Henry James’s The Ambassadors (3rd Post): The Plural Title Refers to the Main Character’s Multiple Personality

Mr. Strether is the novel’s only major character. The story is told from his point of view, and he is on every page. All other characters appear from rarely to occasionally.

Many readers may think that the title is plural because a few minor characters make a very brief appearance in Paris (where Strether’s American employer’s prodigal son is living), but their appearance is too brief and minor for them to be [referred to by] the title’s “ambassadors.”

The novel’s central conflict arises out of the fact that when Strether gets to Paris, he does not act like the man his employer thought she had sent. At first, he tells her son what he is supposed to in order to get him to return to America. But then Strether changes sides and tells the son to be loyal to the woman who has kept him in Paris. His employer thinks that Strether is a traitor and has changed—from Jekyll to Hyde (my analogy)—and it is Strether’s two personalities who are the ambassadors, plural.

As I noted in a previous post, James flags the issue of multiple personality when he says in the novel’s second paragraph that Strether has “double consciousness” (a synonym for multiple personality).

Multiple personality is again flagged just three pages before the end of the novel when Strether is saying his final farewell to Miss Gostrey, who has been his occasional confidante. She hopes that he will stay on in Europe with her. But he explains why he cannot. Strether recalls how they had first met, and:

“…the curiosity felt by both of them as to where he would ‘come out’…He was out, in truth, as far as it was possible to be, and must now rather bethink himself of getting in again. He found on the spot the image of his recent history; he was like one of the figures of the old clock at Berne. They came out, on one side, at their hour, jigged along their little course in the public eye, and went in on the other side” (1, p. 467).

Let me emphasize that there was absolutely no literary necessity for James to raise the issue of “double consciousness” (multiple personality). Strether was 55-years-old, and James could more easily have attributed his character’s behavior to a mid-life crisis.

Thus, The Ambassadors is one more novel with what I call “gratuitous multiple personality.” The only reason multiple personality is in this novel is that it was, evidently, a personal issue for the author.

1. Henry James. The Ambassadors [1903]. Penguin Books, 2008.