The "Internationalism" of "The Golden Bowl"

Abstract

T HE LAST THREE NOVELS James was able to finish-The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl-mark his return to international themes, though they far transcend what in the New York prefaces he called the emphasized internationalism of his earlier fiction. Paris, as he said in the preface to The Ambassadors, had the great merit of sparing him preparations, though different setting might have served his thematic purpose if it could have represented a place in which Strether's errand was likely to lie and his crisis to await him. Something similar is true of the other two novels of this period. Like The Ambassadors, they are concerned with conflict between different moral sensibilities, and the scene where, after years of expatriation, James found such conflict most ready to his hand was the international scene. In the words of one of the New York prefaces, his sense of contrast-the contrast on which any painter of life and manners inevitably much dependshad been rather oddly predetermined for him by the facts of his situation. The consistency with which he arrayed various nationalities in his moral dramas is, therefore, neither incidental nor ephemeral. Taken together, the three novels form trilogy exploring the possibilities of two radically different systems of morality-one idealistic, the other empirical-represented by America and Europe. And coming just before his return to America in 1904 led him to readjust his focus somewhat, they