Impressions Received in The Ambassadors
Chapter 5 looks at The Ambassadors, arguing that its protagonist Lambert Strether’s impression is at different times empiricist (a means for him to discover the truth) and aesthetic (a means for him to appreciate beauty for its own sake). In its empiricist guise, Strether’s impression helps him to glimpse what is taking place behind the deceptive surfaces of Paris, behind the performative impressions engineered by Chad Newsome and Madame de Vionnet to disguise their sexual relationship: it helps him to discover facts and make moral judgements. By contrast, aesthetic impressions, including those confected for him by the lovers, help him to ‘live’, to make the most of life by imaginatively augmenting it, by offering him a fuller appreciation of the moment or a beautiful memento of it. The impression, then, lies at the fraught intersection of the aesthetic freedom of the imagination and the empiricist exigencies of experience.