginative and aesthetic appropriation of the forms and connotations, detached from the original contexts which had given them meaning.
More importantly, Gostrey also initiates Strether into an alternative way of understanding and engaging reality. Rather than retreating into what DeKoven has characterised as “the old patriarchal scripts,” at the end of the novel, Strether adapts (or more accurately, perhaps, ‘absorbs’) Maria Gostrey’s rhetorical as well as perceptual strategies such as ‘embroidering,’
‘filling in,’ absenting oneself rather than insisting on one’s presence, and allowing events to organically unfold on their own terms rather than controlling. These ways of being in the world are inevitably disruptive of the stabilising fictions which have sustained the identities and fortunes of Woollett.
In his final conversation with Maria Gostrey, Strether acknowledges his own new disruptive power: he is, according to Chad, “exciting” and he has “pretty well to have upset everyone.” He has accepted the impossibility of his ever being “in harmony” with any surroundings—Woollett, Paris, London—in which he may conceivably find himself (343). He has changed—
yet he has not changed to another, fixed state, but rather an identity of being “different,” in relation to Mrs. Newsome’s “more than ever the same”
(345). His returning ‘home’ will not be returning to a familiar, stable, and natural environment, but a return “[t]o a great difference” from which he will attempt to create something new and meaningful. Whatever Strether
‘makes’ of his newfound and hard-earned consciousness of this external and internal “difference,” it will elude the criteria of value established by American capitalist dynamics; he will not gain or profit from his experience in Paris, even metaphorically. If there is any ‘logic’ to his Parisian adventure, it is “’Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for [him]self’” (346).
Whatever his future holds, it will involve rupture from past narratives of identity and value.
Strether initially tries to read Mme de Vionnet as the repository of old and enduring values. From his early impression that her possessions are somehow “transmitted” rather than exchanged for money, unlike those in Gostrey’s “little museum of bargains” (145), to his final impression of her as Madame Roland, the sentences which describe his perceptions of her are often shaped around bouleversements and contradictions which undermine his readings. From her putting her elbows on the table in that very Parisian
modern invention, the restaurant, to her entrepreneurial dealings on the marriage market, to her sexual discretions, Mme de Vionnet cannot be accounted for by Strether’s perceptions of her. His various narrative templates for female sexuality—Cleopatra, the Madonna, or a maidservant weeping over the loss of her ‘follower’—cannot contain or even address her being. What Strether wants to see as her magical and passive embodiment of transcendent ‘antique’ values is really, after all, very clever advertising—
her manipulation of images and associations for the consumption of a desirous observer. As Maria Gostrey tells Strether, Madame de Vionnet is multiple and polyglot: “It would doubtless be difficult, today […] to name and place her” (139). An example of the syntactic bouleversements which are associated with Strether and de Vionnet’s encounters occurs in the scene in Notre Dame. Without recognising her, Strether spends quite a bit of time making the woman he observes at prayer into “a heroine of an old story […] that […] he might himself have written,” noting that “his impression absolutely required that she be young and interesting” (174).
However, Madame de Vionnet does recognise Strether a few moments later, and quickly reads him and takes control of the situation: “[s]he checked, quickly and gaily, a certain confusion in him, came to meet it, turned it back, by an art of her own; the confusion having threatened him as he knew her now for the person he had been observing” (175). She not only resists but manipulates the narratives Strether’s very act of seeing her attempts to impose upon her. Thus they leave Notre Dame, the medieval cathedral resurrected by Victor Hugo’s 19th-century novel, for a restaurant, “a place of pilgrimage for the knowing, they were both aware, the knowing who came for the great renown, the homage of restless days, from the other end of town” (177). Other Parisian women, too, confound Strether, and his confusion is often enacted in sentences which contain paradoxes, reversals, and inversions within their syntax and imagery. [Miss Barrace, who, to Strether-the-tourist’s surprise and delight, smokes cigarettes publicly and incessantly, “is “so oddly […] both antique and modern” (156); Strether cannot tell if he has either “soared above or sunk below” Maria Gostrey’s explanations (178).] These modern women are citizens of a public sphere:
introducing themselves, as Maria Gostrey does, to strange men in public spaces. They are denizens of hotels, restaurants, streets, and shops. Paris is peopled by women, such as “the prompt Parisian women […] driving the public pen” at the telegraph office (317) in the novel’s final pages, who give a sharper and more threatening focus to Strether’s earlier impression
of Paris’s distinctive “promptness” (59). Though Madame de Vionnet professes that she has never been to the left-bank restaurant with Chad
“‘because I don’t go about with him in public’” (178), she is clearly at ease as a modern woman moving through urban spaces, as she invites him to stroll aimlessly and comfortably through the city streets. What for Strether is the inevitable ‘smash’ at the end of a ‘runaway’ is her natural habitat: “The smash was their walk, their déjeuner, the omelette, the Chablis, the place, the view, their present talk and his present pleasure in it” (179).
Strether first meets Madame de Vionnet in the artist Gloriani’s garden.
The physical location of Gloriani’s garden and its allusions to The American set the stage for the revision of the role Paris plays in the transformation of each novel’s protagonists. Gloriani lives in “the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and on the edge of a cluster of gardens attached to old noble houses […] which spoke of survival, transmission, association, a strong indifferent persistent order” (119). This is the neighborhood where James’s earlier American ambassador on a failed mission to Paris, Christopher Newman,
found the quiet privacy of the “grey and silent streets […] a queer way for rich people to live; his ideal of grandeur was a splendid façade, diffusing its brilliancy outward” (The American [1978] 50). The aristocratic Bellegarde Hotel “answered Newman’s conception of a convent” (50). Ironically, the convent Claire de Cintré actually ends up immured in is located in “a quarter [which] has an air of modern opulence and convenience” (275) on the other side of the river. The Carmelite convent in the novel is next to the Parc Monceau, the meticulously preserved remnant of a ducal garden surrounded by Haussmanian-era high intensity real-estate development. The convent, and Claire’s fate, is an archaic disruption of both setting and narrative.
The Faubourg St.-Germain surroundings of Gloriani’s garden remind Strether, too, of a convent: “Strether had presently the sense of a great convent, a convent of missions, famous for he scarce knew what, a nursery of young priests, of scattered shade, of straight alleys and chapel bells” (The Ambassadors [1994] 119-20). In the later novel, this air of the convent—suggestive to Strether of aristocratic immutability—encircles the bohemian vivacity and hybridity of Gloriani’s guests, with their ambiguous nationalities and indeterminable social ranks, polyglot conversations, and suggestions of migratory and perhaps louche lives.
Madame de Vionnet has replaced the chaste and victimised Claire de Cintré as the exoticised and eroticised ‘Other’ of desire. Both women have been married to husbands who were ‘brutes,’ and thus deserve better men.
Madame de Vionnet lives on Rue de Bellechasse, which crosses the Rue de l’Université, where the Bellegardes lived (Fussell The Ambassadors 185).
While Claire’s names evoke purity and strong connections between opposites (a cintre supports the center of a bridge or arch) and speaks to Newman’s failed fantasies of uniting the values of the Old and New Worlds, of amassing centuries of European history to sit atop his New World spoils, Mme de Vionnet’s names playfully evoke a range of competing femininities, among them ‘notre dame’; her foil and perhaps romantic rival, Maria Gostrey; and the French designer Madeleine Vionnet. Although she did not open her own atelier until 1912, Vionnet, the inventor of the bias-cut gown, by turn of the century had developed her own reputation, when she worked for designers such as Doucet, for garments which stylishly allowed her customers to move freely and naturally. Other readers, most amusingly Fussell, have pointed out that Strether’s sense of Madame de Vionnet’s historical connections is based on Strether’s very limited and inaccurate perceptions of French history.
Strether’s mission to Paris fails because the Woollett/Paris binary upon which he builds his interpretive apparatus fails. The hierarchised differences and distinctions which he must make—between virtuous and bad attachments, for example—are confounded by his adventures in Paris.
Yet the confusions, connections, and ambiguities which baffle him during his sojourn in the modern Babylon will also be present in Massachusetts, as he brings this new consciousness back with him to the United States. Chad, the other Woollett adventurer, is also bringing something back to the United States: his commitment to new advertising methods, which he transports from London—where he has the “revelation” of the “great new force” that advertising can be (341), which opens the possibility that perhaps Mrs.
Newsome, as her company employs the latest marketing techniques to disseminate the product too quotidian to be worthy of naming, is as much a citizen of Babylon as Madame de Vionnet.