Introduction: Master and Worm; Anarchist and Idiot

Abstract Since this book, I hope, will interest not only literary critics but intellectual historians in various fields, it may seem perverse to begin with two concluding moments in Henry James’s late fiction. But they provide a convenient point of entry to my set of concerns in the present study. Near the close of The Ambassadors, Maria Gostrey and Lambert Strether recall an earlier “curiosity felt by both of them as to where he would ‘come out’ “ if his delicate mission to return Chad to America came “to smash.” In the wake of Strether’s botched mission, his Parisian pleasures, and his uncertain American future, they realize that “he was out, in truth, as far as it was possible to be” (342). Near the end of The Golden Bowl, James’s last completed novel, Maggie Verver is close to reclaiming her straying husband and renewing their marriage on a new basis of sexual intensity. She compares her husband, an Italian prince “fixed in his place,” with her own evolving status. Whereas Amerigo’s place “was like something made for him beforehand,” Maggie’s “own had come to show simply as that improvised ‘post’ ... of the kind spoken of as advanced” and serving “a settler or trader in a new country.