The Multi‐Dimensional Stereotype: Jewish Characters in Henry James's The Golden Bowl

Abstract

A Bakhtinian reading of Henry James's The Golden Bowl, in which the novel is treated as a “polyphonic” text, highlights the dialogic equality between the interpreting consciousnesses: the characters “within” the novel, as well as the “outside” author and reader. However, it also accentuates a contradiction between the author's lack of dominance, due to this dialogic equivalence, and his authorial control over the text. This contradiction is of particular significance in The Golden Bowl, which is concerned with moral issues and thus insists upon the author's and the reader's unequivocal moral discrimination, yet, as a polyphonic text, also resists univocal ethical judgements. The tension between moral absolutism and ethical multivalence is reflected in the stereotyped, but also multi‐dimensional portraits of the Jewish characters figuring in the novel. Their stereotypical appearance notwithstanding, these Jewish characters also function as multi‐dimensional objects for interpretation, as well as creators of texts that must be decoded by the novel's interpretive consciousnesses. Thus, duplicating the novel's other creators, exponents for a force that can be considered creative as well as destructive, and in the absence of clear authorial judgement, the Jewish figures share the characters’and the reader's moral confusion. Moreover, creators of their texts, they also appear accountable for the evil inherent in them. Indeed, they even seem to bear the guilt for the anti‐Jewish response they evoke and thus appear responsible for their own victimization. However, it is the reader who should be held accountable, for, in the final analysis, it is he who creates the multi‐dimensional yet stereotypical Jewish image into being.