“That’s How I Make Them Do What I Like”: Contagious Loving and Maggie’s Homeopathic Magic”

Sigi Jöttkandt, Ghent University

“That’s how I make them do what I like!” Maggie explains to an awed Fanny on page 339 of The Golden Bowl. “It had an effect on Mrs Assingham, who rose with the deliberation that, from point to point, marked the widening of her grasp. ‘My dear child, you’re amazing” (339). My questions here will be twofold: how does Maggie make them “do”, and secondly, and just as interestingly, what is it that Maggie “likes”?

The second question is perhaps easiest to answer, at least at first sight. As we know, by the beginning of Book 2 Maggie has become beset by a gnawing suspicion that her marriage is not all it seems, and she devotes many hours to “thinking” about the relation between the members of her immediate family: her father Adam, her step-mother Charlotte, and her husband the Prince Amerigo. It comes to her, in a series of inspirations, that Amerigo and Charlotte are having an affair and are managing this by “treating” her as if she were, ultimately, too innocent – “stupid” is Maggie’s word for it – ever to come to this realization by herself. It is this innocence or “stupidity” that is supposed to make them “safe.” The essence of Maggie’s plan, her sole “act”, is simply to continue to behave as though she were indeed so stupid, yet by doing so she forces Amerigo to choose between herself and his lover. What Maggie “likes” is thus not so much Amerigo himself (although James leaves us in no doubt as to her strong feelings for her husband). What she “likes,” that is, is not the simple success of recapturing her husband, as an elated Fanny, in an unusual display of obtuseness, gushes: “You’ve done it . . . They’re going.” “Is that what I wanted?” Maggie smartly rejoins (461). Revealing her affinity with an earlier James heroine for whom freedom is the key word, what Maggie “likes” is for her husband to freely choose (her); her aim is to make him give her a sign of his desire. Simply banishing her husband’s lover is not enough for this acute young woman; she wants him to actively want her (which doesn’t strike me as too much to ask in any marriage).

The question the novel raises, then, is how do you go about getting someone to want you? How do you elicit desire in another, particularly when the other already desires someone else? In this sense, surely it is Maggie who is the ‘adulterer’ here as she tries to shift the direction of Amerigo’s desire away from Charlotte and towards herself? Maggie’s high sense of and deeply felt guilt towards her old friend evinces her recognition of this and her “groveling” attempts (Maggie’s own word for it, 467) to allow Charlotte to retain her pride in the face of Amerigo’s betrayal suggests nothing so much as the deeply conflicted feelings of a woman who has walked off with her best friend’s husband.

How do you get someone to desire you then? As an entire literary tradition founded upon courtly love has taught us, desire is not something that simply erupts spontaneously; it can be cultivated, made to appear. It can be “forced” (to borrow a term from set theory). Desire, in other words, possesses “rules”, as a popular handbook of desire that was doing the rounds in New York City in the mid 1990s reminded us.[1] The first, and easiest, method is to have other people desire you first. Maggie seems well aware of René Girard’s theory of the triangular structure of desire which, after all, played an important role in the formation of her own desire for Amerigo. Recall how, in the first book, Maggie jokes with Amerigo how she would forgive her husband anything, “even should he some day get drunk and beat her, the spectacle of him with hated rivals would, after no matter what extremity, always, for the sovereign charm of it [. . .] suffice to bring her round” (108-9). Nothing makes Amerigo more attractive to her than when she sees other women desire him: “she never admired him so much, or found him heart-breakingly handsome, clever, irresistible, in the very degree in which he had originally and fatally dawned upon her, as when she saw other women reduced to the same passive pulp that had then begun, once for all, to constitute her substance” (108). Although James suggests (through Maggie) that her desire for Amerigo was already well in place before the narratorial consciousness shifts in Book Second to her reflections, it is my feeling that it is only with her growing consciousness of the possibility of Amerigo and Charlotte’s affair that Maggie truly begins to desire her husband, that is, to the extent that she can joke about her jealousy with her husband, she doesn’t yet desire him in the profound way that comes truly to “constitute her substance.” Fanny’s comment seems to confirm this sense when, on suspecting that Maggie has begun to suspect, she tells Bob “[Maggie] has begun to live” (249).

Yet aside from her father, there are few men around who might effect the turn in Amerigo’s attention in her favor. In this case, what other options are available to Maggie? In her own experience with Amerigo, Maggie seems to have learnt something fundamental about desire, which is that it is profoundly mimetic. Desire does not exist in a vacuum but requires a social context in which to appear, and Maggie’s “mimetic” desire for Amerigo is just one (and the least complex) of the forms that this mimesis can take. But despite her own desiring structure being expressed in this simple, first-level mimetic way, this is not to say that “our young woman”, despite her professions, is “stupid”. Maggie is clever enough to realize, for example, that simply by acting like Charlotte (“She would go to balls again” (268)), she will have little prospect of changing Amerigo’s feelings for her. Imitating the object of her beloved’s desire will merely make her pathetic in his eyes, and go nowhere towards lighting the spark of desire in him.[2]

Maggie’s “plan” in fact evolves into a far more subtle understanding of mimesis than a simple imitation of Charlotte, more subtle too than Girard’s triangular model that organizes her own structure of desire. As I said, Maggie’s “plan” is simply to act as if she doesn’t know what is going on, to act as if she were just as innocent and naïve – as “stupid” – as her friends believe her to be. Yet in this way, by imitating a certain unproblematic state among the four participants, she actively brings about its reality. This will require an understanding of mimesis that is more than merely imitative; it must be creative. By acting ‘like’ her husband desired her, and that the relations among the four are precisely as they appear, she makes the imitation into a fact, that is, into a truth.

Now, what I am about to propose might strike you as a little wishful, not unlike the “magical thinking” that Beth Sharon Ash, for one, detects in Maggie’s need to arrange the inconvenient realities of her environment into the harmonious design of her “narcissistic illusion”. But, in truth, what I am proposing is precisely a kind of magic, its difference from the childish, narcissistic universe being that, in this case (as in fact in the Freudian conceptualization Ash originally draws from[3]), the magic works.

In his strangely similarly named monumental study of what we would now loosely call the “tropology” of mythology, The Golden Bough (1890), James Frazer identifies two forms of “sympathetic magic” whose basic principles he discovers operating across manifold cultures and epochs.[4] The first type of sympathetic magic he terms “homeopathic”. Homeopathic magic works according to the “Law of Similarity” where “the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it” (Frazer 11). The other type of magic is “contagious.” Here the “Law” is that of “contact” and it operates according to the principle that things that have once been joined continue to remain so, across the distances of time and space. Thus the magician “infers that whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed part of his body or not” (11).

Both forms of magic are relevant to our discussion, but it is clearly the first, “homeopathic” kind of magic that seems to speak most directly to Maggie’s “plan”. Let us look at bit more closely at the way it is supposed to work then. Both homeopathic and contagious magic, Frazer tells us, operate under the general Law of Sympathy (12). Its basic presupposition is that objects can influence each another from afar. Things are assumed to possess a “secret sympathy” (12) that binds them unerringly together, and whose impulses are transmitted to one another through a kind of “invisible ether” (12). While contagious magic depends upon the existence of a prior link between objects such that anything that is done to one will also be felt in the other (thus giving rise to the various charms involving hair, nails, teeth, afterbirth etc. that Frazer provides as examples), homeopathic magic acts according to the principle that “like produces like.” Here the examples are predominantly of representations: the making of images that are to transform what they represent into reality. Thus Frazer describes the Ojebway Indian who “makes a little wooden image of his enemy and runs a needle into its head or heart”; or the Sumatran woman who makes “a wooden image of a child [and holds it] in her lap, believing that this will lead to the fulfillment of her wish” (13-14). Other forms of homeopathic magic, Frazer tells us, involve the “banishing” of properties in an effort to cure sickness. Describing the “ancient Hindoos”, Frazer relates how an elaborate ceremony was performed against jaundice “whose main drift was to banish the yellow colour to yellow creatures and yellow things, such as the sun, to which it properly belongs, and to procure for the patient a healthy red color from a living, vigorous source, namely a red bull” (15).

Although Frazer never addresses this point directly, the overarching principle driving both homeopathic and contagious magic is the idea of equilibrium. Things that are done to one thing (whether directly or mimetically) create an imbalance in the world which is then rectified by the “success” of the charm in producing its effect on the object. An unspoken “Law of Equilibrium” thus supercedes even the “Law of Sympathy” beneath which Frazer consigns the two forms of magic. But the difference between homeopathic and contagious magic lies in their concepts of what causes the disturbance in equilibrium. In contagious magic, the effect is transmitted through a prior identity which causes all future influences on one to be felt by the other. In homeopathic magic, effects on one object are generated through a likeness that is mimetically forged – the “cause” of homeopathic magic is produced by a representation of the desired effect.

Bearing this distinction between the two forms of magic in mind, let us turn back to The Golden Bowl and the question of how one elicits desire in another person. If to fall in love with someone is to fall to some extent under their “spell” (a word that appears with striking frequency towards the end of the book, particularly in relation to Adam who is several times described as having an “indescribable air of weaving his spell” (448)),[5] the question is what form of this “unfailing magic” (300) does desire take? The Girardian notion of mimetic desire that characterizes Maggie’s own desiring structure seems to fall fairly comfortably within the basic idea of contagion. I fall in love with someone because someone else to whom I am in some way connected also loves him; I “catch” their desire (through direct contact). But recall how contagion really requires a prior contact: things that have once been conjoined will ever be so. Contagious magic thus seems better to describe the relation between the Prince and Charlotte, whose mysterious “identities of impulse” (232), “kinship of expression in the two faces” (286) and “identities of behaviour, expression and tone” (290) increasingly begin to strike our heroine. They are described as “conjoined” (331), two faces on a medallion “for ever face to face” (287). Maggie reflects how “They’ll do everything in the world that suits us, save only one thing – prescribe a line for us that will make them separate” (311). Although this link or bond should be irrevocable, it seems it can be superceded by a magician of superior powers who can forge his own connection with the object, as Adam does when he appears to Maggie as if in possession of a “long silken halter looped round [Charlotte’s] beautiful neck” (450). The very strength of this form of magic is thus also its weakness. There is nothing to stop a magician of still more superior powers from cutting Adam’s leash and binding Charlotte to him. This hints, too, at the inherently violent and acquisitive nature of contagious magic, precisely the traits that many critics have faulted Adam (and, indeed Maggie) for, citing their “collecting” of people as just so much “human furniture” (496) to be hauled out or packed away.[6]

But with Maggie, at least as far as Amerigo is concerned, things are different. Despite their formal relation (as a married couple), there exists no prior emotional link between them and it is this link she must try to forge. But differently from Adam, she approaches the problem from the homeopathic angle. She must make the link and, unlike the obligatory or necessary bond of contagious magic (with all of the violent implications this carries), this link must be voluntary: Amerigo must actively choose her, rather than, like Charlotte with Adam, be forcibly bound to her. He must be made to “like” Maggie, in the homeopathic sense – to gravitate towards her just as yellow things gravitate towards other yellow things.

As I suggested, the way Maggie goes about this is mimetic: she acts ‘like’ there is nothing wrong between her and her husband, and this likeness ultimately produces its result: “‘See?’” asks Amerigo in the closing words of the novel, “I see nothing but you’” (502). Maggie imitates a state of being that ultimately becomes a reality. And because it is produced homeopathically, i.e. voluntarily, this reality is far less brittle and therefore less likely to break than her father’s. However, the word “voluntary”, in this context, is a little misleading, because it implies an act of free agency, whereas magic inevitably presupposes that one is making others do your will. And it remains my sense that the novel does indeed describe the ultimately successful bending of the others’ realities to Maggie’s own will (for which she has been both extensively praised and chastised). It would not be enough simply to have Amerigo suddenly discover that he loves Maggie better than Charlotte – this might be a happy novelistic ending, but it wouldn’t be a James novel. As Maggie discovers, and as I indicated earlier, one doesn’t “freely” desire (in the sense of a consciously chosen act of will); one is rather, and quite specifically, “forced”.

The term is borrowed from set theory and it describes a way of making predictions about the contents of a set that, for various technical reasons unnecessary to go into here, one cannot ever directly know or see. [7] “Forcing” establishes a set of conditions such that, if it is true in one set, one can determine that it will be true in the other set. When I say, then, that Amerigo is “forced” to desire Maggie, this doesn’t refer to any act of violent imposition. Rather, it means that Maggie puts in place a number of conditions such that, if it is true in one (state or condition or more generally, set), then it will (have been) true in the other. By acting like Amerigo desires her, in other words, by setting this as a condition in her own set, she “forces” it to be true in Amerigo’s.

How Maggie accomplishes this recalls a certain logical problem that Lacan discusses in his essay, “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism.”[8] A prison warden will release one of his three prisoners if they can pass a test. If they can determine what color disk he has placed on their backs, they can go free. There are five discs altogether, two black and three white.

1. Possibility one: prisoner A sees two black discs. She makes the immediate deduction that she must be white and runs for the door.

2. Possibility two: prisoner A sees a white disc on B and a black disc on C. Since B is not running for the door, she concludes she must be white and runs for the door.

3. Possibility three: prisoner A sees two white discs, with the result that she must make a supposition in order to determine her color. What if she supposes that she is black? With this supposition, she watches to see what prisoner B does. If she is black, and B also supposes that he is black, then by all rights C should be seeing two blacks and be running for the door. However, C does not run, so B can conclude (as A did in possibility two), that he is white. But what if B also does not run? In this case, prisoner A is forced to revise her initial supposition and conclude that she is white. She, along with the other two (who have meanwhile reached the same conclusion), all run for the door at the same moment – and the warden is obliged to release them all.

Let us put Maggie into the position of prisoner A in the first possibility, allowing the bowl to act as the definitive proof of the Prince’s and Charlotte’s infidelity. In this schema, she ‘sees’ two black discs, as it were, she ‘sees’ their guiltiness and should be able to run for the door. Next, the Prince occupies the position of prisoner A in the second possibility: he sees Maggie with a white disc and Charlotte with a black and, knowing what he does about himself, imagines he also is wearing a black disc. However, since Maggie doesn’t act, he must logically conclude that he is white. Let us now add Charlotte to the schema: Charlotte occupies the position of prisoner A in the third possibility. She sees only two white discs (on Maggie and the Prince, i.e. she doesn’t know what Maggie knows, and nor does she know what the Prince knows about Maggie’s knowledge). Imagining she is wearing a black disc, and supposing that the Prince also imagines he is wearing a black disc, she imagines that he puzzles about why Maggie doesn’t immediately ‘run’ (i.e. accuse him). But since Maggie doesn’t act, the Prince, like prisoner A in possibility 2, must be concluding that he is white. However, since the Prince himself, then, doesn’t run – which he would were she, Charlotte, wearing a black disc – Charlotte must revise her initial supposition and conclude that she is white, like them all, in which case they must all make a run for the door.

The core of Charlotte’s problem, what makes the game so incomprehensible to her, is precisely Maggie’s immobility. Charlotte believes she knows that she and the Prince are guilty, i.e. wearing black discs and, with her “perfect critical vision” (272), believes that Maggie is gradually coming to recognize this. As Maggie herself admits to the Prince at the end of the novel, “she [Charlotte] knows, she knows! . . . She knows enough” (489). What Charlotte can’t understand, then, is why Maggie, presumably seeing the two black discs so clearly, nevertheless remains still, the effect of which is to make the Prince hesitate about what he sees. Is Maggie standing still because she is stupid and genuinely sees black as white (the very same stupidity that was originally supposed to “save” the two adulterers)? Or is her immobility the result of hesitation? Charlotte’s inability to answer this question – her inability to “close the time of comprehending”[9] and act – dooms her to the permanent imprisonment James so unambiguously condemns her in the final chapters of the novel. Recall the “gilt wires and bruised wings, the spacious but suspended cage, the home of eternal unrest, of pacings, beatings, shakings, all so vain, into which the baffled consciousness helplessly resolved itself” (413).

Time constraints prevent a more thorough exploration of the Prince’s position but we know that as the prisoner A in the second possibility, everything depends upon a movement by Maggie. What is crucial for Maggie, then, is not what the Prince is thinking but for how long he can continue to think. Maggie must use the Prince’s “time of comprehending” to baffle Charlotte, making it impossible for Charlotte to arrive at the moment of action. It is this temporal dimension of the problem that Lacan highlights in his notion of anticipated certainty. For as long as the Prince continues to think, Charlotte must waver in indecision, in a paralysis that makes Maggie free to act: “‘They’re paralysed, the paralysed!’ she commented, deep within” (297).

What is crucial for what I propose to call the truth status of Maggie’s act is its dimension of intersubjectivity for, at the most fundamental level, without the presence of the other two, Maggie would be incapable of ever discovering the color of the disc on her back. But even though she ‘sees’ enough to enable her to arrive at an immediate conclusion (i.e. as prisoner A in the first possibility: she sees two blacks which make her white), she nevertheless imitates the others’ hesitations. She acts like she sees what she wants them to see (i.e. all whites), which in turn makes the others hesitate as to what they see. In effect, Maggie creates a condition in her ‘set’ that “forces” a truth in the sets of the others, namely, that they are not guilty (whose ultimate meaning is that it is Maggie whom Amerigo desires). What makes this act an act of forcing, i.e. what makes it ‘true’ rather than merely a wishful deluded act of narcissistic illusion, is its intersubjective dimension. Because this is a truth that is in the end ‘assented’ to by the others (Charlotte cannot move first because she cannot conclude, while the Prince comes to ‘see’ what Maggie sees), it escapes being the purely subjective act of an individual and acquires the status of a collective truth.

Returning to my earlier question, then, it seems that the trick to getting someone to desire you is simply to act as if they already do. This short-circuits the causal logic of contagious loving that depends on the existence of a prior connection. Maggie’s supreme insight was to recognize how any sign of one’s desire will only ever be perceived as a demand by the beloved, unless the beloved already desires you first. In every case, there must first be a latent desire on which desire can then cast its mysterious spell. Maggie’s stroke of brilliance, what makes Maggie the master magician, is in the way she jump-starts the desiring circle through an act of homeopathic magic: she acts like her husband desires her and in this way ‘forces’ it to become a truth.