Abstract

Henry James's The Golden Bowl is a novel about knowledge and a novel that refuses to be known. Any traditional interpretation will necessarily overstate the coherence of a novel critics have placed at the "very limits of novel form" (Bradbury 124). James himself, for example, characterizes it by saying, "[t]he [End Page 259] Prince, in the first half of the book, virtually sees and knows and makes out [. . .] everything that concerns us [. . .] the function of the Princess, in the remainder, matches exactly with his" (GB 20-21). But the novel is not this neatly contained. The experience of reading is more one of questions, confusions, and frustrated expectations, as we, to put it in the language of the novel, constantly try to locate just "where" we are. Critics have continually tried to describe the way The Golden Bowl slips out from under them: "Its insanity is beautifully rational. Like an intricate mathematical proof correct in every detail except for the assumption upon which it is based" (Sears 181).

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