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.

Contexts (II)

Chapter 3, continuing Chapter 2’s intellectual history of the impression, begins by exploring British aestheticism and its roots in Kant and romanticism (Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Immanuel Kant, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth). It then turns to twentieth-century theories of performativity, which, it argues, combine elements of the empiricist and the aesthetic (J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Judith Butler, J. Hillis Miller). James followed Pater in resurrecting the ‘impression’. Pater found in Hume’s impression a role for the imagination at the heart of consciousness. But the interpretive excesses of James’s protagonists’ cognitive impressions must also be understood alongside the more flamboyant aestheticism of Pater’s disciple Wilde, and his ‘critic as artist’. The most active of James’s impressions, however, are performative: they are impressions made, not received. Performativity helps frame an account of the impression that encompasses both the receiving and making of impressions, and the confusion between the two.

James’s Criticism of Existing Theories of the Impression, 1872–88

Chapter 1 explores the anomaly that while James was critical of French impressionist painting and literature, he nevertheless made the impression the centrepiece of his representation of the novelist at work in ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884). It addresses this anomaly by reading some of James’s early art criticism, literary criticism, and travel writing as a remaking of existing models of the impression, arguing that James’s impression combines the best of the French novel’s attention to sensation with the English novel’s attention to reflection. It also places the impressions of James’s criticism in dialogue with those of painterly impressionism. It observes that James attributes as much importance to the making of impressions as to the receiving of them. It thus introduces a distinction, fundamental to the argument in later chapters, between ‘performative’ impressions and ‘cognitive’ impressions.

Introduction

The introduction argues that James’s work is best understood as impression-driven rather than impressionist. It allies the book with those critics who take a philosophical view of literary impressionism, while arguing that the book’s approach complements more historicist views of literary impressionism of the last decade. It emphasizes that this book’s contribution lies in: its belief that James has a greater debt to the impressions of pre-impressionist painters than to those of impressionist painters; its greater emphasis on the making of, rather than the receiving of, impressions, and its use of theories of the performative to conceptualize this; and in the detailed intellectual and cultural history of the impression that it offers, which helps the book tell a new story about James’s artistic, philosophical, and psychological influences.

Impressions Made in The Wings of the Dove

Chapter 6 looks at James’s next novel, The Wings of the Dove. It argues that Milly Theale is a dupe, like Strether, deceived by her friends, Kate Croy and Merton Densher, who deploy performative impressions to conceal their secret love affair. Unlike Strether, however, Milly realizes impressions involve the collaboration of impressor and impressee and that these roles may be reversed. With this knowledge, she learns to make impressions, which scupper the plot against her by making Densher fall in love with her, hence making real what had previously been feigned. Milly begins as a critic of the lovers’ artful deception, but in the end she becomes an artist in her own right. Her most performative impressions refute the truth uncovered by her recognition, when she is told of the plot against her, and adhere so tenaciously to the aesthetic surfaces she has created that they fashion a new reality.

Impressions New and Used in The Golden Bowl

Chapter 7 acts in part as a conclusion. It shows how The Golden Bowl not only codifies but also extends the impressions of the previous two novels. Maggie Verver uses cognitive impressions to discover that her husband, Prince Amerigo, is unfaithful. She then uses performative impressions to manipulate him. Like Milly Theale, then, she employs impressions as both critic and artist. Again, like those of Milly, her performative impressions refute empiricist recognition by adhering so tenaciously to deceptive, aesthetic surfaces that they become a reality. But, unlike Milly, Maggie is always aware of the depth she glimpses through recognition, and so does not become seduced by the surfaces of her own impressions: she manipulates them in a pragmatist manner, not to create a brittle artefact, like Densher’s love for Milly’s memory, but to save her marriage. Unlike in the previous two novels, Maggie’s performative impressions impose a composition that is both moral and aesthetic.

James’s Late Theory of the Impression

Chapter 4 explores the theoretical uses to which James puts the impression in the prefaces to the collected New York Edition of his work (1907–9). It serves as a preface in its own right to the final three chapters of the book, in which James’s fictional treatment of the impression in the three celebrated novels of the major phase is examined. James’s impression uneasily accommodates both empiricism and aestheticism. What James does with these uneasy accommodations is to make them the narrative focus of his late novels and, in the prefaces, to theorize the novels’ interest in these terms. The novel is still an impression, then, but of a different kind: thanks to James’s increasing use of restricted point of view, it is now, first and foremost, the impression of an individual character which lies at the heart of the novelist’s drama of consciousness.

Contexts (I)

Chapter 2 begins the book’s intellectual history of the impression from the seventeenth century to the twentieth (which continues in Chapter 3). These contexts come from two movements, empiricism and aestheticism. Chapter 2 explores empiricist contexts, arguing that James’s impression owes much to empiricist philosophy (John Locke, David Hume), and nineteenth-century empiricist psychology (James Mill, J. S. Mill, Franz Brentano, Ernst Mach, William James). By tracking the word ‘impression’, we can see that Locke and Hume’s stress on first-hand observation, and on thought as a kind of perception, are contexts for James’s conception of the imaginative but observant novelist, for the epistemological demands he makes on his readers, and for the way he represents his characters’ consciousnesses, especially in recognition scenes. Nineteenth-century empiricists’ divergence as to the agency of the subject in consciousness is reflected in James’s characters whose impressions by turns assault them from the exterior, or are partly fictions of their own making.