Maggie Verver’s “Vast Modern Machineries and Facilities”: The Art of Love and the Passion of Evil in The Golden Bowl

Abstract

This chapter opens by examining how Henry and William James frame the aesthetics of the “American scene” in their correspondence and writing. The chapter then analyzes fictional representations of American ethics and aesthetic judgment in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. In this novel, a series of militaristic, railway, and financial motifs capture the dynamic movements of love, passion, and evil, as they unfold within a single family. These motifs reveal that the young American character, Maggie Verver, personifies an individualistic strain of pragmatism that enacts the literary components of William James’s philosophy. In particular, Maggie develops a distinct brand of ethics built around personal emotion, the rejection of evil, and the search for an institutional context that will affirm her beliefs.