ABSTRACT
In Henry James's The Ambassadors and Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier the wealthy and leisured American visitor to Europe, looking on its customs and culture with a mixture of bafflement and curiosity, is an flneur figure who announces the epistemological uncertainties of modernism. A recent incisive article by William Greenslade on The Ambassadors and the power of advertising' has shown how the civilized art of display which Chad learns in Paris is finally put to practical use in his embrace of advertising. This chapter focuses on strolling flneur which is threatened by a wave of unfamiliar and barely controllable consumer desires. This is one aspect of the visual delights of Europe, but it merges with others that are not so demoralising. In the quickening of the senses and of the intellect which Strether experiences in Paris there is no clear distinction to be drawn between aesthetic and intellectual appetites on the one hand, and sensuous consumer desires on the other.
