What Difference Does Paris Make in <i>The Ambassadors</i>?

Critics have long acknowledged the importance of Paris in Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors, while nevertheless deemphasizing the materiality of the city. This essay argues for the need to recover those material spaces and architectural features of the novel and demonstrates how readings of such material sites can disclose important textual and symbolic relations, notably when set beside the Parisian photography of Eugène Atget. I show how such readings support arguments recently advanced by Anna Kornbluh for rethinking realism as architecture rather than mimesis, and for recovering the submerged utopian impulse and political significance of space and architecture in the Jamesian novel.