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

Comparing Roderick Hudson s Rowland Mallet and The Ambassadors Lambert StretherOne of Henry James great(p) qualities is that, to a greater expiration than with most authors, the only musical mode to authentically 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 at that place 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 fiction unfolds not fully in the light thrown off by the explicit story-telling no matter how elaborate or complete the muniment web, there is always something beyond it, a greater significance that we ar 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 cardinal novels, the portrayal of this resigned but not fully explicated isolation, each comes to shed an fantastic light into the hidden recesses of the otherwise, and onto James larger project as a writer of fiction. The central typefaces of these two books compare in interesting ways. On a certain surface Rodericks Rowland Mallet and The Ambassadors Lambert Strether are quite different. For example, in their respective relations to the opposite sexan important aspect of character in analyzing James portrayal of isolationthe two men appear to bring on quite different histories. Though he is twenty years young than Strether, it is significant that Mallet has never married. We are given, on the very runner 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 cleaning lady again marriageable, Mallets 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 fortune of Strethers 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.)