ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the term ‘ambiguity’, when applied to prose fiction, ought to be reserved for a very specific set of (modified Empsonian) types, and whenever it is used to blanket the field of obscurity, carries within it a number of ideological presuppositions and undiscriminated differences which always take the critical discourse in a certain predictable direction. Fastidious and sensitive to the least intimation of crudity, James’s fiction is haunted by the anxiety that its narrative preoccupations may be seen as vulgar. In fact, euphemistic substitution is one of several forms of indirect reference which suggests that in James any direct, unmed-iated presentation is flagrant. The mixture of sexual pleasure and sadistic violence in destroying the image of this ‘vulgar’ woman gives us a clear and crude version of the recurrent structure in James’s fiction, and the violence of the response should give us pause.
