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Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on June 23, 2009
Literary Imagination 2009 11(3):291-316; doi:10.1093/litimag/imp036
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Strether's Babylon: Counterplot in The Ambassadors

James Walton*

*James Walton, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA. E-mail: Walton.1@nd.edu

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.


   Errand Into the Wilderness
 

"Poor Robin Crusoe. Where are you? Where have you been? How come you here?"
... ... ...
Poor Robin Crusoe, and how did I come here and where had I been?1
... poor Lambert Strether washed up on the sunny strand by the waves of a single day, poor Lambert Strether thankful for breathing-time and stiffening himself while he gasped. There he was ...2
In describing Strether's condition after a day in Paris, the narrator of The Ambassadors provides an "image" of the hero's "own likeness" by echoing Crusoe's parrot. For a paradoxical moment it is as if James's reluctant pilgrim were a castaway and "Europe" his desert island. Strether's passage seems to reverse the direction not only of Crusoe's voyage but that of Cotton Mather's "Christian religion" which, as he relates at the beginning of the Magnalia Christi Americana, took flight "from the depravations of Europe . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Et Omnia Vanitas
 

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