期刊刊名：Asian Journal of Arts and Sciences 　 卷期：2卷1期

篇名出版日期：2011年6月1日

作者：CHUN-SAN WANG

語言：English

關鍵字：speculative economy,erotic imagination,The Ambassadors,expenditure,transgression,exchange

被點閱次數：3次

閱讀時間：796sec

摘要：
This article is a study of the performativity and metaphoricity of desire and its corollary—anxiety--in Henry James's The Ambassadors. It examines the passage of Lambert Strether, the protagonist of the novel, to Europe as predominantly an exploration of the erotic, a conscious effort to delimit and to cross the boundary between self and other, with his eroticized and eroticizing speculation/specularization serving as the point of departure and penetration. However, encoded in the socio-political field of exchange, desire is also subject to the chain of displacements and deferments and, hence, only to partial fulfillment. Thus, rather than pursuing the thematic of the triumph of desiring imagination over reality in The Ambassadors as many Jamesian critics have done, this article examines the endless negotiation between the individual's desires and the dominant sexual ideology, focusing discussion on expenditure (restrictive or otherwise), sacrifice, and the theatricality of desire in the novel. The incessant dialectic between interdiction (in the form of the New England conscience) and its transgression both structures the novel's progress and maps out the itinerary of Strether's nomadic desire. This article concludes that Strether's specular/speculative economy denotes both the triumph and the defeat of his erotic imagination.

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