The Power of Advertising: Chad Newsome and the Meaning of Paris in the Ambassadors

Abstract

buildings ... the 'mounted' play, the prose that is careful to be in the tone of, and with the distinction of a newspaper or bill-poster advertisement-these, and these only meseems, 'stand a chance.'2 In the penultimate scene of The Ambassadors Strether learns that Chad has been 'getting some news of the art of advertising. Much earlier in the novel Jim Pocock has suggested that Chad is the man to boss the on his return to Woollett. That is about the extent of James's explicit reference to the profession prefigured for Chad. The metaphoric extensions of advertising and the implications of James's choice of it for Chad, have been conspicuously submerged until this late exposure. What needs more recognition is the astuteness and the novelistic resonance of James's choice. In the presentation of Chad as the difficult object of Strether's quest in Paris at the turn of the century James creates a world in which display of meaning, signalled through codes that must be learnt, constitutes a moral habituation that in the end precipitates its literal and ideological practice-advertising. It is through these culturally specific codes, which Strether must interpret if he is to understand the nature of Chad's real allegiance, that James channels an important and perhaps underestimated con