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Music in The Sacred Fount

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Love in the Time of Capital

A wonderful scene in The Ambassadors is Strether's last conversation with Chad, where despite his denials of being tired of Madame de Vionnet, it becomes apparent that his real character is coming to the fore -- and that he has found his real vocation, for the advertising business! Here capitalism is allowed to raise its ugly head as the enemy -- far more than puritanism -- of all Strether's idealizations and of James's own aesthetic vision. Earlier there had been a very amusing exchange between the scathing Sarah Pocock and a gushing Strether: '"She might have affected you by her exquisite amiability -- a real revelation, it has seemed to myself; her high rarity, her distinction of every sort"... "A 'revelation' -- to me:　I've come to such a woman for a revelation? You talk to me about 'distinction' -- you who've had your privilege -- while the most distinguished woman we shall either of us have seen in this world sits there insulted, in her loneliness, by your incredible comparison!"' (X iii, 278). Then Strether rather fatuously imagined that he could combine his New England values with the newfound Parisian aestheticism, but now Parisian lies and New England materialism have combined to rip the two worlds apart. The lovely French painting Strether composes in the countryside, and into which Chad and Madame de Vionnet glide en bateau, has at its heart a lie, enacted in their elaborate and amusing efforts to cover their traces. There's a crack in this golden bowl too. Maria Gostrey and Little Bilham have lied to him as well. But Strether comes to accept the lie as a beautiful, civilized thing. He can trust Madame de Vionnet 'to make deception right. As she presented things the ugliness -- goodness knew why -- went out of them' (XII i, 318). Paris wins a handsome triumph over puritanism. As a vision, Strether's magical Paris triumphs over capitalism too, and remains a symbol of the ideal in a way that London, which James knew more intimately, could never pretend to be. But the magic is partly tainted at the end of the novel, for the clanking of money concerns has been heard in the French milieu, especially in the way Madame de Vionnet and Chad arrange her daughter's marriage: 'the Paris he renounces for himself contains cruelty, greed, and suffering as well as generosity, courage, and joy' (Joan Bennett in The Ambassadors, Norton ed., 441). Puritanism will play no role in The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl -- no more fuddy-duddy Longdons or Strethers or hysterical Governesses or Sarahs. Milly and Susan are not particularly disturbed by any moral corruptedness of London life. Maggie's reaction to her husband's infidelity is more pragmatic than puritanical, her 'innocence' made of sterner stuff than Fanny Assingham anticipated. Instead, the battle is between 'love', which for much of the time becomes an enigmatic abstract x -- as Densher's love for Kate sinks into a needy lust or as Maggie's love for Adam and Amerigo floats in nebulous good intentions -- and the cruelly defined imperatives of financial need or rapacity. In these two novels James devotes his skills to his most sustained confrontations with the power of money.

　

The Economics of Forgiveness in The Wings of the Dove

　 The Wings of the Dove is surely James's most grandiose novel, with its ambitious echoes of Milton's two epics and of Shakespeare's Venetian plays, Othello and The Merchant of Venice. The action of the novel must be something appropriately august, not the welter of anxieties and ambiguities to which it is reduced in readings that focus on the subtleties at the expense of the grand design. An alternative title for the novel could be 'Guilt and Forgiveness'. The first two books create a Balzacian world of economic necessity that explains how Kate and Densher slip into shameful inauthenticity in their dealings with Milly. We live the inauthenticity from within in Densher's consciousness. From Book IX section ii to Book X section iii we are privy to all the prickly sensations of Densher's self-loathing, sensations that he does not want to recognize. 'The Oratory in short, to make him right, would do' is the last sentence of this, the most powerful, part of the novel. 'To make him right' means to make his lie to Mrs Lowder about going to a Church turn out to be true, but there is also a deeper resonance. The last event of the novel is Milly's forgiveness, as received by Densher; it is this to which the title of the novel refers. Her disposal of her wealth in a bequest to him contradicts the laws of the Balzacian world and indicates an order of grace that lies beyond it. Her stupendous wealth has given her an ambiguous freedom and superiority in life, but her generosity in face of betrayal allows her to use the wealth to make a gesture of authentic charity. She acts like one of Shakespeare's heroines. Or does she? Is even this last gesture recuperated within a subtle capitalist calculation? Is Milly attempting to buy Densher from beyond the grave? But Densher's refusal of the wealth wipes out the last trace of its poisonous potency, and allows Milly's gesture to be a thoroughly gracious one. He matches the freedom of Milly's gesture with the freedom of his own, turning his back on the universe of calculating self-interest.

　 The plot is the stuff of a thousand nineteenth-century sentimental melodramas. James does all he can to anchor the sublime romantic parable in a realistic portrayal of Milly and Densher. He succeeds totally with Densher, but not with Milly, whose love for Densher remains an abstract and implausible proposition. It would have been more convincing if a rich pre-history had been supplied, comparable to the magnificent portrayal of Kate and Densher's clandestine romance in straitened circumstances in the early chapters. To some, Densher is such a pathetic rat that Milly's love for him becomes unintelligible. He does, however, change and grow. His gropings out of his condition of mediocrity make him an Everyman figure. As the novel's central character, whose point of view governs Books 2, 6, 8, 9, 10 (half of the text), he is the bridge between Kate and Milly, his dark angel and his bright one. Milly's triumph over Kate is won on the battlefield of Densher's conscience (and heart). Kate is the most powerfully drawn character, and might risk eclipsing the other two, but unlike them she does not change significantly.

　 William Stowe, following John Carlos Rowe, views the end of the novel as 'calling into question all preexisting categories of meaning, all such "transcendental signifiers" as "grace" and "love", and substituting for them the consciousness of perpetual difference' (Stowe, 195). The writing is constantly erasing simplificatory projections of Milly's virtue or Kate's vice. Ultimate moral realities reveal themselves only in their withdrawal from our grasp; their present is pervasive but elusive, more potent in the realm of possibility than of securely established actuality. 'The consciousness of perpetual difference' is threatening to one's vision of Milly as an angel of forgiveness, which risks becoming as irretrievable as one's first impression of Maggie Verver as a sweet, innocent victim or of the Governess as a bastion of sanity and noble self-sacrifice. James is a master of virtualities, of the spectral: he knows all the stories that can be told about a given situation, and plays with them as elements in what he actually writes, which becomes a kind of lofty meditation on possibilities of meaning. I use 'spectral' in the polyvalent sense of Derrida's Spectres of Marx. Still, I do not want to agree with Elaine Pigeon who writes: 'While Milly hovers as an angelic presence... the underside of her actions is manipulative, an aspect that more or less deconstructs the black and white difference between her and Kate'. Chris Stuart's riposte is apposite: 'I think that Robert Pippin is right in his recent book on James and Modern Moral Life that, however difficult they may be to pin down, there are limits to the moral explorations in James's novels, and that thus in his novels all moral categories are not reduced to mere relativism and "difference"'. This must be so, but many of James's tales seem to be constructed as moral detective stories. It takes many readings to grasp that Winterbourne or the Governess are the villains of their respective adventures, and the true heroes or heroines often advance under unprepossessing appearances. Perhaps we should look for one Virtue which heroes such as Strether, Milly and Maggie embody. Maggie stands for civilized behaviour just as Milly stands for angelic forgiveness. Then about that central virtue James may let all sorts of questionable virtualities play ambiguously.

　 The virtue Milly represents is one of supreme importance in today's world: forgiveness. Densher was a cad, a rotter, a bounder, one lacking in integrity, and his treatment of Milly fell into the category of what is usually considered 'unforgiveable'. But what is the Jamesian thing to do in this situation, the only really distinguished thing? Milly gives the answer: unconditional forgiveness. The terms 'cad', 'bounder' and 'rotter' are categories drawn from the vocabulary of social relationships, the sort of categories that the late Princess Diana applied to her disappointing lovers. If we had to compose a missing chapter in the novel, we might imagine that Milly's first reaction to Lord Mark's revelations was to utter just such words as these. But she is mature enough to rise above these blanket terms of conventional denunciation, to consider Kate and Densher as human beings. And then she may have reflected that her own wilful naivety had played its part in corrupting Kate and Densher -- how carefully she had ignored the warning signs! Forgiveness is of course a very Christian response: 'Father forgive them: for they know not what they do' (Luke 23.34). But what James also shows is the vulgarity, the bad taste, of recrimination and revenge-thinking. He attains a Buddhist depth of vision, insofar as he traces wickedness to the deprivations of ignorance and proposes to overcome it by an educative compassion. Clair Hughes objects that Densher and Kate are not fogiven on grounds of ignorance, for they know quite well what they do. In Buddhism, ignorance is a deluded sense of one's own identity, resulting in clinging and aversion (the Three Poisons). Kate clings to a certain image of herself, and that is the reason why she cannot find the moral courage to resist economic pressure. Densher, in true Adam-and-Eve style, clings to his fixation on Kate, as if his very identity depended on her. The deadly interplay between a strong and a weak character (Kate's and Densher's) unleashes blind passions. A bodhisattva witnessing this would say 'they know not what they do'.

　 If we apply James's ethics of forgiveness to the fraught realm of criminal justice, we can say that he does not deny criminal responsibility in the ordinary sense, any more than Dostoyevsky does. But by putting us inside the criminal's skin he tells us a lot about our own moral ignorance and blinding passions. Casey Abell objects that James did not question the institution of capital punishment. Few did at the time. Goethe, a self-proclaimed liberal, upheld the death penalty for mothers guilty of infanticide (the crime of Margarete in Faust). That does not prevent us from drawing from his writings, too, lessons for a more humane and compassionate approach to issues of crime and punishment. A reader of James is well equipped to see through the tawdry ideology of revenge and closure that is taking our civilisation backward. He speaks obscurely, in The American Scene, of a prison as a place of grim realities against which people defend themselves at the cost of a certain moral blindness: 'this huge house of sorrow affected me as, uncannily, of the City itself, the City of all the cynicisms and impunities against which my friends had, from far back, kept plating, as with the old silver of their sideboards, the armour of their social consciousness' (Penguin edition, 221). He notes the club-like atmosphere of parts of the prison, but adds: 'I almost blush, I fear, for the crude comfort of my prompt conclusion' -- he did not want his conscience cheaply salved. He gives his impression of the prisoners' faces -- 'One would have taken them to consist, without exception, of full-blown basenesses'. But this is also qualified: the effect of moral meanness is produced 'by its being proved upon them' and would not be so impressive 'if they had still been out in the world'. He questions the objectivity of his impressions. James is a moral writer, deeply concerned with virtue and vice, but the tendency of his writing is to undercut black-and-white judgment and to create sympathetic understanding even of behaviour of which we disapprove.

　 Clair Hughes points out that the recent film adaptation 'prettified' Densher and 'gave him an unwarranted social conscience -- presumably to compensate for his lack of conscience in other quarters'. (Linus Roache transferred to Densher the aura of flawed saintliness from his portrayal of Fr Greg in Priest three years earlier.) Hughes notes that 'Milly's Christian forgiveness brings in its own revenges. As a consequence of her dove-like actions and unseen final (one assumes "forgiving") letter, her "after-image" haunts Densher, to the extent that he posthumously falls in love with her. Love in any real, active sense then becomes impossible for him (the love-object being dead). The "bad sex" scene with which that movie concludes is -- I think -- absolutely right: the lovers' love-nest has become befouled and untenable. As a couple they have no more future than Milly does'. It is true that Milly's forgiveness is tinged, paradoxically, with a note of revenge. But this may be called angelic revenge, of the sort counselled by Scripture itself. 'If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink: For thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head' (Proverbs 25.22-23). This may allude to an Egyptian penitential ritual; the coals were to induce compunction. The text is quoted by Paul in Romans 12.19-20: 'Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath [New English Bible: 'leave a place for divine retribution']: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head'. The coals of fire may sound bloodthirsty but Ernst Käsemann refers them to 'the remorse and shame of the opponent', claiming this is the majority view among exegetes (Käsemann, 337). That is exactly the tenor of Milly's revenge. We need not blame her for the collapse of Densher's relationship with Kate -- which has been sufficiently poisoned by their betrayal of their own and each other's integrity.

　 Casey Abell objects against Clair Hughes that if Densher were a cad he 'would have felt no scruples about plotting for Milly's money'; 'The conclusion of the book makes no sense if Densher was completely rotten'. But one can have scruples and still be a bounder -- look at the 'Aspern Papers' narrator. The point that is being missed here is that there is not one but three Denshers: Densher before his fall is an innocent; in Venice he is shifty, sneaky, uneasy, and then very guilty; the third Densher is the repentant sinner, touched by the grace of forgiveness bequeathed by Milly. He was a rotter, but never completely rotten. Perhaps Gilbert Osmond is completely rotten, and perhaps that is a melodramatic weakness of the earlier novel. But even if Densher was completely rotten, he is no longer so at the end of the story; his sin (no lesser word will do here) has been forgiven. James's surface is at every point continuously plausible, and we can find no melodramatic leap in his characterization of Densher; but nonetheless he allows the Everyman drama of sin, remorse and forgiveness to transpire en filigrane.

　 Can so edifying a transaction coexist with the 'delectable final touch' (Abell) of a woman's revenge on her cheating lover and the 'other woman'? In the capacious world of Jamesian psychology I think it can. Milly is not a pure saint and Densher is not an entirely exemplary penitent; their ordinary unregenerate psychology continues to the end. James integrates into his reflections the ambiguities latent in Milly's forgiveness and her other generous attitudes. It is just this sense of the complexities of human motivation that make this tale of guilt and forgiveness so extraordinarily convincing. There are countless operatic heroines who forgive the bounder and make him melt with remorse -- Violetta, Norma, Butterfly. Here too we get the combined satisfactions of forgiveness and revenge: Butterfly gently cedes Pinkerton to his sposa americana (just as Violetta prays for Alfredo's happiness with his future wife). But the suicide of Puccini's heroine is followed by the desolate offstage 'Butterfly!' of Pinkerton. We are left with the feeling that she has triumphed over him and had her revenge.

　 Marcia Ian writes: 'The term "passive aggressive" comes to mind here -- and fits Milly rather well'. No doubt. But I have a general question about the application of such categories to fictional characters. A fictional character is part of a work of art. If an author presents a character as a heroine, then his or her work of art is likely to be devalued if our psychological commentary robs the character of any convincing heroic status. I remember how Paul Claudel's extremely beautiful piece L'Annonce faite à Marie was devalued for me by Jacques Pohier's psychological analysis of the heroine as a manipulative tease. There is a risk that such analysis could reduce an entire range of literary classics to the status of artistic failures. The kind of suspicion a Freudian brings to real-life situations may not be applicable to fictional ones, in that it may clash totally with what the author is trying to do. Suspension of disbelief is required by all fictions, and can become impossible if we force literary characters to confess unconscious motives. Freudian questioning of the author's unconscious motives can be even more destructive, e.g. analyses of Shelley's Adonais that see it as motivated by sibling rivalry with Keats. Amateur psychologizing, invariably of a debunking kind, has wrought much havoc on the canon of English literature. Consider, for instance, what becomes of Milton at the hands of critics like Empson. At what point should we hold back from such psychological evaluation out of respect for the integrity of the work of art? I would answer: at the point at which it becomes invalid. That point is established by the work of art itself and by the nature of art. An artless novel may lay itself wide open to psychological explanation, but there will always be something in a real work of art that eludes the clutches of such explanation. An artless novel does not deserve to induce suspension of disbelief, and its psychological falsities may justly be left to the mercies of the psychological critic. Nonetheless, Marcia Ian is right to insist that the play of psychological speculation is inevitably aroused by a strong fictional character and that it will enhance the credibility of the character. The great characters in James can bear the brunt of our ethical and psychological inquisition because James has allowed them to think out so thoroughly the perplexities of their situation that the reader will ultimately meet them there less as an object of judgment than as a fellow subject of ethical and psychological inquiry.

　

Virtues and Virtualities in The Golden Bowl

　 What was the colour of Maggie Verver's hair? Posters advertising the Merchant/Ivory film, The Golden Bowl, showed a fair-haired woman (Uma Thurman) whom readers of the novel will have assumed to be Maggie. In the opening scene Prince Amerigo shows this woman around his Roman palace; again one assumes that she is his future fiancee. It comes as a shock when she reproaches him with his forthcoming marriage, and we realize that she is Charlotte, whom we had thought of as the dark-haired girl of classic legend, the scheming villainess -- Becky Sharp, Kate Croy　--, antagonist to the angelic heroine. But the ingenious scriptwriter, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, has made Charlotte the heroine of James's fable, while her dark-haired Maggie is a peevish nullity, eclipsed even by Nick Nolte's Adam Verver and Anjelica Huston's Fanny Assingham. Consider how the majestic image of the pagoda that opens the second half of James's novel is reduced to incoherent babble on Maggie's lips in the film. The seller of the golden bowl is a Henry James look-alike, whom Maggie describes as 'that nice man'. I take this as a barb directed by Jhabvala at James himself, who showed a dehumanized set of values in making so much of Maggie and treating Charlotte so unkindly (half the novel is written from Maggie's point of view, whereas we have access to Charlotte's only on one occasion). At the end of the new film it is Charlotte who triumphs, assuming her American destiny and flourishing on it. Maggie's triumph is elided; she does not appear in the final sequence. In the heroic scenes in which she lies to Charlotte (assuring her she has nothing against her) and accepts Charlotte's final lie (when Charlotte pretends to be leaving for America of her own accord, to save her marriage from Maggie), we share Maggie's point of view in the novel, whereas in the film our sympathy is directly engaged on Charlotte's side. The heavy symbolism of the cracked bowl is rather tiresomely emphasized in the film, and a new dimension of symbolism is added by the invention of a story about a step-mother punished for improper amours in the bloody past of Amerigo's family, a prefiguration of Charlotte's fate. Perhaps the fuss about the cracked bowl is deliberately made tiresome to withdraw sympathy from Maggie, whereas Charlotte's fate is given maximum pathos.

　 The story Jhabvala tells is lying there, ready to be exhumed, in James's novel, but the finer play of consciousness in which that story is enfolded over and over again cannot be transferred to the screen, and the values exhibited in that play of consciousness seem impossible to convey to a contemporary audience; in any case, what could be done in that line has already been achieved superbly in Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. What troubles the reader of the novel is that his or her suspicions about Maggie, its ostensible heroine, are revived by this film, which mounts the case against the Ververs as effectively as Deborah Kerr's performance in The Innocents impugns the Governess in The Turn of the Screw. James intended us to view the heroine of the latter story ironically, and it seems clear that there is a no less abundant play of irony in the presentation of Maggie. But Maggie is nonetheless to be taken as a heroine exhibiting virtues dear to James, just as Milly is in The Wings of the Dove. To read either of these novels as merely exposing the manipulativeness of the idle rich would greatly reduce their significance. Maggie is the central protagonist, but she is not put forward as a heroine. But if Maggie-phobia reaches the point at which we lose sympathy with her in her painful struggle or see her as a villain, then again we have made the novel a failure. Kate and Charlotte may be more vivid and attractive presences, but it is Milly and Maggie who carry the moral burden of the tale. I suggest that James allows all sorts of sinister virtualities to play about his chosen heroines, impurities of motive which they themselves to some extent penetrate, but that the characters he constructs are sturdy enough to be able to retain our sympathy and final approval despite these shadows.

　 Though Maggie represents civilised order and James was an ardent supporter of this value, he probably had much more sympathy for Charlotte than Maggie has -- even in her oh-so-heroinely moments of compassion. One could say the novel pays tribute to the necessities of civilized living even as it exposes the cruel cost they can exact -- a cost paid maximally by Charlotte, but also by the other three. Established society is often unfair and abusive in its claims on the individual, yet dealing patiently with the necessities it imposes, rather than relapsing into impulsive barbarism, could be seen as quite a virtuous activity, and James gives all four protagonists high marks for that. Published ten years before the Great War, the novel is a monument to the arts of diplomacy; that would seem to be its chief claim to moral relevance today as well.

　 The lesson Jhabvala draws from the novel is that it exposes the exploitativeness of patriarchal society. She has Charlotte lecture on a Holbein portrait of Henry VIII, an emblem of male arrogance. The corresponding scene in the novel is subtler. James seems more fascinated by the exploitation of Amerigo than by the oppression of Charlotte. Leland S. Person has analyzed the sadomasochistic dynamics of the novel in depth, noting especially the way Amerigo is exploited by his 'owners' -- allowed the 'use-value' of his sexual prestige as the hired lover of Verver's wife and daughter, while the 'exchange-value' is retained by Adam and Maggie (who even in her masochistic postures is really stage-managing him). 'Amerigo's ready cooperation in producing a masculine performance on demand effectively reduces him, in the extended financial metaphor that James prosecutes throughout the novel, to a kind of bank -- a sperm bank -- of masculinity' (Person 2000, 158). Such hyper-subtlety is no surprise in late James. His mind ran along those lines from the start, always clued in to the intersection of financial and erotic complexities. The perverse laws of the sexual market explored in The Golden Bowl already emerge in The Awkward Age, the central conceit of The Sacred Fount, and the exchange between Chad and Madame de Vionnet. Those who come closest to being passionate lovers are the losers in this market: May Server, Marie de Vionnet, Charlotte. The message of this is not a feminist one, but concerns more generally the integrity of personal relationships in a capitalist world. Mr Longdon and Nanda, Strether, Densher preserve integrity by a final withdrawal (preceded by Isabel Archer and Maisie Farange). In The Golden Bowl no one withdraws from the game, and the final tableau could be read as civilized compromise, a triumph for all concerned. Or it could be read, more troublingly, as defeat and loss for Amerigo and Charlotte and brazen capitalist gratification for the Ververs. As Roger Ebert remarks in his review of the film: 'There are four good people in "The Golden Bowl" and four bad people, making, in all, four characters'. Whatever Maggie's ultimate standing as a moral agent, the novel brings home the message that the practice of virtue is enhanced by awareness of the virtualities of evil that lurk in every corner of capitalist society and of the human heart.

　 The Golden Bowl is James's most Wagnerian work. Charlotte and Amerigo are explicitly presented as doomed Wagnerian lovers. The image of the bowl plays a central part comparable to the image of the Ring in the Tetralogy. Also Wagnerian is the association of wealth with a curse on love. Maggie strikes up the Wagnerian theme of 'redemption through love', but her enactment of it leaves more troubling questions than did Milly's in The Wings of the Dove. Just as the Ring Cycle ends in obscurity and ambiguity, so the reader is left pondering inscrutable mysteries at the end of The Golden Bowl. Like Shakespeare's Hamlet, these are works in which the artist of genius takes on material exceeding his grasp, or becomes the channel of something greater than his conscious intention. Despite infinite labours of form, the ultimate result eludes clarity, as one discovers if one tries to tell the story of Hamlet or of the Ring Cycle. The story of The Golden Bowl leads into a similar opaque maze. Perhaps the highest achievements of art lie beyond the horizon of Apollonian vision, sounding an obscurity that is brought to awareness only when all the shafts in Apollo's quiver have been spent.

　

　　　　　　　　　　　　　Works Cited here and in the articles below

Bell, Millicent (1998). 'The Unmentionable Subject in "The Pupil"'. In: Freedman, 139-50.

Bradley, John R. ed. (1999a). Henry James and Homo-erotic desire. London: Macmillan.

Bradley, John R. (1999b). 'Henry James's Permanent Adolescence'. In: Bradley (1999a), 45-68.

Ellmann, Richard (1999). 'James Amongst the Aesthetes'. In: Bradley (1999a), 25-44.

Felman, Shoshana (1982). 'Turning the Screw of Interpretation'. In: S. Felman, ed. Literature and Psychoanalysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 94-207.

Freedman, Jonathan, ed. (1998). The Cambridge Companion to Henry James. Cambridge University Press.

Gargano, James, ed. (1987a). Critical Essays on Henry James: The Early Novels. Boston: Hall.

Gargano, James, ed. (1987b). 'James's The Sacred Fount: The Phantasmagorical Made Evidential', in Gargano, ed. Critical Essays on Henry James: The Late Novels. Boston; Hall, 113-30.

Graham, Kenneth (1975). Henry James: The Drama of Fulfilment. Oxford: Clarendon.

Graham, Wendy (1999). Henry James's Thwarted Love　Stanford University Press.

Haralson, Eric (2000), '"His little heart, dispossessed": Ritual Sexorcism in The Turn of the Screw'. In: McCormack, 133-48.

Hederman, Mark Patrick (2001). The Haunted Inkwell: Art and Our Future. Dublin: Columba Press.

Hughes, Clair (2001). Henry James and the Art of Dress. New York: Palgrave.

Käsemann, Ernst (1974). An die Römer. Tübingen: Mohr.

James, Henry (1984). The Figure in the Carpet and other stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

McCormack, Peggy, ed. (2000). Questioning the Master: Gender and Sexuality in Henry James's Writings. London: Associated University Presses.

Person, Leland S. (1999). 'Homo-Erotic Desire in the Tales of Writers and Artists'. In: Bradley (1999a), 111-23.

Person, Leland S. (2000). 'Jamesian Sadomasochism: The Invisible (Third) Hand of Marriage in The Golden Bowl'. In: McCormack, 149-75.

Stevens, Hugh (1998). 'Queer Henry In the Cage'. In: Freedman, 120-38.

Stowe, William (1998), 'James's Elusive Wings'. In: Freedman, 187-203.

Symonds, John Addington (1984). Sexual Inversion. New York: Bell Publishing Company.

Tintner, Adeline (1995). 'A Gay Sacred Fount: The Reader as Detective'. Twentieth Century Literature 41:224-48.

Other names referred to are interlocutors in the discussion at [email protected].

Authorial Consciousness in "The Golden Bowl"

James’s method as finally developed is to chronicle from a single viewpoint the entire web of motivations, calculations, hesitations or intimations that accompany the unfolding of any human interaction, bringing to bear on them the closest logical analysis. It is a method which is oppressive until it becomes addictive, until we are drawn so deep into the jungle that we are prepared to wonder at every leaf on every tree along with its proud proprietor. The imperturbably eloquent prose gently leads us through many twists and turns, down many a long dark corridor of consciousness, but once its tone of quiet excitement is caught we do not lose it again. Like his contemporary Sherlock Holmes, James convinces us that no detail is to be thought of as uninteresting, that even the tiniest clue may wonderfully convey us to the heart of the maze.

In his last major novel, The Golden Bowl, James gives us access to the workings of two consciousnesses representing both sides of what, despite the bizarre aspects of the plot, is a fairly common situation. On the one side is Prince Amerigo, who takes life easily, finding that fortune plays into his hands, that people comply with his wishes, and who does not scruple to take advantage of whatever opportunities or facilities contribute to his ease. His marriage to Maggie Verver is a godsend, bringing wealth as well as domestic contentments. On the other side, in the second part of the work, is the situation of the wife who wakes up to the fact that her husband and her father’s wife are on terms so close as to constitute a threat to both marriages. The interaction of exploitative and exploitable personalities is a theme in The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, and The Wings of the Dove, but one never handled as completely, as subtly as here. What makes for completeness above all is the reaction of the victim in The Golden Bowl, her determined and righteous turning of the tables, which so succeeds that the Prince and Charlotte in turn become victims: hers is the strength of virtue, theirs the weakness of conscious guilt. What makes for subtlety is the rigorous code of civilized behaviour imposed on all four characters. Though their external attitudes, at a certain stage in the plot, amount to no more than a polite fiction, played out in the looming shadow of the unspoken, still appearances must be kept up, under pain of surrendering civilized order to the wreckage that awaits its breakdown. The situation is so arranged that the last painful ounce of interest can be squeezed out of the theme and the drama of mutual manipulation followed through all its changes of mood and perspective. Some will complain that the treatment of the subject is inadequate since it abstracts from all the dark forces which are never translated into terms of rational motivation in such battles. Still I would think that if James is true to the surface play of conscious awareness he cannot but make us feel the presence, too, of its fathomless sources.

In the reproduction of the Prince’s consciousness we have an instance of how fidelity to the surface creates the impression of depth. From the start we are aware of a loose harmonious quality in his sense of life, a Latin responsiveness:

 

The young man’s movements, however, betrayed no consistency of attention ― not even, for that matter, when one of his arrests had proceeded from possibilities in faces shaded, as they passed him on the pavement, by huge beribboned hats, or more delicately tinted still under the tense silk of parasols held at perverse angles in waiting victorias.

(29)

 

Throughout the novel the external scene is introduced only as framed and coloured by consciousness, and its recurring details ― spacious town and country houses, hansoms and victorias, parasols and objets d’art, serene landscapes ― correspond to great spaces or stifling enclosures in the mind or have some other subtle symbolic import. The possibilities which draw, or in this case fail to draw, the preoccupied young man, are suggested in the rather seductive terminology of this sentence: ‘shades’, ‘delicately tinted’, ‘tense silk’, ‘parasols held at perverse angles’, ‘waiting victorias’. In another place the Prince admires the beauty of an amoral arrangement, and James makes us so feel the charm of it that his character's lack of a moral sense is glossed over by the rich music of his aesthetic awareness:

 

... things that melted together almost indistinguishably to feed his sense of beauty. If the outlook was in every way spacious ― and the towers of three cathedrals, in different counties, as had been pointed out to him, gleamed discernibly, like dim silver, in the rich sameness of tone ― didn’t he somehow the more feel it so because, precisely, Lady Castledean had kept over a man of her own, and that this offered a certain sweet intelligibility as the note of the day? (264)

 

James, in his later prose, cushions every sentence handsomely with clauses, adverbs, adjectives, turns of phrase serving to body forth the glowing fulness of the consciousness expressed ― thus ‘as had been pointed out to him’ integrates the geographical detail just given into the medium of the Prince’s conscious reflection; the interrogative form reflects the dawning in his mind of a new shade of realization; ‘offered’ refers to the aspect of the fact perceived that encroaches most immediately on consciousness ― ‘made’ or ‘gave’ or ‘presented’ would not quite catch its intimate pleasing effect; ‘a certain sweet intelligibility’ is a vague abstract phrase which insinuates very exactly the quality of the pleasure given.

If James can enter so entirely into the music of a frivolous consciousness, it may be for the reason that his style itself could easily lend itself to insincerity, could become a parade of surface felicities failing of real contact with any deeper truth. If he so often entrusts his story to an unreliable narrator it may well have been from an awareness of the ambiguity of his own fluency, from a sense that the specious element he could so easily slip into would do as the inner voice of one of his characters' falseness, leaving unflawed his own authorial integrity. Thus the authorial falseness of the opening of The Portrait of a Lady:

 

There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not ― some people of course never do ―, the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. (Penguin edition, 5)

 

betrayed in the patronizing chattiness of ‘some people of course never do’ and in the gushing adjectives, is transferred to a fictional consciousness in the comparable tourist musings of Strether in The Ambassadors:

 

he saw himself partaking, at the close of the day, with the enhancements of a coarse white cloth and a sanded floor, of something fried and felicitous, washed down with authentic wine. (Penguin edition, 343)

 

All the appeal of the picture is retained but something of the complacency with which Strether licks his lips over it is also suggested. James is so conscious, his sense of complications so incompatible with straightforward description or statements, that when he attempts to be straightforward he rings false, for we sense that he is giving only a judicious selection from the whole truth, that both his subject and his readers are being officiously manipulated. This, to me, is the effect of such blunt statements as: ‘Isabel Archer was a young person of many theories; her imagination was remarkably active. It had been her fortune to possess a finer mind than most of the persons among whom her lot was cast’ (43). The first sentence here is a pastiche of Jane Austen, the second of Balzac ― just as the opening paragraph of the novel is a pastiche of Dickens and of the language of the guidebook. James found his true voice only when he ventured to transcribe the fulness of his consciousness, meting it out among his characters. He reached sincerity not by paring away the excess of hollow verbosity, but by filling out the hollow places with a wealth of refining and complicating inflections, with that cushioning already remarked on. That process is carried to its rarest pitch in The Golden Bowl, of which James writes:

 

Their chronicle strikes me as quite of the stuff to keep us from forgetting that absolutely no refinement of ingenuity or of precaution need be dreamed of as wasted in that most exquisite of all good causes the appeal to variety, the appeal to incalculability, the appeal to a high refinement and a handsome wholeness of effect. (9)

 

James arrives at moral truth only through an endlessly complicated dialectic of consciousness. In The Golden Bowl the consciousness of Maggie Verver establishes its authority over that of the Prince and Charlotte; moral awareness proves its superiority over the aesthetic approach to life, passes its judgement, stern, searching, unanswerable, on the culpable nonchalance of the latter. But however pure the moral principles on which action is based, it will always attach to itself elements of the political power struggle, given the tangled condition of human affairs. So the dialectic within Maggie’s righteous consciousness itself, the Machiavellian thickening of her motivation, the multitude of other voices, worldly, scheming or ruthless, which blend with the single one reminding her of the duties of her role, and lastly the ever-shifting perspective created by the changing balance of power between the protagonists, are so many factors promoting a richer approximation to the truth of the matter. Thus the simple situation which was the point of departure, the original grain of sand (for with James this hackneyed metaphor never fails to suggest itself) is developed, by thorough reflection on all its aspects, to a pearl-like pitch of fine-grained concentration. His intelligence is so flourishing, in the later works, and so articulate, that nothing of convention or abstraction remains to clutter vision.

It may be, of course, that his luminous perceptions, his telling notations, enjoy complete validity only within the fictional world to which they belong, and remain tangential to real life. But then one is liable to capture more insight by spreading one's nets obliquely, by following whatever fascinates one, however rarefied and peripheral it may seem, until it yields up the element of depth in it that caused the fascination. When philosophers and theologians take a direct approach, raising straight away the great abstract questions of meaning, they end up not even seeing what they propose to so authoritatively explain. But still, the objection might be pursued, how, if the world that fascinated him is itself so unreal, so exclusively peopled by the idle rich moving in their urbane and opulent settings, can his meditation take us anywhere near reality? I would concede that James is afloat in a very frail boat and that the Wildean duchesses who pass in and out of his pages are unpromising models for complete portrayal of human nature. But it is precisely James’s personal moral tremor that lends the picture its depth. A Wilde might blithely chatter through a painted hell, but James is able to sound this superficial world in the medium of his own graver, mournful consciousness, checking the overtones of its talk in the great, silent chambers of his brooding reflection, so that his painting of the scene reveals a mysterious play of moral light and shade of which most of his characters may remain largely unaware. It would have been a waste to spend a lifetime of such sustained speculation on the trivia of manners and behaviour, if it were not that time and again these slight details, as the anxious Jamesian conscience plays over them, throw up vertiginous glimpses of a lurking abyss. If James surpasses his environment by the tenacity of his moral concern, he also develops its achievements in aesthetic refinement to a new pitch, so much so that his own works can now be seen as the finest product of that time.

But what is the vision this enriching, enlivening play of awareness attains? Perhaps a summary could be ventured only in the form of some such dim, muted realization as the Prince expresses toward the end of the novel: ‘Everything’s terrible, cara – in the heart of man’ (534). As the cracks appear in the idyllic arrangements of the Ververs’ double marriage what crowds in on Maggie’s consciousness for the first time is exactly the presence of flaws in the heart itself, a gap between the innocent appearances and the more tortuous undercurrents experience brings to light and teaches one to deal with. Beneath all the worries and calculations which fill her mind in the second part of the novel, behind each move in the battle of wits on which she’s launched, a battle whose weapons are the frailest ― silences, subtle and ambiguous communications by looks, gestures, a minimum of the most necessary verbal comment and a lot of serviceable or uneasy small talk, timely advances to or withdrawals from intimacy, sincere or insincere reassurances, or the refusal thereof ―, behind even her wish to spare her father pain and her determination to keep her husband, lies a new awareness of what life itself is like. It is not just that, like Isabel Archer, she has grown out of romantic complacency ― though here again, as in the earlier novel, James portrays the betrayal of romantic illusion as happening where it can be most sharply perceived, in the intimate recesses of the relationship founded on it. But the insight that breaks on Maggie Verver has a deeper thrust, the shock of realism it injects causes a more extensive fermentation, sets off a more complex series of reverberations in her mind. She finds herself thrust into a position of responsibility for the threatened order, forced to man single-handed the dykes against chaos:

 

Spacious and splendid, like a stage again awaiting a drama, it was a scene she might people, by the press of her spring, either with serenities and dignities and decencies, or with terrors and shames and ruins, things as ugly as those formless fragments of her golden bowl she was trying so hard to pick up. (458)

 

Their disillusion lights up not only her past mistakes but the entire reach of her present situation, all of whose participants are sensed almost as dangling between heaven and hell, as depending on her intervention for their escape. A single wrong step would suffice to shatter the fragile relationships, already seriously compromised, on which their lives are structured:

 

If she were but different – oh, ever so different! – all this high decorum would hang by a hair. There reigned for her, absolutely, during these vertiginous moments, that fascination of the monstrous, that temptation of the horribly possible... (456)

 

But she takes her cue from the elements of order still intact in her situation, builds sedulously on the stance of dignity demanded of her, and succeeds in subjecting the destructive instincts to the precepts of patience and discretion. This attitude wins her husband over, converts him out of his uncommittedness, and exposes in contrast the rather teutonic moral insensitivity of her step-mother, who insists on putting a bold face on her behaviour. James calls in a priest to subtly underline the point:

 

She [Charlotte] had to confirm, day after day, the rightness of her cause and the justice and felicity of her exemption ― so that wouldn’t there have been, fairly, in any explicit concern of Father Mitchell’s, depths of practical derision of her success? (502)

 

Maggie rises to her role so successfully that in the end even Charlotte is induced to play her part, by offering to remove herself along with Mr. Verver to the United States.

There may be implausible or thin spots in this sequence of events, but his heroine’s situation is a vehicle which allows James to work out fully and suggestively many of his besetting preoccupations. If the average Jamesian situation is distinguished by its grotesque cast, its rarefied unlikelihood, that may be the mark of a curious twist in the author’s own relation to the world of which he was so impassioned an observer. First there is the sense of being ‘in the cage’, observing a scene in which one cannot participate, cut off by a gulf of sheer inhibition, and yet appropriating that observed world and thinking one's way into it by a power of absorption and intuition that causes life to move more busily inside the cage than it does outside it. The cage never appears in James as an existentialist sense of alienation or as narcissism: he is too robust and simple and too fascinated with the world outside ever to get stuck in that rut. Instead it is dramatized anew in each of his stories, either as the effect of oppressive circumstances or of a moral weakness. As Maggie conceals her sense of something amiss and her plan of campaign from her husband, she sets up a barrier between them. Similar distances are established by her silence to her father and Charlotte. But this movement of withdrawal is accompanied by a quickening of sensibility and insight. Familiar habits take on a new, conscious feel, because of the clarity of intention and policy qualifying her actions. Her secret plan effects a change in her relationships which causes all her encounters to be charged with a new wealth of strategic or diplomatic significance. The barrier is most profoundly between her inner awareness and the role she has embarked on:

 

It was this very sense of the stage and the footlights that kept her up, made her rise higher: just as it was the sense of action that logically involved some platform. (322 )

 

In fact, the enjoyment of the intrigue, the guesswork, the observed significant changes of attitude, the moments of truth, the new plans, and in general the political fascination with which every incident in the second half of the novel is fraught, seems quite to dilute the pathos that should attach to such a situation. Pity and terror are almost submerged as we are swept along on the tide of our author’s intellectual excitement. Perhaps his intelligence is the cage and his imprisonment in it a source more of delight than regret. Whether we should regret it for him is even doubtful, given the infectious purr of contentment that sounds through all his smoothly rolling paragraphs.

His concern for total transparency, for an all round view of his subject in the medium of a perfect form, is mirrored in the care Maggie applies to shaping her own circumstances by an effort of creative attention. The least slip can cause her brittle situation to collapse into smithereens. Much of the same anxious care must have presided over the composition itself of The Golden Bowl, so that Maggie’s triumph, the triumph of civilized order, mirrors James’s success in moving skilfully across his chosen tightrope. The weight of moral responsibility that is brought to bear on the tiniest gestures of his heroine reflects the immense seriousness for James of keeping every element in the right place. If his obsession with form is the converse of an uneasy awareness that the rich, subtle fabric of social refinement is thinning under the pressure of a new permissive and vulgar ethos, his heroine’s scruples similarly represent a firm stand for the principle of moral coherence without which society disintegrates into an arena of unbridled rapacious individualism. Charlotte is significantly compared to a wild animal on the loose:

 

The splendid shining supple creature was out of the cage, was at large; and the question now almost grotesquely rose of whether she mightn’t by some art, just where she was and before she could go further, be hemmed in and secured. (460)

 

James, too, feels it is his mission as an artist to hem in and secure the savage forces that threaten the unstable equilibrium of civilized living. This response is wiser I think than the alienation cultivated by modern thinkers, from Nietzsche and Kierkegaard on, or than the doctrinaire Christian reaction of ‘pereat mundus’, or the Marxist reaction of ‘pereat capitalismu’. James is not or waiting for any eschatological boat. He can view the decline of civilization only as an absolute tragedy. His stylistic effort can then, without undue implausibility, be seen as informed by the same ‘infinite sense of intention’ that lies behind Maggie’s manoeuvres (305).

Perhaps it is a matter for rejoicing that the influence of the Jamesian corpus is more extended today than ever before. Its fragrance is the recall, amid our fragmentation, of the ideal of classical wholeness in life as in art. His prose style is the very voice of that ideal. It falls as a gauze veil over all the refined consciousnesses it serves to exhibit and thus distances and objectifies them for the reader at the same time as it espouses and reflects their intimate rhythm. This is not the dramatic immediacy of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique, for James’s style maintains the presidency of the observing authorial consciousness over the consciousnesses it analyzes. The conscientious passivity and neutrality of this presiding awareness express, more than anything else, a tone of Olympian humour. Some regard the eminent author as the merest wind-bag, as one who sublimated his unfulfilment in a grandiose but hollow magniloquence, and his later work as the danse macabre of an exhausted orator with the ghosts of his former competence. Such a judgement is understandable from one’s own impressions, on a first approach, of cloudy masses of circumlocution, great aerial reaches of empty and impenetrable analysis, the serried formation of a tortuous and top-heavy rhetoric ― quite as if having come to view a solid landscape the reader were to find his feet and eyes astray a thousand yards above terra firma. Yet as, after further frequentation, this impression undergoes a gradual change, as the authority of the late Jamesian voice establishes itself, and from its murky verbiage a music begins to proceed, as assured in its charm as it is evocative in its harmonies, how can one not be convinced that, despite its twists and turns, its coy advances and withdrawals, its indeterminate and ambiguous expressions, complications so arbitrary and so indulgently obscure, this intimate and expansive murmur constitutes the exact and transparent representation, in their undiluted strangeness, of the vibrations of a mind more than ever alive with insight? Our author is not after all smitten with some Chestertonian frenzy, attaching his billowy sails, in baroque imbalance, to some insubstantial skiff. Whatever his adjectival efflorescence may own to a resurgence of latent Irishry, it cannot be accused of exceeding the measure, for it is in exact correspondence to the greater complexity, the more totally reflected quality of his final vision. His striving after perfection of form, his refusal to dabble in what cannot be ordered in conscious vision, his high Victorian dread of calling a spade a spade, his desire to retreat from the meaningless and corrupting dispersion of brute fact into an interior realm of clear vision, of a continual creative seeing, might indeed be judged ridiculous if its fruits were not before us. But once we have visited his fictional palaces, admiring their serene arrangement of our experience, their sovereign elevation of its elements to a new power of integration, a new richness of harmony, while we may still not be able to define clearly the sense or estimate the utility of such a process of aesthetic transformation ― is it to be called transcendence? ― we cannot in any case but be glad that James followed his bent faithfully to the end.     

 

Goethe in "The Golden Bowl"

　1. One critic describes The Golden Bowl as 'obscurely compelling'; another refers to the 'shimmering elusiveness' of Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 1809). Each description fits the other novel as well. The two novels are so welfoccul-wrought and well-written that they have strong claims to be the most beautiful in their respective languages. Both are self-consciously 'classical' in their concentration on a single theme, worked out thoroughly, in their reduced number of protagonists, in their handling of time and place, and in their high social tone. Both works have emerged from relative obscurity to new popularity in recent years, suggesting that the tensions they explore are in some way characteristic of our own period. Each novel dates from its author's sixtieth year and was spoken of by its author as his best book. It might not be far from the truth to imagine the sixty year old James emulating the sixty year old Goethe, for in The Golden Bowl James enacts with Goethe one of the most gripping elective affinities in literature. The connection, perhaps James's single most important use of a literary model, was pointed out by Judith Ryan, translator of Elective Affinities, in 1982, but has not been followed up in James scholarship. 'The later work... is an answer to questions left unresolved in the earlier work; indeed, it brings to light problematic aspects of its predecessor which might otherwise have remained hidden and helps us to understand its coordinates more subtly and intricately... The two novels provide the greatest mutual illumination... A master in the study of relationships, James shows us what they have to do with art and artifacts, revealing and refining at the same time the mainspring of Goethe's novel' (Ryan, 153-4).

　

　2. Goethe's novel, published in two volumes, is structured in two parts with eighteen chapters each, and can be subdivided into six sections of six chapters each. Here is the basic plot outline:

　Part I, Section 1: Formation of the foursome.

　Eduard and Charlotte, who wished to marry in youth and have finally done so in middle age(after the death of their respective spouses), are installed in their magnificent estate. They decide to invite his friend the Captain and her niece Ottilie, schoolmate of her daughter Luciane, to stay with them. The Captain helps Eduard beautify the estate and expounds the chemical topic of elective affinities. Charlotte feels rather neglected. But the arrival of the introverted, slightly anorexic Ottilie provides her with companionship.

　Section 2: The 'double adultery'.

　The two couples, thrown together as in a laboratory vessel, form new attachments. Eduard's passion for Ottilie grows like wildfire. At a foundation-laying ceremony on Charlotte's birthday he throws a glass in the air but it is not smashed; it is inscribed with the letters E and O which he takes as an omen. The visit of an adulterous couple, the Count and the Baroness, creates a sense of moral disorder. Eduard and Charlotte make love while thinking of Ottilie and the Captain respectively; the next day Edward embraces Ottilie, Charlotte the Captain.

　 Section 3: Departure of the two men.

　Charlotte tries to restore things to normal. On Ottilie's birthday the Captain saves a boy from drowning. Eduard ignores the general commotion and puts on the fireworks display for Ottilie alone. The Captain leaves. Promising Charlotte that he will try to cure his passion, Eduard retires to a smaller residence, having ensured that Ottilie will stay on, and then joins the army. Charlotte reassures the ex-clergyman Mittler that her marriage is not doomed, for she is pregnant.

　Part II, Section 4. Intermezzo.

　The two women are taken up with an architect who is devoted to Ottilie and with the vain and over-energetic Luciane. They enact various aesthetic fads of the period, culminating in tableaux vivants from which Luciane excludes Ottilie. When Luciane has left, the architect stages new tableaux in which Ottilie poses radiantly as the Blessed Virgin.

　Section 5. The re-emergence of the fateful relationships.

　After the visit of Ottilie's tutor, Charlotte gives birth to a boy who resembles Ottilie and the Captain. A visiting English Lord tells a story which may suggest that Charlotte and the Captain were lovers in the past. More Romantic fads: Ottilie reveals a capacity for water-divining; Charlotte refuses the Lord's offer to cure Ottilie's headache by magnetism. Eduard tells the Captain (now a Major) that his survival in battle means that Ottilie is his. He will divorce Charlotte and the Captain can marry her. This will restore all-round harmony.

　Section 6. Tragedy and apotheosis.

　Stealing back to his estate, Eduard finds Ottilie with his son by the lake and explains his plan. Her excitement causes a boating accident in which his child drowns. Charlotte agrees to the divorce. But Ottilie, stricken with guilt, renounces Eduard. Eduard meets her at an inn on her journey back to the boarding school; she gently declines his advances but returns with him to Charlotte. Charlotte, to soothe Edward, agrees to marry the Major, on condition that Ottilie first agrees to marry Eduard. Ottilie falls into anorexia and mutism, and explains in a written statement that her passion for Eduard has disoriented her and that she wants to recover herself. She hears Mittler speak of the sanctity of marriage, and faints. She dies shortly after, asking Eduard to promise to live. Seeing Ottilie's funeral, the servant-girl Nanny leaps down from her window, and is severely injured, but is miraculously healed when she touches Ottilie's body. A cult forms around Ottilie. Edward discovers that the glass inscribed with E and O has been broken, and he too becomes mute and anorexic, and dies.

　The inserted novella points to a hidden story under the surface. The Captain would have married Charlotte but for his loyalty to Eduard; they try to have Eduard fall in love with Ottilie instead, but he is not swayed. Charlotte knows the episodes in the Captain's life on which the novella is based (442), and we may gather, as James may have, that the girl was Charlotte herself (Winkelman, 80). In the story Charlotte rejects her boring fiance (Eduard) for the Captain; this happy ending, the opposite of what actually happened, moves her so much that she has to leave the room. When Eduard proposes inviting the Captain, Charlotte makes her consent contingent on his consent to the corresponding visit by Ottilie, hoping (at least subconsciously) that this will lead to Eduard falling in love with Ottilie after all and to a divorce that will free Charlotte to marry the Captain. The ethical shadiness of this and the necessity of squaring the Captain's high principles explain the inconsistencies in her later behaviour (Winkelman, 24-9, 79-83, 100-1). The division in her motivations makes Charlotte a 'fascinating woman' rather than the 'bland personification of virtue' critics have seen in her (103).

　

　3. Compare the plot of The Golden Bowl:

　Book I. Part 1: Before the marriage of Amerigo and Maggie.

　Impoverished Prince Amerigo is uneasy about his forthcoming marriage to Maggie, daughter of a wealthy art-collector, Adam Verver. He visits Fanny Assingham, who has helped make the match, and finds her too ill at ease, because Charlotte Stant, who separated from him to leave the ground clear for such an advantageous marriage, has come to London for the occasion. Charlotte makes him join her in a search for a present for Maggie; they consider a curious golden bowl, but the Prince points out that it must have a hidden crack.

　Part 2: The second marriage.

　Two years later, at Fawns, his country estate, Adam is troubled by women who want him as their husband. Maggie's marriage has bound her more closely to her father and even her son, the Principino, is a new bond between them. But Maggie feels Adam would be happier if he remarried. She invites Charlotte to join them. On a trip to Brighton Adam proposes to Charlotte, clearly indicating that it is for Maggie's sake. Charlotte wavers, until a telegram from the Prince resolves her doubts.

　Part 3: Adultery.

　At a ball two years later, Charlotte complains to Fanny that she is neglected by Adam, and that she feels entitled to pair up with the equally neglected Amerigo. This is the theme of one of the distraught colloquies between Fanny and her bemused husband Colonel Bob. A house party at a great country house is the occasion for Amerigo and Charlotte to consummate their relationship, at an inn in Gloucester.

Part II. Section 4: The scales fall from Maggie's eyes.

　Her suspicions aroused, Maggie tries to rearrange the foursome, spending time with Charlotte while Adam is left with Amerigo. She realizes that Amerigo and Charlotte are falling in too smoothly with this plan, and she asks Fanny directly if they are lovers; Fanny solemnly denies it. Maggie buys the golden bowl and is visited by the vendor, who confesses that it has a crack; he recognizes photographs of Charlotte and Amerigo, and Maggie is able to piece together their relationship. She summons Fanny, who smashes the golden bowl, at which instant the Prince appears. Maggie confronts him with the truth.

　Section 5: Lying to Charlotte.

　The scene is again Fawns. The Prince has denied to Charlotte that Maggie knows of their relationship. Charlotte asks Maggie if she has some complaint to make of her and Maggie solemnly lies, pretending complete ignorance (mainly in order to spare her father, who, however, seems to know as much as she does). She feels united with Amerigo in their shared lie. Adam decides to take Charlotte back to America and Charlotte puts the best face she can on it by pretending she wants to go in order to save her marriage from Maggie; self-sacrificingly, Maggie again lies, agreeing with Charlotte's accusation.

　Section 6: Conclusion.

　Before the Ververs arrive to say farewell, Amerigo tells Maggie he wants to tell Charlotte that they have lied to her. But Charlotte gives such a splendid display of confidence that there is no place for this. Maggie and Adam speak to one another in fulsome praise of Charlotte; Maggie feels a guilty pity for her. Alone with Amerigo she feels he has now fully given himself to her, and the novel closes on an embrace.　

　

　4. The similarity in structure between the two works is striking. Edith Aulhorn notes that every third chapter in Goethe's Part I brings a decisive turn: the Captain's arrival (3); Ottilie's arrival (6); silent recognition of the adulterous affinities (9); open confession of them (12); farewells of the two adulterous pairs (15)(Rösch, 104). She does not find this pattern in Part II, but here too we can find a three-chapter grouping: the architect (1-3); Luciane and the tableaux vivants (4-6); the tutor, the birth of the child (7-9); the English Lord, and the reappearance of Eduard (10-12); Eduard's reunion with Ottilie, the death of the child, Ottilie's decision to withdraw (13-15); Ottilie's return and the final tragedy (16-18). Aulhorn does not advert to the more salient patterning in groups of six chapters. The first six chapters set up the foursome, the next six bring their chiastic relationship to full expression, the final chapters of Part I temporarily dissolve the fateful situation; the first six chapters of Part II culminate in the tableau vivant of Ottilie as the Blessed Virgin; the next six center on the birth of the child (in the second chapter of the six) and end with the return of Eduard, corresponding to the middle section of part I which centers on the conception of the child (in the second last chapter of the six); the last six culminate in the posthumous apotheosis of Ottilie.

　James also paces his story in six acts, the latter three mirroring and partly undoing the former three. We might surmise that James's six sections may originally have been intended, like Goethe's, to have six chapters each, as the first section has (the other sections have seven, eleven, eleven, five and three; the proportions grow and decline in mirror-like symmetry of the two halves). Goethe had already used the structure of two volumes that mirror one another in Werther. The two volume format is not new to James (e.g. The Portrait of a Lady), nor is the formal division in two books (The Wings of the Dove). But the more explicit mirroring of the two halves of The Golden Bowl is unprecedented. The mirroring is most obvious in the setting of the central section of each Book at Fawns; even the Lutches and Mrs Rance, the guests of the first Fawns section, make a brief appearance in the second (441), just as the visit of the Count and the Baroness in Goethe's Part II mirrors that of Part I.

　The structural feature that most closely connects the two novels is the shift from Edward as the central consciousness in Part I to Ottilie as the central consciousness in Part II. The last sentence of Part I signals the shift: 'A look into her inner life is provided, however, by her diary, from which we propose to communicate some extracts' (35). Goethe's courtly, officious narrator has much in common with James's. He tells us that her diary has a red thread, such as runs through the rigging of the British navy, 'a thread of affection and devotion (Neigung und Anhänglichkeit)' (368). This is the counterpart to the passion and egoism of Eduard. Just as in James, a woman is positioned as the apparent agent of a redemptive enterprise at the start of Part II. Goethe's Part I has four protagonists; in Part II the least active of the four, Ottilie, emerges as chief protagonist. In James, Book I has four equal protagonists; in Book II Maggie, the least seen in action so far, emerges as chief protagonist, and her point of view dominates as the Prince's did not in Book I. The two parts of Goethe's novel could well have been titled 'Eduard' and 'Ottilie' just as James titles his Books 'The Prince' and 'The Princess'. We do not find this symmetrical relationship between two centres of consciousness in any other of James's novels, though The Wings of the Dove already shows James's mastery of the architectural possibilities of complementary centres. Aulhorn notes that Goethe's Part I is a series of scenes in logical succession, one scene inevitably calling forth its counterpart, whereas Part II works by juxtaposition and contrast (Rösch, 97). James works by logical progression in both Books.

　At the start of Goethe's Part II, since Eduard and the Captain are absent, the vacant place is filled by a newly prominent personage, the architect, who is devoted to Ottilie. In James there is never such an empty place to be filled and no character other than the three principal couples has a substantial presence in the novel; the minor characters at Fawns in Part Fifth, for example, serve only to smooth over embarrassment in the two intense relationships of the principals.

　Towards the close of Goethe's novel a melancholy peace prevails. Charlotte and the Captain no longer resist the fatal passion between the other two, but instead try to smooth the way for it. Similarly, in James, Charlotte and the Prince no longer put up a resistance to the will of Adam and Maggie as they lay down the law of marriage, backed with the law of money. Marriage is swept away by passion in Goethe; passion is stamped out in the name of marriage in James.

　Goethe's characters have wide-ranging cultural conversations, though always coming back to the fatal affinities. Despite the partial conflict between the novel's ambition to provide a critique of culture and the central marriage-plot, Elective Affinities is much tighter in construction than Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. The author of Faust did not share James' aversion to 'loose baggy monsters': 'The only product of greater extent in which I consciously worked to present a pervasive idea was my Elective Affinities. That made the novel easy for the understanding to grasp, but I will not say it thereby became a better novel! Rather I am of the opinion that the more a poetic production is immeasurable and difficult for the understanding to grasp, the better' (G 626). James's characters never discuss or think of anything but their intensely tangled relationships, and thus James completes Goethe's movement towards total classical integration. But this is achieved at the expense of the realistic social texture in the background of Goethe's drama, which is a microcosm of German society in a time of rapid social change, accelerated by the wartime conditions of 1806 (the year in which Hegel was writing The Phenomenology of Mind). However, though there is no presence of the poor in James's novel, it does convey a muffled sense of social crisis. He may have noticed the social dimension of Goethe's story and of its central conceit: the chemical affinities are connected with the relations of 'the nobility and the third estate, the soldier and the civilian' (G 272). The marriages in The Golden Bowl are symbolic 'not only of marriages in actual life but of other social institutions and processes which are fused with them'. Like Goethe's, 'James's novel devotes its full power simultaneously to sanctioning the institutions of marriage as a convention and to challenging its given conventional status' (Holland, 350).

　

　5. The principle of composition at work in each of the novels is felt as an uncanny law, dictating the symbolism, the structure, the decorum, and the pace of the narration. Goethe's novel is superbly paced; often in a succession of quick passionate strokes. The characters act and speak with a lightning-like directness that is at the polar opposite to James, and that gives the narration a daemonic pulse. James's pacing is also perfect, in its slow motion suggesting a stately dream. It cannot be rushed, and any rush would be felt as a lapse of taste. Leisurely rhythmic unfolding, touch by touch, in a patient logical development has been characteristic of James's fiction for a long time, not only in The Spoils of Poynton, The Awkward Age, The Sacred Fount, The Ambassadors, but even as far back as The Portrait of a Lady. The lapse from this principle in The Wings of the Dove, deplored by James himself, leaves readers with a sense that Milly's story, unlike Maggie's, has not been fully told. Ennui is more successfully kept at bay in The Golden Bowl than in the earlier works, despite its length, because of the hypnotic rhythm James sets up, a rhythm common to all the novel's dialogues, yet vibrant and fresh in each of them, so that one almost thinks of Ravel's Bolero. Each of the forty-two chapters is rhythmically shaped and swings majestically to its climax and cadence.

　In the sixties almost all commentators on the novel spoke condescendingly of its longueurs. Ever since Edith Wharton's comments, the midnight colloquies of the Assinghams were seen as almost intolerably tedious. But repeated readings of the novel reveal even these passages to be far more vibrant and dramatic than they seem at first. Fanny's role is seen to be tightly woven into the plot, and her distress becomes more enjoyable for its frank comedy. The Golden Bowl is a much more 'disillusioned' novel than The Wings of the Dove, for here James forgoes all Romantic idealization of his heroine. At the outer rim of his great humming bowl, Fanny's agnonized analyses and the cooler comments of her husband -- 'She's very nice, but she always seems to me, more than anything else, the young woman who has a million a year' (79-80) -- frame Maggie's drama in a manner that dispels the shadows where romance might lodge. Colonel Assingham is the closest thing to an uninvolved spectator in the novel, and can represent the bemused and obtuse reader. But he too plays a role in the composition as the editor of the play of his wife's mind (73) and as he echoes her words and puts his questions. The tremendous elaboration of these analyses is not a lapse on James's part but a deliberate following out of the design until it has reached the fully satisfying ample proportions he aims at. It is a baroque extravagance, to be sure. When Charlotte says: 'though the whole thing is a little baroque, its value as a specimen is, I believe, almost inestimable' (496), James is inserting an apologia for his novel. As the classic proportions that prevail amid this extravagance become clearer, to complain of longueurs becomes, as in the comparable case of Wagner, a mark of defective attention or of philistinism. The classic triumphs over its hasty critics.

　

　6. Ryan correlates the characters of the two novels as follows: Eduard and Amerigo (both decadent aristocrats); Charlotte and Maggie (though Maggie has some of the 'innocence and naturalness' of Ottilie); Ottilie and Charlotte Stant; the Captain and Adam Verver -- the latter pair are 'rather shadowy', 'more functions than characters' she claims (Ryan, 155). Actually it is Charlotte who is eclipsed by Ottilie and reduced to a function in Part II of Goethe's novel. Adam Verver is something more than a function: his point of view governs the entire middle section of James's Book I. Still he may remain 'essentially a product' (Notebooks, 70). I propose instead that the principal correlation is that of Eduard and Adam, Charlotte and Charlotte Stant (who have the same names!), Ottilie and Maggie, the Captain and Amerigo. However, James does not stick rigidly to this parallel; at one point, as we shall see, Maggie plays the role of Goethe's Charlotte in persuading (not her husband but) her father to invite the other woman, Charlotte.

　The enigmatic figure of Mittler, the specialist in resolving domestic disputes, can be compared with Mrs Assingham (Ryan, 157), he too being an 'ass' whose interventions, like Fanny's, are rarely blessed with success. He is also reflected in the similarly named Father Mitchell, 'good, holy, hungry man' (500), who is just as useless to Maggie as Mittler is to Ottilie: 'nothing came but the renewed twiddle of thumbs over the satisfied stomach and the full flush, the comical candour, of reference to the hand employed at Fawns for mayonnaise of salmon' (503). Both Mittler and Mitchell are figures of the Church and its incapacity to deal with the breakdown of traditional morality. Fanny's act of smashing the bowl initiates the reconciliation of Maggie and Amerigo, whereas Mittler's last intervention in Goethe's novel drives Ottilie to suicide. But, like Fanny, Mittler has the gift of acute prophecy: 'He who wants something better than he has is quite blind -- yes, yes! just laugh -- he plays blind man's buff' (256). Maggie's plans of improving her life by inviting Charlotte are just as unforeseeing as Eduard and Charlotte's plans to invite the Captain and Ottilie. Charlotte's unease about the invitation to the Captain causes her to blot her letter, something Eduard lightly laughs off (257). One thinks of the looming unease created by the major mistakes in James: Charlotte's secret rendezvous with Amerigo at the end of Part First, her acceptance of Adam (after awaiting Amerigo's permission) at the end of Part Second, her sexual encounter with Amerigo at the end of Part Third. Incidentally, it is not correct to say that Mittler is a 'staid representative of bourgeois morality' (Ryan, 157); he is a daemonic presence in the novel, an impulsive eccentric who reflects rather the threatened state of the bourgeois moral order.

　

　7. We cannot say how deeply James had studied Goethe's novel, nor how he would have interpreted it. Goethe believed his novel could be understood only on a third reading, and it has been 'the commentators' despair' for two hundred years (Winkelman, 4). Though James had studied the novel diligently in Bonn at the age of seventeen, as he recalls in his autobiography, Ryan is ready to admit that its influence on the composition of The Golden Bowl may have been subconscious (155). This is unlikely, given the highly conscious nature of James's use of models on other occasions. In addition to the coherence of the total effect of James's novel as a rewriting of Goethe's there are a number of minor 'bumps' in James's text that come into satisfying focus only when viewed laterally from the vantage point of Goethe's.

　(i) Consider Amerigo's visit to Fanny: 'The unspoken had come up, and there was a crisis -- neither could have said how long it lasted -- during which they were reduced, for all interchange, to looking at each other on quite an inordinate scale. They might at this moment, in their positively portentous stillness, have been keeping it up for a wager, sitting for their photograph or even enacting a tableau-vivant' (49-50). James then presents his portrait of Fanny in the manner of a tableau vivant. The most famous literary reference to tableaux vivants is Goethe's. They represent the aestheticization of human beings that is a major theme in both novels (see Nussbaum, 131-6). Edith Wharton has a beautiful description of tableaux vivants in The House of Mirth (Book 1, chapter 12), which is contemporaneous with The Golden Bowl; they also feature in 'Paste' (1899).

　(ii) Of Maggie's plan to invite Charlotte Adam asks, 'Is it a strict moral obligation', to which Maggie replies 'No -- it's for the amusement' (146), including Fanny's. As in Goethe, the symmetrical arrangement attracts for the amusement it promises. The scene continues as follows:

　

　　　　 It had come to him within the minute that from the beginning of their session there she had been holding something back... 'You've got something up your sleeve'.

　　　　 She had a silence that made him right. 'Well, when I tell you you'll understand. It's only up my sleeve in the sense of being in a letter I got this morning. All day, yes, -- it has been in my mind. I've been asking myself if it were quite the right moment, or in any way fair, to ask you if you could stand just now another woman'. (GB 146-7)

　

　Compare the following passage from Goethe:

　　　　　

　'At least, my dear', she continued, 'you should know that your wishes, the friendly liveliness with which you expressed them, have not left me untouched, or unmoved. They force me to a confession. I too have hidden something from you up to now. I find myself in a similar situation to you and have already done myself the violence that I suspect you have done to yourself'.

　　　　 'I hear it gladly', said Eduard; 'I have noted that in the marital state one must sometimes quarrel, for thereby one experiences something of one another [erfährt man was voneinander]'.

　　　　 'Then now you shall learn [erfahren]', said Charlotte, 'that my situation with Ottilie is the same as yours with the Captain. I am not at all happy about the dear child being in the boarding-school, where she finds herself in very oppressive connections' (250-1).

　

Eduard exclaims: 'Take Ottilie, leave me the Captain, and in God's name let the experiment (Versuch) be made' (G 252). Charlotte would prefer to 'test (versuchen) for a while how far we suffice in this way for one another' (246). Maggie speaks of Charlotte as Goethe's Charlotte speaks of Ottilie: 'She's always with people, poor dear -- she rather has to be; even when, as is sometimes the case, they're people she doesn't immensely like' (148). Unlike Ottilie, who shows no capacities (251), Charlotte is 'Great in nature, in character, in spirit. Great in life' (149), yet she 'has done nothing, and anyone can see it, and see also that it's rather strange' (151). Goethe's Charlotte will bring out Ottilie's hidden qualities; 'if I were an educator or supervisor I would form her to be a splendid creature'. Maggie, in rather grandiose tones, declares: 'I've lived more myself, I'm older, and one judges better. Yes, I'm going to see in Charlotte... more than I've ever seen' (150). The Charlotte/Ottilie parallel here is underlined by Adam's remark that he had thought of her as a little girl. Maggie points out that she is in fact 'a brilliant woman' (ib.), like Goethe's Charlotte. Eduard remembers Ottilie as having especially beautiful eyes (G 253) and Adam thinks similarly of Charlotte's: 'Her extraordinarily fine eyes, as it was his present theory that he had always thought them' (183)'.

　(iii) Early in Book II a new formation of James's foursome emerges as the two women and the two men are thrown together (326); Maggie realizes that Charlotte and Amerigo are colluding on 'a plan that was the exact counterpart of her own' (328), 'a worked-out scheme for their not wounding her... a bath of benevolence artfully prepared for her' (329; see the bath image, 34). There had been a plan that 'the parent and the child should "do something lovely" together' (330), but Maggie now knows that this would allow Charlotte and Amerigo to 'snatch their moment' (331). Adam drops the plan (336), perhaps because he has had the same suspicion as Maggie, simultaneously. She proposes a new plan to Amerigo -- that he should go on a trip with Adam, 'you and he alone' (338). Amerigo asks if Adam is to propose this (341)and demurs at making the proposal himself, suggesting instead 'we can make Charlotte ask him' (344); Maggie feels this proposal contains 'menace' (351). When Adam, prompted by Charlotte, raises the idea with Maggie (358) and then asks her to let it drop, pleading 'his lack of any eagerness to put time and space, on any such scale, between himself and his wife' (360). Maggie assures him the trip was not for Amerigo's sake; he and Maggie 'perfectly rub on together', a phrase Adam immediately echoes with regard to Charlotte and himself. Maggie feels she has been outmanoeuvred by Amerigo and Charlotte: 'He had played then, either all consciously or all unconsciously, into Charlotte's hands; and the effect of this was to render trebly oppressive Maggie's conviction of Charlotte's plan... She had kept her test, Maggie's test, from becoming possible, and had applied instead a test of her own' (361). This rather odd set of events is a 'bump' pointing to Goethe. At the same point in Goethe's novel the two men have absented themselves, breaking up the spellbound circle of the criss-crossing foursome. Indeed the spell never really took hold between Charlotte and the Captain. James projects the possibility of a premature dissolution of his foursome, but by not following through on it he increases the sense of claustrophobic entanglement between his characters and also assures a tighter symmetrical structure to his novel, in contrast to what may have struck him as the chaotic second part of Goethe's. Also we remember that when Goethe's Charlotte agrees to the divorce she makes it a condition that Eduard and the Major go off together; nothing comes of this; James retrieves this loose stitch in Goethe's design.

　These intertextual effects recall those in 'The Aspern Papers' that pointed to the presence of Pushkin's 'The Queen of Spades'. It has been suggested that the unlikely Venetian garden of 'The Aspern Papers' 'is explicable only because it has been transported from Salem to Venice! (that is, from Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables) (Bell, 192-3); but as we know from a letter of 1906, there actually was a garden attached to the house James used as his model (Palazzo Capello, Rio Marin); the garden may be seen as doubly motivated, having both a factual basis and intertextual value. All the gardening and artistic activities in Elective Affinities also have a factual basis, so that the novel is a sociological document, yet they are laden with symbolic import, to a degree that has blinded critics to their realistic basis.

　

　8. Familiarity with the extreme sophistication of James can make Goethe's plot management seem rather abrupt. Just as 'The Aspern Papers' clothes the skeleton of Pushkin's novella with rich psychological motivation, so The Golden Bowl fills out 'the motivation of the chiasmic love affairs which remain in Goethe somewhat artificial and abstract' and 'provides it with more modern underpinnings, i.e. greater psychological and social credibility' (Ryan, 154). Goethe's novel has something of the schematic character of a novella, a genre that 'concerns a single extraordinary event depicted in a realistic manner', and that Theodor Storm called 'the sister of the drama' (Winkelman, 54). James was a master of the novella genre, but in The Golden Bowl (originally conceived as a novella) he is writing a novel modelled on the novella just as The Awkward Age is modelled on the drama. A novella can afford obvious symbolisms and parallelisms that a full-length novel has to mask. With the exception of the looming eponymous bowl, deliberately thrown into the highest relief, James distributes his leitmotifs so unobtrusively that they are likely to go unnoticed on a first reading, whereas it would be hard not to notice the dense play of motifs in Goethe's novel. The motifs create a web of cross-connections that makes both novels intensely self-referential. Goethe did not exploit obsessively recurrent motifs so systematically in his other works, nor did James, who here again is emulating the German master.

　To trace motival connections between the two novels could be an endless task. Adam is introduced in a setting that has a lake, a village, church, terrace, park, garden just as in Goethe: 'spaces of terrace and garden, of park and woodland and shining artificial lake, of richly condensed horizon,, all dark blue upland and church-towered village' (111). The name Adam evokes gardening, the principal occupation of Eduard. When Charlotte plays the piano for the less musical Adam -- 'She went through his "favourite things" -- and he had so many favourites -- with a facility that never failed, or that failed but just enough to pick itself up at a touch from his fitful voice' (164) -- we are reminded of how when Ottilie accompanied Eduard's flute her playing revealed their affinity: 'She had so made her defects his own that there arose thence again a kind of living whole' (297).

　The ubiquitous imagery of water and boats is imported from Goethe, as when for instance the Colonel sees his wife afloat on a 'mystic lake' (274, 282). Maggie and Adam's incestuous cocoon is imaged as a boat: 'They were husband and wife -- oh, so immensely -- as regards other persons... In the boat they were father and daughter... Why... couldn't they always live... in a boat?' (471). This recalls the sinister link between Ottilie's quasi-incestuous embrace of Eduard and her fatal boating accident. Maggie's initial imagination of the clandestine couple as 'the pair of operatic, of high Wagnerian lovers... interlocked in their wood of enchantment, a green glade as romantic as one's dreams of an old German forest' (488) might evoke the passion of Eduard and Ottilie. One of Ottilie's adages recalls Maggie's struggle to dose intimacy with secrecy: 'In nothing perhaps is the middle way more desirable than in confiding or keeping silent toward those that we love' (385). On the eve of Eduard's birthday Ottilie is enveloped by the atmosphere of the chapel; there is reference to 'the beauty of the vault' (373); Maggie also beholds a vault as she realizes she is being manipulated: 'it now arched over the Princess's head like a vault of bold span' (328).

　

Fateful Symmetries

　Goethe's novel is structured by the chemical law of elective affinities which operates like a fate, the four characters changing places as the elements do in a chemical interaction. The chiastic, criss-cross relation between the four protagonists is reflected in their names: Otto, Otto, Charlotte, and Ottilie. When Eduard (whose real name is Otto) makes love with his wife Charlotte while thinking of Ottilie, the child who is born resembles the Captain and has Ottilie's eyes, thus revealing the scandalous desires of his parents. The child too received the name Otto, a palindrome that is the chemical formula of the relationships among the adults.

　The central symbol of the bowl links all four characters in James: Maggie buys it for Adam, Charlotte, seeking a marriage gift for Maggie, thinks of buying it for Amerigo. It is invoked as a symbol of the seemingly perfect but actually flawed relations between the couples. In Goethe, a similar central role is played by the glass with E and O inscribed on it, which Eduard takes as a symbol of the indestructibility of fated relationships, but which he later discovers has been broken and replaced with another. The breaking of the symbolic object in Goethe hastens the final consummation of Eduard and Ottilie's fated passion in a Liebestod, whereas in James it clears the air for Maggie's final constructive salvaging of her marriage with Amerigo. James corrects Goethe's plot, and brings the affairs to a far more satisfying conclusion.

　The law of elective affinities is expounded in chapter four of Goethe's novel (just as the arrival of the third party, the Captain, begins chapter three). The relationship of the element of quicksilver to itself takes the form of a globe: 'this completely pure relation made possible through fluidity is distinguished decisively and always through the shape of a sphere' (G 271-2), the shape of the golden bowl and of James's novel. Goethe is probably influenced here by a similar discussion of globes in the fifth dialogue in Herder's 1787 book Gott, which he admired; Herder also mentions elective affinities (Wahl-Anziehung) and writes: 'The chemist arranges nothing but weddings and separations' (Herder, 783). Amerigo imagines his (amoral) freedom to be 'as perfect and rounded and lustrous as some huge precious pearl' (268). The 'vicious circle' (292) of the two couples is figured in images of a　pagoda (301-3) and 'a great overarched and overglazed rotunda... the doors of which opened into sinister circular passages' (494); Charlotte sits in 'a sort of umbrageous temple, an ancient rotunda' (508).

　The most complex form of elective affinity, 'double reciprocal affinity' (see Adler, 107-12), is acted out in Part I: 'A will cast itself on D, C on B, without it being possible to say who has first left the other, who has first again linked up with the other' (276). When Eduard and Ottilie eventually embrace we read: 'It was not to be distinguished which of them had first grasped the other' (324); Charlotte and the Captain embrace at the very same moment (326). Similarly, when Amerigo and Charlotte agree on their clandestine rapport which completes the fourfold pattern in James we read: 'their hands instinctively found their hands... They were silent at first, only facing and faced, only grasping and grasped, only meeting and met... Their lips sought their lips, their pressure their response and their response their pressure' (237). Just before this Amerigo has been feeling the 'congruity' of their relationship: 'Charlotte Stant turning up for him at the very climax of his special inner vision, was an apparition charged with a congruity at which he stared almost as if it had been a violence' (225). Her present appearance recalls their affair in Rome five years earlier: 'The sense of the past revived for him nevertheless as it had not yet done; it made that other time somehow meet the future close, interlocking with it, before his watching eyes, as in a long embrace of arms and lips' (227), a promise of revival of their earlier embraces. 'The magic web had spun itself without their toil' (227).

　In Goethe's novel the symmetry of the adulterous couples does not carry over into Part II, for the simple reciprocal affinity between Eduard and Ottilie is far stronger than the sentiment between Charlotte and the Captain. The power and irresistibility of a chemical interaction is what is absent from James's novel. His characters obey not a blindly working instinctive affinity but the convenient symmetry of a social arrangement. What draws them together is in part an attraction of like to like: Charlotte is close to Amerigo through her mastery of Italian, her birth (of American parents) and childhood in Florence, and the Tuscan ancestor he postulates for her (64-5). It is the attraction of opposites, of rich America and romantic Europe, that cements the bond between Maggie and Amerigo. But in large part the marriages in this novel are arranged ones; both Amerigo and Charlotte enter on wedlock with trepidation, and the firm arranging hand of Maggie is felt strongly in Charlotte's case: 'She united them, brought them together as with the click of a silver spring' (189). Money is the fundamental bonding force. Adam buys Amerigo for Maggie; she, in return, makes Adam a present of Charlotte; touched, he exclaims, 'What my child does for me!' (190).

　Amerigo's compliance with the situation arranged by Maggie and Adam and with the suggestions of Charlotte recalls the passivity of Densher, a passivity carried over into the way Amerigo cooperates with Maggie in fixing the situation and the way Densher submits to the redemptive influence of Milly. The Prince's anxiety to be 'safe' (67, 69) recalls the cautious passivity of Densher, and Charlotte's skill in making him feel safe is comparable to Kate's. Charlotte takes the initiative in a rather unscrupulous way at many points in the novel. Only her last gracious acquiescence brings her into harmony with the social and moral order of the Ververs. But her role is fundamentally passive too: 'she showed how the question had therefore been only of their taking everything as everything came, and all as quietly as might be. Nothing stranger surely had ever happened to a conscientious, a well-meaning, a perfectly passive pair' (221). The Prince, moreover, follows her lead with a show of courage, as he later follows Maggie's. The phrasing of the telegram approving of Charlotte's marriage show the two wills moving in equal accord as in the chemical process in Goethe: 'I am charmed with your courage and almost surprised at my own' (222).

　Amerigo is a passive lover -- what draws him irresistibly to Charlotte is less his passion for her than the beautiful fittingness, symmetry of the situation. Fanny says he does not really care for her, as their relationship is 'too easy' (290, 286). James has acquainted us with the texture of Amerigo's feeling for Charlotte. He reifies her attributes, appraising her as a precious object: 'he took the relics out, one by one, and it was more and more, each instant, as if she were giving him time... He knew her narrow hands,... and the perfect working of all her main attachments, that of some wonderfully finished instrument, something intently made for exhibition, for a prize. He knew above all the extraordinary fineness of her flexible waist, the stem of an expanded flower which gave her a likeness also to some long, loose silk purse, well filled with gold pieces' (59). Charlotte's passion for him is of another order, at least as it looms in Maggie's imagination (for James has barred direct access, as he did with Milly, with similar suggestive effect). In this novel marriages of convenience are supplemented by love affairs of convenience: 'They had these identities of impulse -- they had had them repeatedly before; and if such unarranged but unerring encounters gave the measure of the degree in which people were, in the common phrase, meant for each other, no union in the world had ever been more sweetened with rightness' (267). Compare Goethe: 'what divination may achieve when winged by a community of passion' (260).

　Fanny, emotionally unsatisfied with her dry husband and confessing to a romantic feeling for the Prince, seems to be living vicariously through the affairs of her friends. That is why the symmetry of their relationships becomes a kind of fetish, casting a spell on her, and inspiring her to arrange their lives like a creative artist: 'I had fallen in love with the beautiful symmetry of my plan' (291). She finds herself trapped by her own creation: '"You have to do it all", said Bob Assingham, "as if you were playing some game with its rules drawn up -- though who's to come down on you if you break them I don't quite see. Or must you do it in three guesses -- like forfeits on Christmas eve?"' (216).

　The characters are as tightly bound together as in Goethe: 'Our relation, all round, exists -- it's a reality, and a very good one; we're mixed up, so to speak, and it's too late to change it. We must live in it and with it' (86), declares Fanny. Maggie thinks of the two couples as a four-wheeled carriage, from which she now alights (315). Adam uneasily remarks to Maggie: 'we're selfish together -- we move as a selfish mass' (362). The Prince thinks of 'these people among whom he was married' (238). In Goethe, Eduard and the Captain 'have been throughout our lifetime so indebted to one another, reciprocally, that we cannot calculate how our credit and debit stand to one another' (244) -- note here the language of symmetry.　 The filling out of the design provides drama. Charlotte's apologia to Fanny is a squaring of the situation: 'She had made her point, the point she had foreseen she must make; she had made it thoroughly and once for all, so that no more making was required'; she watches 'poor Fanny left to stare at the incurred "score", chalked up in so few strokes on the wall' (204). It is as if the situation of the four is a destiny that cannot be gainsaid. Charlotte has only to point to it to feel herself justified and Fanny's objections quashed. 'They consider their being systematically thrown together as a justifying and not merely as an extenuating reason for their adulterous relationship -- a European view of the matter which James projects with the utmost cogency and persuasiveness' (Segal, 189). In the 'hidden story' of Goethe's novel, Ottilie immediately begins to seduce Eduard, aware that it is for this purpose that her aunt has invited her (Winkelman, 96-7). In a sense Charlotte is obeying an implicit behest of Maggie in reactivating her affair with Amerigo.

　Do the names of James' protagonists reflect the symmetries of the design? Amerigo and Adam share the initial and are both names of pioneers (the pioneer of the race and the 'discoverer' of America). Stant suggests rigidity; Verver shiftiness. The name Charlotte is a prominent name in Goethe's life (Charlotte von Stein, Charlotte Kestner) and work (Werther) but the name of Maggie has even richer Goethean connotations: it is the name of Margarete, the heroine of Faust! How well it suits her we shall have occasion to see. It is interesting to note that Joyce's Exiles also reflects the structure of Goethe's novel, including the chiastic naming of the main characters, RIChard, BERTha, RoBERT, BeatRICe (Mahaffey, 150; see Shaffer). In all three works the affinities between the two men and between the two women are piquant subsidiary themes.

　Superstition and omens play a great part in Goethe's novel, and lend force to the symbolism. But Goethe already begins to naturalize this and to see it as grounded in the characters' psychology. Charlotte has 'a premonition that bodes to good', but she explains that it is based on the reasonable idea that 'nothing is more significant in every situation than the coming in between of a third party (248). In James there is a slighter presence of omens. The wedding of Amerigo and Maggie must not be held on a Friday or have thirteen guests (68); the presumed crack in the bowl is a bad augury (109), and in reference to it Amerigo remarks to Charlotte: 'I go, as you know, by my superstitions' (270); the vendor of the bowl visits Maggie because 'he had known superstitious visitings' and fears it is 'a present that would bring ill luck' (450); indeed all references to the bowl are steeped in a foreboding reminiscent of Goethe's novel. However, just as 'The Aspern Papers' strips 'The Queen of Spades' of its preternatural elements and creates instead a 'submerged fantastic', so The Golden Bowl translates the uncanny fatalism of Elective Affinities into the terms of a drama of consciousness: 'James' belief that consciousness is all' has as its consequence 'the removal from the plot of those elements of fate and the daemonic which Goethe's novel still (if in a highly complex and not unequivocal sense) retains' (Ryan, 162). Fate is at work in the symmetry of the relationships, but it is a fate assented to and largely created by the imagination of the characters.

　Goethe's Eduard plays along with fate in the divorce plan: 'We are no longer master of what has come from it [the original plan], but we have the power to make it harmless and to direct the relationships to our happiness'; to return to the old situation would involve much 'awkwardness, discomfort, irksomeness' (451). Eduard dies as a victim of fate. Maggie, in contrast, actually reverses an apparent fate. James is showing his readers how marriage can be saved, whereas Goethe, almost like the ineffectual Mittler, leaves us only with a stark antinomy between the sacredness of the marriage bond and the irresistibility of passion. Fate is literally fatal in Goethe's novel, taking three victims. No one dies in James yet a little bump in James's text connects Maggie once and once only with the thought of death: 'I know nothing. If I did... I should die' (505). It is because the civilized equilibrium is kept up that Maggie lives; it is because it breaks down that Ottilie and Eduard die.

　The topic of freedom is also central to both novels. James's novel could even be read as a commentary on the maxim in Ottilie's diary: 'As soon as someone considers himself to be free, he immediately feels that he is bound. If he dares to consider himself bound, then he feels that he is free' (397). Charlotte and Amerigo, like Eduard and like Luciane, consider themselves free and immediately run into bonds. Maggie, like Ottilie, finds freedom through assuming bonds of duty. James's characters come close to doubting their free will, as Goethe's do. Colonel Assingham is sceptical of Fanny's view of Adam and Maggie as victims of the conventions they live by and which Charlotte and Amerigo impose on them. He asks, 'Are they mere helpless victims of fate?'; Fanny 'at last had the courage of it. "Yes -- they are. To be so abjectly innocent -- that is to be victims of fate"'(291). Innocence, blindness, makes one a victim of fate, but so does love: 'she had... never felt so absorbingly married, so abjectly conscious of a master of her fate. He could do what he would with her' (314). The fatalism suggested by Goethe's chemical analogy perhaps echoes the Spinozism expounded as follows in 1785 by Jacobi (and much discussed in the following years): 'We merely believe that we acted from anger, love, magnanimity or rational decisions. Pure delusion! In all these cases what moves us at bottom is a something that has no knowledge of all this' (Jacobi, 27; for the Goethe-Jacobi connection see Boyle, 382-5).

　Maggie makes a 'somewhat cryptic remark' on the imbalance created by her marriage: 'What has really happened is that the proportions, for us, are altered' (140); 'we don't... lead half the life we might' (145). Her father's marriage is to restore the balance. Fanny imagines the resultant symmetry will be all the more perfect if the new wife is Charlotte. Adam says to Maggie: 'So far as you've wronged me therefore, we'll call it square' (144), alluding to the restored symmetry of the foursome. Fanny is 'squared' (219, 263, 391) by Amerigo and Charlotte; Maggie 'squared again her little objects on the chimney' (425) as she confronts her husband; the vendor apologizes for not having been quite 'square' with Maggie (452). The word 'square' becomes a motif signifying vision of the pattern and restoration of integrity. Adam 'begun to square himself' (483); Maggie sees a 'lighted square' (496).

　Adam's remark: 'I had better get married just in order to be as I was before' (144) again underlines something deadly in the symmetry of the plan. It is so perfect that it produces constant confusion as each element mirrors the others. It is as if the characters have become trapped in a collective solipsism. Hence the play on confusion of pronouns, both in the dialogue and in narrative text, that grows increasingly frequent. Pronouns referring to character A are taken to refer to character B, or are reassigned to character B, suggesting virtual relationships coursing along side by side with the real ones. References call for such clarification on pp. 52, 54, 68, 77 (twice), 78, 85 (twice),　118, 131, 175-6, 194-5, 214, 231, 275-6, 276 (three times), 277 (twice), 287, 289, 297, 343, 361, 387, 408, 415, 417, 419, 482, 504, 505 (twice), 512, 524, 531 (twice), 532 (twice). When Maggie says to Amerigo that Charlotte is 'dying for us -- for you and me' (532), the suppressed identity of the 'us' is Maggie and her father, who inflict tragic loss on the other two. These quiproquos become worthy of Ionesco when in reply to his wife's remark 'I should feel... that the two of us were showing the same sort of kindness', Amerigo says 'The two of us? Charlotte and I?' (343), revealingly replacing his wife with Charlotte. One recalls the scene in Goethe in which Charlotte thinks her husband's knocking is that of the Captain's, and each makes love while thinking not of the spouse but of the person they desire (320-1). When Charlotte urges Eduard that they must 'fully return to the old situation' (340) he misunderstands her to refer to a divorce that would restore their premarital state. In James such criss-crossing misunderstandings, dictated by passion, create an almost choreographical sense of symmetry and add to the final effect of the novel as a beautiful artefact in which all the flaws and lies in the characters' relationships are integrated into a semblance of civilized form.

　

The Anatomy of Egoism

　

　1. W. H. Auden notes that Goethe's tales of romantic passion can be read as subtle studies of egoism:

　

Living in the twentieth century, not the eighteenth, and knowing, as most of his contemporaries did not, Goethe's later work, Werther can still fascinate us, but in a very different way. To us it reads not as a tragic love story, but as a masterly and devastating portrait of a complete egoist, a spoiled brat, incapable of love because he cares for nobody and nothing but himself and having his way at whatever cost to others. The theme of the egoist who imagines himself to be a passionate lover evidently fascinated Goethe, for, thirty years later, he depicted a similar character in Edouard [sic], the husband in Elective Affinities. (Auden, 126-7)

　

In similar vein, Ryan says of Eduard and Amerigo: 'Both men are egotists, fancying themselves to be great lovers' (155); again, this applies better to Adam than to Amerigo.

　Egoists who imagine themselves to be lovers is a very Jamesian theme: one thinks of Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady (see for example ch. 35) and the grown-ups in What Maisie Knew. It is more particularly a Meredithian theme. Meredith's The Egoist is the novel closest to The Golden Bowl in its slow deliberate pace, subtle psychological analysis, systematic milking of every aspect of a very restricted plot, critique of leisured egoism, and stylistic density that makes re-reading essential to full understanding. Meredith's Willoughby belongs with Austen's Mr Collins, George Eliot's Casaubon and the Aspern narrator to a gallery of monstrous egoists in English fiction. He is a probable source for the portrayal of the arch-egotist Osmond; The Egoist appeared in 1879 and James began work on The Portrait of a Lady at the end of that year. In The Golden Bowl egoism masquerading as passionate love runs rife. All the characters are utterly spoiled, either through being plutocrats, or through being the darlings of the rich.

　Eduard, introduced as 'a rich baron in the prime of life' (G 242) is a man of property. His father had 'a never to be sated greed for possessions' (246). 'Eduard was not accustomed to deny himself anything. The only, spoiled child of rich parents' (249). When Ottilie relates his wife's disobliging comment on his flute-playing his vanity is stung and 'he feels himself absolved from all duties' (330). His impatience with beggars, in this period of great social distress, is a mark of personal egoism and the egoism of his class (286). He prevents the beggars from disturbing his life by arranging for them to be dealt with as they leave the town. Goethe's critique of Eduard's class is conveyed in deadpan Swiftian shafts: the Captain 'had taken careful measures to prevent beggary and other inconveniences whereby the agreeableness of an entertainment is spoiled' (334). Charlotte, too, is adroit in smoothing out the rough edges of life, as when she beautifies the graveyard with scant regard for the dead and their families. Readers have missed Goethe's satire because of the imperturbable majesty of the late style (Winkelman, 47-8), and the same is true of James's ironic handling of the Ververs.

　In the early chapters Eduard is occupied with improvements to his estate. The plan of inviting the Captain and Ottilie belongs to this realm of engineering, just as Adam Verver's plans are an extension of his collecting. When the Captain draws up a plan of the estate, Eduard feels 'that he was getting to know his properties for the first time; now they seemed for the first time rightly to belong to him' (261). Eduard's passion for Ottilie makes him oblivious of the boy the Captain rescues from drowning: 'Everything is being looked after, and our intrusion would merely be a hindrance' (338). 'I'd like to see the man who exceeds me in the talent of loving' (355), he boasts. 'Men prone to tears are good', he claims (356); 'tears stood in his eyes' (254); compare Adam Verver's lachrymose moments 'strange tears in his own eyes' (497). Adam's 'majestic scheme' (169) of marrying Charlotte has aesthetic beauty and is compared to a 'glazed picture', and its ugly egoism is masked from him by a sense of doing it all for Maggie (169). The language of 'experience' is tinged with egoism here as in Goethe: his relationship to Charlotte is 'an experience... of a new and pleasant order' (170).　

　Eduard and his wife are very concerned with enriching their social life, by generous invitations. When Ottilie arrives, Charlotte gets to know her: 'For Charlotte was of the opinion that one cannot swiftly enough acquaint oneself with the character of the people with whom one has to live, so as to know what one may expect of them, what in them can be shaped, and what one must once for all concede to them and forgive' (G 282). They are full of elegant consideration for one another, like the characters in James. Linked together in a collective ego, they can be seen as cushioning one another's egoism.

　Auden's judgment on Werther underestimates the potency of the melange of sexual passion and a longing for infinite freedom that makes Goethe's protagonist a precursor of Wagner's Tristan -- but of course Auden is happy to follow Nietzsche in seeing Wagner's heroes also as neurotics and decadents, representing forces in the human psyche which are to be overcome (Auden, 253-5). The sentimentality of Werther, who specifies that he would like to be buried in a yellow waistcoat, is one example of the culture critique knit into the novel (see G 544). Unlike Wagner, Goethe can judge his heroes morally, particularly in the passages added in the second version of the text, including the tale of the murderer whom Werther wants to have released. As Goethe remarked to Henry Crabb Robinson: 'It was never perceived by the critics that Werther praised Homer while he retained his senses, and Ossian when he was going mad. But reviewers do not notice such things' (G 536). This combination of empathetic representation and moral discernment creates a rich polyphony which can confuse the inattentive reader; in English novels discernment flourishes at the expense of empathy. Jane Austen underlines the follies of Emma throughout. Emily Bronte goes the whole hog with empathy but rather abandons discernment. One of the great uses of point of view in James is to present the characters with complete empathy, yet at the same time expose them to discerning judgment.

　

　2. The word 'experience' occurs 24 times and 'experiment' or 'experimental' 6 times in The Golden Bowl (19 and 3 times respectively in The Ambassadors; 5 and 8 times respectively in The Wings of the Dove). 'Experience' carries the overtones of its French sense, 'experiment'. In addition we have phrases like 'their settlement again in England, experimental though it was' (117). The images of exploration and discovery (noted in Burrows 2000) -- Amerigo (81), Gordon Pym (42), Cortez (122-3), the Golden Isles (46, 122) -- suggest that James's characters are exploring unknown territories in human relationships. Adam's full vision of the perfect pattern marriage with Charlotte would form (as allowing him to so manage 'that Maggie would less and less appear to herself to have forsaken him') transforms the night landscape into 'a vast expanse of discovery' (167-8). Maggie rejoices in her discovery of her husband's infidelity: the bowl has the value of 'its having given me so much of the truth about you' (428), she tells Amerigo; she doesn't want her money back: 'I feel so that I'm getting its worth' (434). When Charlotte asks Adam, 'Do you think you've　"known" me?', he counters with, 'What is that then -- if I accept it -- but as strong a reason as I can want for just learning to know you'; she in turn remarks: 'when it's a question of learning, one learns sometimes too late' (176-7). Experience and knowledge of the other become a scientific challenge. Images of scientific experiment reinforce the images of discovery. Of the 'artlessly-artful' Adam we hear that a 'spark of fire ... had made the chamber of his brain a strange workshop of fortune', the scene of 'a miraculous white-heat, the receipt for producing which... the master of the forge could not have communicated' (112); we hear of the 'action of the cerebral temperature' and 'perfection of machinery', and　'a dim explanation of phenomena' (113).

　Fanny's interest in the two couples resembles a scientist's: 'She found his [Amerigo's] eloquence precious; there was not a drop of it that she didn't, in a manner, catch, as it came, for immediate bottling, for future preservation, The crystal flask of her innermost attention really received it on the spot, and she had even already the vision of how, in the snug laboratory of her afterthought, she should be able chemically to analyse it' (208). Maggie's discovery of the truth in Part II has all the excitement of a scientific process: 'as great a difference of view as the shift of an inch in the position of a telescope' (439).

　Critics who note the Gordon Pym and Cortez references have failed to indicate that these are mediated by the literary culture of the Prince and Adam respectively. The reading of the characters suits them: Amerigo reads a boy's adventure story, Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; Adam has middlebrow tastes in poetry, Keats's sonnet on Chapman's Homer (122) and Longfellow (362). Maggie, the fair girl, reads French novels ('her pale novel', 307) and the current issue of a 'salmon-coloured French periodical' (455). If the 'Review' is James's favourite Revue des Deux Mondes, then Maggie is given tastes close to the author's, as befits her role in the novel. Meanwhile Charlotte, the dark girl, struggles with an old dark-covered three-volume English novel (507), which Maggie has given her and which she helps her to read. Maggie retrieves the second volume and gives Charlotte the correct first volume instead, an allegory for her retrieval of Amerigo from and restoration of Adam to Charlotte. Maggie seeks classic form and clarity in relationships, Charlotte an English luxuriance and passion, with less clear definition.

　3. Commodity fetishism again dominates this novel, as Maggie and Adam 'buy' and then 'buy off' their respective spouses. Adam says of Charlotte: 'That's what we got her for!' and Maggie chimes in with this dehumanizing commodification: 'What we got her for -- exactly! (364). Even at the end, when Adam concurs with Maggie that Charlotte is 'beautiful', he speaks not in love but in appreciation of her value, striking 'the note of possession and control' (545). On the last page Maggie learns from Amerigo how much her victory is worth: 'she had begun to be paid in full' (547). Now James avoids the tritely puritanical attitude to money that was just below the surface in The Wings of the Dove; instead he indicates by numerous subtle touches how the Ververs' constant consciousness of ownership gives a Midas touch to their human relationships. In Goethe, Eduard, Charlotte and Luciane marry for money, as Amerigo and Charlotte Stant do. Charlotte stands aside to allow Eduard's first marriage and the Captain stands aside to allow Charlotte's marriage to Eduard, just as Charlotte Stant stands aside to allow Amerigo's marriage.

　Maggie reifies the Prince as 'a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of price... a morceau de musée' (35). He objects: 'my single self, the unknown, unimportant -- unimportant save to you -- personal quantity. About this you've found out nothing' (33). Very Goethean is her reply: 'what then would become, please, of the promised occupation of my future?'　He speaks of himself as being bought and of being sent to American City for safety like other objects in Adam's collection (36). Adam praises Amerigo for his smoothness as a piece of architecture: 'for living with, you're a pure and perfect crystal' (120). Compare the mason's speech in Goethe: 'just as people who are naturally inclined to one another are still better held together when the law binds them, so are stones, whose form already fits them together, still better unified through these binding forces' (G 300). 'The instinct, the particular sharpened appetite of the collector, had fairly served as a basis for his acceptance of the Prince's suit' (GB 121). He even compares Maggie to a figure on an antique vase: 'it came from his caring for precious vases only less than for precious daughters' (154). 'Nothing perhaps might affect us as queerer, had we time to look into it, than this application of the same measure of value to such different pieces of property as old Persian carpets, say, and new human acquisitions; all the more indeed that the amiable man was not without an inkling, on his own side, that he was, as a taster of life, economically constructed' (159-60). Though not as direct as Goethe's comments on Eduard, such remarks effectively underline the monstrous character of Adam's attitude; it is quite wrong to say that 'James seems to take Mr. Verver at his own estimate', and if James 'invests him also with a paradisal innocence' (Matthiessen, 89), that is only one more instance of the treacherous irony of most of James's portraits of innocence, such as the Governess's righteousness in 'The Turn of the Screw', which Matthiessen also takes at face value (see also Pearson, 339, corrected by Marshall, 195). In dealing with Adam, 'the narratorial voice exudes irony' (Marshall, 190). The refrain, 'this amiable man' (111), is ironic like Antony's 'honorable man' in Julius Caesar. Shades of the abominable disciple of Pater, Gilbert Osmond, loom when we read: 'It was all, at bottom, in him, the aesthetic principle, planted where it could burn with a cold, still flame' (160) -- not, notice, with the 'hard, gemlike flame' of Pater; passion is lacking. James compares Adam to 'gentlemen of pleasure' who are 'discreet in their entertainment of compromising company' and adds: 'That figure has, however, a freedom that the occasion doubtless scarce demands, though we may retain it for its rough negative value' (160), clearly suggesting that there is something licentious and unscrupulous in Adam's manipulation of people. His rapacity is masked by self-idealizing notions reminiscent of the Aspern narrator: 'He was equal, somehow, with the great seers, the invokers and encouragers of beauty -- and he didn't after all perhaps dangle so far below the great producers and creators' (122).

　Guilt about being selfish prompts Adam and Maggie's decisions: 'I ain't selfish. I'll be blowed if I'm selfish' (476). It is Adam who proposes the return to America with Charlotte, offering himself as a sacrifice. But he also leads Charlotte to the altar of sacrifice, 'the end of a long silken halter looped round her beautiful neck' (493). 'It is almost like some allegory -- "beauty led by the rich; or "the proletariat in the chains of Capital"' (Pearson, 328). This halter could be a reminiscence of the silken Halstuch (scarf) with which the Captain as a child binds the hands of the girl in the inserted novella in Goethe (453).

　

　4. The words 'victim' and 'sacrifice' are a recurrent motif in James, both corresponding to German Opfer, a word often on the lips of Goethe's characters. 'I do not think it proper that Ottilie should be sacrificed' is Eduard's specious plea when Charlotte suggests that Ottilie should leave (341): when he himself leaves, he declares: 'I have sacrificed myself' (344). In Part II the word takes on its weightiest sense: the dead child is a 'victim' to seal the adults' happiness (461), 'the first victim of an ominous destiny' (464). Similarly, in James, the light references to victims and sacrifices early in the novel are proleptic of the grave sacrifice demanded of all four protagonists at the end. James is developing a less mystified and more constructive concept of sacrifice and renunciation, and exposes the masochism or hidden egoism underlying his characters' rhetoric of sacrifice.

　At one point James has Maggie victimize Fanny: 'We have each our own way of making up for our unselfishness, and Maggie... would verily, at this crisis, have seen Mrs Assingham's personal life or liberty sacrificed without a pang'; 'the current aspects and agitations of her victim' (369). She plays the same role more grimly with Amerigo and Charlotte. The element of vindictiveness in her treatment of Amerigo is doubled by the suggestion that Adam is simultaneously treating Charlotte in the same way: 'the vision of the two others alone together at Fawns, and Charlotte, as one of them, having gropingly to go on, always not knowing and not knowing!' (437). Both Maggie and Adam feel a muffled sense of guilt at their egoism and compensate by making sacrificial gestures with a masochistic tinge. Goethe's Ottilie also thinks to compensate for her role in undermining Eduard's marriage by sacrificing herself.

　

　5. 'Eduard can be seen qua individual as distinct from a representative person, and in this light his very faults are endearing foibles and he becomes an attractive character with whom the reader may tend to identify and sympathize, as did Goethe, who said that he found Eduard priceless because he loved unconditionally (letter to C. F.　von Reinhard, February 21, 1810)'(Winkelman, 69). In Part II Edward's love for Ottilie acquires high dignity; the final lines are: 'So the lovers rest alongside one another. Peace hovers over their resting places; serene, kindred (verwandte) images of angels gaze down on them from the vault, and what a joyful moment it will be when they awaken together some day' (490). Auden's reading does not do justice to this dimension of the novel. The ending however is problematic. Goethe is visibly adopting a fairy-tale mode that clashes deliberately or not with the rest of the novel. The novel contains a subtle critique of the Romanticism of Friedrich Schlegel, recently converted to Catholicism and now a vocal critic of Goethe (Bersier, 77-109). Goethe has exposed the absurdities of Romantic superstition, yet now exploits it to lend magic to his plot, drawing on the conclusion of Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan (Winkelman, 114-5) and on the Arabian Nights story of Abul Hassan and Princess Schemselnihar who sicken and die for love and whose tomb becomes a place of prayer (Mommsen, 22). Perhaps Goethe intends to give the Romantics a lesson in how to handle Romantic legend in a serenely distanced, playful style. The canonization of Ottilie, fulfilling the typology set out in the tableaux vivants scenes, is itself an ironic tableau (see Blessin, 94-7), and a similar play of irony surrounds the final redemptive dove-image of Milly in Densher's fetishizing consciousness, and also surrounds Maggie's final heroic posture, an irony deepened if we describe her heroism as 'beautiful' or 'splendid', given all the novel has told us about aestheticization.

　Some critics find that the word 'redemptive' as applied to Ottilie, Milly Theale or Maggie Verver is a simple misreading of secular and naturalistic tales. But in all three novels the author lures the reader into supposing that some lofty redemptive enterprise is afoot: 'The work reckons so much with this preliminary and foreshortened reception that one cannot afterwards override it without cutting out of the novel's action the crucial dimension of a productive "complicity of the reader"' (Blessin, 97). The redemptive, indeed Mariological, associations of the three heroines are qualified, relativized, demythologized, undercut in many ways, and even contradicted, yet the first sublime image remains a part of the final more complex understanding.

　　

　6. Did James seek to steer his perverse foursome to a wholesome moral conclusion, but in the end fail to exorcize the fetishistic relations that loom more hauntingly? Is the unreality of the Principino and his parents' relation to him is an indicator that James is unable to bring his battle of consciousnesses back within the bounds of a real-life family? Ian comments:

　

　　　 I think that for HJ the 'wholesome moral conclusion', the best possible telos of all 'developments' for any subject, is the establishment of a stable fetishistic symbolic economy. 'Symbolic' precisely because the best fetishized objects are generally mental, or 'psychical' as Freud would say, rather than concrete. Indeed, concrete objects are only of value when they symbolize or give birth to mental objects of greater worth. Hence the pathos of those who as in The Spoils of Poynton make the mistake of overvaluing material objects, the evil (Gilbert Osmond) of those who treat people as expressions of their own love of objects, the ambiguity of those who treat people as the material embodiments of their own ideas (Rowland Mallett).

　

She adds: 'The Principino remains unreal because he is of no real interest to any one; he is a fetish no one needs, a superfluity. (As the diminutive suggests, he is too small to be a really desirable fetish; size matters.)' But note Adam's first appreciation of the child: 'In the way of precious small pieces, he had handled nothing so precious as the Principino' (GB 126). Maggie explains to Amerigo: 'Values, in lots of cases, you must know, have nothing to do with size' (36).

　The status of the Principino comes into new focus if we consult Goethe. There we find that both Eduard and the Captain rejoice in the death of the child who is an obstacle to their passions: the Captain's attitude is: 'Such a victim seemed to him necessary for their all-round happiness'; for Eduard the child's death as 'a happy chance whereby every hindrance to his happiness was at one stroke removed' (461). Even his mother does not seem particularly affected by her loss. Compare this exchange between Bob and Fanny, another piece of intertextual play: '"Decide to live -- ah yes! -- for her child". "Oh, bother her child!... Any idiot can do things for her child"' (287).

　Goethe's Charlotte believes that her pregnancy will reunite her with Eduard. But human chemistry here turns out to be a Scheidekunst (see G 273) like scientific chemistry: 'This child is the product of a double adultery! It divides me from my wife and my wife from me, whereas it should have bound us together' (456). Adam Verver fails to give Charlotte 'a Principino of his own' (367) to cement their union the Principino has cemented the union between Maggie and her father (while cementing her division from her husband). The use of 'Principino' here recalls the eerie status of the child Otto as the offspring of all four adults; James likewise presents the Principino as an object variously coveted or used by his four adults.

　In Maggie's final triumph there is a lingering suggestion that her fetishization of Amerigo as her toyboy continues to underlie their restored harmony. Marcia Ian comments:

　

　　　 Maggie is that rare bird in James who ends up getting something material for herself in the end (as opposed to other Jamesian heroes who end up with some form of ethical or symbolic satisfaction, sometimes in the form of a Really Big Negative). And I would hazard to say here that Maggie is rare in James because James allows her to take her fetish home and keep it -- or him, it being the Prince, of course. He is not just one of those symbolic mental objects the hero wraps in pink paper, cotton, or flannel, and keeps in an epistemological box... If James failed to exorcize fetishism, it is because 'he didn't want to -- it's just that we think he's supposed to -- we tend to assume he should want and represent as good 'a real-life family', but that's our problem, not his. In James's own sense he succeeded, rather than failed. He generously leaves Maggie with something HJ never possessed, and perhaps didn't want as much as he wanted to represent it: a truly 'impossible' ideal -- a fetish made of (male) flesh. The Golden Bowl follows the opposite trajectory from that of Roderick Hudson, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, etc. Maggie gives up her ideal -- her father -- in exchange for something much closer to a fetish -- her husband.

　

　Like Milly in The Wings of the Dove, Ottilie is fetishized by others, and in posing as a saint she fetishizes herself. Goethe is surely quite aware of the fetishistic dynamics of the cult that grows up around her after her death. He uses a piece of erotic fetishism to introduce the scene of the 'adultery in the marriage-bed': 'I have made a vow to kiss your shoe this very evening' (320). The fetish is a detour from the normal relationship, just as the Eduard's thinking of Ottilie is. Maggie, too, acts fetishized roles as Madonna and scapegoat. Referring to the consequences of her father's marriage she says: 'I'll leave you all the good ones, but I'll take the bad' (144). Adam reflects that Maggie resembles a nymph and a nun (154) just as Eduard sees Ottilie as 'a heavenly being that hovered over him' (291). 'The whole complexity of their peril... she was there... to charge herself with it as the scapegoat of old, of whom she had once seen a terrible picture, had been charged with the sins of the people and had gone forth into the desert to sink under his burden and die' (457). 'She would confess to him [Father Mitchell] that she hadn't confessed, though taking so much on her conscience' (501). The theme of redemption here is far more muffled than in The Wings of the Dove and indeed radically secularized. Civilized restraint is what patches up broken bowls, not 'the jostle of the higher light, of heavenly help itself' (501).

　Amerigo associates Maggie with the Madonna when he exclaims: 'it's almost terrible you know, the happiness of young, good, generous creatures... But the Blessed Virgin and all the Saints... have her in their keeping' (62-3); the keyword 'terrible' occurs again on pp. 97, 271, 378, 504, 534. She strikes Fanny as a 'miraculous madonna' might a 'truly pious priest' (404). Goethe's Margarete enjoys similar associations. Maggie's Catholicism (129) prepares her to become a Machiavelli (mentioned, GB 48) and links her to the popes and cardinals mentioned (34, 40, 128, 166, 229, 376). All this self-stylization is continuous with the other forms of fetishism and aestheticization that pervade the novel. Even Charlotte has her fetishistic moments: 'I've got so much by my marriage... that I should deserve no charity if I stinted my return. Not to do that, to give back on the contrary all one can, are just one's decency and one's honour and one's virtue. These things... are my rule of life, the absolute little gods of my worship, the holy images set up on the wall' (241).

　

　7. To say: 'The father-daughter pair by which James varies Goethe's quadrilateral adds a nice touch of early twentieth century psychology to the affair' (Ryan, 155) is to miss the quasi-incestuous element in Eduard's infatuation with Ottilie. Edward seeks his mother in Ottilie (as he has in his wives), she her father in him (Winkelman 22, 68, 88, 91). Their intimacy is thwarted by the image of her father that she wears on her breast; when she is persuaded to remove it 'he felt as if a stone had fallen from his heart, as if a dividing screen between him and Ottilie had been taken down' (293). The incestuous element in Adam and Maggie's relationship is frequently suggested by the pronominal quiproquos mentioned above. 'They had made vacant, by their marriage, his immediate foreground, his personal precinct -- they being the Princess and the Prince' (131)-- we are assured that the marriage is not that of Adam and his daughter!

　'It was of course an old story and a familiar idea that a beautiful baby could take its place as a new link between a wife and a husband, but Maggie and her father had, with every ingenuity, converted the precious creature into a link between a mamma and a grandpapa' (GB 132). 'What was not clear, at all events, for the father and the daughter, was their simply knowing they wanted, for the time, to be together -- at any cost, as it were' (134) and they steal away to an Edenic sequestered spot. Meanwhile Fanny maternally smooths over the sidelining of the Prince; 'she was there to keep him quiet' (136), offering him explanations which he likes 'almost as if he collected them, in the manner of book-plates or postage-stamps, for themselves' (135). Fanny predicts that 'the innumerable facts he had collected would find their use' like a 'great gun' that will someday make a 'big noise' (137).

　Maggie says to her father: 'It was as if you couldn't be in the market when you were married to me. Or rather as if I kept people off, innocently, by being married to you' (143). Adam remarks: 'I've always thought of her as a little girl' (155); he recalls her as an 'early playmate of Maggie's' and how he 'paternally lumped the two children together' (157). It is as if Charlotte is less a wife than a substitute for his daughter, so that his marriage, too, is quasi-incestuous. 'He might have been her father' (176). '"Are you so certain that there's room in your life -- ?" "For another daughter?"' (177).

　At the start of Book Second, Maggie's new consciousness is likened to an unwanted pregnancy to be concealed. Jane Ford sees this as a clue to what is really going on (Ford, 1998): Maggie　was aware of Amerigo and Charlotte's affair all along; in fact she arranged it; but now that she has become pregnant by her own father, she needs her husband around to assume paternity, and this is the real motive of her pretended distress at the affair. This 'hidden story' is far less convincing than the one Winkelman finds in Elective Affinities. It is better to take James's strange language as another example of anamorphosis requiring intertextual perspective. Here is the suggestive passage, in which I have italicized phrases recalling the uncanny child in Goethe and the scene in which Ottilie accidentally causes it to drown:

　

She had not, so to speak, fallen in; she had had no accident and had not got wet; this at any rate was her pretension until after she began a little to wonder if she mightn't, with or without exposure, have taken cold. She could at all events remember no time at which she had felt so excited, and certainly none -- which was another special point -- that so brought with it as well the necessity for concealing excitement. This birth of a new eagerness became a high pastime, in her view, precisely by reason of the ingenuity required for keeping the thing born out of sight. The ingenuity was thus a private and absorbing exercise, in the light of which, might I so far multiply my metaphors, I should compare her to the frightened but clinging young mother of an unlawful child. The idea that had possession of her would be, by our new analogy, the proof of her misadventure, but likewise, all the while, only another sign of a relation that was more to her than anything on earth. She had lived long enough to make out for herself that any deep-seated passion has its pangs as well as its joys, and that we are made by its aches and its anxieties most richly conscious of it. She had never doubted of the force of the feeling that bound her to her husband; but to become aware, almost suddenly, that it had begun to vibrate with a violence that had some of the effect of a strain would, rightly looked at, after all but show that she was, like thousands of women, every day, acting up to the full privilege of passion. Why in the world shouldn't she, with every right -- if, on consideration, she saw no good reason against it? (303-4)

　

　By having his own novel echo Goethe's, James is able to project all sorts of sinister virtualities of the tangled situation he describes, while in reality confining the dramatic incidents in his own plot to an extreme minimum. As to the incest allusion, Marcia Ian objects that 'it is her passion for her husband that is vibrating violently within her. If anything, the direction of Maggie's "development" can be read as a (however belated) rejection of incest, that is, as the healthy displacement of incestuous childish desire, onto adult heterosexual desire, in rather straight Freudian fashion'. Yet James seems to allow an overtone of incest to linger ambiguously. The phrase 'a relation that was more to her than anything on earth' refers to her marriage, but as so often in the novel we have to cogitate a little before this becomes quite clear. In the meantime we may spontaneously mistake the reference as being to her relationship with her father. Even when that idea is cleared away, we may retain the impression that Maggie rather protests too much to herself here, as she suppresses her fixation on her father through delighting on her newly discovered passion for her husband.

　

　8. The novel ends with a paean to Charlotte, because she has 'played the game' with a delicacy and a sense of propriety that Maggie did not expect. Or is it that Maggie ends up crowing complacently over her defeated rival? Like matter and anti-matter, the benign and sinister readings of the characters' actions seem to balance each other off in the symmetry of a constant ambiguity. Maggiephobes see Charlotte Stant as the true heroine of the novel, as a woman who has the courage to compromise herself in passionate love. James certainly allows us to retell the story from Charlotte's viewpoint, in which Maggie would appear as a kind of witch, coldly manipulative, never putting a foot wrong, sexless as her father, her only passion a jealous possessiveness. Maggie's gentleness and discretion as she turns the tables on Charlotte are partly an expression of her own contrite sense of guilt for the situation she created (Marshall, 204-5). The notorious halter image reflects 'her ability to view her father with a more critical eye'; but 'although Maggie is clearly aware of Adam's latent sadism (revealed in the silken halter image), the reader is unsure whether Maggie condemns him sufficiently or even allows her "lucidity" fully to illuminate his defects'; nonetheless, 'she manages largely to dissociate herself from his point of view' (ib., 224). The paucity of explicit moral judgment on the protagonists in 'the inscrutable Goethe' is imitated by James, who comes closer than ever before to 'the moderation of a Goethe... of one who stands on a great intellectual height, far above the heady fumes of our simmering human prejudices' (James 1984:714, 1329). James's ironic vision threatens to undermine the significance of the plot, reducing it to a nihilistic phantasmagoria of self-deception.

　Eduard's passion for Ottilie breaks the proportions of the foursome, whereas Amerigo's for Charlotte remains doubly harmonious, an ironic twist. 'In Eduard's ideas as in his actions there is no longer any measure. The consciousness of loving and of being loved drives him into the infinite' (G 328; see also 333). Goethe's Charlotte has the delusive idea that 'that one could return to an earlier, more restrained state, that it was possible to confine again what had been powerfully unbound' (329). If Eduard's passion for Ottilie causes him to lose a sense of measure, the passions in James follow the law of measure for measure. The word 'measure' is frequently used to describe Adam's and Maggie's behaviour. They triumph by their sense of measure and of measurement. The only unadulterated passions in the novel are Maggie's for her father and Charlotte's for Amerigo. But, as in Goethe, the social institution of marriage is valued more highly, though in a style unlikely to satisfy traditional defenders of matrimony. Maggie banks on the marriage bond, and her scarcely masked inquisitorial jealousy in the first section of Book II are on the brink of vulgar conventionality. She does not cut a saintly or even a lovable figure. The novel is not a morality play. Yet in reconstructing her marriage she shows a refined creativity, a mastery of civilized, compositional arts of which James must approve. Soon after publishing the novel he spoke of the values Maggie enacts, in his 1905 graduation address at Bryn Mawr: 'The idea of good breeding -- without which intercourse fails to flower into fineness, without which human relations bear but crude and tasteless fruit -- is one of the most precious conquests of civilization, the very core of our social heritage... It is an idea... for which, always, in every generation, there is yet more, and yet more, to be done; and no danger would be more lamentable that that of the real extinction, in our hands, of so sacred a flame' (James 1999:45).

　It is disturbing that the major activity by which civilization is sustained appears to be lying -- not diplomatic white lies either but sustained and formal perjuries. Here we may find an allegory of the lies that pervaded political life at the time. The 'equilibrium' that the characters are obsessed with preserving might recall that great theme of European and imperialist politics, the balance of power. Goethe's characters have a similar concern; Eduard 'longed for outer danger to counter-balance the inner one' (359). But in the wartime poverty and disturbances of 1806 equilibrium had broken down, whereas James's novel is set at the peak of British imperial security, with only new American plutocracy to threaten it, and it enacts not the breakdown of equilibrium but the its vigilant maintenance by diplomatic art.

　Charlotte's gratuitous lie about the price of the bowl (108) anticipates the three pivotal scenes of solemn lying in Book II. First Fanny lies to Maggie about Amerigo and Charlotte, 'upon my positive word as an honest woman' (381). Then when Charlotte, boldly pretending innocence, confronts Maggie, Maggie lies to her, again upon her 'honour' (469), about her knowledge of the affair, knowing that Amerigo has also done so (446). The shared lie cements her unity with Amerigo and also with her father, who appears to be keeping up an equally elaborate pretence of ignorance, mirroring her own. Finally, when Charlotte lies to Maggie about her motive for going to America with Adam, Maggie humbly concurs in this lie (514). The three scenes are quite protracted (373-82; 466-9; 511-4), achieving an effect rare in fiction (and anticipated in 'The Aspern Papers'). Maggie's lies are cruel mystification, yet can be construed as noble. Charlotte's pretence of enthusiasm for the return to America at the end of the novel is carried off with a style that redeems her earlier lies.

　Maggie's final stance is perhaps best seen as positive despite everything. Moral growth in James is never more than a tiny incremental step. Maggie, at the end, is still treating people as commodities, art-objects, fetishes; even of her son she says: 'I "ordered" him for half past five' (542). 'We have been put on our guard against projects of safety and projects of perfection, so we wonder whether Maggie's new ideal has itself a crack in it' (Nussbaum, 135). Densher, Strether, Isabel Archer hardly make greater progress, while Winterbourne and the narrators of 'The Aspern Papers' and The Sacred Fount make none at all. The final embrace of Maggie and Amerigo is the last in a series that includes the embrace of Charlotte and Amerigo (237), Maggie and Fanny (382), Charlotte and Maggie (469). Maggie and Adam (485), each of which marks the close of a chapter. These demonstrations are all presented in such guise as to leave the reader feeling quite uneasy: the first enacts an immoral pact, the next two seal a perjury, and the last, which 'august and almost stern, produced, for its intimacy, no revulsion' seems to be holding back from incest. The Prince's final surrender to Maggie inspires the tragic emotions of pity and dread. His words, 'I see nothing but you', could possibly mean that she has blotted out the horizon of his freedom and of his love for Charlotte. 'And the truth of it had, with this force, after a moment, so strangely lighted his eyes, that, as for pity and dread of them, she buried her own in his breast' (547). The strange light in his eyes may not betoken devotion to Maggie but suffering at the loss she has inflicted on him. And the all-observant Maggie refuses to see, not because she has buried doubt and questioning, but because she does not want to see how much her victory is at his expense. She sees 'that she and he together have brought about, within his imagination, an extinction of vision and a failure of response; and that this has happened of tragic necessity because of the requirements of his commitment to her... She sees in her husband the genuine, unredeemed article, a "hero" violating love for the sake of love, purified by no inner sympathy, by no higher consciousness' (Nussbaum, 136-7).

　

REFERENCES

The 1878 text of 'Daisy Miller' is quoted from Henry James, Complete Stories 1874-1884. New York: The Library of America, 1999.

G = Goethes Werke VI, ed. Erich Trunz. Hamburg: Wegner, 1951.

WD = Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, ed. J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks. New York: Norton, 1978.

GB = Henry James, The Golden Bowl, Penguin Modern Classics, 1966.

Notebooks = The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. Oxford University Press, 1987.

NY = The Novels and Tales of Henry James. New York Edition XVIII. Scribner's, 1909.

　

Adler, Jeremy (1987). 'Eine fast magische Anziehungskraft': Goethe's 'Wahlverwandtschaften' und die Chemie seiner Zeit. Munich: C. H. Beck.

Auden, W. H. (1974). Forewords & Afterwords. New York: Vintage.

Bell. Millicent (1962). Meaning in Henry James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bersier, Gabrielle (1997). Goethes Rätselparodie der Romantik: Eine neue Lesart der 'Wahlverwandtschaften'. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Blessin, Stefan (1974). Erzählstruktur und Leserhandlung: Zur Theorie der literarischen Kommunikation am Beispiel von Goethes 'Wahlverwandtschaften'. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.

Boyle, Nicholas (1991). Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Volume I. Oxford: Clarendon.

Bradbury, Nicola (1979). Henry James: The Later Novels. Oxford: Clarendon.

Burrows, Stuart (2000). 'The Golden Fruit: Innocence and Imperialism in The Golden Bowl'. The Henry James Review 21:95-114.

Ford, Jane (1998). Patriarchy and Incest from Shakespeare to Joyce. University　Press of Florida.

Graham, Kenneth (1975). Henry James: The Drama of Fulfilment. Oxford: Clarendon.

Greisch, Jean, ed. (1999). Philosophie Poésie Mystique. Paris: Beauchesne.

Herder, Johann Gottfried (1994). Werke, Vol. 4. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag.

Holland, Laurence Bedwell (1964). The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James. Princeton University Press.

Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (2000). Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn, ed. Marion Lauschke. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft.

James, Henry (1956). Selected Letters of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis.

----- (1984). Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers. New York: The Library of America.

----- (1999). Henry James on Culture, ed. Pierre A. Walker. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

Lacan, Jacques (1986). Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre VII: L'Éthique de la psychanalyse. Paris: Seuil.

Mahaffy, Vicki (1995). Reauthorizing Joyce. University Press of Florida.

Marshall, Adrée (1998). The Turn of the Mind: Constituting Consciousness in Henry James. London: Associated University Presses.

Matthiessen, F. O. (1944). Henry James: The Major Phase. Oxford University Press.

Mommsen, Katharina (1988). Goethe und die arabische Welt. Frankfurt: Insel.

Nussbaum, Martha (1990). Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford University Press.

Pearson, Gabriel (1972). 'The Novel to End all Novels'. In: John Goode, ed., The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James. London: Methuen.

Rösch, Ewald, ed. (1975). Goethes Roman 'Die Wahlverwandtschaften'. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Ryan, Judith (1982). 'Elective Affinities: Goethe and Henry James'. Goethe Yearbook 1:153-71.

Shaffer, Brian W. (1989). 'Kindred by Choice: Joyce's "Exiles" and Goethe's "Elective Affinities"'. James Joyce Quarterly 26:199-212.

Segal, Ora (1969). The Lucid Reflector: The Observer in James's Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Tintner, Adeline R. (1986). The Museum World of Henry James. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

----- (1993). Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press.

Winkelman, John (1987). Goethe's Elective Affinities: An Interpretation. New York: Peter Lang.

e

Fetishism in "The Wings of the Dove"

　1. Against Alain Badiou's claim that the task of contemporary poetry is to 'win its proper atheism', Jean Greisch points out that lyric poetry like that of Paul Celan or Ossip Mandelstam 'opens a space of questioning address', and that this is intrinsic to its nature as poetry (Greisch, 61-125). Would it be possible to say something similar of the modern novel, which in the hands of Flaubert, James, Proust and Joyce seems to present a radically secular world in which God's 'housing problem' (D. Strauss) is more acute than ever? Could we see Ulysses, for example, as a kind of Mass, offering up one day in the life of its shabby lower middle class characters, a day consecrated by all the resources of style and form, to some unnameable but gracious ultimate?

　Of James's novels, The Wings of the Dove is the one that most manifests a thrust to transcendence. The work is not as formally self-enclosed as its rounded companions The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. Its open, broken character opens up a space of questioning beyond the well-defined issues of the other two novels, and allows it to reach further, at least by suggestion, into moral and spiritual possibilities. The characters have the conatus of the urge to life (which may stumble on ultimate futility) and the conatus of style and form redoubles this and extends its energies. 'The imaginative force is outward, straining toward a meaning not to be found within the work, but beyond it, escaping the constrictions of Kate's mean world and of Milly's death-bound "box": a meaning Densher will come to recognize only in its absence, as an opportunity passed: the state to which those who can never be again "as we were" might have aspired' (Bradbury, 72).

　

　2. The chief centres of energy in the novel are the scheming Kate and Densher, just as Satan is the engine of Paradise Lost. Like the first edition of Paradise Lost, and like The Awkward Age, the novel is in ten books. Kate is introduced in Books I and II, just as Satan is in Milton's epic. James is not given to biblical allusion, but when the Bible is filtered through Milton it falls within his favoured range of classics. Milton was already a source for the 'Satanic' traits of the narrator of 'The Aspern Papers'. 'The sense of the slippery and the sticky' (WD 21) in Lionel Croy's rooms is the novel's equivalent of the burning lake where Milton's action begins. 'Slippery' suggests a serpent, and we hear later that Mr. Croy 'wriggles' (58). Kate faces her infernal background as bravely as Satan his woes: 'To feel the street, to feel the room, to feel the table-cloth and the centre-piece and the lamp, gave her a small salutary sense of neither shrinking nor lying. This whole vision was the worst thing yet' (21). The relation between Kate and her father recalls that between Satan and his daughter Sin: they cling to each other yet hate each other. Like Satan, the father of lies, 'there was no truth in him... he dealt out lies as he might the cards from the greasy old pack for the game of diplomacy to which you were to sit down with him' (23). He uses the words 'conscience', 'morality', 'duty', 'honour' (29-30) in an inverted sense, partly in cynicism, partly in self-deceit, as the leading devils do in Paradise Lost II. The name Croy suggests a scavenging vulture, while 'Kate' suggests 'kite', the hawk to Milly's dove. The Croys are condemned to scavenge on the body of a rich but moribund society.

　It is against this background that the vision of luxury opened up by Aunt Maud can assume sacral status: 'how material things spoke to her' (35). Aunt Maud wants Kate to be exalted: 'I want to see her high, high up -- high up and in the light' (65). Kate is driven by a vision of pride; there are references to 'the pride of her step' (61), Aunt Maud's 'fond proud dream' (66), 'your pride and prejudice' (69). The pride goes hand in hand with idolatry. Aunt Maud's opulent furniture is described as the blazonry of paganism: 'the heavy horrors that could still flourish, that lifted their undiminished heads, in an age so proud of its short way with false gods' (63); 'she's on the scale altogether of the car of Juggernaut... The things in your drawing-room there were like the forms of the strange idols, the mystic excrescences, with which one may suppose the front of the car to bristle' (69).

　All of this threatens the Edenic innocence of Kate's trysts with Densher in Kensington Gardens. Their intimacy becomes conspiratorial, already a little corrupt: 'Our being as we are... So extremely gone... we shall go a good deal further' (73). Deception is in the air: 'There was a difference in the air' (74). The scene is 'frightening because we feel that we are at the inmost pulse of a relationship: we can feel its life, and we can feel its life flicker and hesitate' (Graham, 170). By such delicate touches, 'James is able to "naturalize" the transcendental, and to make the world of the spirit a part, even if a tragic part, of our natural living' (Graham, 162).

　Book III begins on Alpine heights, echoing the ascent to heavenly light at the start of Book III of Paradise Lost. Just as Milton introduces Christ, Satan's victorious opponent, at this point, so Milly is portrayed as the angel of light over against the dark world of Kate. Seen through Susan's eyes, she is in some ways a twin or double of Kate. She plays Amelia Sedley to Kate's Becky Sharp; Kate is full of 'Thackerayan character' (112). Like Kate, Milly first appears in a black dress. She, too, has her vision of the world: 'She was looking down on the kingdoms of the earth, and though indeed that of itself might well go to the brain, it wouldn't be with a view of renouncing them' (87). Quite explicit is the parallel with Christ in the wilderness, as well as the contrast (Paradise Regained). Her greed is of a higher, more spiritual order than Kate's. She, too, is tempted to hubris: 'her liability to slip, to slide, to leap, to be precipitated by a single false movement, by a turn of the head -- how could one tell? -- into whatever was beneath' (87). So at least Susan's melodramatic, novelistic imagination sees her (Bradbury, 89). She spreads her wings to fly into danger. Susan warns 'we move in a labyrinth' and she replies 'Don't tell me that -- in this for instance -- there are not abysses. I want abysses'. Susan is won over to this dangerous recklessness: 'Ah then let us hope we shall sound the depths -- I'm prepared for the worst -- of sorrow and sin!' (120). This echoes Paradise Lost IX: 'Sin and its shadow, death, and misery/Death's harbinger', and soon we hear the post-lapsarian phrase 'the world was all before them' (89), from Paradise Lost XII.

　Milly's temptations are those of great wealth, Kate's are those of desperate need. One sets herself up as prey, the other as predator. Neither are innocent. Are there any adult innocent victims in James's fiction? Isabel Archer could marry Osmond only by dint of wilful blindness; Catherine Sloper, Tina Bordereau, Maggie Verver are deceived by their own wishful naivete. Milly suspects Kate's intimacy with Densher quite early: 'Is that the way she looks to him?　(140; also 157-8); their conversation is 'practically all stamped with avoidance' of Densher's name (144; also 169-70). Yet 'she shook off the obsession' and decided to trust Kate totally. However, the word 'grace' is associated with Milly from the start: 'something helpless in her grace' (91). Kate also struggles for 'grace' against the vulgarity of her relatives: 'the grace to which she had sacrificed' (44), but it is a willed grace, and her attitude is that of the Pelagian heresy.

　Milly's success in London society, 'the pink dawn of an apotheosis coming so curiously soon' (137) anticipates her final apotheosis after death. The chill in the air materializes in the Bronzino portrait: 'Looking at the mysterious portrait through tears', Milly feels her life has reached its peak, and is brushed by a fear of impending death: 'The lady... was a very great personage... And she was dead, dead, dead. Milly recognized her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her. "I shall never be better than this"' (137). Kate, comparing Milly with the portrait, appraises her as 'superb': there is a hint here of the deadening aestheticization and commodification of people that is a major theme in this novel and its successor, a hint underlined when Kate's evaluation is picked up by society: 'Lady Aldershaw meanwhile looked at Milly quite as if Milly had been the Bronzino and the Bronzino only Milly. "Superb, superb. Of course I had noticed you"' (139).

　Milly's redemptive role is in formation from about this point. After a troubling interview with her physician she sits in Regent's Park: 'here doubtless were hundreds of others just in the same box. Their box, their great common anxiety, what was it, in this grim breathing-space, but the practical question of life?' (153). In her decision to live she is in solidarity with suffering humankind. Later she accepts Kate's identification of her as 'a dove' (171). At first being a dove involves no more than a sweet social manner, which works like magic; a loftier significance will accrue to the role as she discovers 'how a dove would act' (172). The first half ends with Milly's love-lit encounter with Densher -- in which she overlooks the significance of Kate's presence at his side and even her own suspicion that Densher is merely being kind.

　

　3. As in The Golden Bowl, the second half begins under the sign of a redemptive project of the heroine. Both Maggie and Milly emerge as counter-forces to the energies, or iron laws, prevalent in the first halves. What Milly actually does is something characteristically Jamesian. She assumes the role thrust on her by circumstances, but transforms it by the consciousness she brings to it. Her social value as a 'rich American girl', like Kate's social value as 'the handsome English girl', transformed her into a commodity. But the commodity acquires sacral overtones, like Mrs Lowder's furniture. Her identification with the Bronzino lady and the dove image and her 'Byzantine' self-immurement in the Palazzo Leporelli lend aesthetic sublimity to her fetishized status. Then she deploys her fetishized identity with a new creative purpose, transforming herself from idol to icon, to transmit a gracious message that will form the basis for her posthumous apotheosis. Enacting the role of the Virgin Mother in Veronese's 'Wedding Feast at Cana', she embodies the freedom and generosity of a maternal charity. 'Let loose among them in a wonderful white dress' (301) for the first time, in her last public appearance, she fully exhibits her dove persona, recalling the dove let loose by Noah in Genesis 8.8-11, a figure of peace and reconciliation. 'Under some supreme idea' (302), her wings have 'spread themselves for protection' (304). As the Bronzino completed her profile in Volume I, surrounding her vital figure with the aura of death, here her final profile is determined, that of a dying woman radiating the glow of life (Tintner 1993:100-1). She has mastered the process of aestheticization or fetishization and put her own stamp on it. Her other actions: the decision to live and conceal her ill-health, the decision to love Densher, and above all her forgiveness of Densher and bequest of her money to him, are not fully developed by James. What they stand for, an economy of grace and mercy that breaks the chains of the utilitarian and calculating money logic summed up by Lord Mark: 'Nobody here, you know, does anything for nothing' (106), is best grasped by an observing consciousness. And if the consciousness is that of the chief beneficiary of her graciousness, who become increasingly conscious of his unworthiness of it, then we have the perfect medium for the exhibition of Milly.

　It is Densher's consciousness that will register, and magnify by idealizing and fetishizing it, Maggie's redemptive counter-project. Two Books are narrated from Kate's point of view (I-II); four from Milly's and Susan's (Bks III-V, VII); and four, finally, from Densher's (VI, VIII-X). The effect is rather as if the first Book of The Golden Bowl had been dominated by Charlotte and the second by Amerigo. What makes Densher invaluable as the centre of consciousness is that he tastes ever more fully of the Tree of Knowledge: 'His knowledge of American friends was clearly an accident of which he was to taste the fruit to the last bitterness' (202). To say, in regard to earlier appearances of this motif, that James 'seems to have forgotten that such an image is inescapably one of temptation' (Matthiessen, 65) is to miss how much James suggests by light allusions, avoiding the heaviness of point by point allegory.

　Of course James is well aware of the temptation to sentimentalism and cheap religiosity that such a formula of composition entails. His own dealings with the memory of Minny Temple would have instructed him on the ambiguities of apotheosis. So he naturalizes all these redemptive notes, notably through underlining the fetishistic character of Densher's final attitude to Milly. I have used the word 'fetishization' rather freely so far. Before going further I should like to clarify it, drawing on Mircea Ian's remarks in a discussion of this topic on JamesF-L internet discussion group (see 'The Henry James scholar's Guide to Web Sites' at www.newpaltz.edu/~hathaway).

　

　4. In that discussion, Marcia Ian quoted an interesting passage from Roderick Hudson (1875) in which James criticizes Mrs Light's exploitation of her daughter's beauty thus:

　

Mrs. Light evidently, at an early period had gathered her maternal hopes into a sacred parcel, to which she said her prayers and burnt incense -- which she treated generally as a sort of fetish. These things had been her religion: she had none other, and she performed her devotions bravely and cheerily, in the light of day. The poor old fetish had been so caressed and manipulated, so thrust in and out of its niche, so passed from hand to hand, so dressed and undressed, so mumbled and fumbled over, that it had lost by this time much of its early freshness, and seemed a rather battered and disfeatured divinity.

　

Ian comments:

　

Reading his use of the fetish here requires a complex parsing out of James's understanding of what might be described as the Catholic paradigm of self-psychology vs. the Protestant (and, further down the religious food chain, the Muslim and Jewish)... Catholicism was caricatured by Protestants throughout the nineteenth century, as it had been since the Reformation, and as Henry Sr. also caricatured it, as a primitive and fetishistic religion; this is also in part why James is attracted to it. Fetishism was thought to be even more primitive than idolatry, since the fetish embodied, rather than represented, Something... James is developing and exploring by way of the novel such antithetical (for James) concepts as 'idol' vs. 'ideal'.... The novel is full of stifled ideals and imperious idols; Rowland Mallett survives the psychological slaughter the plot enacts precisely because he idealizes (and accordingly sublimates to achieve this), rather than idolizes. Those who idolize -- Mrs Hudson and Mary Garland who idolize Roderick (as he himself says), Roderick who idolizes Christina -- lose out.

　

In James's day the notion of fetishism was fresh, illuminating, pregnant. Comte identified fetishism as the earliest stage of human civilization. Alfred Binet theorized that everyone had fetishistic tendencies. Marx saw a kind of fetishism at work in the production of commodities: 'The riddle of the fetish of money is just the riddle of the fetish of goods become visible' (Das Kapital). Such fetishes blind us to the real social relations that produce them, thus replacing a relation between humans with one between things in a process of reification, mystification, and alienation. James too is a connoisseur of fetishism, in its intersection of the religious, the aesthetic, the economic, and the psychosexual. Here is Milly seen through the eyes of the unconsciously resentful Kate: 'her freedom, her fortune and her fancy were her law; an obsequious world surrounded her, she could sniff up at every step its fumes' (114). What the sacrificial 'fumes' are offered to is not Maggie the individual but Maggie as an embodiment of the magic of money. Wherever she goes she stirs this fetishistic excitement in others. Her money is indeed a 'law' binding her to this reified status.

　A fetish is an artificial or natural object which is felt to have sacral power, mana, and which is treated accordingly. It can be used for magical purposes, black or white. Psychoanalysts are fascinated with the fetishistic effect whereby a common thing is transformed into a sacral Thing. A postage stamp has a useful function in everyday life, but we are scarcely conscious of it as a thing in its own right. But in the philatelist's collection it shines as a precious Thing. All collectors have a touch of fetishism in their make-up. Lacan admired Jacques Prévert's matchbox collection, and notes that here the matchbox became a thing for the first time:

　

I think that the shock, the novelty, of the effect realized by this assemblage of empty -- that point is essential -- matchboxes was that it showed this: that a matchbox is not at all simply an object, but that it can, under the form, Erscheinung, in which it was proposed in its truly imposing multiplicity, be a Thing. In other words, that arrangement showed that a matchbox is not simply something with a certain use, nor even a type in the Platonic sense, the abstract matchbox, but that it is all on its own a thing, with its coherence of being. The completely gratuitous, proliferating and superfetatory, almost absurd, character of that collection aimed in fact at its thinginess as a matchbox. (Lacan, 136)

　

Lacan calls this 'one of the forms, the most innocent, of sublimation'. He identifies sublimation and the 'overvaluation of the object' in erotic relationships (130), which is dictated by basic drives.

　Lacan uses Heideggerian language in speaking of das Ding. But this may create a confusion between the sacralized thing of fetishism and the authentic thinghood perceived by an artist. Things come into their own when envisioned by an artist such as Cézanne. When the thing 'things' it opens up worldhood at the same time. Prévert's matchboxes, if treated as objets trouvés in the manner of Marcel Duchamp, might claim the status of art. But the collector psychology works at a more primitive and less disinterested level than the appreciation of art. James's collectors, too, however fine the things they collect, are motivated by a tenacious clutching that has nothing to do with art. Like the work of art, the fetish makes the thing a Thing, but one that excludes worldhood by monopolizing the attention of the one on whom it has cast its spell. While a fetish confers vibrant spiritual or magical life on the thing, it also makes the thing an abstraction by stripping it of its relations to the world.

　Erotic fetishism is seen by Freud as the most revealing kind. The fetish usually acquires the psychic value of a phallus and can serve to compensate for (or serve to deny) the sense of lack or 'castration'. Fetishistic sexuality has an infantile cast to it. It may substitute for encounter with a human other, and thus like commodity fetishism produce a reification of human relations. One could speak of the Midas touch of the perverse imagination, both in its ability to turn dross to gold and in its reduction of the other to the 'gold standard' of its fantasy. However, in the economy of a given individual situation fetishism could possibly function as a source of sexual and affective energy, pleasure and fulfilment. There are still a lot of mad scientists around who offer aversion therapy and electroshock therapy to those anxious to be rid of embarrassing fetishistic habits. It would be more humane to open up to the anxieties or sense of lack that may underlie these habits, or failing that, just to sit back and enjoy them.

　The most promising approach to James's sensitivity to fetishistic phenomena today would be to rearticulate it in terms of Lacan's account of the objet petit a, the obscure object of desire that plays a pivotal role in human passions and relationships. We should differentiate this from reification, whereby the openness and complexity of personal interaction becomes a stylized or ritualized business in which persons become things or roles -- in which Milly becomes for example 'the New England heroine', 'the American girl' or 'the dove'. In addition to commodity fetishism, James's characters sacralize the objects of their desire in a way that borders on madness and that is full of primitive religious energy. James portrays many characters obsessed by such desire. Sometimes it is a desire for knowledge: the contents of the Aspern papers, the secrets of the children in 'The Turn of the Screw', the solution to the riddles in The Sacred Fount and 'The Figure in the Carpet'. His texts systematically refuse to satisfy this desire, either for the characters or for the readers who become infected with the characters' desire. Instead, he dramatizes the blinding influence of this obsessive mentality. The typical Jamesian consciousness is an intense and isolated one, which is impinged on by a series of others who are experienced as threatening and fascinating. Dealing with others as a philosopher would with inscrutable riddles, this consciousness 'in the cage' may find every kind of fetishization a useful recourse. The stories, and their style, are a demonstration that the desire for fetishized knowledge is rooted in this deeper, pervasive sense of lack, and that this lack must be faced and accepted, both in its sexual aspect as castration anxiety and insofar as it is intrinsic to human finitude. The fetish-ridden narrators of 'The Turn of the Screw' and The Sacred Fount fail in their desperate attempts to understand the people around them, being unable to move from fetishizing consciousness to a more responsive awareness based on mature recognition of their own existential lack. Their ultimate defeat is also the reader's defeat, for we are not able to produce a superior authoritative account that could rectify the narrators' perceptions. Like the burning of the Aspern papers or the Poynton 'things', this defeat dissolves the fetishism into which the text has lured the reader and refocuses attention on the human texture of the desires and anxieties of the characters. Though the unhappy protagonists are left in the lurch, the text has considerable therapeutic value for the readers, educating them not only in greater sophistication but in greater sanity.

　One James list correspondent writes: 'The system of suggestiveness in James' writing is related to a suppression of something -- akin to the circumlocutionary writing of Proust -- and perhaps that constitutes a fetish for the text'. The writing seems to circle around some elusive central riddle; so do the meditations of the principal characters. But I would not call this a fetish. In Proust it's obvious what the fetishes are -- the little obscure objects of desire that recur obsessively throughout the work -- they include names (Guermantes, Balbec), places, people, pieces of music (the Vinteuil melody), works of art. The desiring subject (Marcel rather than Proust himself) believes that in possessing or consuming these fetishes he will know happiness and peace. They are projected from a deep sense of lack and they promise to allay that sense of lack, but the promise is deceptive. Now opening up to the 'elusive central riddle' means stepping beyond fetishism and embracing one's lack ('castration'). Then the obsessive fetishes are replaced by the creative labor that produces the work of art, which is no longer the fetish of a dilettante but an instrument of exploration of reality.

　　

　5. The only fully material fetishes in The Wings of the Dove are Mrs Lowder's furniture and the two letters Densher receives after Milly's death. In both cases James piles the fetish-language on thick. But the obsessive character acquired by thoughts (Densher's desire for Kate, his memory of Milly) or images (Milly's self-image as dove) also has a fetishistic aspect.

　Densher is enveloped by a 'sacred hush' (399; cf. 369) as he takes in the immensity of Milly's forgiveness: 'something had happened to him too beautiful and too sacred to describe. He had been, to his recovered sense, forgiven, dedicated, blessed' (370). Her letter falls portentously into this hush, as the embodiment of her essence. It has an uncanny, preternatural presence: 'I found it with some other letters on my table. But my eyes went straight to it, in an extraordinary way, from the door. I recognised, I knew what it was, without touching it' (386). It is a numinous object -- 'the thing' (392, 394), 'something I feel as sacred', 'the sacred script' (393). It is handled ceremoniously, and casts a spell on the handlers, who move as if under hypnosis: 'he drew, standing there before her, a pocket-book from the breast of his waistcoat and he drew from the pocket-book a folded letter to which her eyes attached themselves. He restored then the receptacle to its place and, with a movement not the less odd for being visibly instinctive and　unconscious, carried the hand containing his letter behind him' (391).

　The fetishized letter looms even larger in Densher's mind after its destruction by fire (Kate's vain attempt to extinguish its threatening mana). Now it is the thought of the letter that is handled ceremoniously: 'he took it out of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one, handling them, handling it, as a father, baffled and tender, might handle a maimed child' (398). It is by being destroyed that the letter reaches its　destination, sealing Densher's love for Milly, by causing all its lost possibilities to vibrate in his mind: 'he should never, never know what had been in Milly's letter'. Its possible contents become 'a revelation the loss of which was like the sight of a priceless pearl cast before his eyes... into the fathomless sea, or rather even it was like the sacrifice of something sentient and throbbing, something that, for the spiritual ear, might have been audible as a faint far wail'. The later letter from Milly's lawyers -- 'that thing' (401), 'the long envelope on the table'　(403) -- has again the threatening aura of a poisoned gift, and Densher is again to 'surrender' it.

　Milly might also be considered as an icon (opening up a space of transcendence), as opposed to an idol (a signifier which has become its own signified, absorbing the devotee's fascination entirely and blocking out transcendence). But there is a tense dialectic between Milly as fetish and Milly as iconic ideal. Insofar as Densher is an infantile fetish worshipper here he cuts a comic figure (as one critic has observed), but the other, more sublime reading also holds its own. Densher may still be in thrall to a deadening image, yet we sense too that a space of transcendence has opened up for him. The very ambiguity of his feelings save James from ending the novel on a sentimental and melodramatic note. It might be suspected that the aura surrounding Milly's posthumous letter is a melodramatic effect, and that it is James who vamps up the letter to bring his novel to a satisfying conclusion. But in fact this final epiphany of Milly has been organized by Milly herself. Her triumph, like Portia's, is not without a shade of ruthless manipulation. She arranged to have her letter arrive on　Christmas Eve: 'This thing has been timed' (392). A fetish, according to Freud, is a replacement for the absent maternal phallus. Thus a mother reassures her son　by providing fetishes: rattles, lollipops, filled Christmas stockings. The 'mercy' (303, 316, echoing The Merchant of Venice) that Milly shows to Densher and Kate is distinctly that of a mother (all three are orphans). The dove's wings that 'cover' the couple (403) are not merely those of sentimental indulgence, however. They recall Milton's maternal image of the Spirit: 'with mighty wings outspread/Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast abyss'. Milly uplifts her erring 'children' and her idealized memory supplies Densher with a prosthetic moral backbone.

　The idea of human beings reifying themselves, fixating themselves in roles (a process which one critic analyzes as Milly's 'bad faith'), or conversely assuming such roles in a creative spirit (as when Maggie becomes an 'actress' in the latter part of The Golden Bowl), is a Jamesian preoccupation. The narrative coherence of The Wings of the Dove is not undermined by our uncertainty as to whether the final tableau of Densher's necrophiliac remorse and Milly's covering wings is to be taken at face value. Perhaps some of James' tales, including this one, should be regarded as open-ended problematic compositions, leaving the readers free to navigate their own path through the possibilities explored. Similar problematic endings are characteristic of Goethe, probably the modern author James most admired. Goethe may have freed him from any sense of obligation to Victorian or French ideas of the well-made novel, with all ambiguities neatly wrapped up.

　Marcia Ian doubts if Milly can be called Densher's fetish:

　
She lacks several signal qualities of a fetish, whether defined anthropologically, sexually, economically, or semiotically. She is, and stands for, the immaterial, not the material. The materiality of the fetish is key. Obviously nothing in a novel is literally material, but it would at least have to signify the material. Her money does not count; she is an 'angel with a thumping bank account'. It is Maud's money that signifies the material. Milly is not of a 'low' order but is on the contrary the top of the representational hierarchy in the novel. A fetish must have something low about it -- whether a smell, some connection to the lower bodily stratum (a phrase from Bakhtin), commodity status, whatever. She is no gilded turd, you should pardon the expression... Densher idealizes Milly, he does not fetishize her, and this is why in effect he comes out 'on top'. On the other hand, and 'below' Milly down on earth, Densher might well be said to fetishize -- to materialize and treat as sacred -- his own mental objects, most obviously the phallic 'idea all erect before him' which appears to him in his rooms after he has taken Kate to, and in.

　

　But does a fetish have to be 'low'? Fetishistic investment or cathexis is not confined to things but can also extend to ideas or symbols or public totems (Throne and Altar, as Freud notes). A person can fetishize their own role or symbolic identity (as Goethe 'godified himself' according to D. H. Lawrence, who also criticized Wordsworth for 'making flowers speak', another kind of fetishism). Even a precious object is 'low' when it is the object of greed or retentiveness, and in this sense Milly can become a fetish for others. Perhaps fetishism has roots in the anal stage of infantile sexual development. Hence the high/low undecidability attaching to fetishes ('filthy lucre' etc.); recall how the narrator of 'The Aspern Papers' expresses a revulsion against his precious spoils when faced with Tina's marriage proposal as their price. Just the tension between the two poles gives the fetish its power. Ultimately, Milly establishes herself as lofty icon, but the ado about her in London society (like the press's 'feeding frenzy' about Princess Diana) is a primitive fetishism she has to overcome. Milly follows the old literary strategy whereby one who dies young becomes an adored symbol, beckoning from the abode of the eternal. She constructs herself as a symbol of charity over against the tightly ordered Balzacian world of self-interest and deceit. She exploits the literary resources of elegiac apotheosis, assuming actively the Adonais strategy that James had imposed on the Minny Temple. Even before she dies Mrs Lowder and Densher speak of her as if she were already dead. Her human personality has been absorbed into the symbolic shape of her career, into the image of the Dove. In contrast, Maggie Verver reconstructs conventional order over against a chaotic world of passion. She exploits the literary resources of comic resolution, which dictate the restoration of marital harmony.

　Milly and Maggie thus collaborate with the author in the construction of meaning and in determining the novel's final form (though it is Densher who draws out the full significance of Milly's gestures). Indeed, it is a necessity of James's later rigorous novelistic ethics that the characters themselves construct the novel. The relation of author (or the narratorial persona who fills in for the author) to characters becomes so intimate that one critic (Leo Bersani) speaks of a breathy proximity of the late James's narrative voice to his centers of consciousness. They are all Jamesian meditators, and one senses that narrator and character-consciousnesses are constantly confabulating and conspiring as they work together to construct of the novel. James comes down to the level of his characters, brooding with them on their problematic choices. He knows no more about the ultimate meaning of life than his characters do. If Densher's religiosity does not in the end completely transcend an infantilist fetishism, James does not claim to judge it from a higher standpoint. The play of irony and scepticism in the presentation of the characters' motives is more an uneasy interrogation (particularly acute in the case of Maggie) than a superior correction.

　The radically secular world of the post-Flaubertian novel may espouse a transcendent conatus in human existence, which is enhanced and doubled through the labour of style and structure. In James the collaboration of author and protagonist integrates this transcendent opening more thoroughly into the texture of the tale. The pointers to transcendence are produced by purely immanent means, as human constructs, and there is continuity between the characters' mythmaking and the novel's questioning openness. The fetishistic energy of Milly and Densher, which bursts the Balzacian constraints that provide the ground-rules of their universe, is continued in James's own imaginings. No dogmatic religious certitudes are needed to keep this space of questioning open.

　The Wings of the Dove combines indirection and obliqueness in the texture of the writing with a starkly melodramatic plot-structure. The melodramatic elements seem to be systematically toned down (in contrast to some scenes in The Portrait of a Lady). Not only is the drama transferred to the consciousness of Densher and the conversations between Densher and Kate, but even here there are few points at which issues come vividly to a head. It is as if the melodramatic plot existed to provide orientation for the reader, while the author devotes himself to wringing the last degree of subtle psychological and ethical analysis out of it.

　Fetishes in James threaten to trap and imprison their adherents. When a fetish is destroyed, that signals a spiritual liberation. Tina's burning of the Aspern papers may not liberate the narrator but it is certainly a liberation for Tina herself, who has perhaps come to share the narrator's obsession, not because of love for the fetishized dead poet but for love of the narrator himself. 'I have done the great thing. I have destroyed the papers', she declares, as after the consummation of a ritual sacrifice.

　When Kate burns Milly's letter she is attempting to shake off its power over Densher. Densher's own surrender of both letters to Kate is a heroic sacrifice. It frees him from a polluting bondage to Milly's money and to Kate's schemes. But the same gesture lays the foundation of an altar to Milly in Densher's mind. Does he then become a higher-level fetishist of the kind of which James heartily approves? Does he retreat into an ivory tower of solitary consciousness? Everything comes into perspective through Densher's eyes. He sees Kate's family situation compassionately (we had seen it through her eyes in Book I). Mrs Lowder also comes into more sympathetic focus as Densher talks of Milly with her. The final image of Milly herself crystallizes in Densher's mind, as the emblem of grace and mercy, and there can be little doubt that this is meant to be taken as the keystone to the meaning and structure of the novel, despite all the ironies that James allows to play around it.

　A Christian reading of this novel does not demand any allegory, since the themes of sin, grace, and forgiveness are quite explicit. When Densher is turned away from Milly's door, he has 'a sudden sharp sense that everything had turned to the dismal' (325), the beginnings of a full-blown case of 'conviction of sin'. James applies the moral scalpel as lightly and effectively as Austen, George Eliot or Meredith: 'It was his own fault if the vulgar view, the view that might have been taken of an inferior man, happened so incorrigibly to fit him. He apparently wasn't so different from inferior men as that came to' (325). Of course, James is too subtle a realist not to allow Densher lots of self-excusation: the new-found morality of his expostulations against Lord Mark, and the pathetic, 'I had meant awfully well' (364). His guilty Venetian broodings recycle the narrator's torments in chapter 9 of 'The Aspern Papers', carrying the analysis of guilt and denial to dizzying heights of fine observation. It must be regretted that his acceptance of the wooing of Milly (with her reactions) was not given proportionate treatment; that too recalls the earlier Venetian story: the word 'kind' was of frequent occurrence to describe the narrator's attitude to Tina Bordereau; now Densher thinks of Milly as 'the little American girl who had been kind to him in New York and to whom certainly... he was perfectly willing to be kind in return' (279-80). His subsequent search for 'straightness', the way he is moved to awe by Milly's forgiveness in terms similar to but even more intense than those in which he responded to Kate's surrender to his desire, and the way he drifts to the Oratory after hearing that Milly is dead, are all described in a very convincing way (all the more so in that Densher still has those passive, obtuse, indecisive traits that got him into his moral pickle in the first place).