Andrew's Wiki
Golden Bowl

Folks

• Adam Verver, Mr. Moneybags, on a mission to Europe to grab art and artifacts to found a museum in his name in American City. He’s quiet (not forceful, likes his privacy) and sweet, really a flat character to tread water for the others. Thinks the Prince, “everything else the master of the house consisted of, resources, possessions, facilities and amiabilities amplified by the social legend, depended, for conveying the effect of quantity, on no personal ‘equation’, no mere measurable medium. Quantity was in the air for these good people, and Mr. Verver’s estimable quality was almost wholly in that pervasion.” (237)

• Maggie Verver, Miss Moneybags, a sweet innocent girl who comes to knowledge and fuller personhood: a bildungsroman based on learning the game of playing with lies, deceit, and passion. “Charged with the sins of the people” (469), Christlike, she apparently sacrifices for Charlotte and Amerigo’s sins by having to give up her father, but she’s trying to save her father, which also happens to mean to save her conscience about shoving her dad into marrying Charlotte. Her reaction to the affair is dignified and honorable, but she ends up with the most in the end, with Amerigo caring about her for the first time ever, and with her feeling a victory over him (whom she describes as imprisoned) and Charlotte (whom she thinks of as caged). “She was no longer playing with blunt and idle tools” (304): she grows, yes, but to what terrible power?

• Prince Amerigo, named for the Italian explorer who got the credit for Columbus’ discovery (vis a vis Adam, the “first man,” right), marries Maggie even though she doesn’t know his “personal quality” which he says she “knows nothing about” (7). Suave and accommodating, he lets people come to him, quite the Prince, but mostly significance as an object of sexual desire for the two women. Fanny notes, “The man’s in a position where he has nothing in life to do.”

• Charlotte Stant, the penniless young American who can’t marry her lover b/c of mutual poverty, who retreats into a convenient but cosmically unsuitable marriage in order to escape the loneliness of her jet-setting single woman life, to find an “anchor.” Pretty, clever, tall, and strong, with boatloads of style, she has all sorts of action and ability, and she is the perfect social representative of the family: the perfect hostess, cicerone, wife, etc. She’s brave: “I risk the cracks,” she says (264), and she’s the one who pays when Amerigo begins to lose his transparency (her ability to read his mind). She is doomed b/c separation from Amerigo, as Maggie considers her caged and admits that she used Charlotte to get closer to Amerigo. She is the cost of Maggie’s growth.

• Fanny Assingham, the familiar character of “confidant” for James character, but unfamiliarly, she’s imperfect. Not the Gostrey who only loses her use when Strether outdistances her, Fanny always is a little at sea with Charlotte and Amerigo, always afraid of her own role in putting the foursome together. She consumes gossip like food (“a large heaped dish presented to her intelligence and inviting it to a feast” 189), but her involvement makes her “condemned to consistency,” (250) that is to help the lovers, but she eventually moves to Maggie’s “side.” “She was there, inordinately, as a value, but as a value only for the clear negation of everything. She was their general sign, precisely, of unimpaired beatitude” (450): she must pretend that appearances are truth, that they are still innocent and perfect.

• Bob Assingham, the confidant of the confidant, he’s always there to listen to Fanny, sometimes to give her an extra push in a new direction.

• Maggie to Amerigo: From Maggie being nothing to Amerigo to being a real person for him: “like a rare flower snatched from an impossible ledge” (481), their relationship was saved, the lovely outcome of the situation. “Seeing? I see nothing but you,” Amerigo says, last spoken line of the novel (567).

Themes

• Bowl
  • Considered as a wedding present from Charlotte to Maggie, it represents the present Charlotte actually does give Maggie: the hidden flaw in Amerigo, their secret relation.
  • When Charlotte’s talking with shopowner about flaw: Shopowner: “But if it’s something you can’t find out, isn’t it as good as if it were nothing?” Charlotte: “I probably should find out as soon as I had paid for it…. Does one make a persent of an object that contains, to one’s knowledge, a flaw?” It is seen as bad luck, and shopowner later comes back to Maggie, blowing apart the whole charade, to avoid this bad luck. Yet man ends by saying that all you have to do is “mention it” (the flaw) to still have “good faith,” which we learn later is what Amerigo believes he has always had. (86)
• Danger of Innocence
  • Adam and Maggie’s innocence and love for each other is not blameless: as Fanny notes, “It’s their mutual consideration, all round, that has made it the bottomless gulf; and they’re really so embroiled but because, in their way, they’ve been so improbably good.” (289)
• Collectible People
  • Amerigo is to be part of her father’s collection, says Maggie
    • “You’re at any rate part of his collection… a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of price.” (10)
      • Why is he collectible? Because of his known history (“you belong to a class about which everything is known” she says): the family past, most of all the Pope
    • Maggie and Adam’s acquisition of him is “not so much an expectation of anything in particular as a large, bland, blank assumption of merits almost beyond notation, of essential quality and value. It was as if he had been some old embossed coin, of a purity no longer used…of which the ‘worth’ in mere modern change…would be enough, but as to which, since there were finer ways of using it, such taking to pieces was superfluous….he was to constitute a possession, yet was to escape being reduced to his component parts.” (18)
      • 19: “sooner or later” they would “put him to practical proof…on a scale that he was not, honestly, the man to calculate. Who but a billionaire could say what was fair exchange for a billion? That measure was a shrouded object, but…he promised himself, virtually, to give the latter a twitch.”
      • Question: James makes Amerigo a rather special commodity, one that has no measurable value. Is this merely whitewashing the ownership? Could we align Adam with a new form of slavery? Or should we see this relationship as a finer version of Adam’s aesthetic purchases? Or are even those latter bad?
• Difficulty of Moral Judgment
  • Maggie can’t ever just revel in being angry at being a cuckolded woman; the feeling dissipates before she can act on it
  • Thinks Maggie, “There was, honestly, an awful mixture in things” so that “you couldn’t be sure some of your compunctions and contortions wouldn’t show as ridiculous” (512)

Quotes

• “We’ve been like a pair of pirates,” Maggie says to Amerigo about her and her dad (10)
• Even though Maggie exults in their “knowing…when great things were great,” “the discovery that it doesn’t meet all contingencies to be right” (124)
• James’ favorite quality: “a very high level of debate—in the cool upper air of the finer discrimination, the deeper sincerity, the larger philosophy.” (220)
• “the possible heroism of perfunctory things” (509)
  • how the round of hospitality in Fawns saved the party from being too stuffy, too dark: social forms make everything else easier

Comps Questions/Relation to Other Texts

• Reification
  • Characters want to possess each other, objectify each other, think and mediate to possess each other via knowledge of them via measurement, a virtual Science of Gossip.
    • Echoes James’ own method of piling on details and qualifications to the point where it makes language scientific and objective, but also like an advertisement
    • Objective collection = reification on a grand or historic scale.
    • Innocence/simplicity = not measuring others but taking them at face value
    • You appraise people to know their value.
  • Fanny: “Well, what’s in the air always has—hasn’t it?—to come down to earth.” (273)
    • ie, movement of abstract into object
  • Why? Because not a lot is definite
    • “The situation had changed by—well, by whatever ther was by the outbreak of the definite.” (423)
    • “the thick breath of the definite—the immediate, the familiar, as she hadn’t had them for so long” (554) but they must “wait” (and the promised moment does occur at the end of the book, when they’re together)

• Leisure
  • A note about Leisure Spaces in general
    • They are the way to have Conspicuous Leisure in a world that turns on Conspicuous Consumption
  • Prince Amerigo is the votary of leisure: vicarious leisure (to reference Veblen)
    • “Amerigo excelled easily [at bridge], as he understood and practised every art that could beguile large leisure.” (468)
  • Country House associated with amorality: moral judgment is “some rather snubbed and subdued, but quite trained and tactful poor relation” “too dingy” to matter very much (243), where “no individual line, however freely marked, was pronounced anything but funny” (242)
• Veblen
  • Charlotte is used to the repute of the social family, ie to Adam, while Maggie is kept to the “minor matters” and “homely work” that Maggie will do, such as sewing (women’s division of labor)
  • Using people honorifically to reflect one’s repute is what happens here.
  • Adam uses Maggie to feel vicariously: about her being jealous of Prince b/c of the ferocity of her passion: “if it wasn’t personally floating, if it wasn’t even sitting in the sand, it could yet pass very well for breathing the bliss, in a communicated irresistible way—for tasting the balm. It could pass, further, for knowing.” (490)
  • Adam truly is the perfect barbarian tribal chieftain: see the Veblenian stuff I’ve noted at the back page of the novel.
• Credit
  • Maggie and Adam save their own relationship by denying to each other the truth about their marriages. They rely instead on credit: what they will admit to each other’s faces what they apparently think. As long as they look like they believe in it, it might as well be true. That’s credit.
  • Prince Amerigo is taken on credit: they don’t know his “personal quantity” at all, but Amerigo knows someday his measure will be indeed taken (it turns out to be Adam’s presence in Maggie’s life).