The two big themes of The Ambassadors: Sex and Money

Despite its many idiosyncrasies and its lead-footed plot and its circuitous dialogue and its occasional complete obscurities of reference and phrasing, when you get right down to it, Henry James's "The Ambassadors" is much like many other novels: it's about sex and money. That may not be obvious to most readers, at least at first - nothing in James ever is obvious, and he was no doubt far too insecure to write directly about sex and far too much of a social snob to write directly about money - everything in James is by indirection. But sex and money are at the heart of this novel: Strether wants to marry Mrs. Newsome, or thinks he does, for only one reason, and that's to latch himself to her fortune. There's not a moment in the novel when he has an affectionate or loving word for her or even thought about her - she's basically the tyrant back at home who sent him on this pointless, Herculean task: bringing son Chad back home to run the business. Money's the allure - and James associates money with crass American values (the least sympathetic character in the novel, at least from James's point of view, would probably be hapless Jim Pocock, the American businessman, in Paris intent on having a "good time"). Well, it's a good thing those Americans are back home making money, for who else could foot the bill for these three-year sojourns in Europe? The novel contains no sex scenes, but it's clear that part of the excitement of entering Europe is the sexual awakening that the characters (the male characters, in any event) seem to feel and experience: Strether has obviously built some kind of relationship - consummated or not, James doesn't even really hint - with Miss Gostrey, a high-cultured escort, essentially. Strether's friend Waymarsh, though he's hard to pin down, has hitched himself to Miss Barrace, but as we near the end of the novel he definitely seems interested in the beautiful Mme de Vionnet; and of course Chad himself, the object of all this ambassadorial effort, has also fallen in love with Mme de Vionnet, an older woman - a relationship that would be far out of the conventional norm back in the U.S., but is OK in Paris - he of course will never leave (or if he does it will be the death of him). Then there are the homoerotic undertones, particularly surrounding Strether: his physical attraction to Waymarsh at the outset of the novel (which may be what drives Waymarsh away from him for much of the narrative) and his obvious infatuation with the artist Little Bilham, with whom Chad might be enjoying on the side: there's a general sense of Europe as more free, liberated we might say today, than the U.S. - a reversal of the usual expectations and assumptions. Anything's accepted there, whereas, as James repeatedly notes, the social conventions in Connecticut, where Strether is from, are very severe. These sexual relations and tensions and the force that propels the novel, and it's a force that James himself seems in some way to be fighting against: the many circumlocutions and prevarications that make up this long narrative seem to be a defense against the characters' taking any direct, dramatic action as well as a defense James himself erected that keeps him from directly confronting the sexual power latent in his material.