ABSTRACT
The essay “Winchester, Rye, and ‘Denis Duval,’” included in English Hours, testifies to a Thackeray-James intimacy made of roundabout innuendo, “friendly hints,” and “tangled clues.” James admired Thackeray’s skill to construct stories that are manifestly empty of conceptual content and devoid of distinct moral doctrine. What James calls “the manner of Thackeray” is characterized by ruthless ambiguity, thematic undecidability, formal indeterminacy, virtual inconclusiveness, in short, of narrative freedom. But indeterminacy is not exclusively formal: it also informs Thackeray’s novels’ moral and sexual agendas, promoting the social double-entendre of snobbery and sexual indeterminacy. In this chapter, I read The Ambassadors as a revisionist completion of Denis Duval .
