Maggie Verver Research Articles

Maggie

This brief article considers Leo Bersani’s descriptions of Maggie Verver, a character in Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, in relation to some of Bersani’s famous arguments about sexuality. Observing that Bersani’s presentation of Maggie in “The Jamesian Lie” and elsewhere makes her an apt figure not just for sexuality but also for Bersani’s later notion of queer sex as a negation of the social, the article considers both how an ampler consideration of this character might reflect back on Bersani’s use of her to instantiate his claims about desire, and how his account of Maggie might speak to readers torn between competing accounts of queer negativity.

Dynamic Form: How Intermediality Made Modernism

Dynamic Form: How Intermediality Made Modernism

Temporality and the Unconfident Heroine in Henry James's The Golden Bowl

Abstract Readers traditionally associate heroism with risk and confidence in one's abilities. Yet within the realist tradition, Henry James creates a portrait of an unconfident heroine. The Golden Bowl's Maggie Verver demonstrates she has the ability to become an effective actor, and she can be read as a special case within the underdog character type. Despite being caught in a deception plot, she surprises readers with the pleasure of a “win” by developing a specific know-how that relies on reading temporal tensions. The article uses theoretical work on temporality by Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Lacan, and Alain Badiou to explore how Maggie's confidence and courage emerge from the depths of anxiety and how this process allows James to create a narrative in which the reader learns to gauge and appreciate human action in process.

The Dispossession of Character

The Dispossession of Character

Henry James and the Art of Auto/biography by Miroslawa Buchholtz (review)

Reviewed by: Henry James and the Art of Auto/biography by Miroslawa Buchholtz Anthony Louis Marasco Miroslawa Buchholtz. Henry James and the Art of Auto/biography. Frankfurt am Main; New York: Peter Lang Edition, 2014. 222pp. $64.95 (hardcover). Scholarship has long found connections between the birth of the bourgeois sense of identity and the rise of the novel as a literary genre. Curiously, one of these connections was provided by the invention of photography in 1839. The camera helped stage the new sense of identity, while offering a universally valid template for all forms of representation, a template that also seemed to validate the very spirit of the machine age: Everything could be mechanized and automated, even the production and reproduction of likenesses. And yet, in less than half a century, photography could be listed as one of the practices contributing to the ushering in of the very nemesis of bourgeois individualism, the age of the masses. Once the marketing of the Kodak No. 1 in 1888 placed the camera in the hands of millions (“You press the button, we do the rest”), what was taken to be an unmediated representation of reality became a disposable commodity without much weight or substance—exactly the kind of document the Surrealists could later use to subvert any claim to veracity the bourgeois had ever made. Posed portraits gave way to casual snapshots, and the sense of studied gravitas that had pervaded the Daguerreotype Age vanished with the vanishing of the early bourgeois sense of historical mission. The writings of Henry James are uniquely placed to illustrate some of the paradoxes produced by the rise and fall of the volitional self. What is freedom? Is it entirely in our hands, or do we owe it to others? And if we do owe it to others, as Isabel Archer had to learn, is it still freedom? And on the perceptual level, can we know on our own? Do we not need what Charles Sanders Peirce called a “community of knowers”? But if we do need the corroboration of our peers to know anything at all, as Maggie Verver had to discover questioning Mrs. Assingham, what do we really know on our own? Is it all the product of lies and deceptions what we figure on our own? It should not surprise that the visual played so large a role in the fiction of the period. The sense of sight is closely linked to freedom, for it suffers no barriers. To see anything we must have free access to the visual field. We no longer notice the importance of this, but in the nineteenth century people were still bound by rank, race, and gender to the social conventions limiting the freedom of sight. At the same time, while being one of the most immediate channels in the human sensorium, it is also one of the most unreliable. Sometimes we see what is not there. Or we remember seeing what we wished had been there. Visual experience is vivid but deceptive. In short, we cannot really trust our eyes—if not through intersubjective validation. This is why photography came to play such a role in the age of realism. What the camera captures is immediately real and objective. Its invention seemed to prove by inference [End Page E-3] that any author, in any field, could be true to life by just standing unobstructed on a line of sight. Miroslawa Buchholtz’s Henry James and the Art of Auto/biography is an excellent point of entry to those interested in using the writings of Henry James to explore the realm of shadows inhabited by the early bourgeois sense of self. This is particularly true for those interested in understanding how, in time, everything started to turn on its head. In the first chapter the reader is quickly brought up to speed on the state of the art in biographical studies. This field has been thoroughly deconstructed in recent theory. If the goal of biography and autobiography has been traditionally to aggrandize its chosen subject, today we approach auto/biography “as a special case of historical writing” (30). We approach it, that is, with a full...

The Women: Introduction

The Women: Introduction Susan M. Griffin This special issue asks us to think about Henry James with women. The contributors draw our attention to some of the many female figures among whom James lived and worked. From the beginning, of course, readers and critics have been drawn to James's female characters. A quick look at the stunning variety, rich psychologies, and vivid presences of, for example, James's "M" heroines—Mary Garland, Maisie Farange, May Bartram, Marie de Vionnet, Maria Gostrey, Milly Theale, and Maggie Verver—shows us why (and this is only a partial list). That the two women most central in Henry James's life are Mary James and Minnie Temple has not been regarded as a coincidence by most Jamesians. These figures, how they are represented, and what they represent have always played a central role in James criticism. Henry James's own deep connections and identifications with both his female characters and the women in his life have long been recognized. Over time scholars also showed what female writers learned from Henry James and, occasionally, paid attention to what James learned from women writers. There were those who dismissed James as himself a woman: a sissy, an effeminate writer of society novels. Leon Edel's biography of James, on the other hand, tended to downplay, or, sometimes, as in the case of Edith Wharton, even mock, the women in James's life, a tendency that Edel's edition of the letters evidences as well. First-wave American feminists, focused on the misogyny of the American canon and its making, typically saw James as an at least partial exception. The essays included here demonstrate how recent archival, biographical, critical, and creative work have shifted and multiplied how we read James with women. In investigating James's epistolary exchanges with his niece, Susan Gunter proposes that Henry and Peggy's relationship is best understood as rhizomic: "non-hierarchical, constantly evolving, interrelated on equal planes." What is striking here is how the figure of the rhizome (borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari) mobilizes our possible conceptions of women and James. We need not reduce, say, Constance Fenimore Woolson to wife manque, frustrated lover, or sister substitute. Instead, we can imagine James and Woolson's relationship as—while certainly circumscribed by personal psychology and societal structures—creative and changing. [End Page 207] This general openness can been seen in essays that give us both fresh understandings of the familiar—Isabel Archer and Isabella Stewart Gardner, in essays by Sarah Blackwood and Rosella Zorzi—and less expected intimacies—Peggy James and Alice A. Bartlett as introduced by Gunter and Sarah Wadsworth. Blackwood focuses our attention on the fact that Isabel's fine consciousness is emphatically an embodied one. Zorzi plots the balance between intimacy and distance that James maintained in his often ironized letters to Gardner. The Henry James who appears alongside Alice Bartlett, Wadsworth shows us, is the unfamiliar figure of James as equestrian. Clair Hughes attunes us to the nuances of dress—indeed of accessories—that Maisie must learn to read. Meaghan Clarke also historicizes Jamesian fashion but does so by attention to "exhibition culture," the intricate connections among fashion, art, and the female in the late nineteenth century. "The Woman Question" that unsettled the Victorians was often framed in terms of suffrage, an issue that Joanna Gates investigates in James's epistolary relations with Elizabeth Robins, actress, playwright, and feminist activist. Robins as performing woman is also of interest to Gail Marshall as she explores, not James's playwriting, but the domestic theater of his fiction. Geraldine Murphy and Jennifer Sorensen Emery-Peck focus specifically on narrative strategies in relation to gender and sexuality. Murphy demonstrates that Vernon Lee writes back to James's "The Aspern Papers" (the germ for which was provided by Lee's brother) with her "Lady Tal" and, in doing so, renders "a defense of women's writing and experience at the turn of the century." Emery-Peck argues that James manipulates the formal techniques of "In the Cage," shifting perspectives between outside and inside the telegraphist's cage and consciousness to "explore the positions of woman as author and woman as reader." And...

What Maggie Knew: Game Theory, The Golden Bowl, and the Possibilities of Aesthetic Knowledge

This essay views The Golden Bowl through the lens of contemporary game theory—crucial to a number of social science fields, especially economics—arguing that James anticipates many of its crucial tenets through the strategising of his various characters, including most notably (and most successfully) Maggie Verver. But the novel also suggests the limitations of not only game theory, but of the means/ends logic of advanced capitalism that game theory unwittingly but brilliantly theorises.

Stasis & Verve: Henry James and the Fictions of Patience

What are the implications of patience's prominence in the final paragraphs of both Roderick Hudson and Portrait of a Lady? How do these patiences differ from each other, and from patience as more ordinarily considered? Such questions provide the frame for a more sustained engagement with patience, as deployed in The Golden Bowl. Patience, in the hands of Maggie Verver and the Prince, becomes luridly preferable to what it otherwise seems to defer; James's treatment of patience, I argue, posits this mode of temporality as inextricable from understandings of knowledge, authority, and (most plangent in The Golden Bowl) from love.

Charting an Ethics of Desire in The Wings of the Dove

Why do philosophers and literary theorists consistently return to ques tion of ethical behavior in Henry James, a writer who, as Lee Clark Mitchell recently observed, resists any simple notion of human psychology or ethical engagement?1 As we struggle to understand Isabel Archer's return to her disas trous marriage, Lambert Strether's commitment to fantasy of Madame de Vionnet, Maggie Verver's agonized contemplation of a successfully imprisoned Amerigo, and Milly Theale's construction of a space in which she can hold on to her desire, we are riveted by complexity of these characters' emotional and ethical responses. We return to James not only because his characters' dilemmas refuse simple resolutions (perhaps any resolution) but also because we experi ence suffering and paradoxical triumph of those who pursue their desire to its most far-reaching conclusion. James's characters are nothing if not willful— and ultimately alone—in their quests. Like figures from ancient Greek drama, they demand everything and give up nothing, enacting Jacques Lacan's ethical claim that the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire.2 In doing so, these characters seem to call into question, or at least complicate, Kantian categorical imperative and ideal of disin terested action, offering a radical ethical alternative. James's characters enact, I will argue, an ethic of desire.

Vindication Against Misreading in The Golden Bowl, The American Scene , and the New York Edition

VINDICATION AGAINST MISREADING IN THE GOLDEN BOWL, THE AMERICAN SCENE, AND THE NEW YORK EDITION Molly Vaux The City University of New York In the letter he wrote to Scribner's in 1905 proposing that he "furnish " each volume of his forthcoming deluxe edition with a preface, Henry James portrayed his novels and stories as disenfranchised beings patiently awaiting a "chance" for their cause to be righted. James would be their advocate and the prefaces the texts with which he would demonstrate his novels' worth.1 In this essay I will argue that the writing of The Golden Bowland The American Scene were essential precedents and complements to this project of self-vindication. Reading The Golden Bowl through its preface shows that beneath the narratives of familial and marital relations in the novel run stories of a writer's contention with a misapprehending audience—the same struggles out ofwhich James spun creative autobiography and a theory of fiction in the prefaces to the New York Edition. Through his indirect critique ofhis readership in The Golden Bowland the fierce challenges he delivered to his compatriots in The American Scene James laid essential groundwork for the lessons in reading and creative production he would later offer in the New York Edition. Paul Armstrong has argued that James's prefaces require the same "doubled reading" his novels require, that while the reader is absorbing James's account of his writing experience and his theory of writing , the reader is also responding to James as a centering consciousness whose "interpretive attitudes . . . are as much on display and as much an object forthe reader's scrutiny as the impressions ofa Lambert Strether or a Maggie Verver."2 As comparable centering consciousnesses, James the preface-writer and his heroine Maggie Verver do make common assertions. Both figures demonstrate the power of the creative deed. Paralleling James's affirmations about "doing" in the preface to The Golden Bowl is Maggie's discovery in the novel of her own brilliant capacity for action. After the assignation ofthe Prince with Charlotte in Gloucester, Maggie begins "to doubt of her wonderful little judgement of her wonderful little world."3 She begins to "put" things both to herselfand the people around her. She contrives gestures to effect a change in her "practically unattackable" situation (327). The terms James uses to describe Maggie's campaign to rebalance familial and marital relations are the same terms he uses in his notebooks and pref- 50Molly Vaux aces when he celebrates the capacity to let oneself go with writing: "Ah, just to let oneselfgo—at least," he writes in his notebook in 1895, "to surrender one's self to what through all the long years one has (quite heroically, I think) hoped for and waited for—the mere potential , and relative, increase of quantity in the material act—act of application and production."4 Likewise, in the preface to Roderick Hudson, James celebrates the tendency of the writer's canvas "to lead on and on."5 In her lively interrogations about the Matcham houseparty and the Gloucester sightseeing Maggie lets herself go in a similar way: Maggie went, she went—she felt herself going; she reminded herselfofan actress who had been studying a part and rehearsing it, but who suddenly, on the stage, before the footlights, had begun to improvise, to speak lines not in the text. . . . Preparation and practice had come but a short way; her part opened out and she invented from moment to moment what to say and to do. She had but one rule of art—to keep within bounds and not lose her head; certainly she might see for a week how far that would take her. (348) In this passage Maggie becomes James, inventing her role as she goes, while also inventing the rules for invention. The labor is hard but exhilarating. It works invisibly, by a charm, "touch by touch" (348) without her audience suspecting how much she understands. She is a reservoir of "ideas" and she rejoices in her sudden capacity to translate them into action (348). Maggie's creative exhilaration builds during the dinner party with the Matcham group: "Oh she was going, she was going...

Risking the Cracks: The Mystic Self in Henry James's The Golden Bowl

When Maggie Verver, in Henry James's novel Golden Bowl, first begins to suspect that husband, Amerigo, is having an affair, it's not because of his unexplained absences or his evident predilection for company of his beautiful young mother-in-law, Charlotte. Such material clues as these mean less than nothing to her. They can be explained by cozy arrangement among four (Maggie, Amerigo, Charlotte, and Maggie's father, Adam), in which Maggie is willing participant - and which, however curious it may appear to uninitiated, satisfactorily accounts for such apparent oddities as Amerigo's repeated public appearances with his mother-in-law. In fact, it is not any action of Amerigo's that arouses Maggie's suspicions - she catches him in no furtive look of love, no subtle betrayal of hidden passion. Instead, she simply has growing sense that husband and stepmother are connected in some way. She begins to recognize in Amerigo expressions, phrases, and attitudes that she has seen in Charlotte: to identify of expression in two faces (349) and identities of behavior, expression and tone (350). two seem to have same impulses, same words, and, worst of all, same way of treating (353). Their kinship comes to seem, for her, like a medallion containing on either side cherished little portrait: The miniatures were back to back, but she saw them for ever face to face, and when she looked from one to she found in Charlotte's eyes gleam . . . that come and gone for in Prince's (350). narrator of Sacred Fount, who, like Maggie in Golden Bowl, becomes absorbed in trying to identify existence of hidden passions and illicit affairs by tracing their effects, comments that: It was of course enough that when people were so deeply in love they rubbed off on each - that great pressure of soul to soul usually left on either side sufficient show of tell-tale traces. (16) For narrator, idea that passion sufficiently intimate and intense enables some kind of transfer between lovers is enough. But he takes this familiar idea further, speculating that passion between lovers opens kind of channel between them through which very essence of each may flow into other, as the full-fed river sweeping to sea (245). Sexual passion, he suggests, is transformative: youth, energy, beauty, charm, and intellect may flow from one person to another, resulting in visible, tangible changes in each. Thus narrator, when he confronts one of his suspects, Gilbert Long, uses very similar words to those Maggie finds to describe sense of foreign influence in husband: He faced me there with another light than his own, spoke with another sound, thought with another ease and understood with another ear (163). This aspect of Sacred Fount has been seen by Leon Edel as one of most explicit developments of so-called vampire theme in James's work (Henry James 16). This is because of emphasis in novel on draining of one partner by other: in process of exchange, one person becomes bloated (67) while is sucked dry (81); [o]ne of pair . . . has to pay for other (29). Indeed, in developing his theory about Brissendens, narrator tells his friend Obert that what Mrs. Brissenden, who appears to have suddenly acquired youth and beauty she has never before, has extracted from husband, who appears to grow older by minute, is new blood; and he, to supply with her extra allowance of time and bloom, has had to tap sacred fount (29) of his own energy, indeed, his very life, and is thus visibly depleted. While vampirical Mrs. Brissenden is the flooded banks into which source swelled (245), victim-husband, source, is paying to his last drop (30). …

Narcissism and the Gilded Image: A Psychoanalytic Reading of The Golden Bowl

Narcissism and the Gilded Image: A Psychoanalytic Reading of The Golden Bowl By Beth Sharon Ash, University of Cincinnati The most influential contemporary readings of The Golden Bowl have focused on how Maggie Verver gets what she wants rather than on why she undertakes her project—that is, on her design and not on the desire that underwrites that design. Such a critical slant makes sense to some extent since, of all the characters in the novel, Maggie alone has the blueprint for marital happiness; and she rigorously imposes this construct on those around her. Mark Seltzer therefore regards her as James's novelistic representation of the way the marital norm operates as a means of social control; and Leo Bersani interprets her as a Jamesian artist inventing novelistic reality according to her formal requirements . These descriptions of Maggie (as a socially conditioned "agent" of power, or as an intellectually self-defining "artist") seem opposed on the issue of human freedom, but in fact neither Seltzer nor Bersani is talking about subjectivity in any obvious way. Their decision to eliminate subjectivity precludes an adequate theorization of it, and they are as a result forced to claim that some metaphysical entity—namely, the a priori of power or of pure mind—determines Maggie's design. In contrast, I believe that James presents Maggie Verver as exerting an undisciplined desire to be perfect and, more specifically, that her subjective pursuit is psychologically organized in terms of an archaic structure of both oedipal and preoedipal narcissistic wishes. Maggie's desire cannot be understood simply in terms of power, of intellectually driven self-construction. The "why" of desire invites a careful psychoanalytic reading of relational subjectivity—of how The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 55-90. © 1994, The Johns Hopkins University Press 56 The Henry James Review Maggie's bond with her father shapes or patterns her subjectivity, and of how these patterns of self are enacted and repeated in her effort to shape or design her social world. Before turning to my reading of the novel, I want to explore a bit further the positions of Seltzer and of Bersani for the ways in which they implicitly invite a psychoanalytic rejoinder to their arguments for the primacy of design. For Seltzer, "method is already the goal," and by this he means that, in the novel, care is a strategy or a design of power (60). I agree with Seltzer's observation that love and control coincide in the text, and I am in other ways indebted to his reading. I disagree, however, with Seltzer's Foucauldianism, which says that any desiring relation is repressive because power is coextensive with the social. In effect, social beings are not disciplined by the repression of their desires, since they are repressed by their desires instead. As I see it, there are at least two problems with Foucault—one having to do with the constitution of the subject, and the other having to do with motivation. First, the idea that unidirectional and surveillant modes of power transform human beings into subjects is incoherent. A human being becomes a subject through interaction with other subjects, and such interaction presupposes the possibility of the reciprocal recognition of subjects. For both Foucault and Seltzer, the only reciprocity is reciprocal or reversible force that always implies a hierarchy. The result is not only that the social domain of intersubjectivity is undertheorized, but also that power, since it shapes and invents, assumes the status of a meta-subject. Second, since the entire human capacity for strategy and calculation is passed over to power, the question of whose power and for what purpose or want can never be posed. Seltzer can only tell us that "love and power in The Golden Bowl are two ways of saying the same thing" (66); he cannot tell us why, in James's depiction of the relational system of the Verver household, Maggie's love takes the form of coercion. Like Seltzer, Bersani eliminates the psychological subject. For him, Jamesian écriture has nothing to do with unconscious fantasy and is best understood according to the idea of pure intelligence—or, as he puts it, mind "liberated from...

Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction

Reviewed by: Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction Stuart Culver Roslyn Jolley. Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. xi + 239 pp. $41.00 cloth. The past decade has seen a number of efforts to historicize Henry James’s corpus and career and to insist on the continuities between the novelist’s aesthetic commitment and the ideological currents and historical trends surrounding him. Roslyn Jolley’s Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction tries to do something a little different. It is less about the history in James’s writings and the historical work done by his texts than it is about what James himself thought history was and how he understood the difference between writing fiction and doing—or making—history. In the end, the story Jolley comes to tell about the novelist’s career is a familiar one in which, sometime around the turn of the century, James undergoes an epistemological conversion that distinguishes his later manner from the realist work of his early years. For Jolley, this conversion is best understood as a rethinking of the relations between fiction and history. If the early James had believed that fiction could only be taken seriously when it imitated the style and the epistemology of “scientific” history, the later James understood fiction or narration as a way of mastering or ordering facts that are never either neutral or objective. Ironically, Jolley’s book is weakest where one would expect it to be most original. Her account of 19th century historiography is extremely sketchy. She doesn’t look closely enough at the practices of any given historian to establish a model of historical narrative; consequently her claim that the early James’s narrative voice imitates those of the historians around him remains provocative but unsubstantiated. At the same time, she fails to discuss whether or not history writing itself underwent the same shift from positivism to relativism. The effect is to make James’s conversion seem unique and ahistorical. What does engage Jolley’s interest is the Victorian debate over fiction’s [End Page 831] value, and she does a very good job of arguing that James’s early criticism “shows itself to be produced by and complicit with the culture of censorship” as it defends fiction by insisting on the analogy with history. But, while she argues that the novelist’s first major works are all structured around a tension between the narrator’s historiographic voice and the imaginative consciousnesses of the central characters, Jolley calls attention to the ways in which the texts undercut the opposition between history and fantasy. She notes, for example, that there is no compelling reason why Isabel Archer—or her reader—should let the “facts” disclosed by Countess Gemini shatter her own narrative construction of her life. The “facts” in this case may be nothing more than the fictions of another mind. The novels of the Major Phase are explicit in their rejection of the Puritan opposition between facts and fictions and more emphatic about the value of narrative as a means of mastering and interpreting history. Jolley does not present the late style as a pluralist mode however; rather, she insists that the central message of James’s form is that “different versions of the ‘right’ cannot coexist.” Thus The Golden Bowl closes with Maggie’s tragic recognition that, because she cannot appeal to facts independent of any interested narration, she must violently and arbitrarily impose a fiction on others. The dark truth of The Golden Bowl became even more real for James as he witnessed the First World War. Jolley’s account of his reaction to the war stands as her book’s real contribution to James studies. In letters written to friends in his last years the novelist took Maggie Verver’s insight one step farther, insisting that “the relation between war and civilization is not one of opposition but of complicity.” But in the public essays collected in Within The Rim, James described the war in jingoistic, melodramatic terms as a struggle between civilization and its barbarous other. The fantasy he indulges in these essays is more excessive than those of any of his characters, from Christopher Newman to Lambert...

Aestheticism: The Religion of Art in Post-Romantic Literature (review)

Book Reviews 111 in the apprehension of truth: "In the Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, MuIy Theale and Maggie Verver bodi use the powers of imagination spiritually to intuit a better world. ... In both novels, die reality of experience is temporarily suspended—not denied—until the experiment of a spiritualized conception of trudi... has die opportunity to redeem die corrupt world and make it 'true.'" By comparison, in The Bostonians, James "cannot see beyond die helplessness of a spiritually conceived notion of truth to transform the corrupt world." To compensate for tiiis presumed fadure, James, in the later novels, "confers an authorial dispensation to suspend temporarily this world" so mat die trudi can be brought about in it by die "faitii" of women with "good heads" and "sound hearts." Would that die impUed example of Huckleberry Finn (in itself more problematic than Gabler-Hover is wtiling to acknowledge) could be appUed so directly. But the more important point lies in Gabler-Hover's understanding of James's fadure in The Bostonians, an understanding mat is based upon die entry of die novel into the "poUtical world" and die consequent "failed interaction between tiiat world and die transformative power of virtuous rhetoric." As a result, she claims, James changes the "battleground" in die later works by "retreating from the world of the public into the personal" so that "the trudi is not tied to any ancillary poUtical ideology." I find these assertions astonishing—not only as, again, one-sided readings of die texts but, more urgently, as so lenient toward die always troublesome matter of textual suppressions on behalf of both fiction in general and James in particular (the James who, in the old but important distinction, invariably "shows" rather than "teUs" a story). It is surely not accidental tiiat die ease with which Gabler-Hover wields die terms "pubUc" and "personal" is precisely on behalf of a dichotomy tiiat is so strongly questioned by The Bostonians itself as a major component within James's analysis of contemporary consumerism. Truth in American Fiction is to be welcomed for its punctilious reminder of a rhetorical tradition that has been neglected of late by die commentaries. But we must regret its absoluteness of argument If The Scarlet Letter is about selflessness, an etiiical self-regulation "through our emotional apprehension of the common bond of humanity," then such selflessness has to be considered widiin the complex of law and authority in the novel. If The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is about the ethos of honesty, then that etiios is most usefuUy recognized within those forms of artifice that provide its structure. If MiUy Theale and Maggie Verver mark James's reconstruction of "the virtuous American girl as a rhetorical argument in herself," they mark also the dangers wimin the transcendental apprehension of morality. And if Gabler-Hover, rightly, finds a potent source for her equation between rhetoric and trudi in Emerson's lecture of 1867 on "Eloquence," she might also remember his earlier concern about the complexities of the social world (in the lecture on "Politics" of 1840 and die essay on "Experience" of 1844, for example) which profoundly problematizes the directness of that equation. Ian F. A. BeU University of Keele Leon Chai. Aestheticism: The Religion of Art in Post-Romantic Literature. New York: Columbia U P, 1990. 269 + xiv pp. $32.50. The Aesthetic Movement of die late nineteentii century is still too often associated widi showy props and languid postures, with sunflowers and peacock feadiers and all die stained glass attitudes of die haggard and lank young man that Gilbert mocked in Patience. But nodiing so facetious enters Leon Chai's Aestheticism, which presents a serious philosophy of art as a sober quest for meaning and value, a substitute in effect for 112 The Henry James Review a declining or rejected religious orthodoxy. Chai attempts no broad inteUectual history tracing ideas or assumptions to their Romantic or neo-classical origins. He offers instead a concentrated analysis, often phrase by phrase, of short passages selected to typify diverse aspects of the aesthetic sensibiUty. Although his focus is narrow and sharp, he assembles a considerable range of exhibits drawn from...

"A mistress of shades": Maggie as Reviser in The Golden Bowl

"A mistress of shades": Maggie as Reviser in The Golden Bowl by Priscilla L. Walton, Carleton University, Ottawa When Mark Seltzer notes that, traditionally, The Golden Bowl has been regarded as the "large problem child in James's writings" (66), he draws attention to the critical controversy that novel has generated. Traditional critics have tended to be divided in their assessments of The Golden Bowl, depending upon whether they approve or disapprove of its protagonist, Maggie Verver. Recent critics, who often offer intriguing interpretations of the novel, have moved away from moral judgments of Maggie, but their readings of her character continue to diverge. John Carlos Rowe, Leo Bersani, and Mark Seltzer all perceive Maggie as a textual reviser and suggest that Book II, written from her perspective, manifests her revision of Book I. These male critics, however, display a disturbing tendency to denigrate Maggie and to minimalize her artistic process; they perceive her revisions as circumscriptive and dangerous. Bersani views Maggie with suspicion and suggests that she is a referential reviser: "She does absolutely nothing but wait for the single fiction she promotes—that of her own and her father's happy marriages—to stifle every other way of living the story" (150-51). Along the same line, Seltzer contends that Maggie is involved in a "normalizing process" that is reductive since "[t]o rectify and to normalize, all in the name of love: this is to exercise power in the very act of disowning power" (95). Rowe believes that Maggie is destructive, for "[t]he lies she attempts to hide and then sustains—symbolized in her effort to put the shattered bowl together again—reflect the destructive and subversive qualities of her art" (204). There are other critics, like Elizabeth Allen, who view Maggie's behavior in a more positive light and who draw attention to the depiction of the sexes in the novel. Allen argues that James's last novel dramatizes feminine subjectivity, which "takes into account a perpetual tension between self as other, between being defined as sign and yet attempting to assert subjectivity through multiplication and mystification of the signified, thus focussing attention back to the signifier" (207). But Allen ignores Maggie's act of revision and, hence, The Henry James Review 13 (1992): 143-53 © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 144 The Henry James Review the textual multiplicity. Rather disappointingly, she decides that Maggie reasserts the status quo in Book II because she has learned to accept the dictate that "all women ... must suffer" (200). I agree with the above critics' contentions that Maggie is a subjected character who later performs as a textual reviser. But I also believe that her behavior foregrounds a problem that has escaped critical attention. My reading differs from those male critics of the novel, for I do not perceive Maggie's revisions as destructive or confining. On the contrary, I would argue that these revisions constitute her means of opening the closed text of Book I. Indeed, her methodology is in accord with the tenets of post-structuralist feminism since her revisions disrupt the masculine referentiality of Book I by privileging the pluralizing nature of the feminine Other in Book II. As such, she feminizes the script written by the Prince, her father, and even Charlotte, who subscribes to their view.1 There is, however, a disparity that exists between Maggie's procedure , which is open and inclusive, and her actions, which are not. I would suggest that this disparity lies at the root of the divergent critical assessments of Maggie, for if critics focus on what she does, they perceive her as manipulative; if they focus on how she does it, their response is quite different. Maggie's behavior is contradictory, for while her revisions are liberating, they do not change or modify the oppressive social structure in the text. In this, The Golden Bowl broaches a larger issue, for it allegorizes a potential problem in the practical application of post-structuralist feminist theory. Maggie's fate may serve as a warning that a method that lacks agency may also lack the ability to effect change. Theoretically, the discourses in The Golden Bowl conform to...

Ford Madox Ford and His Relationship to Stephen Crane and Henry James (review)

88 The Henry James Review Bowl and the consequent sense of temporal and spatial disconnectedness (ch. 5). He provides incisive readings of the discussions and the deployment of referentiality in the text (ch. 6). The chapter on narration uses the techniques and the vocabulary of structuralist narratology to support the "argument that the text challenges a realistic ontology, an ontology that valorizes a perceptual denominative vocabulary for regulating the interaction of subject and object" (104). Finally, Steele's discussion of the Bildungsroman in The Golden Bowl, that aspect of the novel he calls "Maggie Verver's Ontological Voyage," is a model of analytic acuity that sees the "Verver" and the "non-Verver" as competing "systems" of being, knowing, and referring, and Maggie's voyage between them not as a one-way trip towards "teleological closure," the "triumph" with which readers have often credited her, but as a gradual movement into "a space of desire where the reader joins the characters in the task of rereading" (130). These are valuable insights, and this is a valuable book. It does not, however, accomplish all that it proposes. The transition between the two sections glosses over the author's insufficiently justified presumption that his three fictional texts somehow "represent" the history of realism or even of "the novel." To state that after Flaubert "the project of the novel is no longer to depict the manners of society but to represent the ontological discontinuity of experience" is to ignore thousands of later novels. The last paragraph of the conclusion marks another of the limitations of the book when it avers that "the way a text reroutes reference becomes a concern not only for linguistics, rhetoric, and philosophy, but also ideology" (133). Steele's study is too strictly textual to answer the challenge that this statement implies; it nods occasionally in the direction of history and society, but does not make the connections that a genuine "concern for ideology" would demand. Like many other deconstructionists (and an even larger number of New Critics), Steele is a fine reader of texts. The insights provided by Realism and the Drama of Reference should help Steele and others move beyond close rhetorical, linguistic, and philosophical reading to a sophisticated understanding of the complicated relations between "realism," "reality," and history. William W. Stowe Wesleyan University Brita Lindberg-Seyersted. Ford Madox Ford and His Relationship to Stephen Crane and Henry James. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1987. 123 pp. $19.95. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted calls the friendship between Henry James and Ford Madox Ford "A Troubled Relationship," and that is a fair description of it. Ford met James on 14 September 1896 when Ford was twenty-two and James fifty-three. They remained in contact, one way or another, until at least 1913, when a letter from James to Violet Hunt on 7 March 1913 conveys James's congratulations to Ford on his being able to work again after a nervous breakdown. Having had a similar breakdown in 1910, James would have understood Ford's situation sympathetically. The last time they met face to face was either in 1912 (according to documentary evidence) or in 1915 (according to Ford) shortly before Ford joined the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium and France. Their friendship had suffered a breach when Ford left Elsie Martindale, his wife, to live with Violet Hunt in London. Ford's publication of Henry James: A Critical Study (1913), though written by Ford to honor James's seventieth birthday, didn't please James either. James had been on good terms with Ford and Elsie when they lived in Winchelsea and he in Rye, as the extant correspondence (seventeen items to Ford and nine to Elsie) reveals. Olive Garnett's diary adds to the facts presented by Lindberg-Seyersted, showing James visiting the Hueffers on the eve of the Epiphany in 1903 and giving their children toys. And after they had moved to Airlie Gardens in London, James did not abandon Book Reviews 89 them. Olive notes that one evening after visiting the Hueffer children in their upstairs bedroom, she returned downstairs to find that Henry James was there. The specific evidence against a friendship between the men is that...

Fractured Symbolism: Der Stechlin and the Golden Bowl

W HEN Maggie Verver painstakingly, yet unsuccessfully, tries to move in one piece the golden bowl that Fanny has just dashed into three, she expresses an impulse that finds its counterpart in Melusine's instinctive revulsion at the thought of disturbing the ice that masks Lake Stechlin's potential turbulence. In these scenes, each woman displays an understanding that the objects are fragile symbols of a precarious sense of completeness she desires. Both women intuit that with the concrete symbol is lost the sense of form and meaning that derived from its presence; they are compelled to protect the integrity of the symbolic orders they have constructed.' This construction is the subject of The Golden Bowl and Der Stechlin. As a subject, the characters' symbolizing activities reflect the narratives' own intentions toward completeness, which are evidenced by the plot structures. The connection between heroine and narrator evolves

From Hamlet to Maggie Verver:: The history and politics of the knowing subject

This essay explores the connections between, on the one hand, Hamlet and Wittgenstein's Tractatus and, on the other hand, The Golden Bowl and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. The issues involved concern the nature of the knowing subject and that subject's relationship to the objects of knowledge: facts. It is argued that, for the earlier pair of texts (one of which foreshadows and the other of which apotheosizes the world of classical Western modernity), that relationship is one of sharply separated and allegedly wholly independent subjects and objects. In the latter and later pair of texts, which reflect the unsettling of that world, subjects and objects are seen as interacting and mutually constituting. Questions are raised about the role played in this unsettling by the political struggles of women and people of the Third World both to claim and to transform the status of knowing subject, and about the consequences for the development of a liberatory epistemology of the abandonment of even the sort of minimal foundationalism constructivism espouses, with its taking as given the identity of the knowing subject.

Imagination and Desire in the Novels of Henry James , and: Henry James and the Art of Power , and: The Problematic Fictions of Poe, James and Hawthorne , and: Engel en afrond over "The Turn of the Screw" van Henry James (review)

Reviewed by: Imagination and Desire in the Novels of Henry James, and: Henry James and the Art of Power, and: The Problematic Fictions of Poe, James and Hawthorne, and: Engel en afrond over "The Turn of the Screw" van Henry James Rosalie Hewitt Carren Kaston . Imagination and Desire in the Novels of Henry James. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1984. 202 pp. $22.50. Mark Seltzer . Henry James and the Art of Power. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984. 200 pp. $19.95. Judith L. Sutherland . The Problematic Fictions of Poe, James and Hawthorne. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1984. 133 pp. $19.00. Ernst Braches . Engel en afrond over "The Turn of the Screw" van Henry James. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1983. 184 pp. pb. No price given. These four books may in some unscientific way represent the continuing diversity of interest in the works of Henry James. Kaston's book, the most absorbing of the three English studies (Braches's book is in German, except for the Epilogue), covers a goodly number of James's novels, and a few short stories, from the perspective that former critics have not fully recognized how James has consciously contributed to his readers' doubts about the value of renunciation—too many have thought their inability to accept the saintliness of a Claire de Cintré or a Lambert Strether was because of a tension between James's values and their own. Kaston argues that many of James's characters, often his centers of consciousness, fail to be imaginers of their self, and it is in the "negative space" of the fiction, the shadow of the plot, the shape it might have taken, that the reader is led to question this failure of the imagination. Only in What Maisie Knew and The Golden Bowl are there centers who take on the dangers of self-authorship, and between Maisie and Maggie it is Maggie who is better able to fuse self with the external world. Although Kaston may herself be entering into some invention in her statements about the inadequacies of former readers of Henry James, she nevertheless constructs an analytical approach that offers a fresh recasting of the characters' dilemmas and their resolution of them. Kaston sees the desire for a self that is created in collaboration with others and in the world as the essence of feminism—the attempt to create a relationship where neither "domination" nor "surrender," neither "mastery" nor "victimization," is acceptable. Kaston uses James's own phase, "the predominant imagination," as the paradoxical descriptor for the person who, like Maggie Verver, desires and achieves the experience of mutuality. The chapter titled "The Melodrama of Helplessness" is chiefly interesting because of the connection Kaston makes between Alice James's invalidism and the desire of characters such as Catherine Sloper, Claire de Cintré, and Isabel Archer to create melodramatic rituals as a substitute for active involvement in the world. Further, their renunciations are primarily based on others' definitions of life, not their own. Like Alice James, they became self-victimizers through their acceptance of a design that conformed to another's vision of life, usually a parental figure. There are two imaginers of Isabel Archer's life—Ralph Touchett, an Emersonian idealist, and Gilbert Osmond, a collector of portraits. [End Page 252] In the next chapter on the ambassadorial consciousness, Kaston pursues James's resistance to the Emersonian theory of self. Fleda Vetch and Lambert Strether eventually advocate self-concepts that reflect a belief in a universal self that is not to be tarnished by too close an identity or involvement with the physical and the social. The heroine of "In the Cage" is, however, breaking down the enclosures that would isolate the self; she actively pursues experience, resisting the melodramatic ritual of renunciation. And it is with this heroine that the major figures of Kaston's last chapter, Maisie Farange and Maggie Verver, are most closely identified. Both Maisie and Maggie author their own fictions of self; and Maggie most completely can possess both "self and world." Kaston's most provocative analysis occurs in the section on The Golden Bowl where she unites the several threads of her argument—feminist theory, Emersonian idealism, and melodramatic rituals...

Counting the Costs: The Infirmity of Art and The Golden Bowl

Counting the Costs: The Infirmity of Art and The Golden Bowl by Mark Reynolds, University Research Corporation He handled it with tenderness, with ceremony, making a place for it on a small satin mat. "My Golden Bowl," he observed—and it sounded on his lips as if it said everything. (GBI 112) The golden bowl which gives its name to James's novel is not a golden bowl at all, but a gilt bowl. The master of the golden bowl (the Bloomsbury shopkeeper) is, then, not just a connoisseur of art, but a manipulator of fictions. His title "my golden bowl" is a fiction, a deceptively simple epithet that denies the actuality of the object to increase its value by masking its threatening fragility. Though James asserts that the great novelist must possess "that essence of reality" (AF 387), he agrees with Guy de Maupassant that is is "absurd to say that there is, for a novelist's use, only one reality of things" (GM 246). Within the novel , the different ways in which characters view the golden bowl, as object and as symbol , indicate their particular construct of "the real," the illusions by which they define and determine their experience. Thus, the importance of the distinction between a golden bowl and a gilt, crystal bowl—the former is the illusion which the shopkeeper seeks to convey, an image of the bowl distinct from (and, in a sense, superior to) the latter. The episode in which the bowl first appears dramatizes the ambiguous relationship between signs and interpretation in the novel. The merchant dramatically presents the beautiful object and trusts its charm "to produce its certain effect" (GBI 112), but he hedges when questioned about the exact nature of the bowl. Though he admits, when pressed, that the bowl is gilded crystal, not solid gold, he challenges Charlotte to find a flaw. If the crystal is not perfect, he promises , she will "never find any joint or any piecing" (GBI 113). Any flaws, however, are invisible beneath the golden surface that cannot be scraped off, having been put on "by some fine old worker and by some beautiful old process" (GBI 114). The shopkeeper 's guarded manner in discussing the bowl makes Charlotte suspicious that something must be wrong with it. Again, the dealer has a reply, "But if it's something you can't find out isn't that as good as if it were nothing?" (GBI 114). When Charlotte notes that one should avoid giving a present that contains a flaw, the shopkeeper's response is, again, curiously ambivalent: "Well, if one knows of it one has only to mention it. The good faith ... is always there" (GBI 115). The shopkeeper himself has never acknowledged any flaw in the bowl. Are we to accept his good faith? This scene describes the formation of a contract between a buyer and a seller and, as such, hinges on the questions of price and faith—two distinct, but related forms of worth. Laurence Holland compares the making of the marriages and the vending of the bowl as two forms of social contracts (341-49). However, the scene suggests another sort of contract as well— the one between artist and audience. According to James, the artist draws a circle around the endless possible relations that constitute any experience; the geometry of the writer creates a form by which the complexities inherent in experience appear to be "happily" contained (AN 5). Our faith in fiction depends, in part, on our acceptance of the price exacted for its effect.1 The terms of this "contract"—the questions of price and faith—are particularly relevant to the major source of critical controversy surrounding The Golden Bowl. The controversy stems from James making his heroine, Maggie Verver, a manipulator of fictions as conscious and apparently willful as her antagonist, Charlotte Stant. That critics should mistake Charlotte for the heroine suggests the risks James runs in the novel's analysis of the relationship between consciousness and the artistic process . Charlotte is in many ways the conVolume VI 15 Number 1 The Henry James Review Fall, 1984 summate artist. In volume one, she fashions for the Prince a...