James in The Golden Bowl presents to us the growth of Maggie Verver in a way that makes problematic the arbitrary distinction between self and other. As Maggie herself experiences the otherizing exclusion in the process of constructing one’s
46 Indeed, we may say as Reginald Abbott points out, until this moment, “Strether never sits in a boat of his own. All the floating images in the novel that place Strether on his own in the water have him actually in the water—the reverse of the demands of the iconography” (181).
47 When Chad poses the question to Strether, “‘what I don’t for the life of me make out . . . is what you gain by it.’ Oh it would have taken his companion too long to say!” cries Strether silently. Then he answers, “That’s because you have, I verily believe, no imagination. You’ve other qualities. But no imagination, don’t you see? at all” (AB 365).
selfhood, she realizes that it is only through constant reactivation of the self/other relations that a wholesome sense of an affirmative subjectivity can be maintained.
I will take the two major images of this novel—water and crystal—into discussion:
one image for destructive dissolution, the other for revalorizing construction, and try to demonstrate how they help Maggie with her self-fulfilment in the mode of her dynamic imagination, the “imagination of courageous moment,” as Bachelard defines (WD 167).
The water element and the accompanied vessel images in the characters’s imagination reflect both the dangerous contingency and the opportunities to change for the better. Water, in Bachelard’s idea, is “an element more feminine and more uniform than fire, a more constant one which symbolizes human powers that are more hidden, simple, and simplifying;” and one “will recognize in water, in its substance, a type of intimacy . . . a type of destiny that is no longer simply the vain destiny of fleeting images and a never-ending dream but an essential destiny that endlessly changes the substance of the being” (WD 5, 6). In other words, water makes aware one’s potential of creative force that is latent in and can be evoked by imagination.
Its simplicity can resist the hallucination fabricated with transient images by substantially changing a given form, and one can thereby construct new ones in reveries. The image of water in imagination henceforth is not the products of blank
speculation but possesses in itself a definite transforming power. “By grouping images and dissolving substances, water helps the imagination in its task of de-objectifying and assimilating” (WD 12). For Maggie, it is by this thorough rearrangement that she successfully rewrites the meaning-loaded appearance forged and imposed upon her by her husband and his lover, her best friend and step-mother Charlotte Stant, and then achieves her independent subjecthood. Instead of a total fusion with others—losing herself in the love for her father Adam Verver, and the love for her husband the Prince Amerigo—Maggie in the end recognizes how one’s sense of self exists in an ongoing process that requires the subject’s active involvement and commitment.48 That rearrangement through destruction and reconstruction is concretely exemplified in the material crystal that makes of the major symbol of this novel: the Golden Bowl.
The Bowl appears in fact only two times in the novel: the first it comes to our view is in Book First, Chapter 6, seventy five pages from the beginning of the story, and the second is in Book Four, Chapter 9, with a 216-page interval in between.49 This period can be seen as the time and space that Maggie needs to crystallize the whole situation. The purchased crystal Bowl with a crack in itself is to be smashed soon after it reemerges into the scene, and it can be taken as a replacement by a
48 “The symmetrical form of The Golden Bowl emerges from James’s equation between the rightness of the kinship relationship and the need to bring it into balance with the marriages;” notes Leo B. Levy,
“The form encompasses the recognition that a solution, however desirable, is beyond reach” (159).
49 The first appearance is shown in page 118, the second in page 434.
crystal, an insightful understanding, formed in Maggie’s imagination that is pure, priceless and value-affirming. “A crystal . . . by virtue of its formal particularities, becomes a ‘sphere of light’, and a great model of the union between image and idea . . . Crystal helps us to comprehend matter, being luminous in both the abstract and concrete senses of the term” (ERW 235). The fact that no one has ever seen the bowl in its intact condition implies that human relationship is predestinedly incomplete, and the crack under its gilt of gold may function not so negatively a flaw as an incentive that inspires individual aspiration for perfection, for making a picture of wholeness of one’s own. The way Maggie discovers the Bowl in the London shop is depicted in a similar spirit to that of Strether in the boat-rowing scene. And like Strether’s final witness of the couple’s intimate excursion in the countryside, Maggie’s confrontation of her husband’s infidelity does not lead her to an overall denial of the positive aspects of humanity. She does not blind herself by vehement fury and the fire of vengeance, and her sympathy for Charlotte50 is evidence of her active imagination that first kindles her suspicion, then gives her the key to truth, and finally endows her with a mind broad enough to embrace not just the good and the beautiful, but also the negative resulted from human limitations which she herself cannot exempt from, either.
50 Carol J. Sklenicka indicates Maggie “feels empathy” towards Charlotte, “identifying with her through their mutual love of Amerigo and her imagination of what it must be to lose him; yet, knowing herself to be the effective cause of that loss tinges her compassion with guilt. Towards Amerigo she feels her old passion, but being changed herself she expects new responses from him” (57).
Maggie distinguishes herself from the other main characters by the dynamics in her imagination which frees her from the restriction of adherence to the manipulated appearance. The distinction reveals that not all the images created by one’s imagination have the same poetic potential to differentiate themselves from the other vain ones that can be merely picturesque. Despite the fact that, in one way or another, the characters all experience water as an element in their imaginations, Maggie’s alone lays weight, creates space, and brings out actions. The reason that
“certain forms born of water have more attraction, more compelling force, more consistency,” “is because more material and profound reveries intervene, because our inner being is more deeply engaged, and because our imagination dreams more specifically of creative acts . . . Water becomes heavier, darker, deeper; it becomes matter” (WD 20). The “creative acts” of Maggie are what allows her to reorder her life. In contrast, Adam’s sole passion for collection ironically turns himself into a
“morceau de muse,” one of his collected items that is itself of great value but permanently impassive as well, and will in the end be “shipped back to American City” (GB 49, 512). Amerigo, the progeny of a decadent Roman aristocracy, exchanges his title for financial security; and he is responsive only to what is seen rather than what is imagined. And that is why he finally surrenders himself to Maggie and tells her, “‘See’? I see nothing but you” (GB 580). The reason for the
exposure of his relationship with Charlotte is owing to their adamant belief in appearance that is ironically what crushes the intrigue and the contriver herself.
Charlotte is a figure that draws our admiration for her intelligence and bravery, and in contrast, Fanny Assingham, who introduces the Prince to the Ververs, exemplifies one who is not strong enough to face her own imagination. She is in effect numbed by it and even in an attempt tries to numb others as well. A comparison among these people tells how Maggie’s imagination is an action that propels the development of her subjectivity towards independence.
Adam wields his invisible dumbfounding control over people by turning them, if they prove precious enough as “a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of price,” into his collection (GB 49). As his name suggests, he assumes himself the first American, who is travelling over the Europe to amass treasures for his Museum in the American City.51 Maggie tells Amerigo, “the collection, the Museum . . . [is] the work of his life and the motive of everything he does,” and the “American City isn’t . . . his native town . . . He started there, he has a feeling about it” (GB 49). Adam takes himself as not just the first American but also in a god-like position, and it reveals in the
51 James’s description of Europe has being changing. In this novel, the “active use of Europe, with all its inevitable frustrations and failures, has been completely bypassed in the Ververs’ successful international marriage;” indicates David Grant, “Europe has ceased to be what it was for many of [Adam’s] Jamesian predecessors—the field for rigorous tests and performances—and become instead simply a market for acquiring the relics of the past” (24). It is the advent of Charlotte that Europe is turn into a “Gothic enclosure,” where James’s Americans “belatedly find circumscribing their freedom to act,” and “Maggie’s Gothic thus constitutes the first step towards a true knowledge of her position in life” (ibid., 32, 32, 33).
cold-rationale of the Museum he intends to build:
It hadn’t merely, his plan, all the sanctions of civilisation; it was positively civilisation condensed, concrete, consummate, set down by his hands as a house on a rock—a house from whose open doors and windows, open to grateful, to thirsty millions, the higher, the highest knowledge would shine out to bless the land. In this house, designed as a gift primarily to the people of his adoptive city and native State, the urgency of whose release from the bondage of ugliness he was in a position to measure—in this museum of museums, a palace of art which was to show for compact as a Greek temple was compact, a receptacle of treasures sifted to positive sanctity, his spirit to-day almost altogether lived, making up, as he would have said, for lost time and haunting the portico in anticipation of the final rites. (GB 143-44)
The “museum of museums” is to Adam the essence of ultimate civilization in its ideal form, as he, self-appointedly, is in charge of eliminating all the “ugliness” from it.
He is preparing for “the final rites” to be performed in that museum-temple where he is enshrined as the worshipped god. He makes no efforts to conceal his ambition, despite his apparent inactive serenity, because that has become embedded in his very being. Adam admits, “American City—if ‘personalities’ can do it—has given me a pretty personal side” (GB 509). James describes him in a rather critical tongue:
It was all at bottom in him, the aesthetic principle, planted where it could burn with a cold still flame; where it fed almost wholly on the material directly involved, on the idea . . . of plastic beauty, of the thing visibly perfect in its kind;
where, in short, despite the general tendency of the “devouring element” to spread, the rest of his spiritual furniture, modest scattered and tended with unconscious care, escaped the consumption that in so many cases proceeds from the undue keeping-up of profane altar-fires. Adam Verver had in other words learnt the lesson of the senses, to the end of his own little book, without having
for a day raised the smallest scandal in his economy at large. (GB 179)
Not only his “aesthetic principle,” but everything that meets his criteria must be
“planted,” that is, placed, in a fixed posture, and then the thing with perfect
“plastic beauty” can “burn with a cold still flame,” instead of growing and flowering with verdure and fruitful bearing. The “lesson of the senses” he once learnt has long been buried under the dehumanizing enthusiasm in the false name of aesthetics.52
Unlike the other characters, the coldness of Adam’s self-grandiosity prevents himself from experiencing the mergence with the element of water that brings out and enlarges the imagination.53 He knows nothing ambiguous or indecisive, except in the episode when he is proposing to Charlotte. She somehow makes him taste, briefly at least, the misgivings derived by her difference from the other artifact items he is hoarding, and such uncertainties are enough to disturb his tranquility because of the fear that there is a possibility that he might be dragged into the murky water from his high, dry, and warm position. He is safe nonetheless because he has never been in the vessel nor in the water; he is “the non-amphibious” like Fanny’s husband and
52 The ambiguous description of where Adam’s money comes from leaves a dark history in the background. “The Verver money, instead of the sign that it is, appears as a thing in itself—appears as the embodiment of Verver’s generosity and philanthropy. With such ideological distortion, the absent signified to which the signifier of money might refer—the human labor which must of necessity have produced his wealth—remains merely an ellipsis;” as Mimi Kairschner indicates, it “is a major omission already inscribed in the structure of the myth that perpetuates the dominant cultural hegemony of the class in power” (189).
53 “Clearly, the capitalist notion of subjectivity as a possession (a thing that can be enhanced or lost, given or taken away) provides a social foundation for narcissistic fantasy,” indicates Beth Sharon Ash,
“especially when, as is true of Adam Verver, unlimited wealth can be placed in service to unlimited self-expansion . . . The mystifications of the market and of the private museum transform capitalist rationality into its opposite—magical thinking” (60).
above all an observer with a gaze of possessiveness (GB 85). During the proposal, Adam feels, “The burning of his ships therefore waited too near to let him handle his opportunity with his usual firm and sentient fingers,” but the vacillating time does not last long because he is very confident in himself, strengthened by the same dominant desire for something he intends to procure (GB 191). His ship will sail to its destination regardless the burning, and in fact the “red glow” the destructive flame turns out to be the bonfire celebrating his victory: “his fixed purpose now, his committed deed, the fine pink glow, projected forward, of his ships, behind him, definitely blazing and crackling” (GB 192, 194). He wins over Charlotte, keeping her for the function she operates for his family just like the Prince does. For the two people—Amerigo and Charlotte—the price to obtain for themselves a financially secured life is to plunge into a trapping abyss where they whirl as the Ververs dictate.
Amerigo, the Prince who carries the great name of his family, wonders the incredible imagination of the Americans, through which he is romanticized, and he parallels this experience to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym:”
He remembered to have read as a boy a wonderful tale by Allan Poe, his prospective wife’s countryman—which was a thing to show, by the way, what imagination Americans could have: the story of the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further towards the North Pole—or was it the South?—than any one had ever done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the colour of milk or of snow. There were moments
when he felt his own boat move upon some such mystery. The state of mind of his new friends, including Mrs. Assingham herself, had resemblances to a great white curtain. He had never known curtains but as purple even to blackness—but as producing where they hung a darkness intended and ominous.
(GB 56)
It is an interesting passage because Poe is a writer who also fascinates Bachelard greatly, and he finds the water image in Poe’s tales as especially heavy and substantial because it is imaginary. “[F]or Poe this favored substance is water or, more specifically, a special kind of water, a heavy water that is more profound, dormant, and still than any other deep, dormant, or still waters in nature. Water, in Poe’s imagination, is a superlative, a kind of substance of substance, a true mother substance” (WD 46). Poe’s water is heavily impregnated with germinal power, a creativity belonging only to the maternal substance. The water that Poe loves is
“an elementary water,” “an imaginary water that attains the ideal of creative reverie because it possesses what could be called the absolute of reflection” which
“seems more real than reality because it is purer” (WD 47). For Amerigo, this
“mother substance” and “the absolute of reflection” can be found not in Adam’s
“bottomless bag of solid shining British sovereigns” but in Maggie’s permeating and creative imagination (GB 273). The Prince is amazed by but unable to join it, and his puzzlement is symbolized in the misty and opaque “white curtain,” a whiteness that is generated from the darkness, from the unknowable. He himself is like
“the shipwrecked Gordon Pym,” “drifting in a small boat” towards a mysterious future. It is for the reason he goes to Fanny and asks her to be his mentor:
“I’m starting on the great voyage—across the unknown sea,” but he “can’t sail alone;”
he confesses, “my ship must be one of a pair, must have, in the waste of waters, . . . a consort” (GB 59). Fanny assuages his anxiety by saying, “you’re practically in port . . . of the Golden Isles” (GB 60).54 Amerigo does feel himself surrounded by the prosperity this marriage has brought him. It is the “sweeten” “waters in which he now floated . . . This was the element that bore him up and into which Maggie scattered, on occasion, her exquisite colouring drops” (GB 48). And he knows only too well, “They were of the colour of her innocence, and yet at the same time of her imagination, with which their relation . . . was all suffused” (GB 48). His knowingly taking advantage of her innocence is what hurts Maggie most, as she tells him later,
“I had before that my idea—which you never dreamed I had” (GB 456).
Amerigo does not relax his vigilance as he steers his boat and takes care not to lose himself “there in the white mist,” and he performs his role dutifully and beautifully (GB 57). Nevertheless, he tacitly justifies his relationship with Charlotte by explaining it to Fanny the situation as an inevitability they must cope with and
54 The Golden Isles here to Fanny and Amerigo means the Ververs—the rich Americans of the New
54 The Golden Isles here to Fanny and Amerigo means the Ververs—the rich Americans of the New