Comparing Roderick Hudson s Rowland Mallet and The Ambassadors Lambert Strether :: Comparison Compare Contrast Essays

Comparing Roderick Hudson 's Rowland Mallet and The Ambassador's Lambert Strether One of Henry James' outstanding qualities is that, to a greater extent than with most writers, the only way to really understand him is to simply read a great deal more of him. This statement takes one thing largely under its assumptive stride, that is that there is something to understand, something suggested and promised by, but not contained within, his immaculate and elegant prose. Again, to a greater extent than with most novelists, with Henry James it is safe to say that the real story unfolds not fully in the light thrown off by the explicit story-telling; no matter how elaborate or complete the narrative web, there is always something beyond it, a greater significance that we are pointed to by a constant inability fully to explain to ourselves, at least within its own terms, the story we are reading. Taking Roderick Hudson from the earlier years, and The Ambassadors from the later, we can trace a certain evolution in the way James handled the themes that pervaded his work as well as his life, namely, disengagement, isolation, difference. Comparing, in these two novels, the portrayal of this resigned but not fully explicated isolation, each comes to shed an enormous light into the hidden recesses of the other, and onto James' larger project as a writer of fiction. The central characters of these two books compare in interesting ways. On a certain surface Roderick's Rowland Mallet and The Ambassador's Lambert Strether are quite different. For example, in their respective relations to the opposite sex†¹an important aspect of character in analyzing James' portrayal of isolation†¹the two men appear to have quite different histories. Though he is twenty years younger than Strether, it is significant that Mallet has never married. We are given, on the very first page of the novel, the gossamer-thin reason that upon meeting the "golden fruit" that his cousin had married, he had "then and there accepted the prospect of bachelorhood."(RH, 49) When his cousin dies, leaving this woman again marriageable, Mallet's "fancy", oddly, dies a "natural death"(49). Strether, on the other hand, has married; but, having married very young, he is, at fifty-five, a long-time widower. (The circumstances of Strether's marriage, and the deaths of his wife and son, "stupidly sacrificed"(TA, 114), sound a little like the plot-line of a James short story.)