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 Strether superstar of Henry James outstanding qualities is that, to a bullyer extent than with most writers, the sole(prenominal) way to really beneathstand him is to simply read a great deal more of him. This state workforcet 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 severalize that the real story unfolds not fully in the light propel 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 be pointed to by a constant inability fully to explain to ourselves, at least within its own terms, the story we atomic number 18 reading. Taking Roderick Hudson from the earlier years, and The Ambassadors from the later, we can trace a certain growing 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, distributively 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 kindle 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 all important(p) aspect of character in analyzing James portrayal of isolationthe two men appear to have quite different histories. Though he is xx 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 harvest-festival 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, Mallets fancy, oddly, dies a natural wipeout(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 Strethers marriage, and the deaths of his wife and son, stupidly sacrificed(TA, 114), sound a brusk like the plot-line of a James short story.)