The "Gaze" use as the motor master of perception in the novel the Ambassadors by Henry James.

1. Introduction

Henry James uses a very simple plot in The Ambassadors (1903), which also focuses on character. Lambert Strether, a middle-aged New Englander, travels to Paris, France, to fetch a young man whose mother is worried about what seems to her to be Europe's decadent influence. The “ambassador,” Strether, falls under the spell of the city and becomes enchanted with the young man's mistress. Instead of sending explanations back to the United States, Strether spends his time exploring Europe; the book's plot focuses on his development as an individual. The use of Gaze motor master of perception explains the ideas of shift of viewpoint which measures the change from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century.

It was common enough in Hawthorne's time for the American artist to be conscious that he was outside the European tradition and to try by whatever means he could devise to get inside. As for the ver nacular tradition growing up around him, in so far as it had taken on any definite character, he either consciously rejected and resisted it, or simply took it for granted. Whatever influence it had upon his work was unconsciously assimilated. It would never have occurred to him to regret that he could not “get inside” such a formative tradition because it would not have occurred to him that it had anything whatever to do with art. By the time James revisited America in the early twentieth century, however, the vitality and energy of the vernacular had effectively displayed themselves in so many forms that the situation was almost exactly reversed.

Artists like James, thoroughly immersed in the cultivated tradition, began to feel the need to make fruitful contact with the emerging tradition. But as James's career makes clear, the gap between the two was so wide that it could not easily be bridged. At the turn of the previous century Henry James, the “Motor Master” of Modernism, was himself preoccupied with identity. In fact, one could rank Henry James within the long tradition in the American literature that dealt with the topic of identity. Such a tradition has existed in Europe as well, but whereas in the European literature the focus has mostly been on personal identity, in the United States identity has usually been defined in relation to a group or a specific sub-culture. For James, the essential principle of fiction was contrast. A large part of his novels and short stories define contrast at the level of the clash of two cultures: that of Europe and that of America. On a smaller scale, this clash involves the opposition of innocence to experience, of the ordinary American life to the extraordinary European life, of material gains to spiritual assets, and the opposition between the shallow present and the rich, deep past. This confrontation between Europe and America is at the core of James' whole literary activity. Much of his fiction involves ...