City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2006 Henry James’s "The Ambassadors": Anatomy of Silence Marie Leone Meyer Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1764 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] HENRY JAMES’S THE AMBASSADORS: ANATOMY OF SILENCE by MARIE LEONE MEYER A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2006 UMI Number: 3232005 Copyright 2006 by Meyer, Marie Leone All rights reserved. UMI Microform 3232005 Copyright 2006 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 ii © 2006 MARIE LEONE MEYER All Rights Reserved iii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Joan Richardson____________________________ ____________ _________________________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Steven Kruger______________________________ ____________ __________________________________________ Date Executive Officer Joan Richardson___________________________ William Kelly_____________________________ Norman Kelvin____________________________ Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv Abstract HENRY JAMES’S THE AMBASSADORS: ANATOMY OF SILENCE by Marie Leone Meyer Adviser: Professor Joan Richardson This dissertation examines the use of silence in Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors. James uses silence rich in meaning to portray the protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether’s unfolding consciousness. James creates different types of silences that reflect a shift from the spoken or written word to alternate symbol systems. James’s novel perches on the threshold of modernity, as his work reflects the ideas of a line of thinkers extending back from James and his brother, William, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sampson Reed, and Emanuel Swedenborg. At the same time, the novel draws on the contemporary ideas of Charles Darwin, prefigures modern narrative techniques, and even anticipates such current neuroscience theorists as Gerald Edelman and Antonio Damasio. Chapter one is an overview which contextualizes the novel, considering its link to Emersonian thought as well as to William James’s description of consciousness, theories of silence, and Darwin’s examination of the development of language in The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Chapter two considers the remnants of language and symbol systems, with the silences, language as thing, resonance, and syntax explored. A close reading of the novel demonstrates the artificiality and concreteness of language, with James ultimately moving away from those remnants. v Chapter three incorporates the current field of acoustic communication with an analysis of vagueness, impression, and charged silence as Strether searches them for what Wallace Stevens would term the “unalterable vibration,” or meaning. Chapter four charts the movement to physical representations of Strether’s consciousness emerging in moments of what James calls “responsive arrest,” and Strether’s awareness after a fact, examined in relation to current work by Edelman and Damasio. Chapter five describes James’s movement to silences that reflect physical expression. Gesture, meeting of eyes, and recognition reflect an awareness of Darwin’s view of the development of language from its physical and gestural nature. James develops an alternative to articulated language that portrays Strether as an emerging modern figure whose consciousness is attained through silence. vi For Charles, Theresa, Cara, and Francesca vii Acknowledgements I would like to thank Joan Richardson, whose guidance throughout this project has been invaluable, and who has taught me how to be a scholar. William Kelly’s and Norman Kelvin’s comments and suggestions have been thought provoking and encouraging. I am grateful to Kathleen Whaley; our conversations about my work have helped me tremendously. I am grateful to my father, Mario Leone, and my father-in-law and mother-in-law, Charles and Marilyn Meyer, for the many hours of babysitting and encouragement. I would especially like to thank my husband, Charles, and my daughters, Theresa, Cara, and Francesca, without whom nothing would be possible; they have filled the silence. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: Why Silence?................................................................................................ 1 Chapter Two: Token Words.............................................................................................. 35 Chapter Three: The Unalterable Vibration ....................................................................... 70 Chapter Four: Arresting Moments.................................................................................. 112 Chapter Five: Naturalized Silence ................................................................................. 147 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 181 1 Chapter One: Why Silence? “Let us be silent, for so are the gods. Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal” (Emerson, Intellect, 419). What is silence? Is it the absence of sound, or is it, as John Cage suggests in Silence, sound that is not notated? Does silence imply that meaning is wanting, or perhaps, instead, that there is a depth of meaning to be plumbed? Throughout the last century, silence has come to represent a number of things, from William James’s description of the mystical state of mind as “ineffable” (The Varieties of Religious Experience 380) to John Cage’s unnotated sounds, with many subtle variations between. Silence has implications not only for philosophers and musicians, but also for all who examine the origins and nature of language and expression. In the fiction of Henry James, for example, silence is so rich with meaning that in The Ambassadors, a 1903 major phase novel, he uses a series of modes of silence to demonstrate the protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether’s unfolding consciousness, shifting from the spoken or written word to alternate symbol systems. In fact, when writing to James about his “Scene in America” in May 1907, William James critiques his style, saying his “account of america [sic] is largely one of its omissions, silences, vacancies” (The Correspondence of William James, vol. 3, 338). While acknowledging that the “core of literature is solid,” William James urges his brother to write in his former, more direct style. I contend, however, that it is precisely Henry James’s omissions, from Strether’s refusal to name “the article produced” (II, 1, 48) back home in Woollett, Massachusetts, to vague sensation, to interpretations of Chad Newsome’s gaze to arrive 2 at understanding, that signal James’s movement to writing which reflects his contemplation of the workings of consciousness and the richness in silence. Since language can be manipulated, it cannot be fully trusted to express truths. For example, Strether redefines terms so that the situation comes to mirror the language used to describe it. Language becomes just another method of expression, along with silence and alternate symbol systems, but it is not a preferred method. Ruth Yeazell’s captures the complexity of James’s method when she observes “the subject of [Strether and Maria’s] talk is talk itself” (69), and talking results in their reexamining and redefining terms. Strether comes to understand the term “virtuous attachment,” used by Bilham to describe Chad and Madame de Vionnet’s relationship (75-6), not through language, but through a form of non-linguistic perception. Initially trapped within the traditional definition of “virtue,” Strether must escape it, arriving at a sense of the adulterous relationship as indeed virtuous. Yeazell characterizes Jamesian dialogue as cryptic, allowing for both character’s and the reader’s questioning motive and fact, and creating meaning (65). She calls truth as Maria Gostrey tells it “inseparable from her personal manipulation of it” (71). Therefore, in order to arrive at cognition, one must interpret and surpass words. James’s movement to silence, in this text and elsewhere, incorporating physical gesture and expression, reflects a progression in the changing use of and thinking about language through the nineteenth century. Heralding Modernism, with its more extreme representations of the working of the mind, such as stream of consciousness, James depicts consciousness. F.O. Matthiessen makes a distinction between James’s method and that of some of his contemporaries and Modern novelists when he observes 3 [‘the stream of consciousness’] was used by William James in his Principles of Psychology, but in his brother’s novels there is none of the welling up of the darkly subconscious life that has characterized the novel