The Aesthetics of Ascesis: Walter Besant and the Discipline of Form in The Golden Bowl

Abstract

In Adultery in the Novel, Tony Tanner suggests that bourgeois novels of adultery have for their crucial subject the problem of how to relate "patterns of passion" with structures of meaning. "As the contact [sic] between man and wife loses its sense of necessity and binding power," Tanner writes, "so does the contract between novelist and reader" (15). Tanner understands the marriage and aesthetic contracts to be "extremely problematical" in late James novels such as The Golden Bowl. He measures James against Goethe, for whom the contract is "binding," Flaubert, for whom the contract is "abrogated in certain calculated ways," and Lawrence and Joyce, for whom "the old contracts no longer have any force at all." In The Golden Bowl, where the drama of the story precisely concerns the restoration and purification of manners which have been threatened by the adultery, we can see that the social equivalent of Maggie's code of manners is mirrored by James's aesthetic fascination with form: a conjunction, then, of manners with mannerism. As Jonathan Freedman nicely formulates it, "the novel's dominant metaphor of the golden bowl implies a powerful homology between James's creative efforts and those of his character Maggie: James, like his character, seeks to gather the shattered fragments of life and remake them into significant and symmetrical order" (241). In this essay I argue that the sources James inherits, countermands, and revises in his telling of The Golden Bowl work to forge a correlation between the forms of life available to his characters and the narrative form his own novel takes and that these revisionary processes constitute an aesthetics of ascesis, an aesthetic which sacralizes form by sacrificing content in the name of a pattern that is clearly discernible. [End Page 278]