Henry James's Evasion of Ending in The Golden Bowl

Abstract

The continuous expansion of Maggie Verver's moral experience in The Golden Bowl and her attempt to direct that experience—to, as she puts it, people [her scene] serenities and dignities and decencies rather than with terrors and shames and ruins1—are conflicting yet equally compelling motives that persist throughout this novel and that are held in precarious balance at its close. A series of scenes within the closing chapters of Henry James's last completed novel may be read as deliberately failed attempts to contain experience within conventional ending patterns.2 These scenes, like sandbars upon which Maggie stands for a moment each character in turn, are surrounded by Maggie's newly acquired--but now irreversible--current of moral consciousness.