Paper presented at “Henry James Today”, Paris, July 2002, by Gro Frølund.

 

Title:

            “[S]even golden bowls full of the wrath of God”[1]

 

 

“Power and authority fascinate James” John Bayley rightly points out in his book Characters of Love in 1960. Nevertheless, he goes on to claim that in The Golden Bowl it is love which dominates the perspective at the end of the novel:

 

[Knowledge] provides a scale of value [in The Golden Bowl] against which to measure love. And in this scale it is knowledge that finally sinks and love that rises.[2]

 

25 years later this view is taken on with vehemence by Gore Vidal in an exchange of letters to the editor in The New York Review of Books. In a response sharp with sarcasm, Vidal is “touched” that Bayley wants James’ career to end on a high note of Love. “But” as he concludes:

 

The Golden Bowl is neither Tosca nor a prothalamion. It is a story radiant with the art of a master fulfilled; and dark with the knowledge of how force is motor to all our lives. It is no accident that in Henry James’ final delirium he thought that he was Napoleon Bonaparte”.[3]

 

It is a fascinating issue: exactly how does James’s writing - particularly in The Golden Bowl - relate to power and authority? Is it, as Bayley contends, merely a side issue, swept off centre stage by love, or can we agree with Vidal that it is an all-consuming preoccupation, to be found at the very core of his perspective as an almost mystical “dark knowledge”?

            This paper wishes to contend with these questions at a less literal level. If we look at power and authority not merely as direct controlling factors, i.e., not as ‘power over’ but rather as ‘shaping factors’, ‘primordial conditions’, or something along those lines, there can be little doubt that this question was at the heart of The Golden Bowl as a project. In other words, the issue becomes one of James’ way of relating to history and tradition: to the authority of the things that have shaped us. History appears in many contexts and many guises throughout The Golden Bowl and one of these is as literary history: as a special form of Jamesian re-writing of the most important texts and traditions of the West. Each of these texts are cornerstones of Western culture, either as religious, classical or popular texts. The following is a brief sketch of each.   

           

            First and foremost, there are comprehensive references to The Bible. “Genesis” is a constant presence. Adam at Eaton Place is perhaps the most obvious reference of a large number to the state of innocence which engulfs father and daughter throughout most of the novel. The ending sees Maggie just on the verge of leaving that condition by accepting the “golden fruit” of knowledge and judgement from the tree of life.

            At the other end of the spectrum, that is, at the end point of life on earth, we have John’s “Revelation” which is woven in to the very fabric of this novel. These two texts, “Genesis” and “Revelation”, ‘bookend’ human life as we know it and give us a hint that this project of James’ is ambitious. It is somehow about human life per se. Or perhaps more accurately: human life contrasted with the perfection of the Godly. In other words, humanity’s imperfection, time-boundness, and finiteness interests James in its difference from the contrasting back-drop of godly perfection, timelessness and infinity of power.

            What is particularly interesting about this contrast for my present purposes is the fact that judgment in the Godly sphere involves a primordial violence, an anger so great at humanity’s transgression of Godly law, of the moral code laid down in the commandments, that only the choice between painful destruction and eternal salvation is possible. The golden bowl of the title is a reference to this. John is shown “seven golden bowls full of the wrath of god” and when each is emptied on the earth during the final judgment terrible calamities ensue.[4]

            Secondly, there are references to Greek tragedy in The Golden Bowl, primarily via the narrative role played by the Assinghams. The way their interludes punctuate the story with a mixture of analysis and prolepsis has often been compared with the role of the chorus in traditional Greek tragedy. Once again, the source of James’ reference is full of violence and pathos. Nietzsche, Hardy and Lawrence were all so fascinated with Greek tragedy for its ability to represent the primordial clashes of immense universal energies which they saw as a slap in the face of our modern conception of individuality and selfhood. 

            Less obviously, but just as interestingly, a number of references to popular genres in The Golden Bowl warrant a mention. Or perhaps rather than being a reference to particular genres, it might be more precise to call it a reference to a theme common to a cluster of popular genres, both oral and literate. That theme is incest. Being at the root of one of our culture’s most difficult clashes, at least according to Freud - namely that between our basic drives and the social - it has been put into a variety of popular forms of expression. It exists as a theme in sagas, in fairy and folk tales, in traditional ballads and in parables. One we all still know is Sleeping Beauty. I might add that incest here means more (or less, if you like) than a sexual relation between family members. Whether or not Adam and Maggie Verver’s relationship is ‘purely Platonic’ is beside the point for my purposes. What is of interest is the mental closeness which makes it impossible for Maggie to fulfil herself separately from her father. This is the topic of Sleeping Beauty. On her 15th birthday, when the evil spell comes into effect, she and the entire court falls into a deep sleep while a rosebush with deadly thorns encircles the castle. Many a prince attempting to enter dies, his hands caught on the prickly branches. On the eve of womanhood Sleeping Beauty is suspended with and tied to her home and her parents, unable to enter the world outside as a separate, sexual, individual being. Eventually, once the 100 years of the evil spell are over, she is released and given to a prince in marriage. It is hard to imagine that James did not have something of this in mind when devicing the modern parable of princesses, princes, fathers and stepmothers that The Golden Bowl undoubtedly is.

           

            But let me return to the question of history and to the question of what authority the past holds for us. Each of the influences mentioned above are interesting on their own but together they come to signify something quite different, quite ambitious. It is as if James has pulled together the entirety of the foundation of our Western tradition, as if he has consciously put himself up against the whole spectrum of expressions which together make up our beginnings. There is the Bible, classical civilisation, Germanic oral folk tales, Nordic sagas and ballads from most parts of Northern Europe. That it was really James’ intention to deal with ‘Everything from the Beginning’ is something we can hardly doubt when among the protagonists we find Adam, the first man and proto-type of fathers.

            That The Golden Bowl is heavy with the weight of history is then established -what the novel does with such a weight is something I shall return to. But what we are time and again brought to see is the fact that all of these beginnings are raw and violent, full of the directness of strong desires and extreme punishment. This is our heritage, he seems to say, this is what has been handed down to us and what we are shaped by. How do we carve an identity out of all this for ourselves, at this new point in history? The Golden Bowl is a work which is very aware of its place in history and of the fact that a new era, a new set of ideas were about to break through. How is it possible to break free from the old and create a new order when even the language we speak is controlling and making possible the conceptions we can use? James tries, in the only possible way: from the inside. Working from within the tradition he tries to challenge, he sets out to take stock of our situation. The focal point of his inquiry is judgment and it possibilities.

 

            On this issue of modern uses of tradition, it is interesting to note that The Golden Bowl has a surprising amount in common with Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce’s rewriting of The Odyssey and its conception of the heroic matches James’ 20th century version of “Revelation’s” wrath. These two modern texts are constructed around the same juxtaposition between ancient pathos and modernity’s ordinariness. The twenty years and thousands of miles which Ulysses traverses become a day in the life of a petit-bourgeois Dubliner. Similarly, “Revelation’s” destructive wrath of God which condemns thousands to an eternity of suffering for breaking His holy law, becomes a subdued rearrangement of (extra-) marital relations.

            Is this ironic, then, in the case of The Golden Bowl in the way it is in Joyce? Is the sharp difference between “Revelation’s” violence and the novel’s “civilised” re-arranging meant to make us frown or wince at the small-mindedness of our form of society? Does it point to a perceived loss of something primordial? James’ ambiguity makes this a particularly difficult question.

            However, it will be argued in this paper that The Golden Bowl presents us with no longing for a simplified primordiality; instead, it is a sustained celebration of the complexity of ethical judgment. The way towards a full understanding of James’ position is a labyrinth because he only really presents to us some, admittedly very tempting, alternatives to the more genuine ethical modes of judging, which - being nothing but possibilities to be read between the lines - can only be imaginatively engaged with. I shall return to these briefly towards the end.

            The central dichotomy, then, of what we might call ‘models of judgment’ in the novel consists of on the one side the righteous, wrathful God’s condemnation refered to in the title and on the other Maggie Verver’s non-judgment. Charlotte and the Prince have sinned by both codes. By the former, punishment is simple and violent: eternal condemnation in hell. Graham Greene, for one, sees the “flush of the flames” on their faces. A little pun on names makes it particularly clear that we are intended to have God’s model of judgment in mind here. Charlotte rhymes with harlot, Charlotte the Harlot, i.e., Charlotte the whore, which brings to mind the Whore of Babylon featuring in “Revelation”, where Babylon most likely is a reference to Rome and the emperor, i.e. the Roman Prince of the novel. In short, Charlotte is the Prince’s whore, seen from this Godly perspective.

            Maggie’s response, however, is as circumspect as is humanly possible. She wants no violent confrontation to tip the equilibrium of her boat, no chaos of strong feelings demarcating their right. Instead, she subtly shifts and manipulates to exclude her rival and regain her husband. This is where many critics are taken in with her new-found abilities of perception and very fine intuitive form of changing. She is a character James has invested a lot of his imagination in, a character which grows in the novel like none of the others. She seems to be the alternative offered us to the categorical, formula-based Godly judging. Maggie refuses to judge and punish and wants only to rectify the situation.

            In fact, the novel presents her as more than a simple alternative - she is the exact opposite of “Revelation’s” judgment. Maggie and the wrathful God are presented as a perfect either/or. And this is where we should start to be suspicious. It is too symmetrical and she is too perfect. Her pitfall, ethically, is a paradoxical one: it is an aspiration to be good, to be happy, never to do wrong. By aspiring to perfection in all human relations, she relativises them fatally. For example, in the name of filial loyalty and fairness she is unwilling to ‘give up’ her father for her husband, thereby revealing that she does not (or better, does not want to) understand that the two men each make a conflicting claim to her attention, i.e., that conflict - and hence judgment - is inherent to her situation.

            The novel forces us to look further afield than the God/Maggie dichotomy to find a model of judgment which takes in the complexity of conflicting claims and desires. And this is where it gets particularly difficult, because no such position is sustained throughout The Golden Bowl. The one character who gives us a suggestion of these possibilities is effectively silenced. That character is Charlotte Stant.

            When writing The Golden Bowl James tentatively named it Charlotte but wrote a novel which all but eliminated the character which would have named it.[5] Almost a century later Martha Nussbaum sat down to write an essay on this Charlotte Stant and ended up writing her seminal essay about the novel which became a twenty page analysis of Maggie Verver’s character.[6] Nussbaum speculates that James may either have experienced the same as herself - that he, too, had witnessed Maggie take over a narrative originally intended for Charlotte, in an eerie parallel to the plot; or, alternatively, that he was thinking of giving the novel a title “that would point us to the central importance of the novel’s silences”. Regardless of conjectures about whether or not James originally intended to let her “speak” in this novel, the silencing of Charlotte Stant is a fact. She is there in the narrative, just, fighting for her place, but is eventually shipped off to America to a fate controlled by her husband.

 

            As mentioned earlier, the position which Charlotte exemplifies can only be imaginatively engaged with -- it is only sketched as the vaguest of possibilities in the novel. One hint is her taste. A judgment of taste always relies on a context, on a whole against which each decision is made. Charlotte, it is emphasised throughout the novel, has a natural ability to make such contextual decisions. Another aspect which should alert us to her potential is the reciprocity she requires and provides in her relationship with the Prince. The famous moment of their kiss is so striking for its description of the intensity of their energies and drives meeting. In short, Charlotte is a character to whom the immediate, concrete reality of the context she is in informs the judgments (whether aesthetic or moral) she makes. No abstract principle guides her decisions because human judging must fit the odd and twisted path of human life, must, in other words, conform itself to the particularity of each situation.

 

Conclusion:

But let's return to the Vidal/ Bayley discussion. To say that The Golden Bowl sees knowledge and power over others sink and love as a principle rise, as Bayley contends, seems to me to show a blindness to the ethical issues at the heart of this book. According to the ideas sketched here, though, Vidal doesn't fare much better. He is certainly right in emphasising "dark knowledge": that is, the violence which is the essence of the cultural history he uses as a back drop to his story. But the point of such a summoning of violent beginnings, I hope to have shown, is precisely the attempt to carve out a new mode of judgment and understanding.

 

In short, as I see it The Golden Bowl wants to suggest the possibility of a context-based ethical mode which no easy principle can explain -- whether that principle be a conception of universal love or the desire for power over others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1]“Revelation”, The Bible; American Standard Version; 1901; ch. 15:7.

[2]Bayley, John: The Characters of Love; Constable; London: 1960, p. 218.

[3]Vidal, Gore: “Cracking The Golden Bowl” in The New York Review of Books, March 1; 1984.

[4]The bowl also features in “Ecclesiastes” but in a milder version of the final judgment. Here it is said that when the golden bowl is broken “then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return to God who gave it” (v. 6).

[5] Edel, Leon: Henry James The Master (1901-1926); Rupert Hart-Davis; London: 1972, p. 574.

[6]Nussbaum, Martha C.: “Love’s Knowledge - Essays on Philosophy and Literature; Oxford University Press; Oxford: 1990.