The Ambassadors is clearly a novel: the novel is free, and has the most elastic form. We could be tempted to say that there is no drama in the work. In fact, drama has different meanings. First, it is the name of theatrical plays of a particular kind or period. Secondly, it can mean a situation or succession of events having the dramatic progression or emotional effects on the characteristic of a play, or the quality or condition of it being dramatic. It is a term often refered to by the critics. The drama has links to both feelings and appearances. James gives himself this expression in a passage of the preface to which we will try and give a relevant sense all along this lecture: "The actual man's note, from the first of our seeking it struck, is the note of discrimination, just as the drama is to become, under stress, the drama of discrimination. It would have been his blest imagination, we have seen, that had already helped him to discriminate ; the element that was for so much of the pleasure of my cutting thick, as I have intimated, into his intellectual, into his moral substance."
[...] Maria Gostrey is an American woman living in Europe who takes the duty of assisting Americans in Europe. As we have seen it before, Mrs Newsome is a widow and Strether has the opportunity to marry her, if he retrieves Chad. We see in II,1 that he has not the same freedom of representation dealing with the two women. Miss Gostrey, as the narrator explains it, is associated in Strether's mind with Mary Stuart and Mrs Newsome with Queen Elisabeth Queen Elisabeth the first is a conventional evocation of a figure of authority. [...]
[...] As a matter of fact, as E.M Forster says it in Pattern in the Ambassadors: Behind Paris, interpreting it for Chad, is the adorable and exalted figure of Madame de Vionnet.[ . ] she asks him not to take Chad away. He promises-without reluctance, for his own heart has already shown him as much- and he remains in Paris not to fight it but to fight for it.[ . ]Mrs Newsome, incensed and puzzled by the unseemly delay, has dispatched Chad's sister, his brother-in- law, and Mammie, the girl whom he is supposed to marry So, though Strether writes letters to Mrs Newsome to show how far Chad has acquired a new personality and a real distinction in three years, thanks to Mme de Vionnet, the Newsome family, with at its head Sarah and Mrs Newsome, stays in the same obstinate position concerning the corrupting effects of Paris. [...]
[...] We can here speak of drama insofar as Paris seems to be a stage on which discrimination has the most important role. There are numerous reasons to this opposition between Paris and Wollett. On the one hand, we have the New world a Massachusetts industrial town called Woollett, the world of commonplace for Percy Lubock: There were opinions at Woolett but only on three or four. The differences were there to match It is also a place of austerity: Woollett isn't sure it has to enjoy says Strether. [...]
[...] In this book, people of New England, except Strether, embodied in the austere figure of Waymarsh, Sarah, and even with Mrs Newsome, always present though not physically, exert a discrimination towards those of Europe, and especially of Paris. Paris appears as the exact opposite of Woolett, for it is a place of discernment. It is a drama insofar as Paris is a kind of stage, on which discrimination plays the main role, but in the positive sense of the term, whereas it is a negative discrimination which comes [...]
[...] Why could we speak of a drama: because it provokes some dramatic emotions in the characters, or because we can notice some elements relating to theatrical play in the text? We will study the interactions between these two terms. First, what discriminations could we identify towards Paris and Parisians? Indeed, couldn't we say that Paris is the exact antithesis of Woollett, for it is a place of discrimination, in the sense of discernment? Finally, what effects in terms of differences and interior drama have these two types of discrimination on Strether? [...]
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