THE INTEREOR MQNOLWUE IN THE
AMBASSAD‘GR5 AND THE GOLDEN BOWL

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The Interior Monologue in
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ABSTRACT

THE INTERIOR MONOLOGUE IN
THE ggEASSADORs AND THE GOLDEN BOWL

 

 

by

Kristin Olson Lauer

This study examines in detail three interior monologues

#

 

from The_Ambassadg£s_and eleven from The Golden ngl. Each
monologue is analyzed both as it relates to the structure of
the novel as a whole and as it is constructed in itself.
These studies of the monologues lead to a definition of the
Jamesian interior monologue.

The interior monologue in James may be one of two
types: a rhetorical monologue with extended metaphors and much
foreshortened narration or a dramatic soliloquy which presents
a character at a moment of decision or crisis. The monologue
is a block of the novel in which the character is alone; he
is sometimes isolated physically and always psychologically.
In other words, he feels alone. James always creates the
definite sense of a particular time and place. The monologue
has a frame; in The Golden ggwl, for example, this frame is
three times a terrace in front of a grand mansion. The
character is working through a specific problem. The monologue
usually has a definite start, turn and finish. Often the

turn involves a moment of insight or decision. These charac-

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KRISTIN OLSON LAUER

teristics vary from character to character and from novel to
novel, but they are, in some sense, present in all the mono-
lOgues.

Those who expect James to fulfill the same purposes
as a modern stream-of—consciousness writer will be disappointed.
James belongs to a more traditional school. Everything in
the Jamesian monologue is ordered toward one central purpose
whether that be the creation of an atmosphere of anxiety or
the introduction of a particular consciousness. James uses
the interior monologue as a structural device and as a stylistic

technique. In Volume II of The Golden Bowl the style which

 

formerly has characterized meditation scenes becomes the
predominant style of the work.

The later method of James provides a superb blending
of the conventions of the romance and the mimesis of realism.
These two strains-~the romantic and the mimetic--are developed
in James through what may be, for convenience, defined as the
external and internal plots of the novels. The external plot
follows the conventions of the romance and often has a Journey

or quest theme. The external plot of The Ambassadors, for

 

example, involves Strether's Journey to Europe to retrieve
Chad from the evil influence of Madame de Vionnet. The
internal plot, on the other hand, follows the patterns of
tragedy and retains, in modified form, the pattern of pride,

flaw, downfall and reCOgnition. The tragic plot of The Ambas-

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KRISTIN OLSON LAUER

sadors is Strether's gradual awareness of what he has lost
through a fruitless life. It is within the monologue blocks
that the internal plots are advanced.

One of the most striking characteristics of the
Jamesian monologue is the range of imagery employed. The
imagery is most effective in objectifying states of mind. It
renders states of mind concrete and thus makes them less theoret-
ical and more dramatic and empirical. The monologues also pro-
vide a synthesis of past, present and future time, develop the
themes of the novels and uncover patterns of motivation and
rationalization. James's most compelling concern in both The

‘gmbassadors and The Golden_Bowl is the faithful creation of

 

 

an individual consciousness, and the interior monologue, which,
traditionally, unveils consciousness, is an important vehicle

through which James achieves his purpose.

THE INTERIOR MONOLOGUE IN
THE AMBASSADOE§_AND THE GOLDEN BOWL

 

 

by
Kristin Olson Lauer

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

G; «- (CNS 4/9/33

1"" a". f: " *fi"

DEDICATION

For two gentle men:

Darrell Lynn Lauer

Thomas C. Gunnings

CONTENTS

 

 

Page
Introduction ......................................... 1
Chapter I
The Foundations.......... ............... . ............. 12
Chapter II
The Use of The Interior Monologue in The Ambassadgrs.. 29
Chapter III
The Interior Monologue in The golden Bowl,Volume I.... 71
Chapter IV
Maggie........................................... ..... 156
Conclusion...... ...... .... ....... . ..... ............... 213

Bibliography ..... 0.0000000... .......... 00000 00000 .0... 216

Introduction

Because the creation of the centre of consciousness

is the primary concern of The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl

 

 

a study of the interior monologues in these novels illuminates
all of their other aspects: structure, characterization and
theme in particular. Although an illumination of the later
method is the ultimate reason for my study of the monologues,
my immediate concern is primarily definition.

A definition of the interior monologue in James will
provide us with two types of information: First, a definition
of the interior monologue as a structural unit of the novel will
clarify the structure of the later novels. Second, a definition
of the characteristics of the monologue itself will provide a
fresh approach to the problems of the later novels. What is
James trying to do as his novels become more and more blocks of
long monologues? A study of the later novels with emphasis on
point of view, for example, will lead to a focus on the Choice
and creation of consciousness. If, however, we shift the focus
and isolate various monologues, noticing that the isolation be-
comes more and more difficult, we are approaching the later
novels from a new perspective. We have moved from emphasis
upon characterization to emphasis upon structure: from the

mind to the manner.

Therefore, a study of the interior monologue will provide

a study of structure and a clarification of the later method.

We will have a definite catalogue of the characteristics of

the interior monologue in James, and a statement of the structure
of the later novels. As an interesting corollary, an analysis

of the plot of Tge Ambassado§s_and The Golden Bowl emerges.

 

 

Though James himself hated the idea of plot, he was never able
to divorce himself from dependence on plots which have always
been open to labels of melodrama. These melodramatic, or
romantic, plots, combined with heavy reliance upon interior
monologue (written in an essentially mimetic mode) provide the
tensions and ironies which often have made the later novels seem
not only obscure, but cumbersome and sloppy.

Most of the critical studies which deal with monologues
in James do not approach the monologue as a separate technique,
but instead focus on the consciousness from which the monologue
stems. These studies are analyses of the techniques which James
employs to dramatize consciousness, to a minor extent, but
usually their major concern is not with technicalities. Percy

Lubbock, in The Craft gT_Fiction, comes closest to a technical

 

analysis of what James is doing as he dramatizes Strether's
consciousness. He says that when James "brings his [Strether'g7
mind into view” James "makes a little scene of it. The world

of silent thought is thrown open as an added means for the
novelist to dramatize his story."1

Few of the critics go so far as Lubbock, though, into

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the technicalities of the monologues. Most analyses of monologues,
in fact, emerge as byproducts in the middle of discussions of
characterization. Discussions of this type, which are really
detailed studies of the psychology of character, often concern
Maggie's monologues at the beginning of the second volume of

The Golden Bowl. In these studies the consciousness reveals

 

the character and thus illuminates the theme.

The illumination of the theme of The Ambassadgrs and The

 

Golden ngl is almost always the critical interest in any study

 

of them. Technical analyses of structure are usually also highly
thematic. For example, J. A. Ward's study of structure in
James2 is built around the interactions of the characters:
Relationships determine structure. Other concepts of the struc-
ture of the later novels evaluate them as metaphors? allegories
and complex dramatizations of various ethical systems. These
approaches are all highly subjective. A thematic intent is
superimposed upon the novels and all patterns within the novel
are carefully articulated to correspond to the demands of a
theory. Happily, the structures of novels and interior monologues
lend themselves to more technical, exacting standards than those
of character analysis and theme.

Critics have dealt with the romantic aspects of James's
plots,)4 and the tragic,5 but few critics have done anything which
suggests that the two modes work together, contrapuntally,in

James. James has, actually, assimilated into The Ambasgadgrs

 

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and The_§gTden_BgflT_many elements from romantic traditions, many
from the traditions of tragedy and many more from the school of
realistic fiction. All of these traditions render the later
novels, especially, highly complex and peculiar to James. I

have found that defining two plots, the internal and the external,
in James's novels, elucidates where the strains of romance and
realism meet, and which parts of the novels belong most correctly
to which strain. It is incorrect to say that James writes
romances, and even more incorrect to say that he writes tragedies.
It is not, however, erroneous to say that there is the convention
of the romance in James and the characterization of the tragedy.

A brief history of plotting in James will explain my method of
definition.

Stripped to their bare essentials, James's plots fulfill
the definitions of two modes--the romantic and the mimetic. In
order to do this, James sets up a contrapuntal movement in which
the realistic, often tragic, manner and the romantic, comic,
manner work into a final organic unit. The demands of both
dimensions lead to tensions and ironies that may appear melo-
dramatic to some, and yet are actually the product of two highly
legitimate dramatic forms.

A James plot serves to provide the situation necessary
to force his protagonist with his intelligent, developed, sensi-

tive consciousness into a highly complex ethical decision, and

it is this protagonist and his ethical decision which determine

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the structure of a James novel. Just as the "centre” must be
"sufficiently acute in order to enable it, like a set and
lighted scene, to hold the play,"6 so the plot must be equal
to the demands of straining this sensitive consciousness enough
to render the ethical decision one of the utmost importance and
interest. The struggle of the consciousness must have drama
and immediacy. The elements of drama, immediacy and poignancy
are supplied in large part by the plot.

James recounts this process of building a plot which
gives substance to an ethical decision in his Preface to The

Ambassadors. Strether's outburst to Little Bilham in Gloriani's

 

garden is to be the climax of the book. The master craftsman
James, carefully, elaborately, structures the plot around this
outburst. In the first place, the outburst must be

led up to; the probable course to such a goal, the goal
of so conscious a predicament, must have in short to be
finely calculated. . . .There must exist a certain
principle of probability: he /Strethe57 wouldn't have
Indulged in his peculiar tone‘Without a reason; it
would take a felt predicament or a false position to
give him so ironic an accent.

 

The entire plot of Th3 Ambassadors, consequently, is built upon

 

the necessity of placing Strether in a "false position."
Strether's consciousness has become the dramatic scene, and the
plot itself must be equal to the task of providing such torment
for Strether that his decision will literally pit protagonist
against antagonist within his own consciousness to the extent

that the intensity of two strong passions in conflict will

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threaten to tear poor Strether apart in bewilderment. As

James says, the situation springs from "The play of wildness and
the development of extremes." Such ”extremes" as are necessary
to structure Strether's predicament are carefully formulated
within every James novel. The plot outlines are in themselves
fascinating, as a look at James's notebooks will immediately
affirm; the demands of "wildness" and ”extremes" are not to be
met with plots of bare, classical simplicity. For this reason,
James drew much of his patterning from the romance. The ethical
decision is forced by the elements of the romance, but its
nature and tone are the nature and tone of classical tragedy
with the traditional tragic pattern of pride, flaw, downfall and
recognition.8 Recognition or "vision” provides the tragic
resolution and the spiritual salvation for every one of James's
major centres.

For convenience, I label the romantic plot the external
and the tragic or mimetic plot, the internal. As James matures,
the elements of the two plots become each more sophisticated
and more carefully defined. The most "rounded" of James's plots,

then, The Amba§sadors, will have both strains-~romantic and

 

tragic, comic and mimetic, in perfect harmony, each developing

and sustaining the other. These diverse plots are unified by

the main character who is the protagonist for both. They are

also unified through the ironies that emerge with the two separate

resolutions. The romantic, comic, plot will center upon action

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and will demand a happy resolution. The tragic, mimetic plot
will center upon character and will demand a tragic resolution.
In this manner James is able to avoid the stylization of most
romantic characters, and yet maintain the infinite variety of
romantic situations, while at the same time avoiding the styliza-
tion of tragic action but creating a tragic hero with all the
stature and pathos of a mythic figure.9
It is perhaps stretching a point to argue that the
mimetic plot is always tragic. The real problem encountered
if we apply the label of tragedy to James is that James has no
metaphysics--a requirement of the most classically tragic fic-
tions. Tragedy, in the strictest sense, implies human will
pitted against fates: cosmic forces. For this reason those who
deny James the stature of a classical tragedian have a legitimate
position, and even though they may not realize why Strether
or Isabel or Milly do not strike them as tragic, it is probably
for Just this reason. The destinies of James's characters are
peculiarly human destinies, to be worked out in social patterns.
In another sense, though, James T§_a tragedian, because his
close attention to the effects of personal choices keeps ever
before the reader the sense of the consequences of free will
and the choice of a specific fate. In other words, even though
Strether himself has chosen his destiny, his mistake assumes
the stature of tragedy Just because he is deep enough, various

enough, to be an archetypal hero.

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The basic romantic plot which James employs is that of
the Journey or quest. The protagonist, equipped with the tra-
ditional innocence of the New World, leaves home on a quest or
mission only to be accomplished in the Old World. Within this
convention Strether comes to Paris and Adam and Maggie procure
the treasures of the Old World for American City. An under-
standing of James's plotting helps immeasurably to explain how

he structures The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. The problem

 

 

of applying a specific label to James becomes answered if we
remember that, in a sense, every author defies categorization.
Strether, therefore, pursues a romantic quest and suffers a
tragic fate which he accepts in a realistic mode. Literary
conventions, in the final analysis, have meaning only as they
organize and clarify specific works and the techniques employed
in those works. This theory is one reason why I have not
shrunk from unabashedly using the term "interior monologue"
indefinite and clumsy as it may be. Within the vocabulary for
scenes of extended reflection interior monologue comes closest
to expressing what I am investigating. I could coin a term of
my own, and yet it would, in the end, become only another in
that endless list of terms which define essentially the same
thing.

No study of James will ever be exhaustive. Hopefully,
someday someone will define the interior monologue as it began

in the earliest tales and trace its use in the early and middle

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novels as well as the later ones.

From Professor Clyde Henson, my mentor, teacher, friend,
I learned a healthy terror in the face of, and a wild enthusiasm
for, the later style of Henry James. Without Professor Henson
and my dear friends from his seminar who heard the same drummer
I did--William Biddle, Dennis Garn, Jack Helder, James Huffman,
Sita Patricia Smith Marks, Bruce Tracy, Regina Wall and Stuart
Wilson--the march would have been far longer and dryer. Without
Professor Valerie Bohanan Carnes's perfect model and wise guidance,
as my Beatrice, into the ways of academia, I should never have
set out. I owe special gratitude to Patty Marks and Bruce Tracy

who labored through my chapter on The_AmQassad9rs in its crudest

 

form and gave me invaluable advice and the courage to continue.
Without Professor Tracy I would have been a Lewis without Clark,
charting Vast territories alone. Without Professor William
Biddle's warm heart I would have missed possibly all the fun

of the endeavor. Without my unselfish, devoted friends, Patricia
Lauer Crosby, Jane Carolyn Church, Linda Caroselli Edison and
Alyce Morishige I would never have believed in myself enough to
reach the coast, and without our tireless Pathfinder, Professor
James H. Pickering, all of the graduate assistants in the Depart-
ment of English at Michigan State university would stand with
neither map nor compass. To my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bert T.
Olson, I owe my sustaining faith without which no first step is

ever taken, and the curiosity to listen for my own drummer. I

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would not have understood exactly why James does not strike many
peOple as a tragedian if Professor Bernard J. Paris had not
pointed it out to me. Without Professor Fred Carlisle's probing,
thoughtful questions my definitions would be far less clear,

and without the conversations I had with Dennis Garn who listened
for hours to my explanations and qualifications, I would never
have understood so clearly the distinction between the mimetic
and romantic in James. For encouragement there has been no
equal to my sister Karin Emily Olson, herself engrossed in a
similar project. Without Mary Kathrin and Robert Cook I would
have been far more tardy reaching my destination for want of a
dependable typewriter and two dependable shoulders to lean on.

It has been said that behind every man's achievement there is

a woman: if this is so, than the reverse is a hundred times more
true. Not only behind, but in front of and, most wonderfully,
beside, stood one man, through the mornings, afternoons and long
evenings: my husband, Darrell Lynn Lauer. In conclusion, I

wish to thank Professor Thomas Gunnings who taught me to chart

by the stars in the darkness and Lynne: Who made the coffee.

FOOTNOTES

1(New York, 1929), p. 157.

2Joseph Anthony Ward, The Search for Form: Studies TE the
Structure 3: Tamesis FIcEion (CEapeI HIII, I967)

3For some interesting discussions of the structure of the later
novels see Yvor Winters, "Maule's Curse” in Maule's Well;
Studies in the History of American Obscurantism: Hawthorne,
Cooper, MEIVIIle, Poe, Hierson, Jenés Very, EmIly‘DIEEInson,
Henrngames (NorfoIET'I938). Winfers hEIds essentIally the
vIew that I'do of the importance of ethical choice in James:
Since James conceived the art of the novel primarily in
terms of plot, and plot almost wholly in terms of ethical
choice and its consequences; since he raised the plotting
of the novel to a level of seriousness which it had never
before attained in English; since all intelligent criticism
of James is resolved inevitably into a discussion of plot;
this moral sense, this crisis in history, will prove, I
believe, to be the essential problem of James's art. (p.176)
See also James L. Spencer, ”Symbolism in The Golden Bowl,"
Modern Fiction Studies, III (Winter 1957-587, 3:345755112abeth
Stevenson, The CFESEEH Corridor (New York, 1949 ; James Walter
Allen, The EfiglIsh NdveI: A Short Critical History (London, 1954);
Sallie SEErs, The NegaEIve Imagination: Term and Perspective in
the Novels gT'Hgfiry James (IEHEEET—T968) Ié“" '-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ll

“See Jacques Barzun, "James the Melodramatist,

Kenyon Review, V
(August, 1943), 508-521.

 

 

 

5See Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James
(New York, 1962). -‘ '—.

6Henry James, The Art ET the NoveT_(New York, 1962), p. 16.

 

7Ibid., p. 313.

8For a broader explanation of my use of the terms romantic and
tragic as they apply to the novel see Robert Scholes and Robert
Kellogg, The Eature_gT_Narrathe (New York, 1966).

 

 

9This distinction is drawn by Scholes and Kellogg, gp.cit.,
Pp. 207-239.

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Chapter 1
The Foundations

1
It was Percy Lubbock in The Craft 2T_Fiction who first

 

recognized that James was dramatizing his centres of conscious-
ness as subjects in themselves:

[james's method is to bring his ZStrether's7'mind into

View at the differen moments, one after another, when

it is brushed by new experience--to make a little scene

of it, without breaking into hidden depths where the

change of purpose is proceeding--to multiply these

glimpses until the silent change is apparent, though

no word has actually been said of it.
Lubbock is talking about the interior monologue as a vehicle for
uncovering the process of change: growth, awareness, acceptance
or deterioration. The Jamesian monologue serves this purpose of
recording change within the consciousness either of attitude or
perception, one usually giving rise to the other. The record
of changes within the consciousness is both a structural and
, stylistic literary technique. The blocks of the novel which
expose the consciousness in which the character is essentially
alone uncover the motivations for action and change and are
part of the architecture of the work. In this sense these
blocks, more easily separated in the earlier novels than in the
later, are elements of structure in the same way that scenes

in a play are separate elements of structure and may be analyzed

in themselves as entities with their own internal principles of

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structure apart from the dynamics of the play as a whole.

In another sense, in James, the interior monologue is a
style which James assumes when dealing with the processes of
consciousness. Every writer has his own particular manner of
uncovering both internal thought and feeling. In the modern
novel it is customary to use the stream—of—consciousnessstyle
within an interior monologue, thus creating the kind of free-
flowing effect which Freud intimated is the most accurate way
to reach preverbal levels of articulation. Modern writers are
trying to imitate feeling as it approaches thought. It is
ironic that William James, brother of Henry James, coined the
term "stream of consciousness" because James himself is neither
the father of, nor a practitioner of, a stream-of—consciousness
method. James is trying to achieve some of the same effects
for which the stream-of-consciousness writers like James Joyce
and VirginiaWoolff struggle, but he is employing a very different
style.

Because the phrase interior monologue as applied to James
includes both structure and style, it is these two aspects which
must be investigated if we are to determine exactly what James
does with the technique. The interior monologue which occurs

in Chapter XLII of The Egrtrait gT_a_Lady is James's most famous

 

because he mentions it as an important tool in the uncovering of
Isabel‘s consciousness in his Preface to the novel. This

clearly indicates that James felt that the interior monologue was

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a block of structure as well as a narrative technique. He is
very aware of presenting Isabel, alone, in meditation:

Reduced to its essence it is but the vigil of searching
criticism; but it throws the action further forward than
twenty ’incidents' might have done. It was designed to
have all the vivacity of incident and all the economy of
picture. She sits up, by her dying fire, far into the
night, under the spell of recognitions on which she

finds the last sharpness suddenly wait. It is a representa-
tion of her motionlessly seeing, and an attempt withal to
make the mere still lucidIEy of her act as 'interesting'
as the surprise of a caravan or the identification of a
pirate.

It represents, for that matter, one of the identifica-
tions dear to the novelist, and even indispensible to
him, but it all goes on without her being approached by
another person and without her leaving her chair.

One enlightening method to use in an examination of the
Jamesian monologue is to look at each monologue separately both
as it relates to the structure of the novel as a whole and as
it is constructed in itself. This method reveals both the
internal and external dynamics of each monologue and the charac-

teristics of the narrative style employed. This technique is

very adequate for an analysis of the monologues of The Ambassadors

 

and of Volume I of The Golden Bowl. In Maggie's volume of The

 

Golden Bowl it is somewhat harder to distinguish separate

 

monologue blocks because the particular style of the interior
monologue is the style used predominantly throughout the volume.
For this reason, those monologues chosen from Maggie's volume
are more arbitrarily selected than the others. As James's later
style developed, style overshadowed the dramatic structure until,

as Yvor Winters urges:

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It is only a step, in the matter of style, from The
Golden Bowl to Dorothy Richardson and Proust, frdfi'
ffiem Eo Ehe iridescent trifling of Mrs. Woolf, and
from her to the latest Joyce; in fact James travelled
the greater part of this distance when he wrote The
Sense 3T_EE§ Past.3 0_..

 

 

The Jamesian interior monologue is highly dramatic.
James, in the attempt to create both the economical picture and
the vivacious incident, used all of the background he had acquired
in the theatre in the service of the meditation. The dramatic
setting is of crucial importance to all of the monologues. The
time and place of the monologue help to create the effect of
meditation. Often the sense of the meditative vigil of the

romance is incorporated into the monologue. In The Golden Bowl

 

there are three famous "terrace" meditations; one reason for
this is that a character on a terrace in front of a grand mansion
is thrown into relief with the house behind him and the sweeping
grounds of an estate before him. The balustrades of the terrace
strongly invite reflection and offer a place to lean on and
gaze into the distance, symbolically, into the future, whether
that be the future of Gloucester or of a marriage to a beautiful
woman. In keeping with his strong feeling for picture, as James
calls it, the monologues are all carefully "framed" so that
there is a definite sense of a particular time and place. Often,
the pictorial framework is a pastoral one. The pastoral adds
to the atmosphere of romantic introspection.

Besides the setting of the monologue in a time and place,

James uses a dramatic structure within the monologue. Most of

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16

his meditations have a definite start, turn and finish. The
”turn" of the reflection is a moment of insight or inspiration,
as, for example, when Adam Verver, on the terrace at Fawns,

has the happy idea of marrying Charlotte for Maggie. Most of

the "turns" within Maggie's monologues are moments of awareness
of the situation around her. For example, at one point she
accepts the life the four in the family have been living as
”funny" and sees that Charlotte and the Prince have had to shoulder
all the social responsibilities of the two houses at Portland
Place and Eaton Square. Sometimes the ”turns" of the monologues
are climactic moments in themselves such as the moment when
Maggie, terrified, realizes that Charlotte and the Prince have
foiled her attempts to rearrange the patterns and have worked
closely together to again arrange her "out" and smother her in
the "bath of benevolence." Usually the monologue builds to one
such moment as this one of awareness. At other times, the climax
is not so much a realization of a situation as the determination
upon an action. Adam Verver decides, in his meditation on the
terrace, to marry Charlotte and the Prince decides, in his medita-
tion on the terrace at Matcham to have an affair with her. At
these moments James is dramatizing that one precipitous moment

of choice which has such monumental consequences and yet is, in
reality, so fleeting. James was psychologist enough to know
that a determination to act does not emerge in one split second,

but that it is built slowly from both conscious and unconscious

17

motives. The monologues catalogue details and incidents which
build to the "turns" or climaxes. Another function which this
dramatic structure serves is the unification of the monologue.
The traditional novelist always assumed tight control even over
the meditations of his characters so that everything in the
novel has the sense of direction and purpose. The monologue
does not gather sense impressions and free associations haphazardly
in an attempt to represent the flow of consciousness. Instead,
in James, everything is carefully selected to assure one effect.
Within Maggie's famous "pagoda" monologue everything builds the
mood of anxiety and tension. Every image reinforces Maggie's
uncertainty until the composition becomes almost overwhelmingly
Oppressive at the climax. James often varies the intensity of
imagery and incident within the monologue; for example, at one
place Maggie is knocking at the forbidden pagoda and a few
paragraphs later she imagines herself a small dog shaking the
water from its ears. The homely tone of the imagery often varies
the pace of the monologue, but the effect which it creates is
still uncertainty and anxiety.

The situation of the monologue is the traditional situa-
tion of a divided psyche. Even though James makes a subject of
his centre, he does not uncover this psyche as a block of the

novel until a moment of crisis. In The Ambassadog§_8trether's

 

peculiar "double vision" is extremely appropriate for a monologue

because he is the perfect example of a character listening to

 

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18

two very disparate inner voices. The voice and imagery of
Woollett and the voice and imagery of Paris weave themselves
through all of Strether's monologues. There is never the
feeling that one voice is ascendent in Strether, but always
that the two consciences speak of two Strethers, one as dynamic
as the other. Though Strether may at times deny one of his
voices, he can never silence it entirely. Maggie's psyche is
not so much divided against itself as it is the scene for all

the planning and activity of the second volume of The Gngen ng1.

 

What happens in Volume II is no more nor less than what happens
within Maggie, and thus the various processes through which she
must pass to maturity are uncovered within her monologues. First,
she will have to be shaken and become dissatisfied with her life
as it is. Second, she will have to realize the depth of the
deception done to her and the amount of ignorance she has lived
with. Third, Maggie will have to outwit Charlotte and, fourth,
she will have to give up her father. All of Maggie's sacrifices
are first mental activities, and James systematically reveals

the emotional turmoil attendent upon every decision. The divided
psyche of the Prince is one of James's most fascinating subjects.
The Prince is constantly trying to "put himself into relation"

to the society of England which is so alien to him. Not only

is this difficult for him, but he has the added dimension of an
American father-in-law and wife to confront after his marriage.

The Prince continually studies the foreigners around him just as

 

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they, ironically, study him. His monologues create the atmosphere
of some well-intentioned cheerful Prince at loose from the
royal nursery into the streets where he carefully picks his
way with the social equipment of complicated royal toys, never
understanding why anyone should treat him differently in the
shops and alleys than in the nursery where he has been adored.
The Prince is James's portrait of humanistic Renaissance royalty.
The Prince admires the achievements of science and respects
British solidarity and economic stability, but is easily bored
and highly sensitive. Each one of James's centres is engaged
in a monologue at a time of personal crisis, and it is these
crises which help to give their meditations immediacy and inten-
sity.

Another dramatic element of the Jamesian monologue is
the great sense of isolation which the character feels. Strether
is isolated because he no longer belongs to Woollett, and yet he
cannot completely embrace Parisian morals. The Prince is isolated
because he is adrift in a culture foreign to him, and Maggie is
isolated because there is no one except Fanny to whom she can
turn with the truth of her feelings. One of the reasons that
Maggie's consciousness is so full of anxiety is that she has to
control all of the situations about her rigidly so that her father
will never suspect the treachery of those around him. The un-
veiling of Maggie's consciousness uncovers great tensions between

her strong emotional impulses and her severe self-discipline.

20

The forms of the life around her, particularly in Book V at
Fawns, contrast vividly with Maggie's tumultous inner state.
Throwing the character into relief as the monologue does allows
James to delineate his consciousness as subtly as he wishes
without any appreciable amount of distraction. As we will see,
this posture makes some of the inCidents of the novels ambiguous,
as any rigidly held point of view must. We are never certain
that Charlotte's speech in the gallery is really a wail of pain,
or even that this cry, if it is a cry, affects Adam with the
same intensity that Maggie feels. These are Maggie's emotional
responses to the situation, and the narrative is carefully
controlled so that they are the emotional responses of the
reader also.

One of the most striking characteristics of the Jamesian
monologue is the range of imagery employed. Some of the imagery,
like that of Maggie as actress and dancer and author of a play,
is a motif that runs throughout the novel. Some of the imagery
describes a complex relation; for example, Adam sees the Prince
as a Palladian Church, and Maggie sees the relation of Charlotte
and the Prince as a pagoda. Strether's imagery reflects his
two voices. He hears the scriptural cadences of Mrs. Newsome
through the same ears that hear the whispers of Paris. At times
James catalogues images in a series which, as it continues, seeks
to clarify a relationship. He does this in Maggie's monologue

in which she thinks of herself and her father first as sociable

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drinkers, then as birds in the air, and at last as tourists,
she with Baedecker; he, without. The motif of Charlotte as

a caged animal describes not only various relations but also
Maggie's fear of her. The imagery, though various, is never
indescriminate. James always uses images which help build the
entire effect of a monologue. The imagery is most effective in
objectifying states of mind. Because emotional responses and
attitudes are highly abstract, they are very difficult to dramatize.
One way that James surmounts this difficulty is through the
color and movement of imagery. James exploits his imagery, also,
to gain every effect which he can. He extends his metaphors to
cover as many relations and situations as possible. For example,
the "bath of benevolence” image implies the conspiracy of
Charlotte and the Prince, the opulence of the family finances,
and the passivity of Maggie as well as her terror and feeling

of suffocation or ”drowning." Paradoxically, the imagery adds
to the realistic flavor of the novels. It renders states of
mind concrete and thus makes them less theoretical and more
dramatic and empirical.

The Jamesian monologue, as a structural unit, may serve
many different functions in the novel. A monologue may be
primarily introductory. This type of monologue is highly
rhetorical because situations must be explained as economically
as possible. The long, rhetorical introductory monologues of

the Prince, Adam and Strether gather the reader into the novel

 

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and into the patterns of a particular centre. These monologues
provide a large amount of background material and essentially
give the novel a solid foundation from which to proceed. They
fulfill the same functions as paragraphs of description did in
the earlier novel. Giving the introduction of situations to a
character, rather than entirely to a narrator, gains many
advantages for the author. What could be cumbersome material of
little interest to the reader becomes much more immediate because
it is immediate to the centre. Strether's background means more
to the reader told through his meditation in the Luxembourg
Gardens than it would described in an extended narration by

any narrator, no matter how clever. This doesn't mean, however,
that James completely abandons narrative control. There is an
obvious narrator, who has the personality of an ironic, urbane
gentleman, present within every Jamesian monologue. The amount
of distance he creates between the reader and the consciousness
of the centre varies from monologue to monologue and even within
the monologues themselves. He is important because he organizes
impressions, focuses scenes, and gives a posture from which to
judge the centre. He is not grave, and can feign astonishment

II

with his outburst "Wonderful woman! over Maggie's lapses from
consistency, but he is not a comic device, either. It is the
presence of this cosmOpolitan gentleman who stays at home from
church with Adam Verver and who goes to Gloucester with Charlotte

and the Prince which largely distinguishes the Jamesian monologue

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as of the traditional school of novelists rather than the modern.

As well as long introductory monologues, James uses
meditations essentially as soliloquys. The distinction between
the rhetorical monologue and the dramatic soliloquy is slim but
important. I have chosen to call monologues which include large
amounts of foreshortened time, description and extensive imagery
rhetorical monologues. These meditations, on the other hand,
which are immediately prior to important decisions, and are
given to uncover motivations for climactic movements, I have
called soliloquys. The soliloquy always has the flavor of an
audience, a dramatic moment and a particular crisis. This does
not mean that there is no foreshortened time in a soliloquy and
no climactic moment in a rhetorical monologue. The distinction
merely gives a name to the two types of monologues most commonly
found in James.

Because the monologue blocks are such important structural
units of the novels, they have important work to do in the
development of both the internal and external plots. Essentially
what the monologue does is to synthesize the external and internal
plots. In the first place, the monologue serves to dramatize
the internal plot which involves a psychic conflict. It gives
the internal plot the same sense of organic growth that we find
in the external. Usually, also, the monologue advances the
movement of both plots, particularly when the monologue provides

a synthesis of times-~past, present and future. At times parts

 

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of the monologue serve functions traditionally found in the
flashback. In the later novels, the monologue establishes the
dependence of the external plot upon the internal--all is con-
trolled by the consciousness. Obviously, also, the monologue
will provide a synthesis of plot and character, a problem of
division seldom encountered in James, anyway, with his careful
choice of point of View. Without the carefully developed centre,
however, James's novels would seem highly melodramatic and perhaps
far too coincidental and almost sloppy. With the development

of the centres, the motivation is so minutely advanced that the
coincidences are emotionally foreshadowed to the point that they

seem necessary.

Every element in The Ambassadors and The GQIden ngl

 

 

serves to create the centre further, but the monologues add an
extra dimension to the representation of consciousness. The
monologues unravel patterns of thought and motivation. The
sensuous nature of the Prince, for example, is dramatized through
the imagery which he instinctively selects. Maggie's shift from
an essentially passive character to an essentially active one is
revealed most vividly through her monologues. Adam Verver's
compulsion to look at everything in his world as a precious
object of art is unmasked in his monologues. At moments of
important decision the monologues reveal what has precipitated
the crisis. For example, the Prince's pride has been hurt at

Matcham, by his wife, Lady Castledean and English society in

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25

general. He is, therefore, especially vulnerable at this time
to Charlotte's charms and especially eager to naestablish his

self-respect as a galantuomg.

 

The monologues also develop the themes of the novels. In
the first place, the interior monologues dramatize the powers
of the will; though these may be defined variously, most of the
monologues in the later novels expose the freedom of the will
and the individual's part in his own destruction. Never is this
so clear as in Charlotte's monologue on the stairs at the
Ambassador's Ball. She is beautiful, proud and intensely selfish.
She wants the Prince to herself, and has no compunctions about
adhering to social conventions or stealing her best friend's
husband. Maggie's will becomes even an awesome power in her
volume. She manipulates the entire atmosphere at Fawns, control-
ling everyone within the requirements of her ”scheme."

The monologues also develop the themes which eadiparticular
novel treats. The international theme is important in the monologues
of both Strether and the Prince. All of the monologues of Th3_
Golden E23} extend the discussion of the theme of exploitation
of human beings and the dangers of the unqualified aesthetic

vision. Th§_Golden Bowl also expresses the theme of the dependence

 

on forms rather than honest human relationships, and the dangers
of such narrow living. The vision of each centre is individual
and thus the theme will vary as expressed through different

consciousnesses, giving it the maximum variety and inclusion.

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In the tradition of the interior monologue in all genres,
James's monologues dramatize ethical conflicts: The same con-
flicts which are the central conflicts of the internal plots.
Within each monologue James uses monologue markers and
narrative controls. I term monologue markers those words, phrases
and sentences which indicate states ofirflection. For example,
a mon010gue marker may be as simple as the verb ”reflected"
or as complex as an entire paragraph explaining that Maggie is
disturbed and particularly given to introspection at this time.
Monologue markers indicate why a character is particularly
reflective: for example, the Prince feels alienated at Matcham
and therefore tends to ponder English society there more than
elsewhere. The markers also merely control the meditation at

times. In The Amhassadors and The Golden Bowl the frequent use

 

 

of such expressions as "She was to think later" and "He was

' gives a reflective tone to much of the

to remember many times,‘
novel: this tone heightens the sense that a particular conscious-
ness has received impressions, lived with them, and is offering
them up after long consideration. This is an appropriate tone
because moments of crisis usually become most real in the imagina-
tion long after their actual occurrence has passed.

The question of narrative control leads to the consideration
of the control of time in the Jamesian monologue. James is

interested in rendering the truth of psycholOgical time, not

actual time. Volume II of The Golden Bowl, to be mimetic, must

 

27

give the impression of a mental confrontation and struggle from
immediately after Easter through a long, purgatorial summer.

He is interested in the kind of mental time that must pass from
impression to action. Maggie's triumph over Charlotte occurs,

actually, in three chapters in the middle of Book V of The Golgen

 

22!}! but this time seems far longer because of the endless
preparation for the event. Past time in James becomes actualized
as it affects present time; for example, Strether's past is
presented almost in shadows, but it becomes more poignant as
Strether suffers from the knowledge of having wasted it. James
had learned in the later novels that it is not the faithful
detail of time that passes that is important, nor the representa-
tion of climactic moments of time, but rather the selective com-
pounding of detail as the consciousness sifts and resifts scenes
and impressions that recreates the sense of time passing.

The interior monologue in James is both a structural
block of the novel and a style. If we study the monologues both
in relation to the structure of the novels as a whole and as
to their internal structure, and if we investigate their style,
we will understand what James felt could be accomplished
through the technique, especially as it applied to his own

theory of fiction.

FOOTNOTES
1(New York, 1929), p. 164.

*w~———

3Yvor Winters, Maule's Well: Studies Tg_Ame§ican gscurantism
(Norfolk, 1938), bZ'EIA. III

 

28

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Chapter II
The Use of the Interior Monologue in The Ambassagors

The Ambassadgrs is, in some respects, James's great

 

comedy of manners with its Pococks, its medieval guide figure
leading with soft and elastic light gloves, its dinner parties,
endless communications by letter and telegram, drawing rooms
and precious bibelots. The conversations are those of the

comedy in which every remark is inverted and served up again

fresh.

”So that Chad has done the whole thing?"

”Oh no--not the whole. We've done some of it. You

and I and 'Europe'."

”EurOpe--yes," Strether mused.

”Dear old Paris . . . . And dear old Waymarsh. You,"

she declared, ”have been a good bit of it."

He sat massive. "A good bit of what, ma'am?"

"Why of the wonderful consciousness of our friend here.
You've helped too in your way to float him to where he is.’
"And where the devil is he?"

She passed it on with'E laugh. ”Where the devil, Strether,

are you?"

I

Yet, at the same time, The Ambassadors is James's most

 

poignant tragedy in which the very best of men is defeated by
the most implacable enemy of man--Time. To synthesize the two
modes which he employs, the tragic and the comic, James builds
two plots which interact providing a vivid impression of both
the romantic comedy and the realistic tragedy. The external

plot of the novel is a romance in which an innocent adventurer,

29

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30

ironically a man of fifty-five, sets out to retrieve a precious
treasure in the hands of an unscrupulous woman in an evil
country. The classic guide figure is, again ironically, a
lovely expatriate, and the distressed parent, waiting with
prayers in the home country, is a possessive, neurotic New England
matriarch. The climax of the external plot comes when the
innocent, good-hearted adventurer sees at last that he has been
hopelessly exploited: Circe has bound him, too, and not until
the last is he to learn that she is immoral, a common fraud.
In fact, the reckless young man has sown his wild oats and is
ready to return home in Book VII, and probaby would, except
that his savior from home has fallen under the evil spell of
the far country and must himself be rehabilitated before he can
be turned round and set upon the straight and narrow once again.
There are many ironies in the use James makes of traditionally
romantic characters and situations, but the manner is very
obviously comic. Every element of the romantic external plot
leads from or to the basic romantic resolution--marriage. Love,
and particularly romantic love, is the material of the romance,
as it is also the material of the comedy of manners.

The external plot resolves ironically because in the
sense that the wayward young man is rescued from his folly,
the hero's mission is a success and the meed is won; the young
man is returned to his rightful love and duty; in this case,

disgustingly enough, his mother. Yet, in another sense, the

31

comedy of manners has also a tragicomic note because Madame de
Vionnet is left alone. The lovers have been separated, is one
way of putting it; the illicit affair has been broken up, is
another.

Just as the characters, plot and theme are borrowed
heavily from the romance, so the setting adds to the atmosphere
of the historical. The scene at Notre Dame is an obvious
example, with Madame de Vionnet's vigil an ironic parody of the
saintly Knight's vigils in great churches to prepare himself
for battle. The pastoral effects, particularly Strether's long
monologue in the Luxembourg Gardens, add to the manner of romance
as do the recurring balcony scenes. The very circumstance of
the setting in a foreign city whose name is synonomous with
intrigue and moral laxity, adds its own special romantic effect.

The romantic plot of the novel is dependent for deveIOp-
ment primarily in the scene, or action, of the novel. The
internal plot depends instead most heavily on the reflective
passages, the monologues, for development. The most obvious
reason for this, certainly, is that the internal plot has to
do with changes within Strether; outside relations and social
patterns will be affected by the internal changes in Strether
because the concept of free will is developed in James through
the dependence of the external plots upon the internal; however,
2

the changes are best dramatized when, as Percy Lubbock says,

Strether's consciousness is on stage.

32

The internal plot is just the effect which Paris and
its values have on Strether. This plot concerns Strether's
realization that he has not lived; its climax comes in Gloriani's
garden when Strether encourages Little Bilham to "Live!" All
of the "wildness and extremes" as James calls them, of the
external plot conspire to change the New England Strether into
the continental Strether, the man of the world. The internal
plot becomes tragic at the moment when Strether acknowledges
that "There were some things that had to come in time if they
were to come at all. If they didn't come in time they were lost
forever." (p. 131) The resolution of the internal plot is
tragic in that Strether must succomb to his fate and return to
Woollett. He has seen enough to know what he has personally
missed, but he also has seen enough to know that Parisian values,
at least sexually, disgust him because they are, no matter how
polite, refined, "fluted", still and all--dishonest. James

himself, in The Notebooks, frequently refers to "poor" Strether

 

and "tragic" Strether, emphasizing that his purpose was, partly,
to give Strether tragic dimensions, even though, in the strictest
sense the novel may be not a classical tragedy.3

The external plot with its romantic elements intrudes
upon all aspects of the novel--characters, settings, action
and scene. If James is going to balance this extreme romanticism
with at least as powerful a realism and tragedy, he must put his

most potent technical tool to the service of the internal plot.

33

This he does when he chooses his point of view. Everything

will be presented through the consciousness which will be chang-
ing. To capture those changes, to develop the internal plot as
dynamically as the external, the processes of this consciousness
will be presented in pictures, carefully structured to achieve
the sense of scenes. Throughout the novel, James centers every-
thing in the internal plot because every vision is a reflection,
a comment, and every reflection is a development from the last
reflection. A good example of the masterful use of point of
view which furthers the internal plot in such a simple matter as
description emerges in a comparison of two passages describing
Strether's impressions of Madame de Vionnet. When he first
meets her he is amazed, comforted, delighted that she "differed
less; differed, that is, scarcely at all-~well, superficially
speaking, from Mrs. Newsome or even from Mrs. Pocock...What ESE
there in her, if anything, that would have made it impossible

he should meet her at Woollett?" (p. 129) This is Strether's,
and the reader's, first impression of Chad's French love. A
striking change has occurred, however, the very next day, in
Strether's impressions, because, in her apartment, he feels that
"at bottom of it all for him was the sense of her rare unlikeness
to the women he had known." (p. 146) The alteration in Strether's
conception of Mme. de Vionnet has come about through, mainly,a
conversation that Strether has had with Chad which has gone far

to convince him that the attachment is, indeed, virtuous. Like-

34

wise, throughout the novel, developments inside Strether are
signalled through his reflections--his changed mental relations
to people and events.

These examples of the development of the internal plot
occur on almost every other page, but even more vivid developments
come in the longer monologues like the passage in the Luxembourg
Gardens which does as much to introduce the internal plot as the
conversation which Strether and Maria Gostrey have at the theatre
does to introduce and clearly establish the external.

An examination of the two plots and the two corresponding

modes at work in The Ambassadors is one way to talk about the

 

structure of the novel. In this sense the romantic elements and
the tragic elements, and the tensions arising between them,
determine the way the novel is put together--the technical
structure. There are, however, as many ways to look at structure
as there are critical imaginations at work on the novel. The
very concept of a structure suggests architecture and geometry.
For this reason, discussions of the structure of novels usually
divide the material of the novel in some manner. Usually the
principle of division takes the content of the novel into account;
(it must, of course, take the content into account somewhat in
any case, even if the critic merely counts words and paragraphs)
the principle of division, therefore, often signifies what that
particular critic feels are the major climaxes, themes, and

resolutions of the novel. Three methods of looking at the

35

structure of the novel have been briefly mentioned. First, the
novel is put together like a romance with a journey or quest
theme. Second, the novel is structured through the changes in
Strether's consciousness; and, third, the novel is structured
around two plots, each of which has its own mode and resolution.
These three methods are all legitimate ways of analyzing Th3

Ambassadors.

 

Many other methods of division are immediately apparent.
The most obvious method for study of the novel would involve
investigation of the twelve parts of the novel. James was
under the dictates of serialization, and took as his challenge
the necessity of having each one of the episodes end on a
climactic note. The novel may also be analyzed in connection
with recurring scenes: the balcony scenes, for instance, or the
restaurant scenes. The conversations that Strether and Maria
Gostrey have provide a structure for the entire novel. E. M.
Forster)4 emphasizes the "hour-glass” structure of the novel:
Strether and Chad change places. There are less obvious, more
original ways of looking at the novel. Also, Durr sees the
structure as Strether's mythic night journey.5

James himself liked to talk of structure in terms of
the theatre. Everything was built through pictures and scenes.
What happens in the later novels is that the pictures and scenes
tend more and more to fuse so that a picture, which is usually
a character involved in a monologue, is actually a scene. Though

the picture thus becomes more and more dramatic, it never wholly

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ceases to be a picture, and may be set aside as a block of the
novel; these blocks of solitary activity and reflection balancing
with the blocks of dialogue make the novel beautifully "rounded."
It is in the blocks of monologue that the most important work of
the internal plotting is accomplished. A study of the monologue
blocks will, in fact, unravel the primary themes, techniques and
achievements of the novel.

Each of the monologues in The Ambassadors, because it has

 

a specific function in its own section of the book, has individual
characteristics as well as the more general ones which define
any Jamesian monologue. One effect which James uses throughout

The Ambassadors which adds immeasurably to the sense of reflection,

 

even in the midst of what is most obviously picture, is the
mention of a conversation as recalled and reflected upon later.
Time and again, passages occur which suggest not the immediate,
but the sifted, the scrutinized:

"Do I strike you as improved?" Strether was to recall
that Chad had at this point inquired. (p.95)

This little device is another one of those effects working to
unite picture and scene.

The idea of picture suggests a frame, a subject composed.
This is most vividly demonstrated in the first real monologue
block of The Ambassadors, in which Strether is composed in the

 

Luxembourg Gardens, which themselves add the necessary pastoral
note for quiet meditation. The sense of a definite time and

place, a present, is conveyed through this framework, also.

37

It is morning, Strether's second morning in Paris, to be definite.
As the monologue block is introduced, James gives a vivid recol-
lection of the night before when he and Waymarsh went to the
theatre and the Cafe Riche together. A strong sense of the
immediate yesterday is as present as the immediacy of the present
morning. At the other end of the time frame, some twelve
paragraphs later, Strether approaches Chad's house, and stands
watching Little Bilham on the balcony. Thus, symbolically,
Waymarsh is at one end of the soliloquy; Little Bilham,at the
other. Not only, however, is the specific framework of the
gardens present, but also the larger framework of Strether in
Paris. The gardens themselves are described in terms of
picture with

terraces, alleys, vistas, fountains, little green trees

in green tubs, little women in white caps and shrill

little girls at play all sunnily ”composed" together.(p.59)
Strether has come down the Rue de la Paix, has passed the
Tuileries, has passed the palace which is gone, and which he
remembers. One of the recurring verbs of the monologue is
"remember" and here, as Strether's historic sense fastens upon
the palace, the larger past of Paris comes into relation with
the personal past of Strether.

The dramatic scene is in this manner carefully set.

Another highly dramatic element of the monologue is found in
its technical structure. The monologue has a definite start,

turn and finish. It is divided, fairly neatly, in two parts.

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38

The first part deals with Strether, his past, his relationship
with Mrs. Newsome, his own struggle to achieve the "common
unattainable art of taking things as they came." (p. 61) The
second, with Strether's present mission and Chad. Both sections
of the monologue serve its primary purpose, which is to provide
valuable background. Adding to the scenic quality of the
"picture" are those who come to share the stage with Strether.
First, there is Mrs. Newsome, that strange lady never physically
present in the novel, who stalks back and forth at the far end
of the set, casting her gloomy, penetrating gaze everywhere about
her. She is present through the ingenious device of her letters.
These letters provide a highly dramatic element because they
serve as an activity for Strether-~he reads them as the monologue
opens--which will precipitate all of the rest of the monologue.
After Mrs. Newsome, come Strether's young wife and son, now dead,
and, as the monologue turns, at the moment when Strether
questions, "Was he to renounce all amusement for the sweet sake
of authority?" (p. 64) Chad enters. Thus, with the help of
those who enter and leave the stage, the monologue is divided
neatly among past, present and future. The introduction of

the monologue gives Strether's past, both immediate-~the yester-
day--and distant. The turn of the monologue comes as Strether's
immediate past, the previous evening with Waymarsh, meets Chad's
present, and Strether's responsibilities in that present. The

finish of the monologue provides Chad's past through the Woollett

39

analysis, and the monologue ends as Strether leaves to begin
his quest. The monologue is precisely timed so that the informa-
tion conveyed is always immediate and dramatic; in a way, the
monologue is a flashback, with the scene in the past presented
as it plays upon Strether's consciousness.

Added to these dramatic elements, is the climax of the
monologue, the moment when Strether wonders

if he...should like it too much, what on earth, with such
a bond, would become of either of them? (p. 64)

This situation, Strether's awakening consciousness of the attrac~
tions of Paris and his own response to them, is in itself one

of the most highly dramatic elements of the monologue. One of
the traditional characteristics of the internal monologue, in
fact, is that it occurs at a time when the character is in con-
flict, in a dilemma, from which there is no obviously perfect

release. Within this first monologue of The Ambassadors the

 

conflict which is to determine the entire novel is presented.
Strether is, here, himself becoming aware of what is to be his
real problem in Paris. Most Jamesian monologues occur at just
such moments of doubt and awakening as this one. Dramatically,

it is the perfect moment to present the consciousness because

the internal agitation provides all the impetus necessary to

make the picture as vivid and suspenseful as the scene.

Usually, James gives a vivid impression of the character's

isolation. Because the character is alone, at a specific time,

in a specific place, working through a specific problem, this

4O

monologue has almost the quality of a soliloquy. Strether is
"composed;" done, that is, as a picture is done. He is thrown
into relief, heightened by his isolation. Often in a block of
picture like this one, James gives an even more acute sense of
the character's isolation because he not only is physically alone,
but, emotionally, he £33 3 alienated. Here is Strether in a
strange city, far from home, feeling the glamor of the forbidden
fruits, feeling guilt and separation from Mrs. Newsome, not yet
having met Chad, with no friend except the unpredictable, novel
Miss Gostrey, herself an unknown quality. Thus the mind will
have to present each question to its own analysis, trusting to
its own subjective evaluation. This internal dialogue--one
speaker, Woollett, one speaker, Paris, and poor Strether gasping
for breath between-—is the optimal situation to give an essentially
static picture the drama of scene.

The patterns of imagery in the monologue serve to heighten
the effect toward which it moves. Much of this effect is
achieved through contrast. First, there is the contrast of "the
prompt Paris morning" which "struck its cheerful notes" (p.58)
with the tone of Mrs. Newsome which "filled...all the air," and
yet struck Strether as ”the hum of vain things." (p.60) All of
the images which describe Paris are full of youth, beauty,
attraction and expectancy. Nature herself appears to be "a white-
capped master chef." (p.59) The city itself appears to Strether

as a ”vast bright Babylon" which "hung before him...like some

41

huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard....It
twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all
surface one moment seemed all depth the next." (p.64) It is
here in Paris that he hOpes to feel once again ”the brush of

the wing of the stray spirit of youth.” (p. 67) All of the
imagery of Paris is of motion, color and liveliness. The
Parisians themselves are ”little brisk figures, figures whose
movement was as the tick of the great Paris cloak." (p.59) On
the other hand, the imagery of Woollett and of Strether's past,
has a heavy Puritanical, Biblical ring. Mrs. Newsome gives
Strether "chapter and verse for the moral that nothing would
suffer" (p.60) while he is away. Strether had taken homahis
impressions from Europe in his youth with many resolutions that
they should ”bear a good harvest." (p.62) Most memorable, how-
ever, are the series of images that depict Strether's sense of
his past and himself. He feels somewhat ”washed up on the sunny
strand by the waves of a single day,...thankful for breathing
time and strengthening himself while he gasped." (p.60) The
imagery adds a great deal to the sense of agitation and expec-
tancy within the monologue. Strether must find something to be
his "compass and helm." (p.61) If Strether's present is that of
a gasping swimmer, his past is a series of the bleakest composi-
tions of despair and wasted time. True, he has attempted so
many ventures that ”no slate should hold the figures” (p.61) yet

it has all come to the picture of a "long, crooked course, grey

42

in the shadow of the solitude.” (p.61) This image of Strether's
past is peopled with very few others, and the ”pale figure of
his real youth" stands holding against its breast the "two
presences paler than itself.” (p.61) Strether sees his youthful
endeavors, his acquisition of yellow volumes in his youth as
”mere sallow paint on the door of the temple of taste that he
had dreamed of raising." (p.63) He sees his past as "a meager-
ness that sprawled...vague and comprehensive, stretching back
like some unmapped Hinterland from a rough coast-settlement."
(p.63) About every image is the summation that "If the playhouse
wasn't closed his seat at least had fallen to someone else."
(p.64) The only mitigating element in the unrelieved gloom of
Strether's self-searching comes with the hope, the "gleam of
light" (p.64) that he might enjoy Paris without falling away
from his mission if he didn't enjoy it "too much." (p.64) For
the most part, the imagery reflects the theme of the monologue,
the two forces now contending for the domination of Strether.
These contrasts add to the drama and impact of the monologue,
helping, again, to fuse the sense of picture and scene.

The alternation of picture and scene was the guiding

principle around which James worked when he wrote The Ambassadors.

 

Each monologue is a particular structural unit, serving a
definite function within the total structure of the novel. This
block of the novel, in the Luxembourg Gardens, comes at a

place when the action has been moving quickly and the pace may

43

slow before the opening of the external plot's action when
Strether meets Little Bilham. This monologue is a preparatory
monologue. It is used to summarize all the background before
the real drama begins. Because so much of the following material
will have to do with Chad and the very interesting question of
the nature of his relationship with Madame de Vionnet, James
must halt to depict Strether's own personal struggle at this
moment. The monologue brings past, present and future into
relation. It states the elements of the internal plot: The
conflict within Strether. Strictly within its own small serial,
the monologue beautifully balances with the long conversation
between Strether and Maria which has come immediately before.
Everything in Book II is hung with the sense of expectancy, an
effect which the dilemma within the monologue does much to
heighten.

The monologue blocks of the novel have many structural
purposes besides this technical alternation of picture and scene.
In the later novels, the impressions which the consciousness
receives, serve to provide most of the substance of the novel.
These impressions must all be carefully recorded. In order to
do this as dramatically as possible, James provides a monologue
which will gather all of Strether's impressions at one point,
immediately before his most important steps are taken. Strether's
impressions are so mingled with his memories and conflicts that

the whole becomes a vast mosaic which is like a picture which is,

44

in turn, itself a composition of many small scenes, figures, and

a few conspicuous images. This definition of the monologue may
even serve, in a larger sense, as a definition of what increasingly
happens throughout the later novels as consciousness becomes more
and more dominant.

Another structural function which this monologue serves
is the synthesis of the beginnings of the internal and external
plots. The monologues render the internal plots as organic as
the external: The vivid sense of a struggle of tremendous import
is preserved both in Strether's tragedy and Chad's comedy. This
is important because the melodramatic lively quality of the
external plots will capture attention and monopolize it if the
internal plot does not promise the same suspense, tension and
excitement. The internal plot must itself promise passion and
intensity. Strether's monologue fulfills this function at the
beginning of the novel. It is just as significant and uncertain
what will happen to Strether as to Chad. Another important aspect
of the relation of the external and internal plots emerges here
in that Strether's consciousness is presented as the dominant
force of the novel. Strether's impressions will control both
plots. In other words, the external plot will serve the purposes
of the internal. This is not absolutely apparent here, at the
outset, but it will become more and more so in the course of
the novel. The position from which the control comes determines

that the impressions of Chad and his situation will be more

45

important in the novel than the realities. The external plot
is throughout treated subjectively. Everything that happens
in the novel is controlled by Strether's development.

Because Strether is the most important technical, and
thematic, device of the novel, his characterization influences

all the other elements. In fact, nothing in The Ambassadors

 

functions independently of Strether. Because of this James
preserves the effect of characterization as supreme over plot.
Even though there are two compelling plots, Strether as a man
always dominates them. The monologues add greatly to the unity
of plot and characterization. They develop equally plot strains
and character analysis, but the very nature of the monologue
demands that the character's mind will be the focal point. If,

as in The Ambassadogs, a central point of view is used, an even

 

stronger sense of the dominance of characterization is formed.
These, then, are three of the major structural purposes
which the monologue serves: 1) It provides a dramatic presentation
of the impressions which the consciousness, which controls all
the material, receives; 2) It helps to unify the internal and
external plots, and 3) It unifies plot and characterization.
Finally, Strether's monologue in the gardens contrasts beautifully
with the material which surrounds it because its texture, sentence
structure, images, the very rhetoric of the monologue, is richer,
more varied, "thicker," than the scene would accommodate. For

example, this passage demonstrates several elements which con-

46

tribute to the rich texture of the monologue:

There were instants at which he could ask whether, since
there had been fundamentally so little question of his
keeping anything, the fate after all decreed for him
hand't been only to be kept. Kept for something, in

that event, that he dIdn't pretend, didn't possibly dare
as yet to divine; something that made him hover and

wonder and laugh and sigh, made him advance and retreat,
feeling half ashamed of his impulse to plunge and more
than half afraid of his impulse to wait. He remembered
for instance how he had gone back in the sixties with
lemon-coloured volumes in general on the brain as well

as with a dozen--selected for his wife too--in his trunk;
and nothing had at the moment shown more confidence than
this invocation of the finer taste. They were still
somewhere at home, the dozen—-stale and soiled and never sent
to the binder; but what had become of the sharp initiation
they represented? They represented now the mere sallow
paint on the door of the temple of taste that he had dreamed
of raising up--a structure he had practically never carried
further. Strether's present highest flights were perhaps
those in which this particular lapse figures to him as a
symbol, a symbol of his long grind and his want of odd
moments, his want moreover of money, of opportunity, of
positive dignity. That the memory of the vow of his youth
should, in order to throb again, have had to wait for this
last, as he felt it, of all his accidents--that was surely
proof enough of how his conscience had been encumbered.

If any further proof were needed it would have been to be
found in the fact that, as he perfectly now saw, he had
ceased even to measure his meagerness, a meagreness that
Sprawled, in this retrospect, vague and comprehensive,
stretching back like some unmapped Hinterland from a

rough coast-settlement. (p.63)

First of all, the rhetorical effects of repetition: "since there
had been fundamentally so little question of his keeping anything,
the fate after all decreed for him hadn't been only to 23 kept”
give the sense of a mind groping. The same sense is produced in
the next sentence as Strether animates his imaginings which
”Hover and wonder and laugh and sigh...advance and retreat...

plunge...and...wait." The striking images of the "temple of

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47

taste” and the "unmapped Hinterland" of his past can be exploited
thoroughly in the monologue, but would have to be succinct in

the scene. The style of the monologue, then, gives probably

the most impressive articulation of a mind, an individual, sensitive
mind, groping among grammatical patterns for the exact manner

in which to convey feelings and intuitions. Everything is
immediate: The repetitions, the punctuation, all intimate that
this is a process, not merely a static picture. Something happens
within the monologue more than the simple conveying of informa-
tion: Something is "worked through" and Strether is put "in
relation." (p.67)

This attempt to dramatize the process of the mind is
interesting not only structurally and stylistically. The opened
consciousness reveals, quite nakedly, its patterns of rationali-
zation and its motivations. The mixture of technicalities of
point of view in James, leads to many questions about his ”unre-
liable," as Wayne Booth6 terms them, narrators. It is sometimes
difficult to determine what is James looking at Strether,
laughing at and pitying Strether, and what is Strether looking
within. A statement which refers to "poor Strether's fairly
open sense of the irony of things:"(p.64) would seem to be objective
James. Or, even more obviously, when James comments, perhaps
drolly, that Strether "was not a man to neglect any good chance
for reflexion." (p.65) Immediately after this, however, James

returns to Strether, the most obvious evidence being that the

48

sentence is a question, most questions seeming to be, unmistake-

ably, Strethgr's questions: "Was it at all possible for instance

 

to like Paris enough without liking it too much?” (p.65) This
penetration and retreat gives the Jamesian monologue its striking
individuality, but it also leads to questions about what is
rationalization and what is not. The easiest way to resolve

this dilemma is not to look at specific sentences or phrases
for’rationalizations and motivations, but instead to study the
patterns at work within the monologue.

In the first place, it becomes fairly obvious that this
is the meditation of a man with a New England conscience.7 The
language, heavily loaded with the verbs and images of introspec-
tion and Calvinism: "admonished...his duty...put his scruple to
rest...scandalize...moral...justify..." reflects the habit of
self-scrutiny and self-distrust. In essence, what Strether is
doing during the monologue is rationalizing his "finding himself
so free.” (p.60) As the monologue progresses Woollett ranges
itself on the side of guilt, depression and the past, while
Paris ranges itself on the side of the present, ”taking things

as they come,"

escape, youth, and happiness. A return to the
monologue after reading the rest of the novel even more clearly
delineates what is rationalization, what is Woollett and what
is reality. It is to be expected that a man as given to intro-
spection as Strether will have an elaborate system of defenses.

He seems to be, in fact, constantly on the defensive. His decision,

49

in the middle of the monologue to be "consistently good for

little enough}'(p.6l) seems perfectly in character with his abused
conscience. He is fatigued; like many others of rigid conscience,
he will seek to assauge his guilt by emphasizing his uselessness,
his age, his infirmities. Strether's religion is not an active
religion of passions and energies: It is a code which urges
caution and foresight. Rationalization becomes transparent here
because the sense of what Strether is, of his limitations, is

so strong. James gives this intricate, detailed account of the
manner of Strether's thought because a close following of Strether's
rationalizations exposes most clearly what his real motivations
are.

As is to be expected with anyone as scrupulous as Strether,
his actual motivation will lie somewhere between his colored,
conscious reasons and his own passions and impulses. Strether
is under rigid controls, the most potent of which are guilt and
duty. The monologue suggests that Strether has felt a great
sympathy for Chad, and yet his mission is to drag the boy back
to a place which it is quite apparent that he, Strether, has
found totally unfulfilling. This is inconsistent and will bear
watching. What this early monologue promises is that Strether
of Woollett is far more complex than might be expected. This
insight is given largely through the presentation of his memory
of Woollett and his immediate impressions of Paris. One very
realistic element that is characteristic of the monologue is the

very fact that Strether's motives are mixed. This adds to the

50

depth and clarity of his characterization.

The monologue fulfills thematic functions, also, in the
novel. For example, in this monologue the dichotomy between
the values of Woollett and the values of Paris is clearly presented.
The conflict within Strether which the monologue introduces is
the central conflict of the entire novel. Strether's choice
must be between two systems of ethics. This ethical choice is
the basis of the internal plot. Because choices, acts of volition,
are involved in the resolutions of the internal plots in James,
the freedom of the will is always, in the later novels, a prime
thematic concern. To dramatize the processes of choosing, with
all the attendant rationalizations, is a difficult matter, and
James handles it, technically, through his choice of point of
view and his monologue blocks. It is as if the scenes develop
relationShips, those relationships which are the basis of the
external plot and the precipitation of the moral crisis of the
internal, and the picture, or monologue, blocks develop the
consciousness around which the relationships center. The patterns
of the relationships gain coherence as they are seen as vital
to Strether's developing awareness. One thing the monologues
definitely provide is the ironic sense of free choice; that is,
Strether is free to evaluate both Woollett and Paris and to
choose between them, even though it is too late (he feels, any-
way) for his choice to have enough personal significance to save

his life from being a tragic loss. The precarious balance

between Strether's past, his fate, and his present, his opportunity,
is achieved through the most delicate precision and technical

skill.

The other large monologue block of The Ambassadors is

 

conveniently referred to as the Lambinet monologue because that
painter, and Strether's memory of a certain one of his land-
scapes, which he could not afford to purchase in Boston, many
years before, strikes a very decided note for the entire
monologue. In fact, the monologue is structured as a Lambinet,
a picture within which Strether moves, reminisces, and puzzles
again, over his relations to events. James returns throughout
the monologue to the concept of this setting as a very definite
pastoral idyll. At first Strether is seen as outside the frame-
work of rural France; at this aspect of his environment he had
”looked only through the little oblong window of the picture-
frame.” (p.301) The French countryside has been only art to
Strether, the "background of fiction, the medium of art, the
nursery of letters; practically as distant as Greece, but
practically also well-nigh as consectrated." (p.301) After
Strether leaves his train, though, he steps into the romance.
The oblong gilt frame disposed its enclosing lines; the
poplars and willows, the reeds and river--a river of
which he didn't know, and didn't want to know, the
name--fell into a composition. (p.302)
James composes the entirety of this monologue around the elements
of the landscape. The sense, then, of picture and scene is

welded most artistically here, with the device of one Specific

painting to unify the action and setting. The feeling that
Strether is within an art form is produced even further with

the mention that Strether's whole day will remind him of Guy
deMaupassant and, particularly, that writer's own French peOple.
At every murmure of the monologue James returns to his controlling
image. Throughout his day Strether "really continued in the pic-
ture" and not once overstepped the oblong gilt frame." (p.305)
The image happily extends to become almost the objective corre-
lative for James's critical concepts of picture and scene. "For
this had been all day at bottom the spell of the picture-~that
it was essentially more than anything else a scene and a stage,
that the very air of the play was in the rustle of the willows
and the tone of the sky....” (p.306) At one point, when he is
ordering his dinner, "picture and scene seemed supremely to melt
together." (p.306) The fusion of picture and scene on this day
in the country also fuses past and present: ”It was Tremont
Street, it was France, it was Lambinet. Moreover he was freely
walking about in it." (p.302) It is as if the impossible has
really happened, as if a man is able to have a romantic fantasy
materialize, as if, indeed, one were to be pursued along Keats'
Grecian urn or walk the streets of that forever deserted little
Grecian village. The gilt, oblong frame, the pastoral churches,
villages and peasants render this second monologue as picture,
and Strether walking about within the picture which obligingly

"had drawn itself out for him as much as you please" (p.305)

53

gives the picture its dynamic, organic quality, rendering it
a scene.

The monologue is technically structured this time, not
as the first monologue was, around Strether's thought, but more
around his activity within the pastoral frame. The start,
turn and finish of the monologue are the start, turn and finish
of Strether's day in the country. He rides the train from Paris
to the country, from realism to romance. He disembarks when he
has found the appropriate setting, and he plans, mentally, what
his day is to be. Then, he begins to explore; the two very long
paragraphs which give the core of the monologue--concerning
Strether's new relationship with Madame de Vionnet--are presented
between the time when Strether lies down to nap on the picturesque
hillside and "all the rest of his rambling day." (p.305) After
these two paragraphs of reflection, the majority of the
monologue takes up again what Strether does. The monologue moves
as Strether moves; James very effectively using the simple device
of a day to unify the monologue so that Strether's impressions
of the countryside meld with his thoughts of Paris, to unify the
block of the novel, as it, like the monologue in the gardens,
moves freely about, as the mind moves, among past, present and
future.

The mood of the Lambinet monologue is not the overtly
anxious, admonishing mood of the first monologue. It is rather

a mood, a tone, borrowed from the landscape. The situation for

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Strether is like his situation in the gardens in that he has a
new sense of escape, of a release from tension, and that he is,
for a moment, not actively participating, but reflecting, on what
is to come. 0n the other hand, this monologue is not the monologue
of the New England conscience turned in upon itself, producing
motives, rationalizations, that will set the scruples of Woollett
to rest. This monologue gives more the impression that Strether
has found a harmony, that he is able to enjoy his burgeoning

new affiliation with Madamme de Vionnet, and that here is a man
who has broken with the past enough to enjoy reflecting on what
may be the possibilities in a pleasant future. Strether has
asked Sarah for even more time to make a decision; he is stalling,
a fact which his day in the country perfectly mirrors. Strether
is at a moment of crisis, but he refuses to allow any part of

his Opportunity to be a part of the French idyll to be wasted

in a vain attempt to set everything within him-~Woollett, Paris,
all of his various connections—-in order. In his first monologue
Strether sought to put Woollett and Mrs. Newsome into order with
the bright Babylon of Paris. In this later monologue he only
seeks to immerse himself in everything French; his cogitations
about Madame de Vionnet perfectly fit in with the setting be-
cause the values of France: graciousness, beauty, "taking things
as they come" are now Strether's values. He has been troubled
about "a lapse from good faith,” (p.304) characteristic of

careful Strether, but he seems to have made his peace with his

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55

conscience at least for this one day. Underlying everything is
the unstated question: What is to become of his relationship
with Marie de Vionnet? It is very easy to read the monologue as
that of a gentleman who is falling in love with a woman whom

he is not completely free to pursue for a variety of awkward
reasons. The setting adds to the image of the lovesick shepherd,
musing about his lady on a French hillside. At the end of the
day, in the cool evening, Strether has given himself up to the

decision that "The text was simply, when condensed, that in these

 

places such things were, and that if it was in them one elected
to move about one had to make one's account with what one lighted
on." (p.306) In other words, Strether is going to attempt to

lay the scruples of the past to rest and to work in the future
within the uncertain morality of situational ethics.

Strether is thrown into relief against the pastoral back-
ground; he moves about freely in it and yet he is not a definite
part of it. There are also other persons who move about within
this monologue block: The Newsomes, the Pococks, Maria Gostrey,
and, particularly, Madame de Vionnet. Still, Strether is again
isolated. In one sense he has isolated himself, because he
chose this day in the country to be alone, but in another sense
he is culturally isolated from the French peasants who surround
him, as well as ostracized by the Pococks who find him repugnant.
At the same time, he is not completely assimilated into Parisian

society, which leaves him isolated in both a physical and a

social sense. Again, in this monologue, Strether's very aliena-
tion heightens the effect of his consciousness as a dramatic
force. Part of Strether's tragedy is this aloneness. He is not
able to communicate completely with anyone. He comes the closest
with Maria Gostrey, and yet there is the built—in awkwardness
that he cannot, as a gentleman, fully air all of his thoughts
about Madame de Vionnet with her. Caught as he is, between the
Pococks and Madame de Vionnet, Strether becomes more and more
tragic because he will, in the end, be unable to adopt any system
of values which will end his isolation. He cannot fully immerse
himself in the romantic idyll for more than this one day because
this very evening he will learn that Woollett's evaluations of
Chad and Madame de Vionnet have been the right ones, and he can-
not return to Woollett with his integrity intact because he has
spoken lightly of Mrs. Newsome as only ”cold thought.” Strether
is the outcast, the solitary figure, and the monologue blocks
serve to emphasize this.

The peculiar texture of the Lambinet monologue fits the
pastoral mood of the piece. The descriptive language is the
language of the pastoral with attendant "poplars and willows,
the reeds and river....The sky was silver and turquoise and
varnish, the village on the left was white and the church on the
right was grey." (p.302) Strether seems to have been able, for
this one day, to make "the wheel of time...turn...up again,”

(p.301) the scene he remembered on the Boston dealer's maroon-

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57

colored wall. The controlling image of the passage, that of the
Lambinet within the oblong gilt frame, adds to the definite
atmosphere of romance and artistic harmony. Strether's past has
returned to become his present. The day is a fantasy, and the
easy, richly descriptive language creates the fantasy, lulling
the senses even as Strether is lulled to sleep. Other imagery
refers to the drama, again establishing the relationship between
Strether and art forms. The imagery of picture and stage are
fused in the many-dimensional image of the spell of the day as

the spell of the picture which...was essentially, more

than anything else, a scene and a stage....The very air

of the play was in the rustle of the willows and the

tone of the sky. (p.306)
Another art image is incorporated in the monologue with Strether's
thought that the entire setting, and all of his observations,
are "a syllable of the text.” (p.306) This text is the summation
of the monologue which comes in Strether's decision that ”the
text was simply that in Eh§s3_places such things were." (p.306)
Although the art imagery and the pastoral tone definitely
dominate the monologue, two other images suggest surrender,
lending to the easy manner. The first is Strether's feeling
that he ”had dropped...and now he was touching bottom,” (p.303)
and the second is the small image that, when he and Madame de
Vionnet consented not "to talk about anything tiresome,” he had
sacrificed "an armful of high interest." (p.304) Everything

in the style and imagery combines to make the Lambinet monologue

58

almost a pastoral poem, a hymn celebrating the return of time
and youth to Strether.

The structural purposes of the Lambinet monologue are
not those of introduction primarily, as was true of the monologue
in the gardens, but rather the Lambinet monologue serves to halt
the action at the most crucial moment of the novel. The crux
of the relationship between Chad and Madame de Vionnet, at least
from Strether's point of view, is whether their attachment is
"virtuous" or not. It is as if Strether has been living up to
this point in a psychological pastoral idyll that corresponds to
the landscape through which he passes in the monologue. He will,
in the next chapter, come to the end of his innocence, and to
heighten the effect of Strether's awakening as much as possible,
James juxtaposes two chapters which, viewed together, produce
the ultimate of subtle irony. The greatest irony, of course,
is that Strether, at the end of his harmonious day, is to find
himself face to face with disharmony, deception and confusion.
The slow music of reeds and willows will be eclipsed by a nervous
laughter. The scene itself, the beauties of rural France, the
gaities of Paris, the clothes, the amenities, the social graces
will be, in the next chapter, exposed as mere appearances that
hide harsh realities. Strether, who has put himself happily ”in
relation" will be awake long hours of this night in a darker,
harsher meditation, groping to place this final revelation into

relation. Nothing could serve to emphasize the impact that

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Strether's new knowledge will have on him more than this idyllic
end of his innocence. To use his own phrase, Strether is like

a Babe in the Woods, ignorant of the complexities of the moral
questions which have been set before him. He has been consider-
ing moralities much as one might consider climates--the Alps
agreeing with one, the seashore with another; however, this is
far too easy an answer, as James will make clear. The silent
authorial comment on Strether's day in rural France will be that
it proves that innocence, no matter how sensitive and imaginative,
is no match for the manipulations of experience. Innocence and
its correlative ignorance, particularly social naiveté, are
never glorified in James as life-encouraging forces. The great
Jamesian victims--Isabe1 Archer, Milly Theale and Maggie Verver
have been victimized because they were foolishly trusting, as

is Strether. All of the psychic shocks in James which come

to the innocent are, in some sense, deserved.

One of the most ingenious devices which James uses to
furnish the authorial rhetoric is his placement of just such
pictures as this Lambinet scene. Because his point of view
is so strictly limited he cannot use any overt devices to demon-
strate that Strether is becoming more and more an unrealistic
romantic. Instead, he must make this picture of Strether as
absolutely a fantasy of innocence and peace as possible. To
achieve this through the eyes of a fifty-five year old man is a

feat which James accomplishes skillfully, using every device of

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structure that he will allow himself. Strether is living an
illusion; his vision is illusory, and yet his characterization
is highly realistic. Placing this monologue eye-to-eye with
the recognition scene is the most economical way of all to give
a realistic portrait of a romantic man and his romantic vision.
This juxtaposition of the two very different scenes also
helps to unify the action of the external and internal plots.
A large part of Strether's tragedy is determined simply by his
traits which are illuminated in this monologue. His innocence,
ignorance and, above all, his unwillingness to see what he does
not want to look at. This is his tragic flaw. When he was young
he did not have the vision to make the most of his opportunities;
now that he is older he has gained awareness of the value of
life, but he still lacks the wisdom to judge its quality. At
this moment in the novel, James almost promises that Strether
will accept the French values of which he has grown so fond.
This is the closest that Strether comes to staying in Europe
and rejecting Woollett unconditionally. This monologue, then,
is at an important peak in the internal plot. The very next
sceme is the climax of the external plot. Madame de Vionnet
and Chad are discovered. Again, the importance of the knowledge
that they are lovers is all to Strether. Chad was ready to return
to Woollett six weeks earlier. Madame de Vionnet has known that
her only feeble hope to keep Chad was to keep Strether. It is

Strether who will be violently moved by this recognition. l‘hus,

61

the external plot is again subservient to the internal. Chad
will probably return to advertising for the family firm even
though Strether strongly admonishes him not to desert Marie.
He, Strether, will desert her because his fantasy is shattered;
he cannot accept her for what she is. Perhaps one of the subtler
reasons why he cannot is that his day in the country has all
been a delightful speculation as to what the future may hold
for the two of them, and he cannot renounce his fantasy to deal
with the realities of Marie and Chad. He thought that somehow
he could eliminate Chad from his relationship with Marie, but
he finds that impossible now. A monologue block here keeps
attention riveted to Strether, so that Strether's shock will be
artistically the finest moment of tension and surprise.

This second, Lambinet monologue, and the monologue in
the gardens are the two major monologue blocks of the novel.
In both of them Strether is alone immediately before a crucial
moment in the external plot. The third section of the novel
which has the manner of a monologue is so full of elements of
a scene that it is difficult to evaluate it as a monologue in
the same sense that the other two are. It is, in essence, a
scene recounted through the meditation of a monologue giving
it the best tensions and movements of the scene, along with the
reflective, internal, deeply subjective quality of the monologue.
This monologue occurs in the next chapter, directly after the

Lambinet monologue. Structurally, it offers a beautiful balance

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62

with the Lambinet monologue because the tone of this monologue,
recounting Strether's "vain vigil (p.313) almost all night the
same day as his romantic day in the country, is as realistic
and groping as the Lambinet monologue is romantic and serene.
This day has had a profound effect on Strether, and placing his
consciousness at the center of the drama before and after the
climactic event is the best way to illustrate in what way Strether
is affected and how he changes. The elements of romance and
realism are balanced here, allowing James to comment through
his structure on the perils of innocence. In his notebooks,
James describes this ”discomfortable night” as "one way not to

H8

shirk. This is to be the scene, this nightly vigil, in which
Strether comes to the realization that his fantasy has been

only that, mere fantasy, and that whatever discomforts Woollett
may offer, its cold thought has, all the while, seen the truth
of the affair much more clearly than Strether has.

The majority of the afternoon that Chad, Marie and
Strether spend together, and their return to Paris is handled
as it is remembered and sifted by Strether that night. In
this way, the events are reported second-hand, in a manner that
does not demand that they be reported in strict chronological
order, but rather as the chain of impressions passing through
Strether's mind. The scene is developed along the lines of
Strether's meditations, it being obvious that he is groping for

a definition of what has so profoundly bothered him in the event.

63

Chad and Marie de Vionnet's encounter with Strether is
presented with both great immediacy and depth just because of
the manner of seeing the scene as a flashback in Strether's
mind. James adroitly accomplishes the transitions from scene
to monologue and back again through a constant reminder that
the scene is being recalled. These reminders are scattered
throughout the passage, and bridge the gaps between reader,
Strether, author and the scene itself. For example, Strether
wonders "why indeed--apart from oddity--the situation should
have been really stiff,” but this question was "naturally not
practical at the moment” in the scene itself and "so far as
we are concerned” was ”a question to be tackled, later on and
in private, only by Strether himself." (p.309)

Because the chronological sequence of the passage follows
Strether's meditation on the scene James is able to highlight
certain key points which subtly underline what happened in the
scene itself, but also provide a curious understatement and
quiet satire on Strether's perceptions. For example, Strether
is to remember that ”the wonderful woman's overflow of surprise
and amusement was wholly into French," (p.310) a point which,
to him, is an indication of her confusion, but to the reader is
full of small dramatic ironies. There are little exquisite
touches like this one throughout the monologue which deepen
the reader's impression both of the event and of Strether. The

monologue has a dual structure: in one way it is structured to

64

give the scene, and, in another, it builds to a climax of
Strether's awakening to the truth of the affair. James makes
very explicit the importance of the encounter:

When he reached home that night, however, he knew he had

been, at bottom, neither prepared nor proof; and since

we have spoken of what he was, after his return, to

recall and interpret, it may as well immediately be

said that his real experience of these few hours put on,

in that belated vision,--for he scarce went to bed till

morning--the aspect that is most to our purpose (pp.3lO-3ll)
The internal plot, or the plot of Strether's tragedy and moral
decision, is here obviously superior to the interests of the
external plot. The most important consideration of the actual
event is its impression on Strether's moral sense; in other words,
what Strether thinks of the event is more important than what
actually happened. In order to heighten this impression to the
fullest, James gives the event only through Strether's impression
of it so that there can be no mistake that Strether's moral
dilemma is the main concern of the novel, and not, for example,
the reader's estimate of Chad and Marie de Vionnet.

As in the other monologues, James gives the sharp sense
that Strether is isolated: ”...he had, at his hotel, for a long
time, without a light and without undressing, sat back on his
bedroom sofa and stared straight before him.” (p.311) Not only
is Strether isolated physically, but again he is isolated
morally and socially as well. Chad and Marie de Vionnet are

arranged on one side; Strether, on the other. He is spiritually

isolated because of the lie: he is, in one sense, a spectator at

65

a drama, with full dramatic distance maintained between actor
and audience. Another element which makes Strether feel ”lonely
and cold" is his realization of the "deep, deep truth of the
intimacy involved." (p.313) The image that James uses here, at
the end of Strether's vigil, the image of a man who has been
avoiding confrontation with reality, dressing the facts in
fantasy "as a little girl might have dressed her doll," (p.313)
is the image of the romanticist of the Lambinet monologue. Now,
at the end of the day, Strether has come to see the hopeless
romanticism of a man who refused to accept facts, who believed
that they "were specifically none of his business."

The effect of these two monologues is to catalogue why
Strether begins to question Parisian morality which "disagrees
with his spiritual stomach,” (p.313) and to present the moment
when Strether ceases to be the man of the romance and becomes
the experienced, wiser man of the tragedy. Strether has chosen
neither morality; he has sought a compromise rejecting the dis-
honest elements in both ethics. The style of the two monologues
is perfectly suited to content, one having the serene cadences
and imagery of the pastoral, and the other the confused realiza—
tions of discordant reality. Through the three major monologues,
then, James has developed one theme of the novel: The moral
judgments of Lambert Strether, forced upon him by the circumstances
of the external plot.

In a long novel presented through one consciousness there

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will be many short passages which have the effect of little
monologues. These may be any length from one short paragraph

to several pages. In The Ambassadors most of these passages

 

fall conveniently into one of three categories according to
purpose. Short internal monologues are used to give descriptions,
to offer transitions and to present Strether's reflections.

The short descriptive paragraphs that have characteristics
of monologues are found as Strether makes each new acquaintance
which is to be germinal to the novel. The monologue effect of
these paragraphs is usually achieved through phrases much like
those James uses in the last night-vigil monologue. The para-
graphs that describe Strether's first impressions of Chad are
a good example. Strether's impression of Chad is emphasized in
the introductory sentence, "Our friend was to go over it after-
wards again and again." (p.89) This sentence prepares the reader
for the importance of Strether's impression that Chad is not
the same Chad who left Woollett. One of the reasons that Strether's
descriptions of everyone are so important is that everything
that happens in the novel is to be seen as it affects Strether;
thus it is not particularly important what is, but rather what
is to Strether. Throughout the novel what Chad is is never so
important as the change from what he was is to Strether, and
therefore the first description of him says comparatively little
about what he is like and correspondingly a great deal about

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67

thought him to be. The physical details which are to be expected
are eclipsed into the one fact that Chad has some gray hair now.
This method of description, or rather negative description, for
example, one of Chad's characteristics is that his face and

air "disconnect themselves...from any imaginable aspect of a

New England female parent," (p.92) enable James to work on the
reader's imagination to the point that Just as Strether's impres-
sions of Chad are highly subjective, so the reader's impressions
are, too.

It is not the physical change in Chad which is to be so
important to the novel, though, as the social finesse which he
has learned from Madame de Vionnet. This social grace is em-
phasized in Strether's description of Chad's entrance into the
box:

He had never in his life seen a young man come into a box

at ten o'clock at night and would, if challenged on the

question in advance, have scarce been ready to pronounce

as to different ways of doing so. But it was in spite

of this definite to him that Chad had had a way that was

wonderful: a fact carrying with it an implication that,

as one might imagine it, he knew, he has learned, how.(p.9l)
It is through his perception of Chad that Strether Judges Marie
de Vionnet, and it is this very change in Chad that makes Strether
in the end urge Chad to stay with her. If the change, then, is
to be one of the main elements of the novel, the change itself
must be realized by the reader or the characters will lack adequate
motivation. To this end James fashions this first subjective
description of Chad.

Besides the descriptive passages which are short monologues,

68

James uses monologue paragraphs at important transitions in the
novel. One of these occurs immediately before the Pococks
arrive. James builds the tension before their advent through
careful dramatization of the mounting tension within Strether.
One of the most ancient devices to portray a troubled mind is
the medium of dreams, and here James describes Strether's ”fan-
tastic waking dreams" (p.201) of Sarah Pocock in which she "loomed
at him larger than life; she increased in volume as she drew
nearer; she so met his eyes that, his imagination taking after
the first step, all, and more than all, the strides, he already
felt her come down on him, already burned, under her reprobation,
with the blush of guilt, already consented, by way of penance

to the instant forfeiture of everything." (p.201) The image of
Sarah as a phantom, a vulture, a huge, ominous bird is actualized
throughout her stay in Paris. The preparation for her reception
as an evil omen is built long before her arrival. Without the
presentation of Strether's forebodings, the Pococks would lose

a great deal of their force and become merely comic caricatures
of Woollett.

Short monologues are used not only for description and
transition, but also for reflection on many different occasions.
Strether is of a reflective nature, and his reflections are so
much a part of the fabric of the novel that it is almost impossible
to isolate examples that are true little monologues from any of

the other reflections which are not definitely monologues. For

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example, as Strether lunches with Marie de Vionnet after he

meets her at Notre Dame James describes his feeling that ”he had
touched bottom." (p.176) It is short but it links the Strether

of the dinner with Maria Gostrey in London with the Strether here
on the Left Bank, thus adding to the unity of the novel. Many

of the reflective passages deal with Mrs. Newsome, which is to

be expected because she only appears through Strether's conscious-
ness. The point of view makes it hard to differentiate monologues

in this area, indicating that it is difficult in The Ambassadors

 

to isolate the small monologues. In some senses this may not
even be worthwhile, but it is technically interesting to enumerate
and discuss as many varied uses of the monologue as are available
in James.

Without the three large monologue blocks of the novel
James would lose many rich effects. He uses the monologue struc-
turally and thematically to further both plots and to express
the complexity of ethical decisions as dramatically as possible.
Because the novel is presented entirely through one consciousness,
its major conflict played out within one main character, the
monologue blocks do more than any other technical device to

develop this conflict with significance, immediacy and poignancy.

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FOOTNOTES

lA11 citations in the text are to The Ambassadors: An Authori-
tative Text, The Author on the Noveff Criticism ed.'SI P. Rosen—
Eaum, Norton CFItIcaI Edi€i55§.'TN€W York, I965). This quota-
tion is from page 131.

2Percy Lubbock, The Craft 93 Fiction (New York, 1929), p. 164.

3James says, in his Notebooks:
I want him fine, cIever, literary almost: it deepens the
irony, the fragedy....A Professor in a college would
imply some knowledge of the lives of the young-~though
there might be a tragic effect in his seeing at the
last that he hasn't even suspected what those lives
might contain. (p. 373)

F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth Murdock, eds. The Notebooks of

Henry James. (New York, 1947). "-. ' '.

 

 

“E. M. Forster, Aspects 23 the Novel (New York, 1927).

5Robert A. Durr, "The Night Journey in The Ambassadors,”
Philological_guarterlX; XXXV (January, 1956), 23-38.

6Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961).

7Austin Warren discusses the New England conscience in Henry
James in The New England Conscience_(Ann Arbor, 1966).

8

 

Henry James, The_Notebook§, p. 398.

 

 

7O

Chapter III

The Interior Monologue in The golden Bowl, Volume I

 

It is almost as if, as James prepared to write The

*

golden Bowl, he made one large sweeping arc with his arm and

 

uncovered a stage with such a grand play of character and
setting as to stagger the imagination. Certainly, here, on

the surface, the characters are the most obviously the stereo-
types of romance of all the later novels. First, James creates
the Prince, a gallant, handsome, almost Machievellian aristocrat
with a proud and infamous ancestry. His "sovereign personal
power" that so overwhelms Maggie, is the manifestation of the
sexual energy of a long line of passionate men and women whose
morality is a ”slow, steep and unlighted”lstaircase. James
saturates the novel with the overtones of the royal as he con-
stantly refers to his characters by their titles: the Prince,
the Princess and, most suggestively, because in the novel he

is given no other name-~the Principino. The Prince is never
far divorced from his history, a fact which adds to the meta-
phorical quality of his characterization as almost another, but

animate, objet_d'art. To refer to various qualities of the

 

Prince is always to refer to an aggregation which seems to
include one personal, specific man, and many other, indistin-

guishable, but concretely present, POpes, wives, husbands,

71

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children and their friends mustered loyally about with drawn
daggers and rings which conceal poisons. The Prince appears
followed faithfully by these unprincipled, but loyal, ghosts,
so that both his own judgments and the judgments which others
make about him are made with a far larger reference than to

one man in one situation. For example, Maggie is first struck
with the history of his name, Amerigo, which she sees as a link
between them. The Prince as an historical personage, and as a
representative of castles, intrigues and evils of the past is
one of the supreme romantic touches of the novel.

The Princess, in turn, will have to be grand enough to
satisfy the imagination of the suitability of the royal union.
This James achieves through her great, unfathomable wealth. As
the Prince is never far separated from his heritage, so the
Princess is never, at least in the first book, the Prince's
book, far distant from the consideration of her fortune. It
is not until the Princess's own book that she emerges as a real
person, Maggie, to be distinguished from the sweet, innocent
little heiress of the Prince's book. Maggie is always shallow
in the first volume of the novel because she is so strictly
romantic. Maggie's father, also, is the romantic archetype of
the American billionaire. His name, Adam, is as suggestive as
is Amerigo, and as is ChristOpher Newman. James does not say
exactly how Adam acquired his wealth, although it was "wrought

by devious ways,"(I,p.lh5) which is another effort to leave

73

tiresome, realistic questions out of the romance. The fourth
member of the quadrangle, Charlotte Stant, is, within the terms
of the romance, the dark, SOphisticated, beautiful, knowledgeable,
evil woman of the Gothic tale. Charlotte, in these terms, is

the perfect foil for the innocent Maggie, as she is, again in
these terms, too physically perfect as Maggie is too spiritually
pure. It is Charlotte who will threaten the happiness of all

the others, and thus she must have neither money nor connections.
Fanny Assingham is the fairy godmother of the story. She
arranges marriages, and ostensibly aides in the creation of

the happiness of all. Fanny is also, ironically, used as the
seer, the prophetess, of the romance because she foreshadows

each disaster before it takes place.

The settings match the characterizations in grandiose
conception. All the residences are suited to the entourage of
royalty. The spacious country house at Fawns provides both
the pastoral and lavish atmosphere necessary to the romance.

The London residences are equally grand, and Matcham, the
country house from which the adultery is in reality begun, is
another setting for the pastoral idyll, but one which also sug-
gests intrigues and unquestioned freedoms. The places which
appear in the novel only as references--American City and the
Prince's Italy, are also as richly symbolic and suggestive as
the actual settings. The objects which decorate Adam Verver's

various residences gleam with the gold and silver and priceless-

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74

ness of the romance.
These highly romantic characters and settings provide
the mechanics of the also highly romantic external plot. The

external plot in The Golden Bowl is the classic story of the

 

innocent princess, who, all unsuspecting, admits the wicked

woman of the world into her heart and home and then must be
cruelly awakened to the disaster threatening herself and all

that she loves. True to the dictates of the fairy tale, good
overcomes evil, and the wiles of the wicked witch are no match
for the virtue of the true princess.2 In the terms of the
external plot, Maggie wins; whereas, in the terms of the internal,
she grows. Some critics deal with the theme of the novel only

in terms of the external, romantic plot, and these critics are
the ones who see Maggie as the heroine struggling to re-establish
the moral order which has been violated. This view of the novel
ignores the ambiguities and ironies of the Princess's volume,

and sacrifices a great many of the complexities of the novel to

a simplistic, rigidly superimposed order which does justice only
to the novel as a romance, and not to it as realism or tragedy.

The international theme, as it is used in The Golden Bowl, adds

 

to the working out of the romantic plot, because Maggie is an
innocent from the New World, as is her father, confronting the
moral laxity and the deceptions of the Old World in the forms
of Charlotte and the Prince.

Juxtaposed upon the romance of the novel is the realistic

tragedy. In The Golden Bowl, the tragic elements are specifically

 

rendered in just that way, as tragic elements, so that the novel
is not a tragedy, or Maggie's tragedy, in the same way that The

Ambassadors is Strether's tragedy, but, rather, the novel is

 

full of tragic elements, and the manner of the working out of
Maggie's dilemma in her volume is a tragic manner. Thus, an

exmination of The Golden Bowl_as both tragedy and comedy is a

 

study of two modes and how they relate to the same elements of
the novel. With this distinction in mind, the characterizations
and settings may be defined as the characterizations and settings
of the classical tragedy because of their extreme simplicity.3
The dramatic unities of place and action seem, for a novel, care-
fully observed. The simplicity of the plot, and the few characters,
add to the stark atmosphere of tragedy. In this sense, classi-

cal simplicity of structure merges with romantic complexity of
surface to produce a variegated texture which is the perfect
background for a novel built largely upon irony.

The subject of the internal plot is the transfer of
Maggie's primary passion from her father to her husband. Maggie's
tragic flaw is her inordinate attachment to her father, which,
within the novel, she appears to have overcome. There are many
tragic elements in this struggle of Maggie's, and even at the
end of the novel it is not clearly stated that her victory is
not Pyrrhic. In one sense, the novel is the study of the growth

of the tragic consciousness. Maggie, in the beginning, has a

purely romantic consciousness, but by the end of the novel she

76

has known both external evil and her own ignorance. She has

gained maturity, but through a process far too grinding and

torturous to be romantic. All the vestiges of the romantic

little Princess are outgrown by the time Maggie leaves her father.
The irony of Maggie's victory is, of course, that the

forms must be broken and that she must, to win her husband,

sacrifice her father. This is what maturity requires, and yet,

in another sense, each loses what he loved most except the Prince

who seems outside of the tragic consciousness. Charlotte loses

the Prince; Adam loses Maggie and the Principino, and Maggie

loses Adam. The rigidity of the point of view adds much to the

atmosphere of the tragic which surrounds Maggie in her volume.

It also denies an insight into Charlotte and Adam Verver so

that it is impossible to tell, objectively, how deeply the tragedy

is theirs. Charlotte's story, though, on any level, has a

tragic atmosphere, and because Adam loses what he loves most,

and always views people, even his beloved grandson, as a col-

lector, the novel, if it were told from other perspectives, might

easily have been the tragedy of the man who worships beauty

beyond virtue. Evaluating the history of each of the participants

separately would lead to the conclusion that this is the most

ironic of all James's plot structures, because, although the

evil appears thwarted and the forms broken, each of the characters

is left, it appears, spiritually isolated in the end, even

though the relationship between Maggie and the Prince is, sym-

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bolically, salvageable.
An understanding of the romantic and tragic elements in

‘The Golden Bowl, and the dynamics of the internal and external

 

plots, helps to explain the complexities and ambiguities of

the novel. There are many ways to look at the structure of the
novel. The novel may be seen purely as the working out of the
relations of the Prince, Princess, Adam Verver and Charlotte
Stant. The interactions of the four, and the forms they impose
upon themselves, are a method of structure which becomes a
metaphor for the theme. Maggie manages, at Fawns, between the
twin scenes, when Charlotte pursues her and the later scene
when she pursues Charlotte, to change places with Charlotte,
and to manipulate the relations so that instead of h3£_being
the one outside, Charlotte is.J. A. Ward divides the novel up
among the events which occur at London, Fawns and Matcham,
finding that the settings and the moves from one setting to
another also provide a highly metaphoric structure for the
novel.“ The most highly metaphoric structure, however, is that
suggested by James Spencer,5 which would study the novel as an
outgrowth from "the primary symbol, the golden bowl." The
golden bowl, and what happens to it within the novel, thus be-
comes the objectification of the characterizations, themes and
relationships of the novel. There are more technical ways of

dividing the architecture of The Golden Bowl than through metaphor,

 

 

however. The novel may be evaluated as built around recurring

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patterns. One method of patterning would be the returns to
Fanny and Bob Assignham's conversations. Another pattern is
to be found in the balcony scenes, and the many "twin" scenes
which, with repetitions, supply great dramatic irony.

James himself preferred, from what little his Preface
tells, to think of the structure in terms of the two conscious-
nesses from which the story is presented. In this way, the
novel is fairly neatly divided between Prince and Princess.
Finally, like all of James's novels, the novel may be studied
as an alternation of picture and scene. It is this alternation
which presents the question of the use of the monologue in the
novel. The pictures are long monologues which manage, in
Maggie's volume, to "take over” the structure so that, at times,
the monologues interrupt only very briefly to reveal scenes,
sometimes only a mere glimpse of a scene, and then return to
the basic form of the monologue. It is difficult to differentiate
among the monologues in the second volume for just this reason;
Maggie's consciousness is not only a device of point of view,
but is the dramatic stage, the antagonist and protagonist simul-
taneously. Deciding where the monologues begin and end, especially
in the Princess's book, at times must be arbitrary, but a
catalogue of some of the major uses of the monologue in The

Golden Bowl will serve as a guide for the designation of divisions.

 

Monologues are used for many purposes in The Golden

 

Bowl; some of them are crucial, highly important to both plot

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and theme, and some are of lesser importance. The crucial
monologues, those which are most integral to the novel and most
memorable to the reader, occur immediately before important
turns in both the internal and external plots. A few of the
more important monologues of this type are Adam Verver's
soliloquy on the terrace before he proposes to Charlotte; the
Prince's at Matcham, again on a terrace, before he and Charlotte
go to Gloucester, and the very famous "pagoda" monologue as
Maggie realizes that the forms of the relations between the two
couples are actually frightening and isolating her. Another

characteristic of the monologues in The Golden Bowl which is

 

almost universal among them is that they are all concerned with
the relations among the four principals. This is to be expected
prior to crucial turns in the action because the interactions
and maneuverings of the four principals are, in reality, all
there is to action in the novel. Each consciousness in a
monologue block of the novel, or in a shorter transitional
monologue, is attempting to put itself "in relation" to the
other three, or one of the other three. Thus, Maggie's
monologues range from her feeling of isolation, of being "arranged
out," to her eventual mastery and control as she gazes in at

the card players at Fawns and feels that she is the stage
manager of the little play. If monologues do reveal what is
most important to people, if the strands of daydreams do uncover

subconscious trends, and if James is achieving mimesis and not

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80

merely moving his plots along in the monologues, then it is
obvious that to these four principals the relations among them-
selves and how these relations appear to the others is the
most important consideration in their lives.

Another outstanding feature of the monologues in Too

Golden Bool is the depth of characterization they make possible.

 

For example, throughout Adam Verver's first monologue at Fawns,

it becomes obvious that here is a man who judges and discriminates
with the terms of the collector, the Patron of Art. Subtly,

James lays the foundation for one of the large themes of the novel:

The unhappiness which results from using people as oojects d'art

 

and placing the values of the connoisseur above all other con-
siderations. In the same way, the Prince's monologues reveal
that he is grOping and lost in the English society whose ways
seem so strange to him. It is, too, just because the English
are so foreign to him that Amerigo's values become so real, so
concrete. He is never shown operating within his own element,
but just because he is so very cast adrift James emphasizes his
aristocratic values, through the contrast between Amerigo and
Maggie and her father. It is this contrast which forms the
substance of the book if the novel is evaluated strictly from
the technical aspect of the point of view. It is even worth—
while and illuminating to look at the Prince and Princess's
monologues only in terms of the striking contrast in values,

imagery, concerns and motivations presented. For one thing,

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81

juxtaposing their monologues provides an unequalled contrast
between the consciousness of the New World and that of the Old.
It is almost as if these two consciousnesses are the objectifi-
cation of the two halves of James's international theme. It

is all here: The different moralities, the different concepts
of society, family responsibility, personal integrity and
personal loyalty, the different historical consciousness, the
appeal to the past and tradition and the longing for the future.
Nowhere in James is it easier to find the international theme
presented so concretely within two consciousnesses which,
though wedded, seem at times diametrically opposed.

One reason why the monologues in The Golden Bowl are so

 

central to the work is the ambiguity which they create. In
Tho_Ambassadors there is little question but that when Strether
has his final vision of the relationship between Chad and Madame
de Vionnet his vision is accurate; it corresponds to a concrete
reality outside his consciousness. The same thing is true of

The Wings of_the Dove. The reader knows that Merton deserves

 

 

his turmoil along the streets of Venice. The justice of the

punishments and rewards of The Golden Bowl, however, is never so

 

clear. Some things are explained satisfactorily: Maggie has
had a visit from the antique dealer and does know that Charlotte
and the Prince knew each other before her marriage, true, but
to what extent Maggie colors events at Fawns, especially as they

concern Charlotte's motives, and to what extent Maggie evaluates

82

the situation objectively is never clear.

This ambiguity is to be expected, and applauded, in a
novel which has concerned itself with the objectification of
processes of consciousness rather than with any realistic
examination of the truth of the situation; however, no matter
how laudable the ambiguity may be, and no matter how much a
part of the author's intention, ambiguity it remains. This is
the reason that the debate over Maggie is such a hot one. She
is judged either the romantic, savior of the moral order, or
the manipulating neurotically jealous father-intoxicated witch.
Both of these judgments can be supported through the monologues,
depending upon the interpretation placed on the external situa-
tion. Without the monologues in the Princess's volume there
would be, though, strangely enough, even less objectivity than
there is with them, because Maggie's thoughts must give the
motivations for her actions which otherwise would have little
meaning. In fact, except for the magnificent scene in which
Fanny breaks the golden bowl, the Princess's volume has very
little movement as such; the sense of confusion, anxiety and
turmoil is all produced through the objectification of Maggie's
mental states.

Because the various monologues serve so many functions

in The Golden Bowl they have widely differing structures. The

 

simplest designation is to name some of these rhetorical mono-
logues and some dramatic. The rhetorical monologues are heavily

weighted with extended metaphors and foreshortened narration.

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It is in them that the objectification of states of mind, so

characteristic of The Goldoo_Bowl, is for the most part found.

 

The dramatic monologues, on the other hand, are shorter, and
more in the nature of soliloquys that supply immediate insights
and motivations into specific situations. Adam Verver has two
important interior monologues, one rhetorical, and the other,
dramatic, so that these two serve as excellent examples of the
two forms.

The rhetorical monologue has certain characteristics,
all of which may be illustrated from Adam Verver's first mono-
logue in the billiard room on a Sunday morning at Fawns. The
objectification of emotional states and the state of relation-
ships is found throughout the monologue, but most memorable is
Adam's definition of the Prince as a "great Paladian church...
something with a grand architectural front." (I,p.l35) The
monologue is also heavily dependent upon foreshortened narration.
A particular type of rhetorical monologue found often in James

is the monologue of introduction. In The Ambassadors, Strether's

 

monologue in the Luxembourg Gardens is one of these. There are

three such introductory rhetorical monologues in The Golden Bowl:

 

This one of Adam Verver's, the Prince's as he wanders the
streets of London at the Opening of the novel, and Maggie's
"pagoda" monologue. These introductory monologues have several
characteristics of their own: 1) They fuse past, present and

future to provide valuable background material; 2) They introduce

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the character's values and particular patterns of rationalization
so that consciousness is familiar and lucid; 3) They set the tone
of that character's relationships with the other three principals.
In other words, it is obvious from Adam's monologue that his
chief concern is Maggie and that he evaluates the Prince and
even, to some extent, the Principino, as precious works of art.
The pictorial quality of this monologue is created
through the pastoral framework of Fawns as seen from the billiard
room windows which "looked out into spaces of terrace and garden,
of park and woodland and shining artificial lake." (I,p.125) The
billiard room itself is a smaller frame within the larger one of
Fawns, and the table, on either side of which Adam and Mrs.
Rance are poised like hunter and quarry, is another architectural
device. Adam is thrown into relief because, for one thing, he
has sought isolation with his letters and journals. The dramatic
picture of the American billionaire alone on a Sunday morning
perusing his mail is a splendid vehicle to suggest his meditation
and introspection, but the American billionaire attempting to be
alone but relentlessly pursued by a vocal American divorcee is
a comedy which belies an introspective atmosphere. James uses
Mrs. Rance as a symbol to trigger Adam's monologue so that the
concrete fact of Mrs. Rance ever hovering about the edges of
the monologue provides a dramatic situation within the picture
that gives focus and unity to the monologue. Mrs. Rance poses

the conflict, which unifies Adam's ruminating about among past,

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present and future. Mrs. Rance is the symbolic threat to the
pastoral tranquility of Fawns as well as to the harmony of the
family structure. She impresses upon Adam the necessity of an
action which will precipitate everything that is to come in
the book. The overt comic touches of this scene are the few
such touches in the novel, so that it, along with Fanny and Bob
Assingham's intervals, provides valuable balance for the very
serious story.

Probably, as has been mentioned, the most characteristic

elements of the interior monologues in The Golden Bowl_are the

 

patterns of imagery, usually extended metaphors, to objectify
states of mind. Nothing contributes more to the sense of what
kind of consciousness the author is presenting than the imagery
which issues from that consciousness. There are four basic
patterns of imagery here in Adam verver's introductory monologue
which serve as four motifs which stress the theme he will carry
throughout the work. First, there is the motif of the American
billionaire. One of the methods James uses to fuse the, it
would seem, antagonistic elements of an American businessman
and cosmopolitan Patron of Art is the focus of his imagery.

In this case, the concentration of imagery throughout the mono-
logue is on Adam's brain. This brain is characterized by
various images which contrast the quiet repose of cahedrals
with the white heat of furnaces. The ”chamber of his brain

[for a strange workshop of fortune" which "must...have been

86

during certain years the scene of an unprecedented, a miraculous
white heat.” (I,p.127) This brain has "the perfection of
machinery" because from it has issued "the kind of acquisitive
power engendered and applied, the necessary triumph of all
operations.” Yet, within this brain also is the spark of genius
which "sat somewhere in his inward vagueness as a lamp before
a shrine twinkles in the dark perspective of a church." (I,p.127)
True to the pattern of imagery running throughout the novel
of architectural structures, the Paladian church and the pagoda,
so here Adam's brain is pictured as an

establishment, mysterious and almost anonymous, the

windows of which, at hours of highest pressure, never

seemed, for starers and wonderers, perceptibly to

glow, [Eco/”must in fact have been during certain years

the scene of an unprecedented, a miraculous white-heat,

the receipt for producing which it was practically felt

that the master of the forge couldn't have communicated

even with the best intentions. (I,p.127)
It is exactly this same brain, though, which has a second awe-
inspiring aspect before which the young Adam Verver

had knocked.../Ehd hao7'not been immediately; so that

when, after waiting and coming back, he had at last got

in, it was, twirling his hat, as an embarrassed stranger,

or, trying his keys, as a thief at night. He had gained

confidence only with time, but when he had taken real

possession of the place it had been never again to come

away. (I,p.149)
The multiple connotations of the imagery help to create the
sense of a complex man who is at one and the same time a business-
man capable of compiling a massive fortune and a connoisseur of

fine art of the first order.

87

Although it may require a sensitive reading to accept
the fusion of the disparate mentalities of the capitalist and
the Patron of Art, there is a third, minor motif in the monologue
even more difficult to reconcile with the other aspects of
Adam Verver, and that is the motif of innocence. Adam Verver,
seeking escape and a few minutes of solitude is like "a man
of forty-seven caught in the act of handling a relic of infancy—-
sticking on the head of a broken soldier or trying the lock of
a wooden gun.” (I,p.120) And, again, Fanny treats him, he declares,
"as if she were nursing a sick baby." (I,p.l37) The images of
Adam's brain as the genesis of both the capitalist and the
Patron of Art, and the image of the innocent are joined by a
fourth motif closely allied to the first image of Adam's genius.
This motif is the most important thematically because it raises
the important problem of the immorality of looking at people as
"representative fine objects” and equating them with "pieces of
the first order.” Adam Verver's tragic flaw is that he uses
the same criteria to choose a son-in-law that he uses to furnish
American City. James very overtly emphasizes this defect of
his vision as he explains that Adam liked Amerigo because "the
aspirant to his daughter's hand showed somehow the great works
and signs, stood before him with the high authenticities, he
had learnt to look for in pieces of the first order." (I,p.lAO)
The question is one of appearance versus reality, of judgment

which evaluates all relations in the terms of esthetics. He

finds the Principino a ”precious small piece." (I,p.147)

 

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There are many grace notes attached to this motif of
the vision of the esthete. Mr. Verver sees himself in terms
of art. He feels like Cortez in Keauvs sonnet "On First Look-

' and his very religion is ”the passion

ing into Chapman's Homer,‘
for perfection at any price." (I,p.146) Even his relations
become concrete in images of art. "His and Maggie's decent
little old—time union...had resembled a good deal some pleasant
public square, in the heart of an old city, into which a great
Paladian church, say-something with a grand architectural front--
had suddenly been drOpped.” (I,p.l35) He praises the Prince
that he has been "round" not "angular". What a disaster it
would have been had the Prince ”been formed all over in a lot
of little pyramidal lozenges like that wonderful side of the
Ducal Palace in Venice," (I,p.l38) but, no, the Prince is,
instead, "a pure and perfect crystal." The texture of the
monologue is rich and varied, for one reason, because these
images which introduce a very complex, yet in some ways, very
simple, man, are elaborate and vivid and carefully extended
to gain maximum intensity.

The patterns of imagery initiate the picture of Adam's
relationship with those around him. This monologue, like all

the monologues in Tho_Golden Bowl, is concerned with establish-

 

ing the relations of the three principals. At the end of
Adam's monologue it is obvious that his primary concern is that

he shall not be a burden to Maggie. Exactly how, at this point,

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Adam looks at Maggie's marriage is given here; he finds between
Maggie and Amerigo "the maximum of tenderness” and ”immersion

in the fact of being married." (I,p.148) These reflections of
Adam's on Maggie's marriage form a strong contrast with the
facts of Maggie's marriage after the adultery. Adam's opinions,
here, ‘gain even more weight in the context of the rest of the
novel because James leaves completely open the question of
Adam's knowledge at the end of the book. One of the large
ambiguities of the novel remains the problem of how much Adam
suspects. James does give great evidence here, in the introduc-
tion of Adam, that he is highly sensitive to Maggie's feelings
and desires. Throughout the novel the nature of Adam's attach-
ment to Maggie and hers to him, is analyzed and presented in
different lights. In this monologue Adam thinks of Maggie

and his "decent little old-time union" in terms that suggest
nostalgia. Adam is also aware that before Maggie was married

no one bothered him because he wasn't married, almost intimating,
as Maggie is to come right out and say, later, that it is as

if she and her father had been married. Maggie assures Adam:
"You couldn't be in the market when you were married to mo.”
(I,p.172) This monologue does much more than a simple narrative
description can do. Through imagery, foreshortened narration,
and the dramatic situation of Mrs. Rance, James presents many
aspects of Adam Verver and also gives the history of his former

marriage and of his initiation into his present role as a great

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collector. Structurally, the monologue serves the purpose of
the much cruder flashback, and it successfully bridges the gap
in time from the Prince's shopping trip with Charlotte before his
marriage, to Fawns after the Principino has been born. The
leisurely pace of the monologue, before the action commences
again, serves to preserve the sense of the passing of time.
Charlotte's monologue on the staircase at the ball serves a
similar structural function in that it focuses the passage of
time and slows the movement of the novel so that the effect of
change is established and the feeling of continuity preserved.
It is an interesting sidelight that one of the things that

bothered James most about Roderick Hudson was that the timing

 

seemed disjointed. Fictional time, if mimesis is to be pre-
served, must give the effect of actual time, and growth, deteriora-
tion, and maturation must emerge as processes and not merely

leaps backward and forward. In the later novels the effect of
process is achieved, in one way, through the monologues. The

fact of the Prince's marriage is actually solidified through

a third person's reflections, at length, upon it.

One of the interesting characteristics of this monologue
is the shifting point of view. This is true, to some extent, of
all James's monologues, but here James gives the sense of an
observer, and of a dramatic objectivity, in the beginning of
the monologue which make Adam Verver seem an actor upon a

stage who ”might have been observed to Open the door of the

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billiard—room with a certain freedom~—might have been observed,
that is, had there been a spectator in the field." (I,pJES)

The mythical observer is a device from which to watch Adam,

and the shifts from without Adam as seen through the observer's
eyes, to within Adam and the actual monologue, add variety and
coherence. James is not adverse to lumbering into meditation
scenes with a chummy, gossipy narrator's ”we share this world,
none the less, for the hour, with Mr. Verver." (I,p.l25) This
friendly narrator also provides a posture from which to evaluate
Mr. Verver. The narrator suggests that our attention which

is "tender indeed almost to compassion" (F1117 "qualify his
achieved isolation." (I,p.l25) After this introduction, the
narrator still provides information, but the narrative becomes
increasingly internal and subjective until complete subjectivity
appears to be reached with the question Adam feels: ”What did
she (Mrs. Rancof'wish to make of him beyond what she had already
made?” (I,p.l30) A few sentences further the narrator intrudes
again with the information that "It wasn't in him lAdamf...to go
so far as to wonder if their group were next to be recruited

by some friend of her (Hrs. Rance's own...". (I,p.l30) The
shifts to the narrator provide a running commentary upon both
the external situation of Adam and Mrs. Rance and upon Adam him-
self. They provide narrative control over the large amount of
descriptive and introductory material covered in the monologue.

Without them, the monologue would emphasize Adam's dramatic

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situation over character.

Besides the switch to the narrator, there is, near the
end (I,pp.l38—lhO) of the monologue, a shift to the Prince.

This provides a contrast between Adam's view of the Prince as
”rounded” and the Prince's own view of his situation as one

of living among people with whom he hadn't ”the same measure

of importance.” (I,p.l39) This type of shift is more characteris-
tic of the Prince's volume than of Maggie's which is more

rigidly controlled.

In summation, the most important aspects of this monologue
of Adam Verver's are the characterization given him as an
American capitalist and Patron of Art and the immediate situa-
tion of Mrs. Rance which precipitates Charlotte's visit to
Fawns. Thematically, the monologue is important because it
introduces the problem of those who evaluate human relationships
with ”the particular sharpened appetite of the collector."
(I,p.luO)

Adam's second monologue is a dramatic soliloquy which
dramatizes his decision to propose to Charlotte. The setting
isolates Adam, after a pleasant October evening listening to
Charlotte at the piano, on the terrace of Fawns. This is only

one of the three major terrace soliloquys in The Golden Bowl,

 

each one of which dramatically sets a character on a terrace
poised between a grandiose mansion and a vast expanse of nature--

”the gardens, the lake, the circling woods," (I,p.207) which

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render the scene both pastoral and suitable for meditation.
Adam's disturbed state in which ”he thought, in a loose, and
almost agitated order of many things” (I,p.203) is at first
emphasized through the peace and order of nature, but as the
soliloquy progresses to its climax all of nature responds in
sympathy with Adam. As he is later to recall:

the autumn night seemed to clear to a view in which

the whole place, everything round him, the wide terrace

where he stood, the others, with their steps, below...

lay there as under some strange midnight sun. It all

met him during these instants as a vast expanse of

discovery, a world that looked, so lighted, extra-

ordinarily new, and in which familiar objects had

taken on a distinctiveness, that as if it had been a

loud, a spoken pretention to beauty, interest, im-

portance, to he scarce knew what, gave an inordinate

quantity of character and verily an inordinate size. (I,p.207)
This response of nature in which "light broke for him at last"
serves as a highly dramatic climax for the essentially passive
scene in which, objectively, all that happens is that a man
gazes out onto his prOperty "leaning his arms on the old parapet
. . . in a far excursion." (I,p.205) The employment of a
sympathetic fallacy is romantic, suggestive of literary tradi-
tions in which illuminations come from spirits or through dreams,
and nature blends herself into a close harmony with the pre-
vailing mood of man.

The prevailing imagery of the monologue is that of dis-

covery here at the climax. In this monologue the objectifica-
tion of the state of mind is accomplished not, as in the

rhetorical monologues, through images of architectural structures,

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but through the "midnight sun" cast upon the pastoral. This
effect is both subjective and objective because the scene is
concrete, but the illumination of it is a state of mind. The
other images of the monologue are from nature, also. "A full
word or two" (hao7'"dropped into the still-stirring sea of
other voices" (I,p.203) that evening suggesting to Adam that
his relationship with Charlotte demands reflection. Adam
reaches into "the vast freshness of the night" for his answer,
the answer that will save him from ”breathing a chill upon...
éfho7’...luxuriance of her [Haggie‘of spiritual garden." (I,p.207)
One of the interesting characteristics of this imagery is that
it is active and dramatic, not solid and architectural as is

much of the other imagery of The Golden Bowl.

 

The major structural purpose of the monologue is to
dramatize the moment of choice and the major thematic purpose is
to dramatize the motivations of that choice. James was never
one to shirk a demanding scene; as he says in his preface to

The Ambassadors, he will lovingly work out the last rendezvous

 

of Marie de Vionnet and Strether. True to his principles,
James will never leave the moment of choice undramatized unless
the choice is a process, in which case that effect will be
incorporated into the work through mounting tensions. The
chapter builds to the climax of the soliloquy, Opening with
the first terrace scene in which Adam talks with Fanny who

assures him that Charlotte is "the real thing." (I,p.l95)

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After this pronouncement Adam feels delighted that ”the luxurious
side of his personal existence was now again furnished, socially
speaking, with the thing classed and stamped as 'real'.” (I,p.l96)
The chapter progresses through an authorial comment on Adam's
”application of the same measure of value to such different
pieces of property as old Persian carpets...and new human
acquisitions" (I,p.l96) to a statement of the circumstances

which leave Adam and Charlotte alone at Fawns. At the end of

the chapter, Charlotte and Adam's daily habits are recounted

and then the soliloquy completes the chapter, all of which has
centered on Charlotte and everyone else's reaction to her
arrival. The soliloquy is the moment of greatest interest
preliminary to the climadflc moment when Adam actually proposes.
This "intentional" soliloquy is a perfect twin to the Prince's
"intentional" soliloquy on the terrace at Matcham. Structurally,
both soliloquies prepare for high moments in the plot, and,
thematically, both unravel motivations which lead to an identical
conclusion. Both men decide to use Charlotte.

Thematically, this soliloquy completes the characteriza-
tion of Adam begun in the long introductory monologue. "The
esthetic principle, planted where it could burn with a still
cold flame..." (I,p.197) is that principle by which Adam chooses
both oriental tiles and a wife. He had one "measure of value"
described as

one little glass.../Tnto which he puo7...everything

he raised to his lips....As it had served to satisfy
himself, so to speak both about Amerigo and about

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knowledge of at the same time he was consenting to

the announcement of his daughter's betrothal, so

it served him at present to satisfy himself about

Charlotte Stant and an extraordinary set of oriental

tiles of which he had lately got wind. (I,p.l96)
The esthetic principle from which he chooses Charlotte is not
the only exploitation of her, however. Adam decides that
Charlotte will perform a ”service to his daughter" which will
be ‘"the proper direction of his young friend's [Charlotte'g7
leisure.” (I,p.208) Adam marries Charlotte so ”that Maggie
would less and less appear to herself to have forsaken him."
(I,p.208) Adam could not "think of it merely for himself"
ZEhaE? would have been"...impossible. But there was a grand dif-
ference in thinking of it for his child." (I,p.209) Thus, the
motivations for Adam's choice are unwise, and clearly not the
traditional motives of the ardent lover. Adam plans, first,
to appropriate Charlotte because she is ”the real thing,” and,

secondly, to sacrifice her for Maggie's happiness.

Like all of the other monologues in The Golden Bowl,

 

this one concerns the relationships among the principals. Even
here, before his marriage, Adam unconsciously links the Prince
and Charlotte, finding that they both treat him with high "con-
sideration." "It might almost have been--if such a link between
them was to be imagined--that Amerigo had a little 'coached'--
or incited their young friend." (I,p.ZOS) This considerate
treatment of Adam continues to be the pattern adapted by both

the Prince and Charlotte throughout the book. What is appalling

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here is the lack of consideration, beyond the merely formal
and esthetic, which Adam seems to show them. The almost immoral
motivations of Adam's choice lay the foundation for the patterns
of the relationships throughout the book: Maggie is arranged
with her father both in her own mind and in Adam's, and Charlotte
and the Prince are arranged, outside--together. Because James
reconstructs Adam's motivations so carefully, his freedom of
will can never be seriously questioned. He has not been manipulated
into an unwise union, but actually has been caught in the trap
of his own manipulation of someone else: a favorite ironic
development in James.

These two monologues, the rhetorical monologue of intro-
duction and the intentional dramatic soliloquy, characterize
Adam Verver and his relationships with the three other principals.
Even though he never returns to Adam's consciousness after his
marriage, the crucial question of the Princess's book remains
"How much does Adam know?" James gives a detailed analysis of
what Adam thinks about, how he judges, and what is most important
to him here in these two monologues. The evidence they present
would strongly argue that Adam did know, to some extent, how
Maggie felt, because his primary mental occupation is her
welfare.

Adam's consciousness is presented through two monologue
blocks, but James condenses the majority of his exposition of

Charlotte's consciousness in only one monolOgue which is both a

98

monologue of introduction and of intention. This monologue is
enclosed within a heavily ornamented, romantic frame. Charlotte
is isolated ”halfway up the 'monumental' staircase” (I,p.245)

at ”a great official party-—in the full flush of the London
springtime.” Moving up and down the staircase around her are
”The ordered revellers, rustling and shining, with sweep of
train and glitter of star and clink of sword," (I,pp.2u6-2A7)
but Charlotte is pointedly isolated. "She hoped no one would
stOp" because she wants to be alone to ”mark in a particular
manner the importance of something that had just happened.”
(I,p.2u7) The romance of the setting and the emphasis on the
beautiful woman make the passage a shining picture of Charlotte
within a moving, dramatic scene. James deftly describes
Charlotte through Charlotte's own feelings about how she looks.
"For a couple of years now she had known as never before what

it was to look 'well',” (I,p.245) Charlotte herself is every
bit as magnificent as the marble tiers about her with "the
unsurpassed diamonds that her head so happily carried, the other
jewels, the other perfections of aspect and arrangement that
made her personal scheme a success, the proved private theory
that materials to work with had been all she required.” (I,p.246)
The setting for Charlotte's consciousness is romantic and is

in harmony with the characterization of Charlotte developed in
the monologue as the aggressive, evil, plotting, powerful dark-

haired villainess. The villainess classically disdains the

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rest of humanity, symbolized here by ”the dull polish of London
faces;” (I,p.247) traditionally, she held herself aloof in her
physical and intellectual superiority. The classic vice of
the wicked witch is always pride, and Charlotte's monologue
unveils a subtle, but pervasive, pride.
The dramatic setting Of the monologue supports the
intensity of the situation. Charlotte, framed on the staircase,
waiting for the Prince to return from escorting Maggie to her
carriage, is observed by Col. Assingham above her. Bob Assingham
is here the same type of device that Mrs. Rance is in Adam's
first monologue. He focuses both the immediate situation,
Charlotte's thought, and the picture. He intensifies Charlotte's
sense that ”a crisis for them all was in the air" (I,p.251)
because he is the symbol of both Fanny and society at large.
Because Charlotte is so involved with appearances, how she looks
to society is of critical concern to her. The monologue is
intentional because Charlotte, in the critical situation of
being left alone at the party with ”the person it pleased her
to be left with" (I,p.248) is exposed as deeply attached to
the Prince:
She drew inspiration, drew support in quantity sufficient
for almost anything, from the individual value that,
through all the picture, her husband's son-in-law kept
for the eye, deriving it from his fine unconscious way,
in the swarming social sum, of outshining, overlooking
and overtopping. (I,p.248)

Again, it is pride that is the mother of Charlotte's love for

the Prince. To be with him is to appear superior. Charlotte

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nowhere momentarily "decides" to commit adultery in the objective
sense that Adam decides to ask her tO marry him or that the
Prince at Matcham decides that any man of the world must take
advantage of the proximity of a beautiful woman, but she allows
herself to be compromised in appearance which becomes only one
step away from the reality of the compromise. Each of the
major decisions of the book is motivated by a pattern clearly
established as the predominant pattern of choices made by that
Character. In this manner, Adam chooses Charlotte through his
Pride as a connoisseur; the Prince chooses Charlotte through

318 pride as an Italian nobleman, and Charlotte chooses the
Prince because he feeds her personal pride in her own superiority.
3harlotte feels that her "opportunity for happiness" lies in

Ger achieving freedom. One of the great ironies of The Golden

 

@9313; is that Charlotte's flaunting of convention and desperate
Struggle for freedom will end in the most memorable image of
her as following behind Adam Verver at the end of "a long silken
halter looped round her beautiful neck." (II,p.287)

The dramatic framework and situation of Charlotte's
moHOlogue make it, short as it is, impressive and memorable.
StPucturally, the monologue occurs at an important transition
in the plot. Immediately before Charlotte is encountered in
all her splendor as Mrs. Verver, James has dramatized Adam
and a. far humbler Charlotte Stant at Brighton. This transi-

tional monologue scene will have to foreshorten all the time

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between the acceptance of the prOposal and the commencement
of the adultery. At the close of the preceding book James
focuses sharply on Charlotte's relationship to the Prince through
the question of the telegram which the Prince has sent her,
supposedly commenting on her imminent engagement to Adam Verver.
Thus, even though several years have passed in actual time,
fictional time is smoothly continuous because the hypothesis
of a relationship between a future Mrs. Verver and the Prince
is immediately followed by the reality of Mrs. Verver and the
Prince. The only overt authorial instrusion as a concession
to passage of time is a small phrase, "at the particular instant
of our being again concerned with her,” (I,p.245) which also
smoothly unifies the incidents of the plot. James begins Book
III EE.EEQEE ESE; and will return to the contents of the
Prince's telegram, and the facts of the situation of the marriages,
later.

In this monologue the most important focus is the situa-
tion of Charlotte and the Prince's relationship. Like all the

other monologues in Ihe golden_Bowl, this one functions to put

 

the four principals in relation, a particularly important function
here after Adam and Charlotte's marriage. Obviously, the situa-
tion dramatizes the Prince and Charlotte as the social emissaries
of the two families. Also, as Charlotte is to tell Fanny in

the next scene, ”Maggie thinks more on the whole of fathers

than of husbands." (I,p.257) Maggie has returned home to be

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102

with her father. ”She likes him best alone,” as Charlotte
explains to Fanny, which leaves the Prince and Charlotte exactly
in the compromising situation which Charlotte senses is so
critical. The monologue suggests, also, that this is not the
rist of such moments in which she feels an impending crisis.
"When such hours weren't depressing, which was the form indeed
in which she had mainly known them, they were apparently in a
high degree exhilarating.” (I,p.251) This exhilaration which
Charlotte feels is another aspect of her audacity and sense
of victory.

The characterization of Charlotte here, and it is one
of the very few direct insights into Charlotte which James allows
in the novel, is many-faceted but coherent. First, Charlotte
is the stereotyped proud dark woman of romance. She is thinking
of no one but herself, and appearances are her most important
concern. Even her love for the Prince is the fascination of
pride. Charlotte also is a strong, aggressive force capable
of a ”personal scheme" to prove that only ”materials to work
with" (I,p.246) had been needed to make her superb. Charlotte's
decisiveness and energy are important because they support the
theory of her free will. Charlotte chooses to be involved with
the Prince, and even though she is shamelessly used throughout
the novel, she is somewhat scornful of all men. Charlotte
appears to be scornful of everyone and intent on using people

only to serve her purposes. In this sense Charlotte and the

103

Prince differ radically, and it is a crucial divergence in
motivation in James. The Prince commits the adultery because,
according to his ancestry, history, and personal psychology it
is the only honorable thing to do. It is almost expected.
Charlotte's morality is not the Prince's morality but closer
to the corruption of the Old World. Charlotte is always plotting.
She has not merely fallen into the situation but has known that
it was critical from the first. This difference in the two is
emphasized every time that Charlotte must explain a move of
hers to the Prince. He is peculiarly innocent in some respects
and does not understand, for example, why it is so crucial that
Fanny see the two of them together at the ambassador's ball.
Charlotte is the one always arranging, directing, explaining.

In this monologue, although she senses a crisis, Charlotte is
not in conflict as to what she shall do. When she takes the
Prince's arm to continue up the stairs she has made her choice
and is proud of her courage. It is Charlotte who is the most
deceptive throughout the novel because she always consciously
arranges appearances to suit herself; she is always dissembling,
and forever sacrificing humanity to forms to further her own
ambitions. Without her short monologue, Charlotte would be far

more pitiable, and far weaker as a principal in the drama.

Prince #1
The problem which James faced in all of the Prince's

interior monologues was the presentation of a consciousness with

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104

the same sharp "double vision" as Strether experienced. The

Prince is, as he tells Maggie,

two parts....One is made up of the history, the doings,
the marriages, the crimes, the follies, the boundless
bétises of other people...But there's another part,
very much smaller doubtless, which, such as it is,
represents my single self, the unknown,unimportant...
personal quantity. (I,p.l9)

In the first rhetorical introductory interior monologue of the

Prince's with which The Golden Bowl begins, James give the

 

initial revelation of the Prince's profound concern about what
the Ververs expect of him. To create a character like the Prince,

James must compose the motifs of the modern Roman galantuomo.

 

The Prince must be represented as proud and yet not unduly
arrogant and greedy: ”Personally, he considered, he hadn't

the vices in question.” (I,p.l6) His historical consciousness
must emerge as ever-present to him, but, if he is to be more

than a stereotype, he must also have a strong personal psychology.
James tackles these problems of characterization in the Prince's
introductory monologue which is in some respects the traditional
meditation of a bridegroom immediately after "his fate had
practically been sealed...so definitely had the solicitors, at
three o'clock, enabled the date to be fixed, and by so few days
was that date now distant." (I,p.5) The monologue is as dramatic
as the picture of a restless bridegroom, "strayed into Bond
Street” who "paused on corners, at crossings” can be. James
structures the monologue around a scene between Maggie and the

Prince which James explains that the Prince is "catching the

105

echoes £527 from his own thought while he loitered.” (I,p.ll)
The dialogue between Maggie and the Prince, is subordinated
within the monolOgue because it is consciously remembered and

is an integral part of the meditation. It helps to vary the
pace and graphically depicts Maggie and, more subtly, Maggie's
relationship with the father who is clever and amiable enough,
in his daughter's eyes to "make you like him in Chinese." (I,p.8)
The monologue is unified then, by its overall prenuptial nature
of the introspection of the prospective bridegroom, and is
structured, roughly, in four parts: 1) the Prince in Bond Street
absent-mindedly looking in windows; 2) the scene with Maggie,

3) a long digression on the Prince's desire to substitute the
scientific and mechanical for the futile and superstitious and,
4) the Prince's decision to see Fanny Assingham which would be

a gesture toward doing ”something or other, before it was to
late for himself." (I,p.20) The entire range of the monologue
dramatizes the Prince's problem of determining "the motives of
such people," (I,p.22) of the Americans, which "contributed to
that element of the impenetrable which alone slightly qualified
his sense of his good fortune.” (I,p.22) It is "the state of
mind of his new friends, including Mrs. Assingham herself"

which ”had resemblances to a great white curtain." (I,p.22)

The thought which puzzles the Prince is ”the several expectation
...of which he was the subject." (I,p.23) He is attempting to

put himself in relation to the Ververs to find out what he is

106

expected to be. Because this lack of relation will determine

the plot of the book, James presents here both the good-natured
determination of the Prince to be ”much more decent as a son-
in-law than lots of fellows he could think of,” (I,p.S) and

the sharp contrasts among the historical personage of the Prince,
the arch-romanticism and acquisitive economy of the Ververs and
the aspirations of Amerigo to divorce himself from the follies
of his ancestors and his history. The international theme in

The Golden Bowl is clearly dramatized here in the distinction

 

between the romantic Ververs and the modern Prince.

Within the novel this monologue functions as an initial
pronouncement of all the questions to be debated. An introduc-
tion to the Prince and the circumstances of his marriage is an
introduction to the aristocratic consciousness and the Old World
element of the international theme. Within the monologue the
major oppositions of the novel are juxtaposed: Symbolically,
through Home, London and American City, dramatically, in the
scene between Maggie and the Prince; psychologically, through
the Ververs' romanticism and Amerigo's perplexities in the face
of their motivations. The marriage of Maggie and Amerigo is
literally the marriage of Old World and New, with Adam Verver
and modern machinery as the maternal ancestor and a Pope and
numerous infamous personages as the paternal. In the face of
these dichatomies the marriage will be consummated.

Some of the technical problems of creating the correct

flavor for the Prince's meditation are solved through the
diction and imagery of the monologue. Foreign words and phrases
create an atmosphere for the Prince. He terms Adam and himself

"galantuomo;" if the modern Roman seeks an_Imperium he might

 

 

well look "on London Bridge, or even on a fine afternoon in May,
at Hyde Park Corner." (I,p.3) The "cinquecento at its most
golden hour, wouldn't have been ashamed of" Maggie, and his
cousin, Don Ottavio, is ”the most disponible of ex-deputies
and of relatives.” (I,p.l8) These few overt lapses into other
languages are complemented with the references the Prince makes
to his own mental languages. ”He thought of these fellows"
[those who were not decent to their fathers-in—law? ”in English."
The Prince has found English "convenient, in life, for the
greatest number of relations, even for his relation with himself.”
(I,p.5) The Prince has great facility in English, yet desires
to cultivate "American" because it is in that tongue "that he
[Adam Verver? is most alive." On the other hand, "Miss Verver
had told him he spoke English too well" (I,p.6) indicating
that the dialects of English, and language itself, will become
symbolic of other differences. Another motif of language is
that the Prince and Charlotte will later be found to speak
the same language literally and metaphorically, because Charlotte‘s
Italian, and facility with all languages, is very good.

Imagery is always important as a representation of both

the immediate state and the general orientation of consciousness

108

in The Golden Bowl, and here in the Prince‘s monologue the

 

image of the "grimness of the crunched key in the strongest
lock that could be made" strongly suggests a bridegroom's fear
of being trapped. The Prince himself, again characterized in
terms of oppositions, is, on the one hand, submerged "up to

his neck in...a bath...sweetened...Zfihd7'tinted...by the action
of some essence, poured from a gold-tapped phial, for making
one's bath aromatic." (I,p.lO) Maggie‘s "exquisite colouring
drops" are "of the colour of...the extraordinary American good
faith. They were of the colour of her innocence, and yet at
the same time of her imagination." (I,p.lO) Yet, this scented
bath is only a mask for that other ”inexpugnable scent in

which his clothes, his whole person, his hands and the hair of
his head, might have been steeped as in some chemical bath."
(I,p.l6) This is the scent of his race which has been "hand-
somely" full of "arrogance and greed.” These two images are
highly sensuous, suggesting that aspect of the Prince's nature.
When he compares himself with Adam Verver the Prince finds

"I'm like a chicken, at best, chopped up and smothered in sauce,
cooked down as a gremg_de volaille, with half the parts left

out. Your father's the natural fowl running about the bassecour.

 

His feathers, his movements, his sounds--those are the parts
that, with me, are left out." (I,p.8) The Prince is "eating"...
(Adam? ”alive-~which is the only way to taste him." (I,p.8)

This contrast of the Prince as a gourmet's delight with Adam

109

Verver as an animal of color and movement is also indicative

of all the differences between the two men who, throughout the
novel, share Maggie's attentions. The imagery which objectifies
the Prince‘s immediate mental state, and is not merely descrip-
tive, comes at the end of the monologue when the Prince identifies

with

the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small
boat further toward the North Pole...than any one had
ever done, found at a given moment before him a thick-
ness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain of
light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the
colour of milk or of snow. There were moments when

he felt his own boat move upon some such mystery. The
state of mind of his new friends, including Mrs.
Assingham herself, had resemblances to a great white
curtain. (I,p.22)

When the Prince goes to see Fanny he has determined to give ”the

' which is the estimate the Ververs have made

shrouded object,‘
of "the cluster of his attributes,"..."a twitch." The image
which the Prince feels describes his relationship with the
Ververs is

some old embossed coin, of a purity of gold no longer

used, stamped with glorious arms, mediaeval, wonderful,

of which the worth in mere modern change...would be

great enough-~but as to which, since there were finer

ways of using it, such taking to pieces was superflu-

ous. He was to constitute a possession, yet was to

escape being reduced to his component parts. (I,p.23)
The images of possession, as applied to the Ververs, provide
a motif throughout the novel, in this monologue present in the
image both of the gold coin and of Portland Place as a place
where "Mr. Verver had pitched a tent suggesting that of Alexander

furnished with the Spoils of Darius." (I,p.l9) The diction and

110

imagery add to the flavor of the Prince as an aristocrat con-
fronted with the values of the New World. Maggie's imagery
of the Prince's honesty is a significant contrast with the
Prince's imagery: ”Watertight--the highest compartment of all?
Why it's the best cabin and the main deck and the engine-room
and the steward's pantry: It's the ship itself-~it's the
whole line." (I,p.lS)
The monologue introduces the sensuous nature of the

Prince, both through the imagery of the bath and through his
relations with women. ”The Prince's undirected thought" when
met with "possibilities in faces shaded...by huge beribboned
hats, was not a little symptomatic.” He is restless, but the
passage suggests that he was not always a man to avoid the pur-
suit of a beautiful woman. In fact,

the Prince's notion of a recompense to women-~similar

in this to his notion of an appeal--was more or less

to make love to them....He used in these days to mark

them off, the women to whom he hadn't made love: it

represented and that was what pleased him in it--a

different stage of existence from the time at which

he liked to mark off the women to whom he had. (I,p.22)
The Prince evaluates women as objects in much the same way
that Adam Verver views other people. This theme of the exploita-

tion of other people, sexually or otherwise, is one of the

dominant themes of The Golden Bowl. An important part of the

 

characterization in this introductory monologue is of the
Prince as a lady's man. Equally important is the characteriza—

tion of the Prince as mentioned, as an historical personage.

111

The Prince's pride is part of his heritage. For example ”he
expected her [maggigf'desired her to have character: his wife
should have it, and he wasn't afraid of her having too much."
(1.13.19)

Any monologue before a marriage would be expected to
give motivations for that marriage. Although the Prince's
meditations concern generally what the Ververs expect of him,
and what their motivations have been, his own motivations,
though not grossly presented, intimate that he has married
for money. ”It was allying himself to science, for what was
science but the absence of prejudice backed by the presence
of money.” (I,p.l7) Actually, the Prince is attempting to
divorce himself from ”much of th§7ugliness” of his

antenatal history...What was this so important step

he had Just taken but the desire for some new history
that should, so far as possible, contradict, and even if
need be flatly dishonour, the old? If what had come to
him wouldn't do he must make something different. He
perfectly recognised--always in his humility--that the
material for the making had to be Mr. Verver's millions.

(I,p.lo)

One of the large ironies of The Golden Bowl is illustrated here:

 

 

The Ververs value the Prince for his "archives, annals, infamiesf
(I,p.lO) but he wishes only freedom to escape them. Both
Charlotte Stant and the Prince value the Verver money as a means
to personal freedom.

The motivations behind the Prince's marriage help explain
his relationships with the other principals of the novel. The

definition of these relationships here, at the first of the

112

novel, is crucial because in a novel which depends so heavily
upon relationships, the introduction to the nature of those
relationships will set the tone of the development of the plot
and theme. To Mr. Verver the Prince intends to be a good
son-in-law, but he does not understand Adam's romanticism. He
looks at Maggie as "in respect to the beautiful world, one of
the beautiful, the most beautiful things." (I,p.ll) The easy
affectionate tone of the conversation between the Prince and
Maggie, with the Prince's answers ever ”genial, charming, like
every answer the parties to his new arrangement had yet had
from him" (I,p.6) suggests that, although the Prince may not
understand Maggie, he loves her very much. This conversation
also reveals the Prince's almost shy desire to be known for
that other part which "represents my single self the unknown,
unimportant--unimportant save to you-—personal quantity.” (I,p.9)
The last relationship established is that between the Prince and
Fanny who was ”the force that had set them successively in
motion. She had made his marriage.” (I,p.El) Fanny here is
clearly delineated as the author of all that will take place.
Another important question is also answered here: ”He [the
Princgf'hadn't as he believed, made love the least little bit to
Mrs. Assingham-~nor did he think she for a moment supposed it.
(I,p.22)

The narrative style of this introductory monologue is

quite formal. James describes the Prince in the traditional

113

manner of introduction. He had

a handsome face, constructively regular and grave,

yet at the same time oddly and, as might be, functionally

almost radiant, with its dark blue eyes, its dark brown

mustache and its expression no more sharply 'foreign'

to an English view than to have caused it sometimes to

be observed of him with a shallow felicity that he

looked like a 'refined Irishman'. (I,p.4)
Such authorial intrusions as "he said to himself,”--”at the
moment we are concerned with him” and ”as we join him” are
frequent in the meditation, along with traditional indicators
of the monologue in phrases like ”grounds of his predilection”
--and ”undirected thought." The use of the past perfect tense
throughout the scene with Maggie: "The girl had laughed...he
had returned...he recalled what...he had gravely returned,”
also aides in the control of the monologue. James kept a
traditional style because this is the first of the novel and the
reader must be slowly oriented to the characters and settings.
Also, the clarity of the entire monologue depends on an under-
standing of the Prince's situation and his reaction to it.

This long introductory monologue establishes the major

initial situation of the novel and introduces all of the prin-
cipals except Charlotte. It also portrays the Oppositions that
influence the novel, primarily those between Old World and New
and initiates the major motifs and theme of the work. It
introduces the Prince's consciousness and, through diction and

imagery, exposes that consciousness as, essentially, the aris-

tocratic, historical consciousness of the Old World.

11a

The Prince has four major interior monologues in Th3_
Golden Bowl; 1) the long introductory one analyzed above; 2)
the passage as he stands before the window at Portland Place
immediately before Charlotte arrives in the rain; 3) his
monologue in Chapters II and III on the peculiarities of his
position and 4) his soliloquy on the terrace at Matcham the
morning that he and Charlotte go to Gloucester. In addition
to these major monologues there are many smaller monologue

paragraphs which, like the similar passages in The Ambassadors,

 

offer transitions and dramatize important contrasts between the
Prince's interpretation of a given situation and the Ververs'.
One of these smaller monologue passages which gives a description
is a masterful touch and deserves mention. James describes
Charlotte Stant through the Prince's eyes, deftly accomplishing
several purposes integral to the novel. First, the monologue
describes Charlotte in three ways: 1) as she looks to the Prince,
2) as a sexual object and 3) through the motifs of freedom and
strength which all follow her throughout the novel until she
loses both. The monologue also, however, characterizes the
Prince through his relationship with Charlotte and his implied
relationship with women in general.

The Prince has come to Fanny in Cadogen Place on the
impulse of the bridegroom's restlessness; he learns that Charlotte
Stant has come for the wedding. As Charlotte makes her first

appearance the Prince has time to meditate upon her because she

115

turns to speak with Fanny after she enters the room, avoiding
confronting the Prince so that he will, it is implied, have a
chance to look at her carefully.

"What he accordingly saw for some seconds with intensity"
is a clause which foreshortens the time so that a few seconds
of scrutiny expand into a detailed description. The imagery
of Charlotte before Fanny "with an exclusive address...like a
lamp she was holding aloft for his benefit and for his pleasure?
(I,p.NS) suggests the strong illumination of Charlotte and a
desire on her part to be physically apparent to him so that he
will be affected by "her presence in the world, so closely, so
irretrieveably contemporaneous with his own." (I,p.45) The
Prince's vision of her here, and the subsequent repetition of
the word "sharp" in the next sentence: "a sharp, sharp fact,
sharper during these instants than any other at all" both con-
tribute to the dramatic impact of the description.

All of the images which describe Charlotte's impact
on the Prince have connotations of both freedom and the mythological.
For example, ”her thick hair was...brown, but there was a shade
of tawny autumn leaf...a colour indescribable...something that
gave her at moments the sylvan head of a huntress." (I,p.ué)
On the other hand, "If when she moved off she looked like a
huntress, she looked when she came nearer like his notion...
of a muse." (I,p.47)

Like almost all the other descriptions of people in The

116

Golden Bowl, this one, too, develops the theme that the con-

 

sciousness observing looks at the other person as a work of art
to be possessed. In this monologue the idea of the possession
of the connoisseur is cleverly interwoven with the suggestion
of sexual possession. As the Prince looks at Charlotte, he
feels that

...it was, strangely, as a cluster of possessions of his

own that these things in Charlotte now affected him;

items in a full list, items recognized, each of them,

as if for the long interval, they had been 'stored'--

wrapped up, numbered, put away in a cabinet. While

she faced Mrs. Assingham the door of the cabinet had

opened of itself; he took the relics out one by one,

and it was more and more each instant as if she were

giving him time. (I,p.46)
The motif of Charlotte's physical self as a possession is ex-
tended throughout the monologue. Her "free arms" are of the
”completely rounded, the polished slimness that Florentine
sculptors in the great time had loved and of which the apparent
firmness is expressed in their old silver and old bronze.” (I,p.47)
Charlotte's ”main attachments" are of ”some wonderful finished
instrument, something intently made for exhibition, for a prize."
(I,p.47) A parallel to the Prince's image in his first monologue
in which he compares himself with a medallion is his comparison
here of Charlotte's body to a "long loose sifl<purse, well-filled
with gold-pieces, but having been passed empty through a finger-
ring that held it together. It was as if, before she turned to
him, he had weighted the whole thing in his open palm and even

heard a little the clink of metal." (I,p.47) All of these

117

physical images suggest that the Prince and Charlotte have been
physically intimate and that she greatly appeals to his sensual
nature. The images also contribute to the characterization of
the Prince as a man of the Renaissance aristocracy. The Prince
evaluates women with his deve10ped artistic taste and as objects
for his pleasure.
Charlotte as the huntress, the muse, and the purse full

of gold—pieces is also the Charlotte who wears

the air of her adventurous situation, a reference in

all her person, in motion and gesture, in free vivid

yet altogether happy indications of dress...to winds

and waves and custom-houses, to far countries and long

journeys, the knowledge of how and where and the habit,

founded on experience, of not being afraid. (I,p.MS)
James uses the monologue to characterize Charlotte as bold as
well as beautiful. A monologue here, through the Prince's
eyes, establishes Charlotte as a formidable adversary for
Maggie while it also makes explicit the kind of relationship
that the Prince and Charlotte have had. The Prince "as a man
conscious of having known many women" waits for "the doing by
the woman of the thing that gave her away." The passage which
follows, extemporizing on the relationship of man to woman,
explains the Prince's attitude. A man's relationship with a
woman consisted of the woman's giving herself away and "that
extraordinary mixture of pity and profit in which his relation
with her, when he was not a mere brute, mainly consisted.”

Here, as in all of the novel until the last summer at Fawns,“.

the Prince waits for Charlotte to initiate their mutual tone.

118

"She was the twentieth woman, she was possessed by her doom,

but her doom was also to arrange appearances, and what now con-
cerned him was to learn how she proposed." (I,p.SO) As the
Prince waits for Charlotte's first move, he mentally frames

the question which completes the statement that the monologue
subtly makes about their previous relationship: ”Would she

throw herself into his arms or would she be otherwise wonderful?”
(I,p.Bl) Finally, immediately before the actual dialogue

between the two begins, the Prince realizes the ”particular
appearance she would...go in for. She would take it high-~up,
up, up, ever so high." The Prince agrees with her decision:
”Well then he would do the same; no height would be too great

for them." (I,p.52) Charlotte, with her beauty, energy and
freedom is in command of the situation. It is Charlotte's choice
to come to the wedding and to capture a moment alone with Prince.
These facts supplement the theme of Charlotte's free will in

the novel. Charlotte is always the one who comes, who initiates
and who plans, and, in this sense, Charlotte is probably most
morally responsible for the adultery, because her overt manipu-
lation and deception are immoral whereas the Prince's under-

standing and enjoyment of the privileges of a galantuomg are

 

amoral.
Besides describing the previous relationship of Charlotte
and the Prince, the monologue explains how these two will relate

to Maggie. The "pitch" which the Prince receives from Charlotte,

119

is ”the happiness of his wife that was to be-—the sight of
that happiness as a joy for an old friend." (I,p.52) Throughout
the novel Charlotte always appears to arrange for Maggie's
benefit, adding almost a diabolically ironic note to her manipu-
lation. This monologue is an excellent example of James's
skillful use of point of view: a simple description fulfills
multiple functions and establishes an entirely new set of rela-
tions giving both the Prince's and Charlotte's histories and
foreshadowing their adultery.

The monologues at Portland Place, Eaton Square and
Matcham which establish the motivations for the adultery are

crucial to The Golden Bowl. Throughout Book III James uses

 

the Prince's consciousness of his situation in relation to the
Ververs as a focal point around which to structure the adultery.
The actual events which gradually lead to the morning in Glou-
cester are subordinate, structurally, to the development of the
Prince's consciousness of them. The first monologue which sug-
gests the dissatisfaction of the Prince occurs in Chapter IV of
Book III on a rainy March day which ”had blundered back into
autumn” while Maggie and the Principino are at Eaton Square,
having left the Prince at home at Portland Place.

The monologue is structured from the general to the
specific. It is introduced through a long paragraph which gives
the Prince's general reflections about his marriage and the

problem of what to do about time which

120

had originally much helped him--helped him in the

sense of there not being enough of it to trip him up,

in spite of which it was just this accessory element

that seemed at present, with wonders of patience, to

be in wait. Time had begotten at first, more than

anything else, separations, delays and intervals;

but it was troublesomely less of an aid from the moment

it began so to abound that he had to meet the question

of what to do with it. (I,p.29l)
The Prince's problem is actually what to do with himself, and
Charlotte's presence has solved his puzzle by the end of the
chapter. To dramatize the Prince's boredom and agitation
James begins slowly with a long unemotional paragraph about the
relations among the family. After this paragraph a transitional
sentence-~"The fact that time however wasn't, as we have said,
wholly on the Prince's side might have shown for particularly
true one dark day"--ushers in the specific situation which is
to be one example of the loneliness and boredom which the Prince
experiences frequently. Within the second paragraph the tone
of agitation builds. The Prince finds that his ”reflections”
which must ”fill the great square house in Portland Place”
fit "the scale of one of the smaller salons but loosely." It
is into this room that the Prince goes in search of Maggie; he
finds the tea service out before the fire, but no Maggie. The
sense of climax builds while the Prince "measured again and
again the stretch of polished floor." He is endeavoring to
"take his note", of his situation. The tension grows with his
"walk to and fro and...his frequent pause at one of the high

front windows [Fhich7'gave each of the ebbing minutes, none the

all.

m-sr
“A“.

nKb
ll;

4- .
VIZ:

:V-.

.N‘

pn‘

121

less, after a time, a little more the quality of a quickened
throb of the spirit." (I,p.294) These actions within the
monologue add to the dramatic nature of the Prince's'dreary
little crisis.” The insight which the Prince finally achieves
is like ”those fine waves of clearness through which, for a
watcher of the east, dawn at last trembles into rosy day.” The
abstract images of his illumination which was ”all for the mind,
the prospect revealed by it a mere immensity of the world of
thought," (I,p.294) leave doubt as to what, if anything, specific
he realized, but they are highly suggestive, like all the other
abstract imagery of The_Golden Bowl, and richly connotative of
a developing state of awareness. Because James seeks to give
the sense of the emotional process of gaining awareness rather
than a delineation of one specific feeling, his abstract images
are hard to define in concrete terms. In other words, the
traditional image of the dawn breaking here is symbolic of an
insight, but what exactly the insight covers is not explicit.

It does have to do with the Prince and his relationship with

his wife and, whatever it is, it has brought him further
agitation rather than peace or an impulse to constructive action
because it leads him to observe fretfully that ”the colour of
the air, of the mud, of the Opposite houses, of life altogether,
in so grim a joke, so idiotic a masquerade, was an unutterable
dirty brown." (I,p.295) It is at just this moment of grim

annoyance that ”a slow-jogging four-wheeled cab began to make

122

for the left-hand pavement and . . . floundered to a full stop
before the Prince's windows." (I,p.295) The monologue continues
as the Prince watches Charlotte alight and, as he observes her,
the tension increases until she enters the room and asks him
”What else, my dear. What else in the world can we do?” (I,p.297)
The culmination of the Prince's insight comes near the end of

the monologue when he feels that Charlotte has brought the

answer to his dilemma: ”It was as if he then knew on the spot

why he had been feeling for hours in such fashion . . . . He

knew at the same time, none the less, that §h3_knew still more
than he." (I,p.297) The monologue never becomes a scene in

this chapter. Even as Charlotte has her tea the sense of a medi-
tation is carefully preserved. The imagery at the end of the
chapter is still the extended, metaphoric representation of a
state of mind, and the focus is still on the Prince's feelings
and motivations rather than on the critical dialOgue of the two
as it will be in the next chapter which returns to the techniques
of the scene.

The internal structure of the monologue with style,
movement, and situation all ascending to a pitch of tension
parallels the function of this monologue in the structure of
the novel as a whole. The adultery will begin, at least physically,
in the next chapter, and this chapter must provide adequate
motivation for the Prince's participation. The Prince must be

shown to be as greatly discontent as Charlotte is. There are

123

eleven: chapters in Book III which, as a whole, is the part of
the novel which deals with the adultery. The first two chapters
at the Ambassador's Ball foreshadow the adultery through the
Prince and Charlotte's symbolic separation from social sanction
when theyemotionally separate from Fanny. Chapter III is
Fanny's choric comment on the imminent disaster. Chapters IV
and V are the commencement of the affair on the rainy afternoon
at Portland Place. Chapter VI bridges the time between the
beginning of the affair in March and the weekend at Matcham
with continued meditations by the Prince about his situation
and a central episode which is the dinner before Easter, at
Eaton Square. At this dinner the question of Matcham is at
first broached by Fanny in Chapter VII which also extends to
the actual weekend at Matcham. Chapters VIII and IX include
the weekend at Matcham and Chapters X and XI artfully close the
novel with another choric commentary from Fanny. The figure of
Fanny lurking behind the main dramatic interest of the affair
helps to unify Book III and symbolizes the Prince and Charlotte's
separation from their respective moralities and controls.
Within Book III the Prince's monologue passages develop his
sense of the wrong done to him. The Prince is an essentially
passive personage throughout the novel and might be completely
excused as a pawn in Charlotte's deceptive game except that he
gladly allows himself to be used; he "would let her visit to

him be all of her own choosing . . . [fingf'though taking no

124

step, he yet intensely hoped." (I,p.296) The Prince's com-
plicity is firmly established throughout the monologues, especially
whenever the question of freedom arises. The Prince feels that
"Charlotte and he had by a single turn of the wrist of fate

. . been placed face to face in a freedom that extraordinarily
partook of ideal perfection.” The monologues in Book III,
like those in Maggie's volume, describe the state of conscious-
ness so sharply that the moral questions-—questions of guilt
and blame and responsibility-~are posed ambiguously. If Maggie
has symbolically left the Prince for her father then she de-
serves to lose him, but her innocence in the face of his duplicity
almost excuses her.

Another function which this monologue serves within the
total structure of the work is the fusion of past, present and
future as far as the relationship of Charlotte and the Prince
is concerned. As Charlotte dries herself before the fire

the sense of the past relived for him nevertheless as
it hadn't yet done: it made it, before his watching
eyes, as in a long embrace of arms and lips, and so
handling and bustling the present that this poor

quantity scarce retained substance enough, scarce
remained sufficiently there, to be wounded or shocked.

(I,p.298)
Not only is this afternoon at Portland Place linked with the
romance in Rome, but also with the morning in the Park before
the Prince's wedding: "On that morning in the Park there had
been, however dissimulated, doubt and danger, whereas the

tale this afternoon was taken up with a highly emphasized con-

125

fidence.” (I,p.295) James eclipses time to give the Prince
and Charlotte's relationship the sense of the recurring and
continuous so that when they begin the adultery it is more like
a resumption of a former relationship than a new affair entirely.
James employs various stylistic devices to augment the
effects of the monologue. He uses repetition, at first, with
the repetition of both the word and the concept of time: "Time,
in its measured allowance had originally much helped him
. . . . Time had begotten at first . . . separations, delays
and intervals . . . . Time however wasn't _now7 wholly on the
Prince's side." This repetition contributes to the sense of
loneliness and boredom which plagues the Prince. Later in
the monologue, repetition denotes rising agitation: ”It had
been raining for hours, and the colour of the rain, the colour
of the air, of the wind, of the opposite houses, of life
altogether, in so grim a joke, so idiotic a masquerade, was an
unutterable dirty brown." (I,p.295) The diction chosen to
represent the Prince's consciousness also mirrors his rising
agitation. At first he is calm and faintly ironic with the
observation that Mr. Verver "relieved him of all anxiety about
his married life in the same manner in which he relieved him
on the score of his bank-account.” (I,p.292) As his tension
mounts, however, he rises to the image of life as an ”idiotic
masquerade" coloured ”an utterable dirty bown.”

The shifts in tone of imagery of the monologue follow

126

its overall shifts in tone. At first the Prince analyzing
his relationship with Adam Verver, is ironically amused:

He had been living . . . on Mr. Verver's services:

a truth scarcely less plain . . . if he dealt with

them . . . one by one than if he poured them all

together into the general pot of his gratitude and

let the thing simmer to a nourishing broth . . .

He would even thus now and again pick out a piece

to taste on its own merits. Wondrous at such hours

would seem the savour of the particular 'treat', at

his father-in-law's expense, that he more and more

struck himself as enjoying. (I,p.292)
This comparatively quiet concrete imagery at the beginning of
the monologue gives way to more dramatic imagery and more complex,
abstract imagery. His illumination comes with "those fine waves
of clearness through which . . . dawn at last trembles into
rosy day.” After the servant has gone Charlotte ”mounted,
with the whizz and the red light of a rocket from the form to
the fact.” This dramatic image is matched with the images of
fate. One is ”a single turn of the wrist of fate” which gave
them their freedom; another, an image of "the magic web" (Which?
"had spun itself without their toil, almost without their

touch." (I,p.298) Like much of the other imagery in The ggiden

 

Bowl_which describes mental states and processes, the extended
metaphor which describes for the Prince his feeling at the end
of the monologue is complex and confusing. Because James is
attempting to duplicate the process of consciousness he does
not restrict himself to formal rhetorical forms, but lets his

image eXpand to encompass as wide a range of feeling as possible:

127

Above all, on this occasion, once more there sounded

through their safety, as an undertone, the very voice

he had listened to on the eve of his marriage with

such another sort of unrest. Dimly, again and again,

from that period on, he had seemed to hear it tell him

why it kept recurring; but it phrased the large music

now in a way that filled the room . . . Just this truth

of their safety offered it now a kind of unexampled

receptacle, letting it spread and spread, but at the

same time elastically enclosing it, banking it in,

for softness, as with billows of eiderdown. (I,p.298)
Exactly what the voice is saying is not important and does not
demand translation into words. What is important is that some-
thing which seemed to give a warning before his marriage is now
identified with safety and freedom. The image suggests a
major shift in position and foreshadows the adultery about to
begin.

As a whole the monologue is formally controlled, although
it does contain complex images of the processes of consciousness.
This imagery, however, is carefully structured within passages
which are interspersed with narrative references to "the
reflexions just noted” which organize the monologue along con—
ventional lines.

This monologue clearly establishes the relationships
among the principals, explaining the situation in both Eaton
Square and Portland Place immediately before the adultery. The
Prince feels grateful to Mr. Verver for his generosity, but he
also feels that Mr. Verver "took care of his relation to Maggie”

perhaps too conscientiously. The Prince definitely feels that

Maggie and Mr. Verver, as peOple of the New World, are on one

side, and he is on the other. The sense that the Prince feels
like an outsider is clearly established. Charlotte's relation-
ship to the Prince becomes again the romantic one of their Roman
adventure. Immediately in the next chapters James explains
Charlotte's function as the family social representative.
Charlotte's resentment of her position is also evident in the
next chapter when she wonders ”What do they really suppose
. . . becomes of one?——not so much sentimentally or morally,
so to call it, and since that doesn't matter; but even just
physically, materially, as a mere wandering woman: as a decent
harmless wife, after all . . . ." (I,p.305) Together with the
next two chapters, this monologue block describes exactly how
the Prince evaluates his position in relation to both the
Ververs and Charlotte so that his responsibility and motivation
for the adultery are defined. All three of the monologues before
the excursion to Gloucester contribute this same kind of knowledge
as they build the characterization of this particular galantuomo.
Chapters VI and VII of Book III are actually a sustained
monologue block, even though the external setting and situation
of the Prince shift. This long monologue block is divisible
into three parts. The first part is the Prince's meditation on
the nature of friendship and on the nature of Charlotte's
duties as the social representative of the families. James
neatly closes this first section of the monologue with a summation

which establishes that the Prince's thoughts span a length of

12y

time: ”During the days with which we are actually engaged
these images and ruminations of his leisure, these gropings
and fittings of his conscience and his experience, that we have
attempted to set in order here . . . bore him company, not
insufficiently." (I,p.3l9) The second half of Chapter VI is
a monologue that continues through the Easter dinner party at
Eaton Square which Charlotte and Adam Verver host. Chapter
VII, the third part of the monologue block, records the Prince's
observations while at Matcham. James explains the extensive
nature of these meditations at Matcham through the Prince's
own sense that
he had never so much as during such sojourns the trick
of a certain detached, the amusement of a certain
inward, critical life; the determined need while apparently
all participant of returning upon himself, of backing
. noiselessly in, far in again, and rejoining there, as
it were, that part of his mind that was not engaged
at the front. (I,p.327)

In addition to the tripartite structure several other
techniques are used to organize the monologue. One of the
monologue's primary concerns is social customs and the contrast
of the Prince's Old World aristocratic concept of social customs
with social relations as they are carried out in Eaton Square
and at Matcham. The Prince's meditations effectively describe
what is happening both at the dinner at Eaton Square and at
Matcham, just as these two social occasions provide ample

opportunity for the Prince to find himself alienated. The set-

tings thus provide valuable focus for the meditation.

130

The monologue is also structured to give the sense of

the organic growth of a decision. Because this decision is
the delicate one to commit adultery with his father-in-law's
wife the motivation must be carefully established. James
dramatizes the Prince's isolation from his wife at the dinner
at Eaton Square where he finds that the situation "Put the pair
[Maggie and Adam? so together as undivided by the marriage of
each that the Princess . . . might sit where she liked: she
would still always in that house be irremediably Maggie Verver.”
(I,p.323) Not only is the Prince alienated from his wife, but
also from Fanny and other social controls. The monologue begins
with the observation that ”He [the Princgf'had taken it from her
[Charlotte] . . . that Fanny Assingham didn't now matter." (I,p.3l3)
The Prince's relationship with Fanny is a recurrent theme through-
out the monologue. Finally, Fanny and Bob return to London
leaving the Prince and Charlotte alone at Matcham, symbolizing
the Prince's rupture with his moral guide in a culture foreign
to him. The Prince is increasingly isolated; first from Maggie,
then from Fanny, and eventually from the English country society
within which he feels

like a man possessed of a shining star, a decoration,

an order of some sort, something so ornamental as to

make his identity not complete, ideally, without it,

yet who, finding no other such object generally worn,

should be perpetually and the least bit ruefully

unpinninr it from his breast to transfer it to his

pocket. I,p.328)

All of these breaks tend to force the Prince closer and closer

131

to Charlotte and to an alliance with her which will assuage

his bruised ego. Adultery is a pattern which violates social
institutions and customs and prior to the adultery James
establishes the social milieu of the Prince very carefully.

Any representation of the organic growth of a decision must
involve a studied sense of the passage of time which is another
function which this continuous monologue block serves. The
alienation of Maggie and the Prince has been a daily, slowly
accelerating process. James recreates this process through

the detail and methodical recounting of the monologue.

The interior structure of the monologue is also built
around peaks of tension which are composed of moments of in-
sight. For example, the first segment of the monologue in
which the Prince reflects on the nature of Italian versus English
friendship closes with the Prince's amused reflection that "he
had once for all turned his back on” (I,p.315) such services as
"romantic tradition . . . consecrated to affection quite as
much as to hate”; for example: "to lie in wait with the dagger
or to prepare insidiously the cup." (I,p.315) Another such
peak of insight comes during the dinner in Eaton Square: "A
light however broke for him the Princgf'in season”. (I,p.322)
This insight is the one mentioned above that Maggie is Maggie
Verver again when under her father's roof and that she, by
virtue of "the preoccupation that burned in (tea? like a small

flame" therefore, is more the spiritual hostess of the evening

132

than Mrs. Verver is. Another peak of interest occurs at the
end of the monologue when the Prince's amusement and ironic
posture become irritation: ”With Amerigo really the innermost
effect of all this perceptive ease was perhaps a strange final
irritation.” (I,p.333) It is this irritation which eventually
leads to his decision to go to Gloucester with Charlotte.
Although the climaxes of emotion and insight overlap and do not
provide clear-cut divisions, when examined along with the move-
ment of the monologue as a whole, they lead to an understanding
of its structure.

The Prince's deteriorating relation with Fanny also
provides a principle of interior structure. Chapter VI begins
with Charlotte's dictum that Fanny ”didn't now matter," to which
the Prince's "assent remained scarce more than tacit" although
"his behavior . . . so fell into line that for many days he
kept postponing the visit he had promised his old friend."
(I,p.3l3) Even though he doesn't go to see her, Fanny remains
uppermost in his mind, and throughout the monologue James
restates the Prince's relation to Fanny. The developing
estrangement between the two adds to the sense of the passing
of time and the changes in all the various personal relationships
of the novel. At first the Prince feels reluctant to abandon
”that theory of their relation as attached pupil and kind
instructress in which they had from the first almost equally

found a convenience”, but he knows now that she suffers from

133

”a failure of wit" or, more clearly, he feels alienated from
Fanny because she is not the kind of friend given to ”the passion
of personal loyalty” which he fancies himself to be. Fanny's
failure is only one more example of the clash of the Prince's
consciousness with the mores of those around him:

That was what it all came back to again with those peOple

among whom he had married—-that one found one used one's

imagination mainly for wondering how they contrived so

little to appeal to it. He felt at moments as if there

were never anything to do for them that was worthy-~to

call worthy-~of the personal relation; never any charming

charge to take of any confidence deeply reposed. (I,p.314)
The Prince remains at Portland Place, avoiding Eaton Square and
Fanny, giving the first direct indication that he is uncomfortable
in relation to her. The monologue returns to Fanny after a
long digression emphasizing again the Prince's preoccupation
with her:

. . . he worked out to the last lucidity the principle

on which he forbore either to follow up Fanny in

Cadogen Place or to perpetrate the error of too marked

an assiduity in Eaton Square. (I,p.319)
Again, at the dinner at Eaton Square it is "with the Colonel's
wife, in spite of her humility of position [thagf the Prince
was more inwardly occupied than with any other person except
Charlotte." (I,p.321) At the beginning of Chapter VII James
reaffirms Fanny‘s central position in that the Prince, three
weeks later at Matcham, finds ”the persistent aftertaste"
from ”the lingering savour of a cup presented to him by Fanny

Assingham's hand, after the dinner at Eaton Square to have

become ”the main interest” of the hours of that dinner itself.

134

What had ”rather momentously occurred, in Eaton Square” is

that Fanny ”had plumped out for him her first little lie." (I,p.328)
This first lie of Fanny's marks for the Prince a sharp turn in

his relationship with her and alerts the reader again to the
alterations among the original relations of the five principals.
Throughout the monologue Fanny is omnipresent to the Prince's
consciousness, either overtly or by implication, providing a

voice of conscience and responsibility which he will either

have to silence or drown when he goes to Gloucester with Char-
lotte.

The sixth principle of interior structure of this
monologue block is a technical one and involves the shifts in
degree of representation of consciousness. For example, there
are sections of the monologue which are almost direct representa-
tions of thought, the most striking of which is the last para-
graph or so in which the Prince's irritation mounts to a
climactic pitch:

There were situations that were ridiculous but that
one couldn't yet help, as for instance when one's wife
chose, in the most usual way, to make one so. Pre-
cisely here however was the difference; it had taken
poor Maggie to invent a way so extremely unusual--

yet to which none the less it would be too absurd that
he should merely lend himself. Being thrust, systema-
tically, with another woman, and a woman one happened,
by the same token, exceedingly to like, and being so
thrust that the theory of it seemed to publish one as
idiotic or incapable--this was a predicament of which
the dignity depended all on one's own handling. What
was supremely grotesque in fact was the essential
Opposition of theories-—as if a galantuomo, as he at
least constitutionally conceived galantuomini, could

135

do anything but blush to ”go about" at such a rate with
such a person as Mrs. Verver in a state of childlike
innocence, the state of our primitive parents before

the Fall. The grotesque theory, as he would have called
it, was perhaps an odd one to resent with violence,

and he did it—-also as a man of the world-—all merci-

ful justice. (I,pp-334-335)
This emotional outburst at the end of the monologue blocks is
a dramatic summation of everything that the Prince's thought
has led to. The emotional intensity of the entire monologue
block, however, is greatly varied. Parts of the monologue have
the tone of simple description:

Maggie, with a proper spirit, held that her father
ought from time to time to give a really considered
dinner, and Mr. Verver, who had as little idea as

ever of not meeting expectation, was of the harmoni-
ous Opinion that his wife ought. Charlotte's own
judgement was always that they were ideally free—-

the proof of which would always be, she maintained,
that everyone they feared they might most have alien-
ated by neglect would arrive, wreathed in smiles, on
the merest hint of a belated signal. Wreathed in smiles,
all round, truly enough, these apologetic banquets
struck Amerigo as being; they were frankly touching
occasions to him, marked, . . . with a small still
grace of their own, an investing amenity and humanity.
Everybody came, everybody rushed, but all succombed

to the soft influence, and the brutality of mere
multitude, of curiosity without tenderness, was put
off, at the foot of the fine staircase, with the over-
coats and shawls. (I,pp.320-32l)

Others, are a blend of description and the Prince's prevalent
irony:

Quantity was in the air for these good people, and
Mr. Verver's estimable quality was almost wholly in
that pervasion. He was meagre and modest and clear-
browed, and his eyes, if they wandered without fear,
yet stayed without defiance; his shoulders were not
broad, his chest was not high, his complexion was
not fresh and the crown of his head was not covered;

136

in spite of all of which he looked, at the top of
his table, so nearly like a little boy shyly enter-
taining in virtue of some imposed rank, that he could
only be one of the powers, the representative of a
force-quite as an infant king is the representative
of a dynasty. In this generalised view of his father-
in-law, intensified to-night but always Operative,
Amerigo had now for some time taken refuge. (I,p.324)
The overall tone of the monologue block is an ironic understate-
ment full of dramatic impact such as the Prince's image that
the dinner provides, between Charlotte and himself
a mystic golden bridge, strongly swaying and sometimes
almost vertiginous, for that intimacy of which the
sovereign law would be the vigilance of 'care', would
be never rashly to forget and never consciously to
wound. (I,p.325)
The Prince's emotional tone directly affects the degree of
direct representation of consciousness; the more frustrated
and tense the Prince becomes, the more closely the monologue
parallels his unedited thought. When the tone is descriptive
and narrative there is more distance established between
character and reader. In summary, there are six principles
through which to explain the interior structure of this monologue
block. First, the block is easily divisible into three parts:
1) Chapter VI up to the dinner at Eaton Square; 2) the dinner
at Eaton Square; and 3) at Matcham. The monologue may also be
evaluated as a continuing commentary on two specific social
situations and on English society in general. Thirdly, the
meditation gives the organic growth of a decision. In turn,

this decision is led up to through various climactic moments

of insight and tension. The fifth principle of organization is

137

the Prince's changing relationship with Fanny and the sixth
is the shift from indirect to more direct representation of
the Prince's consciousness.

There are three structural functions which this monologue
performs in relation to the exterior structure of the novel.
Within Book III, which is the record of the initiation and
consummation of the adultery, the monologue of Chapters VI and
VII spans the time from the first conspiratorial kiss in Port-
land Place to the weekend at Matcham. The meditation recounts
the growth of the Prince's irritation and tension which will
culminate in his break with Maggie. There must be a sense of
the lapse of time and the continual daily abrasion which rubs
at the Prince's sensitivity. Both of these functions are met
by the meditation with its mounting anger and compounding
of minute detail.

Another structural function which this monologue serves
in relation to the external and internal plots of the novel is
the dramatization of Maggie's tragic flaw: She has seriously
neglected her husband and she is foolishly innocent. Maggie's
type of childish trust and lack of imagination is always a
major weakness in James. Because Maggie's volume is almost
totally subjective, a statement of the Prince's evaluation of
his marriage is necessary to make the rest of the novel coherent.

One of James's achievements in The Golden_Bowl is the balance

 

and objectivity produced through the juxtaposing of two highly

138

subjective views. James exposes both consciousnesses of the
married pair and adds Fanny's choric voice to create a three-
dimensional vision of the actual dramatic situation. This vision
has a highly realistic flavor because it escapes the unemotional
sterility of total objectivity and yet it retains the feeling
of truth because three pair of eyes comment on the same occurrences.
The reader is forced to his own interpretation through a syn-
thesis of three subjective accounts. Maggie's shortsightedness
as well as the Prince's irritation at it are neatly summarized
in his ironic concept of how she must place him in the scheme
of Charlotte's services to the family:

They /Kdam and Maggig? had brought her /Charlotte in--

on thé'crudest expression of it--to do the 'worl y'

for them, and she had done it with such genius that

they had themselves in consequence renounced it even

more than they had originally intended. In prOpor-

tion as she did it more over was she to be relieved

of other and humbler doings; which minor matters,

by the properest logic, desolved therefore upon

Maggie, in whose chords and whose province they more

naturally lay. Not less naturally, by the same

token, they included the repair, at the hands of the

latter young woman, of every stitch conceivably

dropped by Charlotte in Eaton Square. This was homely

work, but that was just what made it Maggie's. (I,pp.318-319)
At the end of the monologue when "with Amerigo really the
innermost effect of all this perceptive ease 46k Matcham was
perhaps a strange final irritation", (I,p.333) Maggie's
ignorance is blatantly condemned through the image of her and
her father which completes the Prince's meditation:

He compared the lucid result with the extraordinary

substitute for perception that presided, in the bosom
of his wife, at so contented a view of his conduct and

139

course--a state of mind that was positively like a
vicarious good conscience cultivated ingeniously on
his behalf, a perversity of pressure innocently
persisted in; and this wonder of irony became on
occasion too intense to be kept wholly to himself.
It wasn't that at Matcham anything particular, any—
thing monstrous, anything that had to be noticed,
permitted itself, as they said, to 'happen'; there
were only odd moments when the breath of the day,

as it has been called, struck him so full in the
face that he broke out with all the hilarity of
'What indeed would they have made of it?‘ 'They'
were of course Maggie and her father, mOping--so

far as they ever consented to mope--in monotonous
Eaton Square, but placid too in the belief that

they knew beautifully what their expert companions
were in for. They knew, it might have appeared in
these lights, absolutely nothing on earth worth
speaking of--whether beautifully or cynically; and
they would perhaps sometimes be a little less trying
if they would only once for all peacefully admit
that knowledge wasn't one of their needs and that they
were in fact constitutionally inaccessible to it.
They were good children, bless their hearts, and the
children of good children. so that verily the Prin-
cipino himself, as less consistently of that descent,
might figure to the fancy as the ripest genius of

the trio. (l,pp.333-334)

The third function of the monologue in relation to the
novel as a whole has been mentioned repeatedly: The Prince's
tension must be built to the fatal visit to Gloucester which
is one of the major climaxes of the novel. In the same way,
Maggie's first "pagoda” monologue builds the tension to her
studied reunion with the Prince after he returns. There are,
in summation, six interior structural principles that organize
this monologue and three structural functions which it serves
in relation to the novel as a whole. This analysis of the
structure of the monolOgue block has introduced many of its

other purposes as well. Although structure and style are two

140

obvious aspects of a monologue block, the deveIOpment of
character and theme are equally important. Most of the charac—
terization of the monolobue block involves the development of
the Prince's consciousness so that the clash between his vision

of himself as a galantuomo and his role as Maggie's husband and

 

the representative of the Ververs in London society will be
as vivid as possible. The Prince finds it incredible that
Maggie's ”imagination was clearly never ruffled by the sense of
any anomaly.” This
great anomaly would have been that her husband, or even
that her father's wife, should prove to have been made,
for the long run, after the pattern set from so far
back by the Ververs. If one was so made one had certainly
no business on any terms at Matcham; whereas if one
wasn't one had no business there on the particular
terms--terms of conformity with the principles of
Eaton Square--under which one had been so absurdly
dedicated. (I,p.33u)
The mimetic effect of the novel depends upon the representation
of the Prince's motives perfectly lucidly. The situation is
extreme, and James will quickly lose control in the midst of
so much potential melodrama unless the Prince's motivation
makes the outcome seem inevitable: This kind of consciousness
must be expected to commit adultery under pressure. The care-
ful construction of the monologue, with its reiteration of the
daily lives of the principals and the mounting boredom of the
Prince and his increasing proximity to Charlotte, makes the
budding friendship between the Prince and his mother-in-law

seem more realistic because every detail fits neatly into a

pattern that draws them closer and closer together. If Maggie

141

will leave the Ambassador's Ball to run to her father, then it
follows only one step further that she will spend more and more
time with him and that, eventually, a social obligation which
she and her father will seek to escape will involve a weekend
trip and that the family's two social representatives will
almost be expected to go as they always do. In other words, the
monologue helps to make an extremely dramatic and unusual climax
appear the casual outgrowth of familiar, established patterns

of living. One of Maggie's most arduous tasks will be the
breaking of these patterns which, ironically, she has done

more than anyone else to perpetuate.

The Prince is characterized as an Italian aristocrat
caught in patterns which disturb his pride. ”Deep at the heart
of that roused unrest in our young man which we have had to
content ourselves with calling his irritation-~deep in the bosom
of this falsity of position glowed the red spark of a higher
and braver propriety.” (I,p.334) He suffers from a sharp loss
of identity in the alien English culture. He often mentally
refers to Maggie, Adam, Fanny and English society in general
as ”those people," different from himself. The Prince is used
to adulation and deference, but the only one who actually gives
him these is Charlotte. He continually refers to the lack of
imagination of the peOple he now lives with, and misses the
passionate friendships of the days before his marriage. Amerigo

demonstrates an ambivalence towards the English peOple and the

142

Americans throughout the monologue. He is indulgent when he
sees them as harmless, innocent children and admiring of their
money:

The present order, as it spread about him, had somehow

the ground under its feet, and a strumpet in its ears,

and a bottomless bag of solid shining British sovereigns

-—which was much to the point--in its hand. (I,p.333)
It seems to him that at Matcham, however, with its

bravery of youth and beauty, the insolence of fortune

and appetite so diffused among his fellow guests . . .

the stir of the air was such, for going, in a degree,

to one's head, that, as a mere matter of exposure,

almost grotesque in its flagrancy, his situation

resembled some elaborate practical joke carried out at

his expense. (I,p.332)
Like all Jamesian centres, the Prince takes himself very
seriously; his ironic humor is unable to assauge the irritation
of his predicament. His philosophical good nature at the begin-
ning of his marriage has gradually been worn away. A monologue
is an excellent vehicle for portraying the shift from an uncom-
prehending, but amused acceptance and amazement on the part of
the alien to bored, disgusted rejection. When the Prince goes
with Charlotte to Gloucester he is rejecting the Ververs' life-
style and asserting his ”higher and braver propriety." The
mental conflict of the monologue involves the Prince's rationali-
zation for this indiscretion:

It had taken poor Maggie to invent a way so extremely

unusual--yet to which none the less it would be too

absurd that he should merely lend himself. (I,pp.334-335)

Just as the monologue furthers the characterization of

the Prince, it also furthers the themes of the novel. Three

143

themes which are especially pronounced are (l) the theme of
exploitation, (2) the theme of innocence and ignorance, and (3)
James's famous international theme which here assumes added
dimensions because not only is there a dichotomy between the

Old World consciousness of the Prince and the New World con-
sciousness of the Ververs, but also the further distance between
the English society at Matcham and the background of the Italian
aristocracy of the Prince. Both Charlotte and the Prince are
exploited by the Ververs. Charlotte has

cheerfully mounted the London treadmill aesisted by7 her
accommodating, her generous view of her omestic use.
She had come, frankly, into the connection to do and

to be what she could, 'no questions asked,’ and she had
taken over accordingly as it stood, and in the finest
practical spirit, the burden of a waiting-list that
Maggie . . . had suffered to get inordinately out of
hand. What could be more simple than one's going through
with everything, she had asked, when it's so plain a
part of one's contract?. . . .To give back . . . all

one can, /I§7’just one's decency and one's honour and
one's virtue. These things, henceforth, if you're
interested to know, are my rule of life, . . . .He had
seen her-—dealing always, from month to month, with

the duties of a remunerated office. (I,pp.317-318)

Charlotte is used to fulfilling the family's social obligations,
and the Prince is no less exploited, not in the sense of any
duty that he must perform, but merely in what he is expected
to be. Adam Verver estimates the Prince, as he estimates every-
one except Maggie, in mere economic terms: Adam's gaze at the
Prince

rested at its ease, but it neither lingered nor pene-

trated, and was, to the Prince's fancy, much of the
same order as any glance directed, for due attention,

144

from the same quarter, to the figure of a cheque

received in the course of business and about to be

enclosed to a banker. It made sure of the amount

--and just so, from time to time, the amount of

the Prince was certified. He was being thus, in

renewed instalments, perpetually paid in; he already

reposed in the bank as a value, but subject, in this

comfortable way, to repeated, to infinite endorse-

ment. (I,pp.324-325)
One of the tragedies of the novel is that the "communities,
from man to man,” that by ”the Prince's original calculation,
might have become possible . . . had not really ripened and
flowered" (I,p.324) between Adam and himself, a happy occurrence
which would surely have forestalled the adultery.

The theme of the inexcusable stupidity of naive innocence
is developed through the various images of Adam and Maggie as
children as well as the Prince's passages of exasperation.

The most obvious thematic development, however, is the inter-
national theme. This theme is introduced at the beginning of
the monologue in the Prince's meditation on the difference
between Fanny's friendship and the passionate alliances of the
Italians. It is expanded at almost every turn in the monologue
in the Prince's thoughts about Maggie, Adam and English society.
The Prince fits easily into English society:

He had paid first and last many an English country

visit; he had learned even from of old to do the

English things and to do them all sufficiently in

the English way; if he didn't always enjoy them

madly he enjoyed them at any rate as much, to all

appearance, as the good peOple who had in the

night of time unanimously invented them and who

unanimously, even if a trifle automatically, prac-
tised them. (I,p.327)

145

And yet,

something of him, he often felt at these times, was

left out; it was much more when he was alone or when

he was with his own people-~or when he was, say, with

Mrs. Verver and nobody else-~that he moved, that he

talked, that he listened, that he felt, as a congru-

ous whole. (I,p.328)
The greatest discrepancy, however, between the Old World conscious-
ness and that of the New World is a question of moral sense.
The Ververs see no ”anomaly” in the Prince and Charlotte's rela-
tionship, and the Prince can see no rational explanation for
their trust.

Like all the other monologues of The Golden_Bowl, this

 

one also develops further the relations among the four principals,
and foreshortens time. The activities that crowd the days at
Matcham are succinctly enumerated: ‘

His body, very constantly, was engaged at the front--
in shooting, in riding, in golfing, in walking, over
the fine diagonals of meadow-paths or round the poo-
keted corners of billiard-tables; it sufficiently, on
the whole, in fact, bore the brunt of bridge-playing,
of breakfasting, lunching, tea-drinking, dining, and
of the nightly climax over the bottigliers, as he
called it, of the bristling tray; it met finally, to
the extent of the limited tax on lip, on gesture, on
wit, most of the current demands of conversation and
expression. (I,pp.327-328)

The activities of the family at home in London are also detailed,
again achieving the sense of time passing slowly and arduously
within a relatively short narrative summation. The weekend at
Matcham and the dinner at Eaton Square provide focus for the
Prince to comment, from his particular vantage point, on the

family and its activities. This balances with Maggie's similar

monologue during the dinner which she and the Prince host at
Portland Place in her book.

James used three major narrative controls in the mono-
logue. The first is his own peculiar style with its extended
imagery like the metaphor of the Prince's ”shining star” quoted
above. The intricacy of sentence structure is another charac-
teristic of this style, for example:

As soon as she [fannZZ had put to him the question of

what he would do--by which she meant of what Charlotte

would also do—-in that event of Maggie's and Mr. Verver's

not embracing the proposal they had appeared for a day

or two resignedly to entertain; as soon as she had

betrayed her curiosity as to the line of the other

pair, so left to themselves, might take, a desire

to avoid the appearance of at all too directly prying

had become marked in her. (I,p.329)
The style is ornate at times, but punctuated with idiomatic
expressions like ”Plumped out for him her first little lie”
(I,p.328) which give balance and the feeling of not thought
alone but also the particular vernacular of a particular character
--in this case the Prince.

Another narrative control is the emerging personality
of the narrator who not only assigns the quotes and sets the
stage, but who also, through his personal idiom, directs the
attitude of the reader toward the Prince. The narrator must
insure that the reader understands the Prince's motivations
and sympathizes with him but also does not hate Maggie whose
consciousness is the subject of the next volume. The narrator,

then, must help to keep objectivity in the monologue. For

example, it is the narrator who explains that the Prince's

147

”assent remained scarce more than tacit” (I,p.3l3) after Char-
lotte's dictum that ”Fanny Assingham didn't now matter.’I It

is the narrator who balances humor, irony and irritation with
parenthetical comments such as the one in this sentence: ”But
he (the Princé? could amuse himself with saying--so far as the
amusement went-~that they [his passionate Italian friend§7 were
what he had once for all turned his back on.” (I,p.315) At
times the narrator is humorous in his subtle, detached comment:
”They [Charlotte and the Prince/'had little need to talk of her
[fanny] after practically agreeing that they had outlived her."
(I,p.315) The narrator takes an almost paternal attitude toward
the Prince when he calls him ”our young man”, and Charlotte

and the Prince "our friends.” The narrator treats the Prince
kindly, and almost always speaks for the part of the Prince
which is the individual man rather than the encumbered Italian
aristocrat.

The posture of the narrator, who is friendly and, one
might imagine, diplomatic, is a guide for the reader. One of
the delicate problems of the monologue is to create the Prince's
consciousness as both the symbolic consciousness of the Old
World and, at the same time, the personal consciousness of
Amerigo the man. He is both a proud, stylized aristocrat and
an individual in a trying situation. It is the individual man
in the Prince who struggles with the ”grotesque” situation at

Matcham; the aristocrat is already far too annoyed and slighted

148

to consider the situation worthy of a moral dilemma.

Much of the imagery of the monologue has been mentioned
and, in an attempt to avoid repetition, a conclusion may
profitably be drawn that the imagery is usually the drawing-
room imagery of relationships:

Judgement, the spirit with the scales, might perfectly
have been imaged there as some rather snubbed and
subdued but quite trained and tactful poor relation,
of equal, of the properest, lineage, only of aspect
a little dingy, doubtless from too limited a change
of dress, for whose tacit and abstemious presence,
never betrayed by a rattle of her rusty machine, a
room in the attic and a late at the side table were
decently usual. (I,p.33l§
The pleasant, well-mannered imagery of ironic detachment is
sustained until the last climactic moment when the Prince loses
patience and recoils from the idea that
a galantuomo . . . could do anything but blush to 'go
about' at such a rate with such a person as Mrs. Verver
in a state of childlike innocence, the state of our
primitive parents before the fall. (I,p.335)

To summarize, this long monologue block contributes
more to the creation of the Prince's Old World consciousness
as both dramatic centre and thematic subject than anything else

in The Golden Bowl.

 

The Prince's monologue on the terrace at Matcham the
day that he and Charlotte go to Gloucester is an intentional
dramatic soliloquy which parallels Adam's soliloquy on the
terrace at Fawns before he and Charlotte go to Brighton. The
dramatic setting is both picture and scene. The time is ”the
half—hour during which éfhe Princ37”strolled on the terrace

and smoked” (I,p.350) before Charlotte appears dressed for the

149

day. The great house is on one side of him and the sweeping
lawns and distant cathedral towns are on the other. The sense
of picture emerges from the Prince's own image:

Its general brightness was composed doubtless of many

elements, but what shone out of it as if the whole

place and time had been a great picture, from the

hand of genius, presented to him as a prime ornament

for his collection and all varnished and framed to

hang up--what marked it especially for the highest

appreciation was his extraordinarily unchallenged,
his absolutely appointed and enhanced possession of

it. (I,p.350)
Later in the monologue the definition of picture grows to
include all of England with: ”earth and . . . air, the light
and the colour, the fields and the hills and the sky, the blue-
green counties and the cold cathedrals.” (I,p.354)

The scene of the monolOgue is composed of the Prince's
dialogue with himself on his circumstances here at Matcham and
in English society in general. There are three major motifs
of the monologue which deserve examination: 1) The note of
possession coupled with the sensual and aesthetic images; 2)
The Prince's injured pride which eventually leads to the adul—
tery and, 3) The familiar motif of the Old World consciousness
of the Italian aristocrat at odds with his alien environment.
The first motif of the meditation, carried out through aesthetic
imagery, is introduced in the passage quoted above in which
the Prince feels in possession of the scene as if it were a
work of art. The feeling of possession melds into the feeling

of command which culminates in the glorious sense of freedom

150

which the Prince enjoys:

If the outlook was in every way spacious--and the towers

of three cathedrals, in different counties, as had been
pointed out to him, gleamed discernibly, like dim silver,

in the rich sameness of tone-—didn't he somehow the more
feel it so because, precisely, Lady Castledean had kept
over a man of her own, and that this offered a certain

sweet intelligibility as the note of the day? (l,pp.351-352)

The sensuous nature of the Prince yields a consciousness abundant
with images of the beautiful. ”The upshot of everything, for
him, was that the exquisite day bloomed there like a large
fragrant flower that he had only to gather.” (I,p.355) Extend-
ing the same metaphor further, later, James combines it with the
recurring metaphor of the novel: the golden cup.

He had his hand there to pluck it, on the open bloom

of the day; but what did the bright minute mean but

that her answering hand was already intelligently

out? So therefore while the minute lasted it passed

between them that their cup was full; which cup their

very eyes, holding it fast carried and steadied and

began, as they tasted it, to praise. (I,p.356)
The Prince, in a last, climactic image, senses that his freedom

is

as perfect and rounded and lustrous as some huge precious
pearl. . . . He hadn't struggled nor snatched; he was
taking but what had been given him; the pearl drOpped
itself, with its exquisite quality and rarity straight
into his hand. Here precisely it was, incarnate; its
size and its value grew as Mrs. Verver appeared, afar
off, in one of the smaller doorways. (I,p.358)

A sensual image of freedom is that its truth is ”blown into
their faces by the wings of the morning." (I,p.358) All of
these sense images contribute to the effect of the monologue
as a preparation for the supreme act of sensual possession:

The adultery.

151

The wounded pride of the aristocrat seems to be the
immediate motive for the adultery. In the first place, the
Prince feels that the women reOOgnize his worth and work for
him:

He had after all gained more from women than he had
ever lost by them; What were they doing at this very
moment, wonderful creatures, but trying to outdo

each other in his interest?--from Maggie herself,
most wonderful in her way of all, to his hostess of
the present hour, into whose head it had so inevitably
come to keep Charlotte on, for particular reasons,
and who had asked in this benevolent spirit why in
the world, if not obliged, without plausibility, to
hurry, her husband'ssnn-in-law shouldn't wait over

in her company. All of which, besides, in Lady
Casteldean as in Maggie, in Fanny Assingham as in
Charlotte herself, was working for him without provo-
cation or pressure, by the mere play of some vague
sense on their part--definite and conscious at the
most only in Charlotte-~that he wasn't as a nature,
as a character, as a gentleman, in fine, below his
remarkable fortune. (I,pp.350-351)

Still, at the same time, the Prince feels used:

As an outsider,a foreigner, and even as a mere repre-
sentative husband and son-in-law, he was so irrelevant
to the working of affairs that he could be bent on
occasion to uses comparatively trivial. No other of
her guests would have been thus convenient for their
hostess; . . . .If he, the great and the clever homan,
on the other hand, had an affair, . . .it was of the
order verily that he had been reduced to as to a not
quite glorious substitute. . . . It marked . . . the
feeling of the hour with the Prince that this vision
of being 'reduced' interfered not at all with the
measure of his actual ease. It kept before him again
at moments the so familiar fact of his sacrifices--
down to the idea of the very relinquishment, for his
wife's convenience, of his real situation in the
world; with the consequence thus that he was, in the
last analysis, among all these so often inferior
people, practically held cheap and made light of.

(I,p.353)
This has been Maggie's mistake, and the grounds for the Prince's

152

growing resentment. Finally, on this particular day at Matcham
he has decided to do ”something quite beautiful and independent
and harmonious, something wholly his own.” (I,p.353) Maggie
has not only denied him his stature as an aristocrat, but she
has also bored him.

He knew why he had from the first of his marriage tried
with such patience for such conformity; he knew why he
had given up so much and bored himself so much; he

knew why he had at any rate gone in, on the basis of
all forms on the basis of his having in a manner sold
himself, for a situation nette. It had all been just
in order that his--we11, what on earth should he call
it but his freedom?--should at present be as perfect
and rounded and lustrous as some huge precious pearl.

(I,p.358)
The Prince has his freedom at last and Maggie, clearly at fault,

 

has given it to him without realizing at all what she has done.

The growing resentment and wounded pride of the Prince
are a result not only of Maggie's ignorance, but also of his
alienation in the society around him:

Even much initiation left one at given moments so puzzled
as to the element of staleness in all the freshness and
of freshness in all the staleness, of innocence in the
guilt and of guilt in the innocence. There were other
marble terraces, sweeping more purple prospects, on

which he would have known what to think, and would have
enjoyed thereby at least the small intellectual fillip

of a discerned relation between a given appearance and

a taken meaning. The enquiring mind, in these present
conditions, might, it was true, be more sharply chal—
lenged; but the result of its attention and its ingenuity,
it had unluckily learned to know, was too often to be
confronted with a mere dead wall, a lapse of logic, a
confirmed bewilderment. (I,pp.354-355)

The Prince, the longer he is among the English, finds them more

and more obtuse.

153

He knew them all, as was said, 'well!; he had lived,
with them, stayed with them, dined, hunted, shot and
done various other things with them; but the number
of questions about them he couldn't have answered
had much rather grown than shrunken, so that experience
struck him for the most part as having left in him but
one residual impression. They didn't like les situa-
tions nettes--that was all he was very sure of. 1They
wouldn't have them at any price; it had been their
national genius and their national success to avoid
them at every point. They called it themselves, with
complacency, their wonderful spirit of compromise.
KI,pP.353-354)
In other words, the English do not have open affairs with each
other, but rather are all dedicated to keeping up appearances.
It is always the Prince's bewilderment in the face of a foreign
culture which prompts his monologues. This controlling prin-
ciple makes the long monologue blocks seem very natural. They
flow from the circumstances which the Prince finds puzzle him
most acutely. In turn the monologue markers are brief and
inobtrusive. Subtle markers that add a note of understatement
like this one: ”his imagination was, for reasons, during the
time, unprecedentally active” and allusions to "his meditative
smile" while "he lingered and waited" and simple adverbs like
"reflectively", help to control the meditation. It is not so
rhetorical a meditation as his others because it encompasses
only one particular situation and his reactions to it and
does not contain large amounts of foreshortened narration.
One of the major achievements of The Golden Bowl is
the objectification of the international theme within the con-

sciousnesses of the Prince and his Princess. In Volume II the

later style becomes increasingly more reflective. Passages,

154

like the one in Chapters VI and VII, provide a prelude for
the style of Maggie's volume. The monologues of Volume I
establish the relationships among the five principals up to
Maggie's volume in which the internal and external plots are

fully developed.

FOOTNOTES
lAll citations to The Golden Bowl in the text are to The
Golden Bowl Volumes XXV and XXVI‘Of The Novels and Tales of
Henry James. New York Edition (Scribners, 190'1 ~I’17). 'Thf§
quota tIOn Is fFquvafume I, p. 31.

2Sallie Sears in The Negative Imagination (Ithaca, 1968) gives

the fairy tale from “wfiifihmThe GOldenIBOwI descends as that of

the three wishes:
The Golden Bowl follows with considerable exactness,
HOWéver unconsciously, the prototype of the fairy tale
of "three wishes," in which the third wish is reserved
for undoing the first two, which always, no matter
what yearnings they have satiated, have put the wisher

 

 

in a state of danger. .The two wishes granted the
Ververg)are extraordinary wealth and extraordinary mates.
(p 16

3See Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal g£_Con§giousness (New York, 1962).
4

 

 

See J. A. Ward, The Search for Form _(Chapel Hill, 1967).

 

5James L. Spener, "Symbolism in The Golden Bowl,"Modern Fiction
Studies III (winter, 1957 1958), ‘33333HET’

 

 

155

Chapter IV
Maggie

The distinction between Volumes I and II of The Golden

Bowl is one of kind as well as degree. In Volume I the View

 

from the Prince's consciousness is often diluted with mono-
logues from the other characters as well as scenes with dialogue.
Maggie's volume is much more intense. It is here that the style
and structure of the interior monologue cease to pertain to

only a few large blocks of the novel, which may easily be studied
as separate entities, and become, instead, the principles of
narrative structure and style throughout the volume. Just as

the Old World consciousness of the Prince is the subject of
Volume I, so the American consciousness of Maggie Verver is the
subject of Volume II; however, scene, dialogue, and description
are carefully subordinated in Maggie's volume to the major
achievement of the novel which is the studied maturation of
Maggie. The dramatization of Maggie's emotional torment and
subsequent education demands that the volume represent emotion

so intensely that the atmosphere of anxiety and the means Maggie
seeks to understand and alleviate that anxiety will control
everything else. It is not unprofitable to juxtapose Maggie's
entire volume beside Chapters VI and VII of the last book of

the Prince's volume to see that the interior monologue develops

156

157

in James until the very conversations become, in many places,
merely hypothetical conversations. It is as if Maggie's

internal mental life has taken over the world outside of her,

and the imaginary conversations have more truth than the words
actually spoken. As is obvious, in Maggie's volume the subject
is the centre of consciousness much more than external reality.
Volume II is structured as an emotional education in the style

of the interior monologue. A study of the presentation of con-
sciousness in James must eventually turn to Maggie Verver because

the second half of the Golden Bowl is the highest point of

 

James's experimentation with the presentation of consciousness
in the novel.

Consciousness as subject is so important in Maggie's
volume that the story itself is ambiguous. The only concrete
reality that James presents is the reality of Maggie's tormented,
plotting mind. This reality is so immediate that the outer
reality is often obscured. For example, what Adam suspects or
does not suspect constitutes a large part of Maggie's agitation.
The reader knows that Maggie is dedicated to keeping harsh
realities from her father, but he never knows exactly what Adam
does know. The reader is enclosed in the square of Maggie's
window in the house of fiction. The most pressing problem
which this presents is the assigning of responsibility. In
some places, Maggie seems the relentless little witch determined,

in her jealousy, to humiliate her rival, Charlotte. At other

158

times, Maggie is more the frightened prisoner of her own
paralyzing terrors. How to evaluate Maggie, though, is not
the most important concern of an analysis of TB3_Golden Bowi.
Maggie's consciousness is inconsistent because anyone changing
emotional investments and growing emotionally is going to be
inconsistent. The larger question of EB: Golden ngl.is the
honesty of Maggie's presentation. This question may be answered
with a strong affirmative. Both Maggie and her struggle are
highly realistic. One kind of mimesis, that of the interior
consciousness, has replaced the more traditional mimesis of
situation.

The external plot in The Golden Bowl is developed largely

 

in Volume I. The scene in Volume II when Fanny shatters the
crystal goblet is the climax Of the external plot which is the
plot of the adultery. Within the dynamics of the external plot,
Maggie overcomes the wicked Charlotte and regains her husband's
affection: Maggie is the virtuous protagonist, Charlotte, the
nefarious dark lady. In terms of the internal plot, Maggie
luckily discovers her immaturity and neglect of her husband and
matures, no matter how painfully. The external plot is the
classic plot of achievement in which good overcomes evil. The
internal plot is the more realistic presentation of education
and maturation. The irony of the story is that Maggie's delin-
quencies far more than Charlotte's manipulations have motivated

the unfortunate tragedy of a life of forms into which Maggie and

159

her father had comfortably settled until Maggie's awakening
after Matcham.

Maggie's volume is divided among three books and eighteen
chapters. The first book is the longest, with ten chapters,
and is the book of Maggie's awakening and action which leads to

the climax of The Golden Bowl in chapters IX and X. In Book V

 

Maggie regains her husband at Fawns and overcomes Charlotte.
Book V contains the most unalleviated, intense presentation of
consciousness in all of James. Book VI takes place back in
London, and is appropriately termed the resolution of both the
internal and external plots. Because the style of the volume
makes it all a long interior monologue, it is very difficult

to separate certain blocks of the volume and say that here is
scene and here is monologue. The best that can be done is to
choose the most representative sections from Maggie's volume and
to examine these in detail to determine exactly what James is
doing in the presentation of Maggie's consciousness. The three
sections which offer the most from such study are the first

two chapters which constitute Maggie's introductory, rhetorical
"pagoda" monologue, and Chapters II and IV of Book V; one, a
dramatic soliloquy as Maggie watches the others at cards at
Fawns, and the other Maggie's monologue on Charlotte as Charlotte
shows visitors through Adam's estate. An analysis of these
three monologues which includes attention to their structure,

style, themes, characterization and plotting will help to answer

160

the large question of how James presents consciousness in The

gglden Bowl. Many of the themes of Volume I are extended,

 

especially the themes of innocence and experience, the Old
World consciousness versus the New World consciousness, and

the exploitation of other people for one's personal convenience
or pleasure.

There are many peculiarly Jamesian devices for the
representation of consciousness in Volume II. Three of the
most memorable are l) the extended metaphors which objectify
states of mind, 2) the hypothetical conversations which Maggie
recounts in detail, and 3) the phenomenon of the "internal
voice" with which one speaks to oneself, in Maggie's case with
uncharacteristically ”strong” language. These devices, along
with all the other ”monologue markers" and techniques of por-
traying consciousness in James, build the unique tone of
Maggie's volume.

Maggie's long, introductory monologue in the first two

chapters of The Golden Bowl is both a rhetorical monologue which

 

foreshortens time and telesc0pes Maggie's prevailing patterns
of thought and feeling and a dramatic soliloquy as Maggie waits
for Amerigo's return from Matcham, and again as she waits for
him to return to her after he dresses for dinner. The internal
structure of the monologue is a montage of picture, scene and
meditation. The two chapters span approximately ten days in

Maggie's life in which she first takes positive action to make

”a difference in the situation so long present to her as prac-
tically unattackable.” (II,p.3) The two primary scenes within
the chapters are: l) the scene with Maggie and Amerigo the
evening that he returns from Matcham; and, 2) the scene the
next morning when Maggie arrives at Eaton Square, not merely
for "an easy change of the guard--Charlotte's own frequent,
though always cheerful, term of comparison for (thg7'process
of transfer," (II,p.32) but to go out with her stepmother. One
of the devices which makes metaphors of these two scenes is
the reference to them as parts of a play. The first scene
fell for retrospect into a succession of moments which
were watchable still; almost in the manner of the dif-
ferent things done during a scene on the stage, some

scene so acted as to have left a reat im ression on
the tenant of one of the stalls. II,p.ll

 

The dramatic analogy in Maggie's memory of the scenes gives

them both the sense Of carefully calculated maneuvers, adroitly
managed on Maggie's part, and of dramatic scenes which pass
before the reader, rendering the meditation lively. When Maggie,
in Eaton Square, began to shift the forms of their lives:

she reminded herself Of an 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. It was this very sense of the
stage and the footlights that kept her up, made her rise
higher: just as it was the sense of action that logically
involved some platform--action quite positively for the
first time in her life, or, counting in the previous
afternoon, for the second. That platform remained for
three or four days thus sensibly under her feet, and she
had all the while with it the inspiration of quite re-
markable, of quite heroically improvising. 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. (II,p.33)

Not only do these references to the drama vary the movement

Of the meditation, but they are also a technique James is using
to represent the way that Maggie remembers, in her subsequent
cogitations, the events of these important first attempts on
her part to rearrange the insidious forms. There are two
important pictures in the chapters. The first vivid picture

is that of Maggie waiting for Amerigo:

She was in the smaller drawing-room, in which she always
'sat,' and she had, by calculation, dressed for dinner
on finally coming in. It was a wonder how many things
she had calculated in respect to this small incident....
She . . . had made herself, during the time at her dis-
posal, quite inordinately fresh and quite positively
smart, this had probably added, while she waited and
waited, to that very tension of spirit in which she was
afterwards to find the image of her having crouched....
She couldn't help it if she couldn't read her pale
novel-~ah that, par exemple, was beyond her£--but she
could at least sit by the lamp with the book, sit there
with her newest frock, worn for the first time, sticking
out, all round her, quite stiff and grand. She had
glanced repeatedly at the clock, but had refused her-
self the weak indulgence Of walking up and down. (II,pp.ll-l2)

The second, is the picture which Maggie, with her now awakened
vision, sees at Eaton Square the next morning:

Charlotte was dressed to go out, and her husband, it
appeared, rather positively prepared not to; he had left
the table but was seated near the fire with two or three
of the morning papers and the residuum of the second

and third posts on a stand beside him--more even than
the usual extravangance, as Maggie's glance made out.
Charlotte, at the window, looking into the side—street
that abutted on the Square, might have been watching

for their visitor's advent before withdrawing; and in

163

the light, strange and coloured, like that of a painted
picture, which fixed the impression for her, objects
took on values not hitherto so fully shown. It was
the effect of her quickened sensibility; she knew
herself again in presence of a problem, in need of a
solution for which she must intensely work....It was
for the next quarter of an hour as if she could have
counted them one by one on her fingers. Sharp to her
above all was the renewed attestation of her father's
comprehensive acceptances, which she had so long re-
garded as of the same quality with her own, but which,
so distinctly now, she should have the complication of
being obliged to deal with separately. (II,p.3l)

Between the pictures and the scenes the monologue continues,
developing both the atmosphere of frustration and anxiety and
the enfolding of Maggie's plan which, in the first monologue,
is thwarted.

Even though the long monologue is a block of the novel,
there are smaller soliloquys within it. For example, Maggie's
meditation before the fire as the Prince dresses, and her
thoughts as she first looks at her father and Charlotte, the
next morning, with an awakened consciousness are both soliloquys.
The transitions between external and internal, picture and
scene, are handled through conventional connectives like this
one between mental image and actual event:

What in particular would the figure in the picture do?

She looked about her, from the middle of the room, under
the force of this question, as if there exactly were the
field of action involved. Then as the door opened again
she recognized, whatever the action, the form, at any

rate, of a first opportunity. Her husband had reappeared--
he stood before her refreshed, almost radiant, quite
reassuring. Dressed, anointed, fragrant, ready above all
for his dinner, he smiled at her over the end of their

delay. It was as if her opportunity had depended on

his look--and now she saw that it was good. There was
still for the instant something in suspense, but it

passed more quickly than on his previous entrance. He
was already holding out his arms. (II,p.24)

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164

There are also transitions which offer an analogy between the
craft of the writer and what is actually happening in the dramatic
scene:

It Zine mental imagg7'made her in fact, with a vague gasp,

turn away, and what had further determined this was the

final sharp extinction of the inward scene by the outward.

The quite different door had Opened and her husband was

there. (II,p.15)

The sense of time, in the monologue, must be created so
that Maggie's gradual awareness is realistic and does not seem
too sudden to be incomprehensible, and yet the sense of time
must also be carefully controlled because the medmation does
not, following the processes of consciousness, follow a strict
chronological order,.and coherence demands that the reader gain
some sense of which event and recognition follows which other
event and recognition. Representing time within the conscious-
ness, that is, as time appears to Maggie, James is recreating
psychological time which may or may not correspond to actual
time. Actual time in the monologue is reported not so strictly
as ”This happened Monday, and this Tuesday”, but, still, quite
conventionally, so that it is not difficult to determine that
the monologue, though covering, psychologically, many hours
over a period of time, does encompass approximately ten days.
References to psychological time must, of necessity, be vaguer
than references to actual, designating time. Because of this,
the monologue begins:

It wasn't till many days had passed that the Princess

began to accept the idea of having done, a little,

something she was not always doing, or indeed that

of having listened to any inward voice that spoke in
a new tone. (II,p.l)

165

This beginning creates the sense of a constant attention to
”a particular hour” until she can accept what she had done.
Past time is also handled somewhat vaguely:

This situation had been occupying for months and
months the very centre of the garden of her life. (II,p.3)

Although the monologue begins promising that ”Many days . . .
passed” before the Princess accepted what she had done, the
monologue itself may be considered set somewhat closer to the
actual time of the events through the narrator's references to
"a change now but a few days old". This is the most specific
of the references to the time when Maggie is putting all of her
observations together. Most of the references are far more
general: "It had been strange as she could consent afterward to
think it . . . , or ”that had later on kept coming to her", and

' Other references like

"back and back it kept coming to her.‘
”The hesitation had been at the first, and she at present saw
that he surmounted it without her help,” (II,p.l7) make ”the
present" no more specific than the more general delineations

of time. If there is no specific present of the monologue block
one might wonder why James bothers to refer to time at all.
These references are necessary because they bridge the gap
between actual time and psychological time and because they
create the sense of the continuity and pervasiveness of Maggie's

anxiety. There are also parts of the monologue block which do

not occur days later, but are more soliloquys that take place

166

at a specific time. Maggie's meditation before the fire as

she waits for the Prince to return from dressing is one example.
She realizes at this time what the social form of their life has
been:

She seemed to see :tOnight as she had never yet quite
done that their business of social representation,
conceived as they conceived it, beyond any conception

of her own and conscientiously carried out was an affair
of living always in harness. (II,p.22)

In this way, James helps to control psychological time with the

presentation of a certain specific awareness at one moment

which leads to the general awareness which will come later.
Several climaxes of insight also help to organize

the monologue, providing peaks of tension which effectively

vary the pace:

She had a plan, and she rejoiced in her plan: this con-
sisted of the light that, suddenly breaking into her
restless reverie, had marked the climax of that vigil.
It had come to her as a question--'What if I've aban-
doned them, you know? What if I've accepted too
passively the funny form of our life?‘ There would

be a process of her own by which she might do dif-
ferently in respect to Amerigo and Charlotte--a process
quite independent of any process of theirs. Such a
solution had but to rise before her to affect her,

to charm her, with its simplicity, an advantageous
simplicity she had been stupid for so long not to have
been struck by; and the simplicity meanwhile seemed
proved by the success that had already begun to attend
her. (II,p.25)

This insight provokes the plan, and a second insight uncovers
for Maggie just why her plan will be too successful to do what
she really wants to do:

There was in the air, for our young woman, a distilled

difference of which the, very principle was to keep
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--it had its hours of doing so; and it may interest us
on the ground of its having prompted in Maggie a final
reflexion, a reflexion out of the heart of which a light
flashed for her like a great flower grown in a night.
As soon as this light had spread a little it produced
in some quarters a surprising distinctness, made her of
a sudden ask herself why there should have been even
for three days the least obscurity. The perfection of
her success, decidedly, was like some strange shore to
which she had been noiselessly ferried and where, with
a start, she found herself quaking at the thought that
the boat might have put off again and left her. The
word for it, the word that flashed the light, was that
they were treating her, that they were proceeding with
her-~and for that matter with her father-—by a plan
that was the exact counterpart of her own. It wasn't
from her they took their cue, but--and this was what

in particular made her sit up--from each other; and
with a depth of unanimity, an exact coincidence of
inspiration, that when once her attention had begun to
fix it struck her as staring out at her in recovered
identities of behavior, expression and tone. (II,pp.4l-42)

The internal structure of this long monologue revolves around
Maggie's first awareness and first plan of action. The mono-
logue spans ten days and includes two important scenes and
several pictures, soliloquys, and climaxes of insight. The
meditation, in relation to the novel as a whole, serves the
same function as the Prince's and Adam's opening monologues.
The monologue introduces Maggie, her problem and her reaction
to it. One important structural function which the monologue
fulfills is to introduce Maggie's reaction to the adultery and

to complete the transition, begun in Fanny's last two chapters

of Volume I, between the Prince at Matcham about to go to Glou-

cester and the Prince returned once more to Portland Place.
The style of this monologue block gives it a strongly

subjective tone. The monologue markers and various narrative

168

controls are frequent so that the meditation has the traditional
commanding implicit presence of the narrator, and the material
never becomes incoherent. The monologue markers, which run
frequently, almost one to paragraph, throughout the meditation,
have many forms. Mere phrases like ”on consideration” and

"handed over to her brooding fancy" and "that had later on kept

coming to her,‘ and ”back and back it kept coming to her," and

"she was to remember afterwards" reinforce the sense of scenes
remembered and meditated upon. Images are also used as mono-
logue markers:

Her actual multiplication of distractions and suppres-
sions, whatever it did for her, failed to prevent her
living over again any chosen minute—~for she could
choose them, she could fix them--of the freshness of
relation produced by her having administered to her
husband the first surprise to which she had ever treated
him. It had been a poor thing, but it had been all her
own, and the whole passage was backwardly there, a

great picture hung on the wall of her daily life for
her to make what she would of. (II,pp.lO-ll)

The most extended image of Maggie's mind which explains the
constant reflections of this ”much-thinking little person" is
the image of the ”accumulations of the unanswered:”

The thick air . . . had begun more and more to hang,
for our young woman, over her accumulations of the
unanswered. They were there, these accumulations;
they were like a roomful of confused objects, never
as yet 'sorted,' which for some time now she had been
passing and re-passing, along the corridor of her
life. She passed it when she could without opening
the door; then, on occasion, she turned the key to
throw in a fresh contribution. So it was that she
had been getting things out of the way. They re-
joined the rest of the confusion; it was as if they
found their place, by some instinct of affinity,

in the heap. They knew in short where to go, and

 

when she at present by a mental act once more pushed
the door open she had practically a sense of method
and experience. What she should never know about
Charlotte's thought-~she tossed that in. It would
find itself in company, and she might at last have
been standing there long enough to see it fall into
its corner. The sight moreover would doubtless have
made her stare, had her attention been more free-~
the sight of the mass of vain things, congruous, in-
congruous, that awaited every addition. (II,pp.l4-l5)

Another image of Maggie's mind at meditation is of her agitation
when she remembers ”a kinship of expression in the two faces,"
of Amerigo and Charlotte as she approaches them after Matcham:

To make the comparison at all was, for Maggie, to return
to it often, to brood upon it, to extract from it the
last dregs of its interest-~to play with it in short
nervously, vaguely, incessantly, as she might have
played with a medallion containing on either side a
cherished little portrait and suspended round her

neck by a gold chain of a firm fineness that no effort
would ever snap. The miniatures were back to back,

but she saw them forever face to face, and when she
looked from one to the other she found in Charlotte's
eyes the gleam of the momentary 'What does she really
want?’ that had come and gone for her in the Prince's.

(II,pp.35-36)
Another image is of her mind as that of the dutiful little

housewife:

When she began to recover piece by piece the process
became lively; she might have been picking small shining
diamonds out of the sweepings of her ordered house. She
bent, in this pursuit, over her dust-bin; she challenged
to the last grain the refuse of her innocent economy.
(II,p.42)

Besides the obvious monologue markers, there are narra-
tive controls such as the intrusion of the narrator to explain
the imagery which abounds in the meditation:

If this image, however, may represent our young woman's

consciousness of a recent change in her life-~a change
now but a few days old-—it must at the same time be

170

observed that she both sought and found in renewed
circulation, as I have called it, a measure of relief
from the idea of having perhaps to answer for what she
had done. The pagoda in her blooming garden figured
the arrangement--how otherwise was it to be named?--
by which, so strikingly, she had been able to marry
without breaking, as she liked to put it, with her
past. She had surrendered herself to her husband
without the shadow of a reserve or a condition and
yet hadn't all the while given up her father by the
least little inch. (II,pp.4-5)

The narrator also neatly gathers his metaphors after the many
images at the beginning of the chapter, in a final image which
he testifies is clearly his own:

She could at all events remember no time at which she
had felt so excited, and certainly none-—which was
another special point--that so brought with it as well
the necessity for concealing excitement. This birth of
a new eagerness became a high pastime in her view pre-
cisely by reason of the ingenuity required for keeping
the thing born out of sight. The ingenuity was thus a
private and absorbing exercise, in the light of which,
might I so far multiply my metaphors, I should compare
her to the frightened but clinging young mother of an
unlawful child. The idea that had possession of her
would be, by our new analogy, the proof of her misad-
venture, but likewise all the while only another sign
of a relation that was more to her than anything on
earth. (II,p.7)

The imagery in other parts of the monologue is less the narra-
tor's own than Maggie's, although the form of the imagery is
such that in most places it is not perfectly clear whether the
imagery is the narrator's image for Maggie's agitation or
Maggie's own image which the narrator faithfully reports. In

this volume of The Golden Bowl the narrator's personality is

 

largely submerged beneath Maggie's own, but phrases in reference

to her like ”little person” and ”our young woman” carry the

 

 

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171

same intimate affectionate connotations as the narrator's posture
toward the Prince did in Volume I, although his attitude towards
Maggie is somewhat condescending.

The imagery of the second volume of The Golden Bowl is

 

 

one of its most remarkable features. James's major device for
representating a particular state of mind is an extended meta-
phor. He not only,however, uses metaphors for states of mind,
but also to explain relationships and actions. Sometimes, as

in the famous ”pagoda" metaphor, the figure of speech becomes

a symbol for an entire complex of relationships, thoughts and

feelings:

This situation had been occupying for months and months
the very centre of the garden of her life, but it had
reared itself there like some strange tall tower of
ivory, or perhaps rather some wonderful beautiful but
outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard bright
porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned at the
overhanging eaves with silver bells that tinkled ever
so charmingly when stirred by chance airs. She had
walked round and round it--that was what she felt;

she had carried on her existence in the space left her
for circulation, a space that sometimes seemed ample
and sometimes narrow: looking up all the while at

the fair structure that spread itself so amply and

rose so high, but never quite making out as yet where
she might have entered had she wished. She hadn't
wished till now--such was the odd case; and what was
doubtless equally odd besides was that though her raised
eyes seemed to distinguish places that must serve from
within, and especially far aloft, as apertures and out-
looks, no door appeared to give access from her con-
venient garden level. The great decorated surface had
remained consistently impenetrable and inscrutable.

(II,pp-3’u)
The "strange tall tower of ivory” is the situation

through which, as the narrator explains, ”she had been able to

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marry without breaking . . . with her past." But the image is
not only the metaphor for the forms within which the four prin-
ciples live, but it also symbolizes Maggie's action at the
moment:

At present however, to her considering mind, it was as
if she had ceased merely to circle and to scan the eleva-
tion, ceased so vaguely, so quite helplessly to stare
and wonder; she had caught herself distinctly in the act
of pausing, then in that of lingering and finally in
that of stepping unprecedentedly near. The thing might
have been, by the distance at which it kept her, a
Mahometan mosque, with which no base heretic could take
a liberty; there so hung about it the vision of one's
putting off one's shoes to enter and even verily of
one's paying with one's life if found there as an inter-
loper. She hadn't certainly arrived at the conception

of paying with her life for anything she might do; but
it was nevertheless quite as if she had sounded with a
tap or two one of the rare porcelain plates. She had
knocked in short--though she could scarce have said
whether for admission or for what; she had applied her
hand to a cool smooth spot and had waited to see what
would happen. Something had happened; it was as if a
sound, at her touch, after a little, had come back to
her from within; a sound sufficientl suggesting that
her approach had been noted. (II,p.3

Maggie's relationship to the pagoda has become both a metaphor
for the relationships among the principles and for her state of
mind. She feels ”helpless”, and "kept at a distance” and
even about to attempt something for which she might ”pay with
her life." Maggie's timidity and self-effacement are emphasized
throughout the metaphor; she is a woman who might easily be
controlled. Maggie's relationship to the pagoda shifts as her
awareness shifts:

The ivory tower, visible and admirable doubtless from

any point of the social field, had risen stage by stage.
Maggie's actual reluctance to ask herself with proportionate

173

sharpness why she had ceased to take comfort in the sight
of it represented accordingly a lapse from that ideal
consistency on which her moral comfort almost at any

time depended. To remain consistent she had always

been capable of cutting down more or less her prior

term. (II,p.6)

Another comprehensive image which fulfills approximately the
same functions as the pagoda is the family carriage image.

But what perhaps most came out in the light of these
concatenations was that it had been for all the world

as if Charlotte had been 'had in,' as the servants
always said of extra help, because they had thus suf-
fered it to be pointed out to them that if their family
coach lumbered and stuck the fault was in its lacking
its complement of wheels. Having but three, as they
might say, it had wanted another, and what had Charlotte
done from the first but begin to act, on the spot, and
ever so smoothly and beautifully, as a fourth? (II,p.4)

In the extension of the metaphor, it becomes clear that this
is Maggie's own image:

Nothing had been immediately more manifest than the
greater grace of the movement of the vehicle——as to
which, for the completeness of her image, Maggie was
now supremely to feel how every strain had been
lightened for herself. SO far as she was one of the
wheels she had but to keep in her place; since the
work was done for her she felt no weight, and it
wasn't too much to acknowledge that she had scarce

to turn around . . . . She might have been watching
the family coach pass and noting that somehow Amerigo
and Charlotte were pulling it while she and her
father were not so much as pushing. They were seated
inside together, dandling the Principino and holding
him up to the windows to see and be seen, like an
infant positively royal; so that the exertion was all
with the others. Maggie found in this image a re-
peated challenge; again and yet again she paused
before the fire: after which, each time, in the
manner of one for whom a strong light has suddenly
broken, she gave herself to livelier movement. (II,pp.23—24)

The metaphor, continuing, describes Maggie's sense of her own

action:

 

 

 

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174

She had seen herself at last, in the picture she was
studying, suddenly jump from the coach; whereupon,
frankly, with the wonder of the sight, her eyes opened
wider and her heart stood still for a moment. She
looked at the person so acting as if this person were
somebody else, waiting with intensity to see what
would follow. The person had taken a decision--which
was evidently because an impulse long gathering had

at last felt a sharpest pressure. Only how was the
decision to be applied? (II,p.24)

This family carriage metaphor and the pagoda metaphor both cul-
minate with the sense of an action, at last, taken.

Other images in the monologue describe Maggie's agita-
tion and emphasize her extreme anxiety:

This was what was before her, that she was no longer play-
ing with blunt and idle tools, with weapons that didn't
cut. There passed across her vision ten times a day the
gleam of a bare blade, and at this it was that she must
shut her eyes, must knew the impulse to cheat herself with
motion and sound. (II,pp.9-lO)

The image of sharp instruments anddenger is juxtaposed with an
image of ballrooms as Maggie tries to explain her anxiety simply:

The case resembled . . . remembered steps that had grown
vague from her ceasing to go to balls. She would go to
balls again--that seemed, freely, even crudely, stated,
the remedy; she would take out of the deep receptacles
in which she had laid them away the various ornaments
congruous with the greater occasions and of which her
store, she liked to think, was none of the smallest.

She would have been easily to be figured for us at this
occupation; dipping, at off moments and quiet hours, in
snatched visits and by draughty candle-light, into her
rich collections and seeing her jewels again a little
shyly but all unmistakeably glow. That in fact may pass
as the very picture of her semi-smothered agitation, of
the diversion she to some extent successfully found in
referring her crisis, so far as was possible, to the
mere working of her own needs. (II,p.8)

Maggie sees herself as an inadequate, helpless spaniel:

175

She tried to deal with herself for a space only as a
silken-coated spaniel who has scrambled out of a pond
and who rattles the water from his ears. Her shake of
her head, again and again, as she went, was much of
that order, and she had the resource to which, save for
the rude equivalent of his generalising bark, the
spaniel would have been a stranger, of humming to her-
self hard as a sign that nothing had happened to her.
She hadn't, so to speak, fallen in; she had had no
accident nor got wet; this at any rate was her preten-
sion until after she began a little to wonder if she
mightn't, with or without exposure, have taken cold.

(II,pp.6-7)
Images also symbolize not mere mental states, but also actions:

He had 'met' her--she so put it to herself; met her with
an effect of generosity and of gaiety in especial, on his
coming back to her ready for dinner, which she wore in
her breast as the token of an escape for them both from
something not quite definite but clearly much less good.
Even at that moment in fact her plan had begun to work;
she had been, when he brightly reappeared, in the act of
plucking it out of the heart of her earnestness-—plucking
it, in the garden of thought, as if it had been some
full-blown flower that she could present to him on the spot.
Well, it was the flower of participation, and as that,
then and there, she held it out to him, putting straight-
way into execution the idea, so needlessly, so absurdly
obscured, of her sharing with him, whatever the enjoy-
ment, the interest, the experience mi t be--and sharing
also for that matter with Charlotte. %§I,pp.25-26)

Just as the initiation of the monologue is an image of Maggie's
first action, so the last images are those of frustration.
Charlotte and the Prince, working, Maggie supposes, together,
have managed to thwart her and keep her out of the pagoda still:It
Now arched over the Princessls head like a vault of
bold span that important communication between them
on the subject couldn't have failed of being immediate.
(II,p.42)
Several images are teleSOOped into the end of the monologue,

all of which reinforce the tone of extreme anxiety and helpless-

ness. Amerigo's tenderness to her when he first returned to

176

Portland Place from Matcham is a warm image of surrender:

But

The warmly-washing wave had travelled far up the strand.
She had subsequently lived for hours she couldn't count
under the dizzying smothering welter--positively in
submarine depths . . . through walls of emerald and
mother-of-pearl; though indeed she had got her head
above them, for breath, when face to face with Charlotte
again on the morrow in Eaton Square. (II,p.43)

Maggie feels that wave quite differently now:

Of course they were arranged--all four arranged; but
what had the basis of their life been precisely but
that they were arranged together? Ah: Amerigo and
Charlotte were arranged together, but she--to confine
the matter only to herself-~was arranged apart. It
rushed over her, the full sense of all this, with
quite another rush from that of the breaking wave of
ten days before; and as her father himself seemed not
to meet the vaguely-clutching hand with which, during
the first shock of complete perception, she tried

to steady herself, so she felt very much alone. (II,p.45)

Maggie's helplessness is perhaps most precisely described in

the

and

image of the "bath of benevolence" within which Charlotte
Amerigo have all but drowned her:

She sat there in the solid chamber of her helplessness
as in a bath of benevolence artfully prepared for her,
over the brim of which she could but just manage to see
by stretching her neck. Baths of benevolence were very
well, but at least, unless one were a patient of some
sort, a nervous eccentric or a lost child, one usually
wasn't so immersed save by one's request. It wasn't

in the least what she had requested. She had flapped
her little wings as a symbol of desired flight, not
merely as a plea for a more gilded cage and an extra
allowance of lumps of sugar. Above all she hadn't
complained, not by the quaver of a syllable-~30 what
wound in particular had she shown her fear of receiving?
What wound had she received—-as to which she had ex-
changed the least word with them? If she had ever
whined or moped they might have had some reason; but
she would be hanged--she conversed with herself in
strong language--if she had been from beginning to end
anything but pliable and mild. It all came back on
consequence to some required process of their own, a

177

process operating quite positively as a precaution
and a policy. They had got her into the bath and,
for consistency with themselves--which was with each
other-~must keep her there. (II,p.44)

Without these varied images, the monologue would lose much of
its force in the presentation of Maggie's consciousness. Images
are able to combine both vivid sense impressions and the lively
motion of scenes so that they add much to the feeling of an
internal arranging and struggling. The images very effectively
provide objective correlatives for highly complex states of

mind and human relationships.

One of the most unique techniques for dramatizing
phantasies in Maggie's volume is the recounting of hypothetical
conversations. These conversations are the unedited, spontaneous
overflow of emotion:

It would have been most beautifully therefore in the
name of the equilibrium, and in that of her joy at their
feeling so exactly the same about it, that she might
have spoken if she had permitted the truth on the sub-
ject of her behaviour to ring out--on the subject of
that poor little behaviour which was for the moment so
very limited a case of eccentricity. (II,p.l8)

From quiet, passive Maggie these conversations bristle with
emotion:

"'Why, why' have I made this evening such a point of
our not all dining together? Well, because I've all
day been so wanting you alone that I finally couldn't
bear it and that there didn't seem any great reason
why I should try to. That came to me--funny as it

may at first sound, with all the things we've so
wonderfully got into the way of bearing for each other.
You've seemed these last days-~I don't know what:

more absent than ever before, too absent for us merely
to go on so. It's all very well, and I perfectly see
how beautiful it is, all round; but there comes a day
when something snaps, when the full cup, filled to

178

the very brim, begins to flow over. That's what has
happened to my need of you--the cup, all day, has been
too full to carry. So here I am with it, spilling it
over you--and just for the reason that's the reason
of my life. After all I've scarcely to explain that
I'm as much in love with you now as the first hour;
except that there are some hours--which I know when
they come, because they almost frighten me--that show
me I'm even more so. They come of themselves--and ah
they've been coming! After all, after all—-!" Some
such words as those were what didn't ring out, yet it
was as if even the unuttered sound had been quenched
here in its own quaver. It was where utterance would
have broken down by its very weight if he had let it
get so far. (II,p.l8)

Sometimes the hypothetical declarations are what Maggie imagines
or fears. She imagines that Charlotte condescendingly defends
Adam to her after she, Maggie, has extolled him:

[This is how7’Charlotte looked in Eaton Square when she
called her attention to his benevolence: through the
dimness of the almost musing smile that took account of
her‘éfiaggie'EZ extravagance, harmless though it might be,
as a tendency to reckon with. 'But my poor child,‘
Charlotte might under this pressure have been on the
point of replying, 'that's the way nice people are,

all round--so that why should one be surprised about

it? We're all nice together--as why shouldn't we be?

If we hadn't been we wouldn't have gone far--and I
consider that we've gone very far indeed. Why should
you 'take on' as if you weren't a perfect dear yourself,
capable of all the sweetest things?--as if you hadn't

in fact grown up in an atmosphere of all the good things
that I recognised, even of old, as soon as I came near
you, and that you've allowed me now, between you, to
make so blessedly my own.’ Mrs. Verver might in fact
have but just failed to make another point, a point
charmingly natural to her as a grateful and irreproachable
wife. 'It isn't a bit wonderful, I may also remind you,
that your husband should find, when opportunity permits,
worse things to do than to go about with mine. I
happen, love, to appreciate my husband—~I happen per-
fectly to understand that his acquaintance should be
cultivated and his company enjoyed.‘ (II,pp.40-4l)

Another voice, besides the voice of these hypothetical

conversations, is Maggie's particular internal voice. She

criticizes and belittles herself even more effectively than
Charlotte can:

And yet by her little crouching posture there, that of
a timid tigress, she had meant nothing recklessly
ultimate, nothing clumsily fundamental; so that she
called it names, the invidious, the grotesque attitude,
holding it up to her own ridicule, reducing so far as
she could the portée of what had followed it. She
had but wanted to get nearer--nearer to something
indeed that she couldn't, that she wouldn't even to
herself, describe; and the degree of this achieved
nearness was what had been in advance incalculable.
(II,p.lO)

The ironies of Maggie's volume are pervasive. The
image of the overflowing golden cup is heavily ironic because
it is the same image that the Prince uses for the day. Both
Maggie and Charlotte have, symbolically, spilled a full golden
cup with the Prince. The dramatic ironies center around the
adultery. Maggie's innocent, or quasi-innocent, curiosity
about the trip to Gloucester is heavily ironic:
Maggie took the measure in approaching her, on the morrow
of her return from Matcham, with the same show of desire
to hear all her story. She wanted the whole picture from
her, as she had wanted it from her companion, and,
promptly, in Eaton Square, whither, without the Prince,
she repaired almost ostentatiously for the purpose,
this purpose only, she brought her repeatedly back to
the subject, both in her husband's presence and during
several scraps of independent colloquy. (II,p.29)

The first mention of the trip to Gloucester is ironic:
He had told her of his day, the happy thought of his
round-about journey with Charlotte, all their cathedral-
hunting adventure and how it had turned out rather more
of an affair than they expected. (II,p.19)

The conversation at dinner is also heavily ironic:

180

She had thrown herself at dinner into every feature of
the recent adventure of the companions, letting him
see without reserve that she wished to hear everything
about it, and making Charlotte in particular, Charlotte's
judgement of Matcham,Charlotte's aspect, her success
there, her effect traceably produced, her clothes
inimitably worn, her cleverness gracefully displayed,
her social utility, in fine, brilliantly exemplified,
the subject of endless enquiry. Maggie's enquiry

was most sympathetic, moreover, for the whole happy
thought of the cathedral-hunt, which she was so glad
they had entertained and as to the pleasant results

of which, down to the cold beef and bread-and-cheese,
the queer old smell and the dirty tablecloth at the
inn, Amerigo was good-humouredly responsive. He had
looked at her across the table more than once, as if
touched by the humility of this welcome offered to
impressions at second—hand, the amusements, the large
freedoms only of others--as if recognising in it some-
thing fairly exquisite. (II,p.26)

Also ironic is Maggie's decision that the day has been an ordeal
for the Prince:

If he had come back tired, tired from his long day, the

exertion had been literally in her service and her

father's. They two had sat at home in peace, the Prin-

cipino between them, the complications of life kept

down, the bores sifted out, the large ease of the home

preserved, because of the way the others held the

field and braved the weather. Amerigo never complained

--any more than for that matter Charlotte did. (II,p.22)

Maggie's characterization is effectively carried out

through the use of her consciousness as subject. She thinks of
herself as weak and inadequate and therefore has remained
primarily passive, especially in the company of the aggressive,
dazzling Charlotte and the equally awesome Prince. The Prince
seems almost a fascinating stranger:

She had seen him last but five days since, yet he had

stood there before her as if restored from some far
country, some long voyage, some combination of dangers

181

or fatigues. This unquenchable variety in his appeal
to her interest, what did it mean but that--reduced

to the flatness of mere statement--she was married

by good fortune to an altogether dazzling person?

That was an old old story, but the truth of it shone
out to her like the beauty of some family picture,
some mellow portrait of an ancestor, that she might
have been looking at, almost in surprise, after a long
intermission. The dazzling person was upstairs and
she was down. (II,p.2l)

Charlotte, with her ambition and self-confidence has left
Maggie continually unsure of herself:

She had ever been, in respect to her clothes, rather
timorous and uncertain; for the last year above all

she had lived in the light of Charlotte's possible

and rather inscrutable judgement of them. Charlotte's
own were simply the most charming and interesting any
woman had ever put on; there was a kind of poetic justice
in her being at last able in this particular, thanks

to means, thanks quite to omnipotence, freely to exer-
cise her genius. But Maggie would have described her-
self as, in these connexions, constantly and intimately
'torn'; conscious on one side of the impossibility of
copying her companion and conscious on the other of

the impossibility of sounding her, independently, to

the bottom. Yes, it was one of the things she should

go down to her grave without having known--how Charlotte,
after all had been said, really thought her stepdaughter
looked under any supposedly ingenious personal experi-
ment. . . .Hadn't Charlotte, with so perfect a critical
vision, if the truth were known, given her up as hope-
less-—hOpeless by a serious standard, ani thereby
invented for her a different and inferior one, in

which, as the only thing to be done, she patiently and
soothingly abetted her? (II,pp.l3-l4)

Because Maggie's internal voice labels her ridiculous she pro-

jects this same attitude onto everyone around her. In respect

to her father Maggie feels the most delicate love and concern:
She thought of herself, instinctively, beautifully, as
having dealt, all her life, at her father's side and

by his example, only in reasonable reasons; and what
she would really have been most ashamed of would be

182

to produce for him, in this line, some inferior sub-
stitute. Unless she were in a position to plead
definitely that she was jealous she should be in no
position to plead decently that she was dissatisfied.
This latter condition would be a necessary implication
of the former; without the former behind it it would
have to fall to the ground. So had the case wonder—
fully been arranged for her; there was a card she
could play, but there was only one, and to play it
would be to end the game. She felt herself--as at
the small square green table between the tall old
silver candlesticks and the neatly arranged counters
--her father's playmate and partner; and what it
constantly came back to in her mind was that for her
to ask a question, to raise a doubt, to reflect in
any degree on the play of the others, would be to
break the charm. The charm she had to call it, since
it kept her companion so constantly engaged, so
perpetually seated and so contentedly occupied. To
say anything at all would be in fine to have to say
why she was jealous; and she could in her private hours
but stare long, with suffused eyes, at that impossi—
bility. (II,p.34)

It will be, in fact, the shift in Maggie's major emotional
investment from her father to her husband which determines her
growth.

Maggie never emerges as a jealous witch because she
is not the type, even mentally, to admit her negative feelings
in definite terms. Whenever she begins to think that she is
jealous, she quickly smothers this realization which she would
find it difficult to accept, especially as she realizes more
and more that she herself has been largely responsible for
the "funny form. . . into which their lives have fallen."
Maggie's imagery, however, betrays her anger. She feels like
a caged bird and drowned in the "bath of benevolence". One

of the reasons for the ambiguity of Maggie‘s volume is that her

183

anger and jealousy are so subdued that they run like a malevolent
undercurrent beneath the conscious surface of her thought.

The themes of Maggie's monologue are the same as the
themes of the first volume. These are the three dominant
themes of the novel: 1) innocence, ignorance and experience:
2) the exploitation of human beings, and 3) the international
theme. Maggie's innocence is clearly exposed as unintelligent
and unwise in her monologue. Maggie must take action now to
break the patterns that, in her ignorance, she has allowed to
envelOp her. Maggie also recognizes that she and her father
have exploited Charlotte. Maggie, as she begins again to "go
about with" Charlotte, senses that Charlotte treats her in a
special way:

Mrs. Verver only wished to know on any occasion what
was expected of her, only held herself there for
instructions, in order even to better them if possible
. . . . Charlotte's attitude had in short its moments
of flowering into pretty excesses of civility, self-
effacements in the presence of others, sudden little
formalisms of suggestion and recognition, that might
have represented her sense of the duty of not 'losing
sight' of a social distinction. (II,p.3?)
Maggie's awareness of the exploitation of Charlotte is fortunate,
because with it comes her desire to break the forms of their
lives;
She wanted him to understand from that very moment
that she was going to be with him again, quite with

them, together, as she doubtless hadn't been since
the 'funny' changes--that was really all one could

184

call them--into which they had each, as for the sake
of the others, too easily and too obligingly slipped.
They had taken too much for granted that their life
together required, as peOple in London said, a special
'form'--which was very well so long as the form was
kept only for the outside world and was made no more
of among themselves than the pretty mould of an iced
pudding, or something of that sort, into which, to
help yourself, you didn't hesitate to break with the
Spoon. (II,pp.27-28)

Empty form in contrast with reality is one of the themes
developed throughout Maggie's volume. The international theme,
as developed in Maggie's meditation, is a corollary of the

theme of American innocence and lack of experience. The wealthy,
naive new world heiress is no match for the imagination of

the cosmopolitan Prince until she makes a studied effort to
surprise her husband. The greatest shock that comes to Maggie

is that it is very hard to break out of forms, and that, when
peOple have become accustomed to them, forms may neatly rearrange
themselves without any concomitant rearrangement in the estrange-
ment of husband and wife:

What had in fact promptly enough happened, she presently
recognised, was that if her stepmother had beautifully
taken possession of her, and if she had virtually been
rather snatched again thereby from her husband's side,

so on the other hand this had with as little delay
entailed some very charming assistance for her in Eaton
Square. When she went home with Charlotte, from whatever
happy demonstration, for the benefit of the world in which
they supposed themselves to live, that there was no
smallest reason why their closer association shouldn't

be public and acclaimed--at these times she regularly
found that Amerigo had come either to sit with his father-
in-law in the absence of the ladies or to make on his

side precisely some such display of the easy working of
the family life as would represent the equivalent of

her excursion it was that everything in Maggie most

went to pieces-~everything, that is, that belonged to

185

her disposition to challenge the perfection of their

common state. It divided them again, that was true,

this particular turn of the tide--cut them up afresh

into pairs and parties; quite as if a sense for the

equilibrium was what, between them all, had most power

of insistence; quite as if Amerigo himself were all

the while at bottom equally thinking of it and watch-

ing it. But as against that he was making her father

not miss her, and he could have rendered neither of

them a more excellent service. He was actin in short

on a cue, the cue given him by observation. II,p.39)

The external and internal plots both advance through

Maggie's monologue block because it is here that she begins
to act. Maggie's plot, which is the internal plot, is her
final conquering of her ignorance and her unhealthy attachment
to her father. Maggie begins to become, through her first timid
knock at the pagoda, a wife and an independent woman capable
of constructive change and aggressive action in the face of a
complex problem. Maggie's first attempts to rectify the
absurd situation in the family are unsuccessful because she
has no idea of the strength of the bond of those who oppose her
rearrangement. The external plot, which pits Charlotte against
Maggie in a contest for the Prince, is advanced in Charlotte's
small victory at keeping the Prince and Princess still apart.
Maggie will have to grow further, and be willing to give up her
father entirely, before she will gain a final, absolute victory
both over Charlotte and over her own immaturity. The cumulative
effect of Maggie's monologue is one of anxiety. An anxious,

dependent young woman has at last decided to take a stand; it

is the state of her consciousness as she makes her initial

moves that constitutes the subject of the monologue block.

Maggie's soliloquy in Chapter II of Book V is another
one of the ”terrace soliloquys” of ng_Golden ngl. The
terrace provides an excellent vehicle for meditation:

/Maggie had resumed her walk-~st0pping heneand there,

While s e rested on the cool smooth stone balustrade,

to draw it out; in the course of which, after a little,

she passed again the lights of the empty drawing-room

and paused again for what she saw and felt there. (II,p.238)

The effect achieved as Maggie, on the terrace, looks in at
the players, makes highly dramatic the sense of Maggie, alone,
valiantly maintaining control of a precarious situation:

It was the first evening there had been no one else. Mrs.
Rance and the Lutches were due the next day; but meanwhile
the facts of the situation were upright for her round the
green cloth and the silver flambeaux; the fact of her
father's wife's lover facing his mistress; the fact of
her father sitting, all unsounded and unblinking, between
them; the fact of Charlotte keeping it up, keeping up
everything, across the table, with her husband beside

her; the fact of Fanny Assingham, wonderful creature,
placed opposite to the three and knowing more about

each, probably, when one came to think, than either of
them knew of either. Erect above all for her was the
sharp-edged fact of the relation of the whole group,
individually and collectively, to herself--herself so
speciously eliminated for the hour, but presumably

more present to the attention of each than the next card
to be played. (II,p.232)

Maggie, retired on the sofa, wonders if

beneath and behind all their apparently straight play,

. . . she weren't really watching them from her corner
and consciously, as might be said, holding them in the
hand. She was asking herself at last how they could
bear it--for, though cards were as nought to her and

she could follow no move, so that she was always on

such occasions out of the party, they struck her as
conforming alike, in the matter of gravity and pro riety,
to the stiff standard of the house. (II,pp.232-233

187

The principals at the card table are maintaining the polite
forms of Fawns rigidly. Their game holds them in control,
and as long as Maggie has them busy at cards, she can relax
for a moment from her vigilance. Maggie herself has broken
the forms; she does not play:

Her father, she knew, was a high adept, one of the greatest
--she had been ever, in her stupidity, his small, his
sole despair; Amerigo excelled easily, as he understood
and practised every art that could beguile large leisure;
Mrs. Assingham and Charlotte, moreover, were accounted
as 'good' as members of a sex incapable of the nobler
consistency could be. Therefore evidently they weren't,
all so up to their usual form, merely passing it off,
whether for her or for themselves; and the amount of
enjoyed or at least achieved security represented by so
complete a conquest of appearances was what acted on

her nerves precisely with a kind of provocative force.

(II,p.233)

Maggie has set the others at a game that she herself does not
play. She has ceased to be a victim of forms and yet, because
of her father, she cannot give them up entirely. The paradox
of Maggie's situation is that she hates the forms, but she
hates even more the thought of the chaos which would follow if
she deserted them:

It was extraordinary: they positively brought home to

her that to feel about them in any of the immediate,

inevitable, assuaging ways, the ways usually open to

innocence outraged and generosity betrayed, would have

been to give them up, and that givin them up was,

marvellously, not to be thought of. II,p.237)

Just as this dramatic setting is a metaphor for what

happens in the soliloquy, so the movement of the monologue is

metaphoric. The tension of the soliloquy is built through

188

the pattern of escape, pursuit, flight and capture. Maggie
escapes from the room and from her own violent impulses onto
the terrace. She feels momentarily safe until she realizes
that Charlotte has left the card game to pursue her. Maggie,
in terror, tries to escape Charlotte, but realizes that she is
trapped. Charlotte captures Maggie, insists on the Judas

kiss, and humiliates Maggie into a position of self-effacement.
The prevailing atmosphere of the soliloquy is one of energy
under rigid control. James creates the extreme tension through
the contrast of the formal, polite card game with the almost
wild pursuit of Maggie by Charlotte and the highly dramatic
scene which follows in which the adulteress accuses and subdues
the innocent wife.

The resolution of the monologue comes after the scene
with Charlotte at the end of the chapter when Maggie realizes
that what she actually wanted has happened; she and Amerigo
are now together with Charlotte outside. Maggie has, at this
point, at last, won her victory.

It was in fact as if, thanks to her hovering image of
him confronted with this admirable creature even as

she was confronted, there glowed upon her from afar,
yet straight and strong, a deep explanatory light which
covered the last inch of the ground. He had given her
something to conform to, and she hadn't unintelligently
turned on him, 'gone back on' him, as he would have
said, by not conforming. They were together thus, he
and she, close, close together--whereas Charlotte,
though rising there radiantly before her, was really
off in some darkness of space that would steep her in
solitude and harass her with care. (II,p.250)

Maggie's insight at this moment is the climax of the

189

internal plot because she has regained her husband and outwitted
the forms. Her final maturity will come as she gives up her
father and is able to feel compassion for the suffering Charlotte.
Within the novel as a whole, Book V, which is set at
Fawns, is the section which recounts Maggie's victory over
Charlotte. The hot summer at Fawns is symbolic of a purgatory
through which each of the principals must pass. The atmosphere
of the book is one of unrelieved anxiety and great suffering.
Book V is highly compressed. Maggie's defeat of Charlotte is
accomplished not through what is done, but through the self-
control which both the Prince and Maggie achieve. The restraint
of strong passions and rigid adherence to forms causes extreme
tension, which builds the powerful emotional effect of Book V.
One of the artistic beauties of Chapter II is its

division between soliloquy and scene. During the soliloquy
Maggie envisions herself in control. She imagines herself as
both actress and author, managing the other principals so that
nothing will break the appearance of harmony in the family.
In contrast, in the scene with Charlotte, Maggie is terrified
and subdued and the opposite of the exquisite Charlotte:

Charlotte had marched straight in, dragging her rich

train; she rose there beautiful and free, her whole

aspect and action attuned to the firmness of her

speech. Maggie had kept the shawl she had taken out

with her, and, clutching it tight in her nervousness,

drew it round her as if huddling in it for shelter,

covering herself with it for humility. She looked

out as from under an improvised hood--the sole head—

gear of some poor woman at somebody's proud door; she
waited even like the poor woman. (II,p.247)

190

This contrast emphasizes Charlotte's power, and the difficulty
Maggie has had in overcoming her. The same pattern of escape,
pursuit, flight and capture is repeated in Chapter V of Book V.
Maggie is highly conscious of the similarity of the two scenes
as she pursues Charlotte:

Within sight of Charlotte seated far away and very much
where she had expected to find her the Princess fell to
wondering if her friend wouldn't be affected quite as
she herself had been that night on the terrace under Mrs.
Verver's perceptive pursuit. The relation today had
turned itself round; Charlotte was seeing her come through
patches of lingering noon quite as she had watched Char-
lotte menace her through the starless dark; and there
was a moment, that of her waiting a little as they thus
met across the distance, when the internal was bridged
by a recognition not less soundless and to all appearance
not less charged with strange meanings than that of the
other occasion. The point however was that they had
changed places; Maggie had from her window seen her
stepmother leave the house . . . and had thereupon felt
her impulse determined with the same sharpness that had
made the spring of her companion's three weeks before.. .
(II,p.296)

In one of these scenes Maggie is afraid, and in the other

she has nothing left to fear. Book V achieves its intensity

in part through the repetition of these scenes and the patterns
within them.

The imagery of the monologue adds greatly to its atmos-
phere of tension and anxiety. The imagery which describes
Maggie's feelings and function is the imagery of the actress
playing a part and the author of a play both. The motif of
Maggie as actress runs throughout her volume because she usually

feels very conscious of her duplicity:

191

She felt not unlike some young woman of the theatre
who, engaged for a minor part in the play and having
mastered her cues with anxious effort, should find
herself suddenly promoted to leading lady and expected
to appear in every act of the five. (II,p.208)

The constant pressure of being figuratively on stage has ex-
hausted Maggie:

The Princess herself had welcomed the comparatively
hushed hour-—for the bridge-players were serious and
silent--much in the mood of a tired actress who has
the good fortune to be 'off,' while her mates are on,
almost lon enough for a nap on the property sofa in
the wing. II,p.23l)

As Maggie looks in at the others from the terrace she senses that
not only is she an actress, but also an author of the play:

Nothing in fact was stranger than the way in which, when
she had remained there a little, her companions, watched
by her through one of the windows, actually struck her

as almost consciously and gratefully safer. They might
have been--really charming as they showed in the beautiful
room, and Charlotte certainly, as always, magnificently
handsome and supremely distinguished--they might have
been figures rehearsing some play of which she herself
was the author; they might even, for the happy appearance
they continued to present, have been such figures as
would by the strong note of character in each fill any
author with the certitude of success, especially of their
own histrionic. (II,p.235)

The image of the author is one of control and energy. Another
image of the stage is in Maggie's glance into the drawing-room
where, in only a few minutes, she will be confronted by Charlotte:

She passed round the house and looked into the drawing-

room, lighted also, but empty now, and seeming to speak

the more in its own voice of all the possibilities she
controlled. Spacious and splendid, like a stage again
awaiting a drama, it was a scene she might people, by

the press of her spring, either with serenities and
dignities and decencies, or with terrors and shames

and ruins, things as ugly as those formless fragments of

her golden bowl she was trying so hard to pick up. (II,p.236)

192

Maggie is in control; she has the key to the situation:

The key to the mystery, the key that could wind and unwind
it without a snap of the spring, was there in her pocket
--or rather, no doubt, clasped at this crisis in her hand
and pressed, as she walked back and forth, to her breast.
She walked to the end and far out of the light; she re—
turned and saw the others still where she had left them.
(II,p.236)

Paradoxically, even though Maggie is in control, she also feels
that she has been exploited and has become the scapegoat of
the others:

They thus tacitly put it upon her to be disposed of, the
whole complexity of their peril, and she promptly saw
why: because she was there, and there just as she was,
to lift it off them and rake it; to charge herself with
it as thesrapegoat of old, of whom she had once seen a
terrible picture, had been charged with the sins of the
people and had gone forth into the desert to sink under
his burden and die. That indeed wasn't their design

and their interest, that she should sink under hers; it
wouldn't be their feeling that she should do anything
but live, live on somehow for their benefit, and even as
much as possible in their company, to keep proving to
them that they had truly escaped and that she was still
there to simplify. (II,pp.234-235)

Throughout the monologue Maggie's impulses and self-control

battle with each other. She feels the strong impulses to cry

in outrage against the injustice done her and yet, at the same

time, she diligently sacrifices everything to protect the forms.
The imagery that symbolizes Charlotte in the monologue

reflects Maggie's sense that she must be rigidly controlled.

Charlotte is symbolized as a caged bird, magnificent but dan-

gerous:

193

The splendid shining supple creature was out of the

cage, was at large; and the question now almost grotesquely
rose of whether she /Maggi%7 mightn't by some art, just
where she was and before 5 e could go further, be hemmed

in and secured. It would have been for a moment, in this
case, a matter of quickly closing the windows and giving
the alarm. (II,p.239)

Charlotte's pursuit of Maggie is seen as an escape with a power-
ful intention:

Yes, Charlotte had seen she was watching her from afar,
and had stopped now to put her further attention to the
test. Her face was fixed on her, through the night; she
was the creature who had escaped by force from her cage,
yet there was in her whole motion assuredly, even as so
dimly discerned, a kind of portentous intelligent still-
ness. She had escaped with an intention, but with an
intention the more definite that it could so accord with
quiet measures. (II,p.24l)

The images of Charlotte as a strong, unpredictable force emphasize
her as Maggie's powerful antagonist and the dark woman of the
romance. The irony of Charlotte is that she pretends to be the
honest, outspoken member of the group:
Charlotte looked at her splendidly hard. 'You're perfectly
sure it's all my mistake?‘
'All I can say is that you've received a false impression.‘
'Ah then--so much the better! From the moment I had
received it I knew I must sooner or later speak of it--
for that, you see, is systematically my way. And now,‘
Charlotte added, 'you make me glad I've spoken. I thank
you very much.’ (II,p.249)
But it is Charlotte who uses an appearance of truth most to
camouflage reality.
One of the most striking images of the meditation is
Maggie's image of evil:
It was the first sharp falsity she had known in

her life, to touch at all or be touched by; it had
met her like some bad-faced stranger surprised in

191:

one of the thick-carpeted corridors of a house of
quiet on a Sunday afternoon; and yet, yes, amazingly,
she had been able to look at terror and disgust only
to know that she must put away from her the bitter-
sweet of their freshness. (II,p.237)

Another image which describes Maggie's emotions is that of

jealousy and rage as passions alien to her nature:

She might fairly . . . have yearned for it, for the
straight vindictive view, the rights of resentment, the
rages of jealousy, the protests of passion, as for some-
thing she had been cheated of not least: a range of
feelings which for many women would have meant so much,
but which for her husband's wife, for her father's
daughter, figured nothing nearer to experience than a
wild eastern caravan, looming into view with crude
colours in the sun, fierce pipes in the air, high
Spears against the sky, all a thrill, a natural joy

to mingle with, but turning off short before it reached
her and plunging into other defiles. (II,p.236)

Most of the ironies of the meditation are the ironies

that arise when appearance is not reality. Maggie knows vividly

DOW

She

the horror of finding evil seated all at its ease where
she had only dreamed of good; the horror of the thing
hideously behind, behind so much trusted, so much pre-
tended, nobleness, cleverness, tenderness. (II,p.237)

also knows the great irony of a polite, domestic scene

which disguises the deceptions of those she loves most:

Silent and discreet, she bent a vague mild face upon them
as if to signify that little as she followed their doings
she wished them well; and she took from each, across the
table, in the common solemnity, an upward recognition
which she was to carry away With her on her moving out

to the terrace a few minutes later. Her father, and her
husband, Mrs. Assingham and Charlotte, had done nothing
but meet her eyes; yet the difference in these demonstra—
tions made each a separate passage--which was all the
more wonderful since, with the secret behind every face,
they had alike tried to look at her through it and in
denial of it. (II,p.234)

195

A large part of the tension of the monologue is produced
by Maggie's internal tension. She feels the seething of violent
passions dangerously close to erupting into expression:

She found herself for five minutes thrilling with the

idea of the prodigious effect that, just as she sat there
near them, she had at her command; with the sense that

if she were but different--oh ever so different1--all

this high decorum would hang by a hair. There reigned for
her absolutely during these vertiginous moments that
fascination of the monstrous, that temptation of the
horribly possible, which we so often trace by its break-
ing out suddenly, lest it should go further, in unexplained
retreats and reactions.

After it had been thus vividly before her for a little
that, springing up under her wrong and making them all
start, stare and turn pale, she might sound out their
doom in a single sentence, a sentence easy to choose
among several of the lurid--after she had faced that
blinding light and felt it turn to blackness she rose
from her place, laying aside her magazine, and moved
slowly round the room, passing near the card-players
and pausing an instant behind the chairs in turn. (II,pp.233-234)

But she must keep these passions under control, and this effort
contributes to the intense emotional effect of the monologue.
Maggie has fled to the terrace to escape her own natural anger:

She hovered on the terrace, where the summer night was
so soft that she scarce needed the light shawl she had
picked up. Several of the long windows of the occupied
rooms stood open to it, and the light came out in vague
shafts and fell upon the old smooth stones. The hour
was moonless and starless and the air heavy and still
—-which was why, in her evening dress, she need fear

no chill and could get away, in the outer darkness,
from that provocation of opportunity which had assaulted
her, within on her sofa, as a beast might have leaped
at her throat. (II,p.235)

Maggie feels that vindictive rage would be actually, much
better, much more honest, than mere acceptance; but she also
knows that such an open encounter will hurt her father and

probably mean that she will lose her husband. One reason why

196

Maggie's rage seems so strong and vicious, even though it is
never expressed, is that it is in such sharp contrast to what
Maggie has always been. Now that, finally, Maggie's self-con-
fidence has begun to rise, she has feelings which indicate the
great wrong done her. She has matured from a weak, completely
self-effacing girl into a strong, passionate woman.

The themes of this soliloquy are the same themes that

run throughout The Golden Bowl. One of the most important of

 

these is the danger of forms. Maggies realizes that because
the forms are artificial, and do not correspond to reality,
they may be manipulated by Charlotte as easily as by her:
As she herself had hovered in sight of it /the card
game a quarter of an hour before, it would have been
a t ing for her to Show Charlotte~~to show in righteous
irony, in reproach too stern for anything but silence.
But now it was she who was being shown it, and shown
it by Charlotte, and she saw quickly enough that as
Charlotte showed it so she must at present submissively
seem to take it. (II,p.244)

Another theme, that of innocence and experience, is
extended here, because Maggie has seen the ”bad-faced stranger"
and has known evil and learned to deal with it. The third
theme of this meditation is one subtly apparent throughout'
the novel as a comment upon the relationships of the principals.
This is the theme of possession and exploitation. At first
this theme, in respect to Maggie, refers to her possession of

the Prince. When she is strong and in control she feels "in

possession” of him. In this monologue the theme of possession

197

is expanded to include her father. As Maggie and Charlotte
look through the window at Adam as he sits at cards it is
very obvious that there is a strong feeling of competition
between them:
It was to her father's quiet face, discernibly expressive
of nothing that was in his daughter's mind, that our young
woman's attention was most directly given. His wife and
his daughter were both closely watching him, and to which
of them, could he have been notified of this, would his
raised eyes first, all impulsively, have responded? in
which of them would have felt it most important to
destroy--for his clutch at the equilibrium-~any germ of
uneasiness? Not yet since his marriage had Maggie so
sharply and so formidably known her old possession of
him as a thing divided and contested. She was looking
at him by Charlotte's leave and under Charlotte's direc-
tion; quite in fact as if the particular way she should
look at him were prescribed to her; quite even as if
she had been defied to look at him in any other. (II,p.244)
The internal monologue form is an excellent vehicle through
which to make thematic statements because it preserves the
objectivity and distance of the stage, and yet keeps the intimacy
and subjectivity which build subtle characterization and intense
emotional effects.

The external plot is extended here through Charlotte's
final confrontation with Maggie which she, Charlotte, will
initiate and control. The dark, dangerous woman of the romance
has attacked the heroine for the last time and is about to be
completely subdued. The internal plot, or Maggie's plot, is
also drawing to a resolution because Maggie has achieved both
wisdom and mastery. Maggie is at last set in relation with

her husband, and going through the last torments of giving up

198

her father.

The monologue of Book V, Chapter IV, expresses the
final humiliation of Charlotte. This chapter is one of the
most emotionally moving in all of James, and it is also one of
the technically most brilliant of his maneuvers. Within this
chapter, the tension of Charlotte's confusion and punishment
is built to an almost unbearable level. The striking thing
is that all of Charlotte's torment is presented through Maggie's
eyes. Never once does James abandon his chosen centre. To
remain faithful to his centre he performs unusual feats of
dramatic virtuosity; for example, in the imagined scenes and
mute conversations, the point of view rigidly maintained through-
out the chapter, and the subjective monologue form, add a new
dimension to Charlotte's pain. Either Maggie is delighting in
Charlotte's humiliation and therefore appluading it, or she is
suffering to see Charlotte so suffer and loathes the entire
situation. Because Maggie feels what happens to Charlotte so
acutely, it is probably wisest to say that Maggie's idea of
the value of punishment matures as the chapter develops. At
the first, Maggie has fantasies of Charlotte gropingly trying
to re-establish contact with the Prince, only to be cruelly
rebuffed; however, by the end of the chapter Maggie has come to
look through Amerigo's eyes and, one would gather, though James
is not explicit, come to find so much human anguish almost

"ridiculous".

199

The chapter is structured as a monologue block built
around four separate scenes. The first is the scene of Charlotte
and Maggie‘s embrace after they have been discovered by the
others. The second is an imagined scene between Charlotte
and Amerigo as the Prince warns her, coldly, not to trust her
advantage over Maggie too far. The third is the haunting scene
in the gallery in which Charlotte shows the visiting neighbor
Adam's precious collections while Fanny, Adam and Maggie carry
on a mute commentary around her. The fourth scene of the
monologue is actually a soliloquy which Maggie has as she
watches the sun rise one morning.

During the monologue the tension builds to the climax
of Charlotte's haunting voice in the gallery. The first scene
is actually a repetition of Maggie's humiliation in Chapter IV
to offer a sharp contrast with Charlotte's humiliation in this
chapter. Maggie's meditation on Charlotte's relationship with
Amerigo bridges the time between Charlotte's apparent victory
in the drawing-room and Charlotte's final defeat in the gallery.
Two circumstances have defeated Charlotte: first, the Prince
will no longer communicate with her and, second, Adam has de—
cided to return to American City. Both men have acted to
protect Maggie and Maggie, though she may in reality have done
little, has actually controlled everyone. The climactic scene
in the gallery has the effect of echoeing through Maggie's

soliloquy so that, even to the last line of the chapter, Char-

200

lotte's cry of pain is heard.

In relation to Book V as a whole, Chapter IV reflects
Charlotte's penance and Maggie's forgiveness. There will only
remain the final parallel scene to Chapter II in Chapter V in
which Maggie will ”do all" and leave Charlotte her pride. It
is always pride which characterizes the evil woman of the romance,
and Charlotte Stant, as part of that tradition, is everywhere
a figure of great mastery and pride. Even in her humiliation
here she is proving her superiority to the ladies who have come
to see the famous estate.

The style of this monologue is fascinating because the
punishment is recounted through the eyes of those who punish.
Maggie imagines the scene in which Amerigo rebuffs Charlotte:

She saw her, face to face with the Prince, take from
him the chill of his stiffest admonition, with the pos-
sibilities of deeper difficulty that it represented

for each. She heard her ask, irritated and sombre,

what tone, in God's name--since her bravery didn't suit
him--she was then to adopt; and by way of a fantastic
flight of divination She heard Amerigo reply, in a voice
of which every fine note, familiar and admirable, came
home to her, that one must really manage such prudences
a little for one's self. It was positive in the Princess
that for this she breathed Charlotte's cold air-~turned
away from him in it with her, turned with her, in grow-
ing compassion, this way and that, hovered behind her
while she felt her ask herself where then she should
rest. Marvellous the manner in which, under such
imaginations, Maggie thus circled and lingered--quite

as if she were, materially, following her unseen, count-
ing every step she helplessly wasted, noting every hin-
drance that brought her to a pause. (II,pp.282-283)

It is easy to imagine that Maggie is enjoying her reverie here.
It is with a far different tone that later in her soliloquy

she seeks to shut Charlotte's wail out of her mind.

201

There are many small mute conversations in the chapter.
These dramatize what Maggie senses gestures and facial expres—
sions signify. The most prolonged imagined discourse is the
one that Maggie hears from her father as he leads Charlotte
about by a "silken halter”:

Two or three mute facial intimations . . . his wife's
presence didn't prevent his addressing his daughter--
nor prevent his daughter, as she passed, it was doubt-
less to be added, from flushing a little at the receipt
of. They amounted perhaps only to a wordless, wordless
smile, but the smile was the soft shake of the twisted
silken rope, and Maggie's translation of it, held in
her breast till she got well away, came out only, as
if it might have been overheard, when some door was
closed behind her. 'Yes, you see-~I lead her now by
the neck, I lead her to her doom, and she doesn't so
much as know what it is, though she has a fear in her
heart which, if you had the chances to apply your ear
there that I, as a husband, have, you would hear thump
and thump and thump. She thinks it may be, her doom,
the awful place over there-~awful for her; but she's
afraid to ask, don't you see? just as she's afraid of
not asking; just as she's afraid of so many other things
that she sees multiplied all about her now as perils
and portents. She'll know, however-~when she does know.‘
(II,pp.287-288)

Such a seemingly cruel interchange as this one at the expense
of another person is descriptive of Maggie before she reaches
the final maturity of forgiveness. In the climactic scene in
the gallery Maggie seems much more human:

'You understand, don't you, that if she didn't do this
there would be no knowing what she might do?‘ This
light Mrs. Assingham richly launched while her younger
friend, unresistingly moved, became uncertain again,
and then, not too much to show it--or rather positively
to conceal it and to conceal something more as well--
turned short round to one of the windows and awkwardly,
pointlessly waited. (II,p.29l)

202

Maggie begins to suffer with Charlotte as the scene continues:

The high voice went on; its quaver was doubtless for
conscious ears only, but there were verily thirty seconds
during which it sounded, for our young woman, like the
shriek of a soul in pain. Kept up a minute longer it
would break and collapse--so that Maggie felt herself

the next thing turn with a start to her father. 'Can't
she be stopped? Hasn't she done it enough?'--some such
question as that she let herself ask him to suppose in
her. Then it was that, across half the gallery——for he
hand't moved from where she had first seen him-—he struck
her as confessing, with strange tears in his own eyes,

to sharp identity of emotion. 'Poor thing, poor thing'
--it reached straight—-'isn't she, for one's credit, on
the swagger?‘ (II,p.292)

Not only does Maggie imagine conversations, but she has grown

to look through other people's eyes. Her sympathy for Charlotte
has begun to develop. She can see her father as Charlotte

must see him:

she absolutely looked with Charlotte's grave eyes. What
she unfailingly made out through them was the figure of
a little quiet gentleman who mostly wore, as he moved
alone across the field of vision, a straw hat, a white
waistcoat and a blue necktie, keeping a cigar in his
teeth and his hands in his pockets, and who oftener
than not presented a somewhat meditative back while he
slowly measured the perspectives of the park and
broodingly counted (it might have appeared) his steps.
There were hours of intensity for a week or two when

it was for all the world as if she had guardedly
tracked her stepmother, in the great house, from room
to room and from window to window, only to see her,
here and there and everywhere, try her uneasy outlook,
question her issue and her fate. (II,pp.283-284)

She has not reached the total empathy that she will know by
the end of the chapter, but she has cultivated enough imagination
to stand where another stands.

The narrative controls and monologue markers also em-

phasize a change in Maggie's judgement. Even though Maggie has

203

begun to refer to Charlotte as "his mistress” openly to herself,
she also calls her again "poor woman," an address which the

narrator comments upon:

What retarded evolution, she asked herself in these hours,
mightn't poor Charlotte all unwittingly have precipitated?
She was thus poor Charlotte a ain for Maggie even while
Maggie's own head was bowed. %II, p. 282)

The narrator at last extols Maggie's marvelous inconsistency in
respect to Amerigo with his parenthetical remark:

He might have broken away, might easily have started to
travel; he had a right-~thought wonderful Maggie now--
to so many more freedoms than he took: (II,p.294)

Throughout the monologue, as in all of Maggie's meditations,
there is the sense of scenes frequently remembered because of
the rich connotations of looks and actions:

Maggie lived over again the minutes in question--had
found herself repeatedly doing so; to the degree that
the whole evening hung together, to her aftersense,
as a thing appointed by some occult power that had
dealt with her, that had for instance animated the
four with just the right restlessness too, had decreed
and directed and exactly timed it in them, making
their game of bridge--however abysmal a face it had
worn for her-~give way precisely to their common
unavowed impulse to find out, to emulate Charlotte's
impatience; a preoccupation, this latter, attached
detectedly to the member of the party who was roaming
in her queerness and was, for all their simulated
blindness, not roaming unnoted. (II,p.278)

Maggie repeats scenes to herself because there is so much
duplicity in the air at Fawns that every movement warrants
study: It can no longer be taken to be simply what it appears.

Everything that is done must be ”exquisitely calculated."

204

In this way James emphasizes scenes which are simple in them-
selves, gaining the maximum of dramatic intensity from every
situation.

The drawing-room atmosphere at Fawns yields easily to
a wealth of understatement:

They had evidently looked, the two young wives, like a
pair of women 'making up' effusively, as women were
supposed to do, especially when approved fools, after
a broil; but taking note of the reconciliation would
imply on her father's part, on Amerigo's and on Fanny
Assingham's, some proportionate vision of the grounds
of their difference. There had been something in the
incident, there had been but too much, for each ob-
server; yet there was nothing any one could have said
without seeming essentially to say: 'See, see, the
dear things—-their quarrel's blissfully overl' 'Our
quarrel? What quarrel?' the dear things themselves
would necessarily in that case have demanded; and the
wits of the others would thus have been called upon
for some agility of exercise. (II,pp.276-277)

There are ironies in this situation, also. Charlotte appears
to have triumphed and yet she has come no nearer to understand-
ing her predicament than she was before:

Maggie's sense turned to the quality of the success con-
stituted on the spot for Charlotte. Most of all, if

she was guessing how her father must have secretly
started, how her husband must have secretly wondered,
how Fanny Assingham must have secretly, in a flash,

seen daylight for herself-~most of all had she tasted

by communication, of the high profit involved for her
companion. She felt in all her pulses Charlotte

feel it, and how publicity had been required, absolutely,
to crown her own abasement. It was the added touch,

and now nothing was wanting--which, to do her stepmother
justice, Mrs. Verver had appeared but to desire from
that evening to Show with the last vividness that She
recognised. (II,p.278)

205

One of the narrator's intrusions is a comment on Maggie's lack
of an ironic sense. This comment gives Charlotte's situation
more depth because it is presented not only as pathetic,
through Maggie's eyes, but also as grotesque, through the
narrator's:

Something indubitably had come up for her /Charlotte7'that
had never come up before; it represented a'new compIica—
tion and had begotten a new anxiety-—things these that
she carried about with her done up in the napkin of her
lover's accepted rebuke while she vainly hunted for
some corner where she might put them safely down. The
disguised solemnity, the prolonged futility of her
search might have been grotesque to a more ironic eye;
but Maggie's provision of irony, which we have taken for
naturally small, had never been so scant as now, and
there were moments while she watched with her, thus
unseen, when the mere effect of being near her was to
feel her own heart in her throat, was to be almost moved
to saying to her: 'hold on tight, my poor dear--with-
out too much terror--and it will all come out somehow.’
(II,p.284)

Almost all of the situations at Fawns are rich with dramatic
ironies but none so much as the embrace of the two women:

The effect, she might have considered, had been almost
awkward-~the promptitude of her separation from Charlotte,
as if they had been discovered in some absurdity, on
her becoming aware of spectators. The spectators on
the other hand--that was the appearance--mightn't have
supposed them, in the existing relation, addicted to
mutual endearments; and yet, hesitating with a fine
scruple between sympathy and hilarity, must have felt
that almost any Spoken or laughed comment could be kept
from sounding vulgar only by sounding be ond any
permitted measure intelligent. (II,p.276)

Although the imagined scenes and conversations objectify
Maggie's fantasies and open her consciousness, and the under-

statement and irony add depth to an understanding of the complex

206

emotional relationships involved here, the imagery of the
monologue does the most to clarify both Maggie's emotional
state and the relations of those around her. The imagery of
Fawns as a haunted house is particularly provocative:

It (the perfunctorx7 took on finally the likeness of
some spacious central chamber in a haunted house, a
great overarched and over-glazed rotunda where gaiety
might reign, but the doors of which Opened into
sinister circular passages.
Here they turned up for each other, as they said, with
the blank faces that denied any uneasiness felt in the
approach; here they closed numerous doors carefully
behind them--all save the door that connected the place,
as by a straight tented corridor, with the outer world,
and, encouraging thus the irruption of society,
imitated the aperture through which the bedizened
performers of the circus are poured into the ring.
(II,pp.288-289)

Maggie's uses the imagery again of performers, and she feels
the sense of impending doom in the house at Fawns which has
become like a prison to all of them. A less gothic image is
of the principals as gold-fish:
Maggie grew to think again of this large element of
'company' as of a kind of renewed water-supply for the
tank in which, like a party of panting gold-fish,
they kept afloat. It helped them unquestionably with
each other, weakening the emphasis of so many of the
silences of which their intimate intercourse would
otherwise have consisted. (II,p.288)
The imagery of the relations among the four vividly describes
the manipulations of each one of the party. Charlotte seeks,
through her embrace, to smooth over all the alienation between

Maggie and herself:

Maggie had seen her unmistakeably desire to rise
to the occasion and be magnificent-~seen her decide

207

that the right way for this would be to prove that
the reassurance she had extorted there, under the
high cool lustre of the saloon, a twinkle of the
crystal and silver, hadn't only poured oil on the
troubled waters of their question, but had fairly
drenched their whole intercourse with that lubricant.

(II,p.279)
Between Amerigo and Maggie the alienation is symbolized as a

great thirst:

As regards herself Maggie had become more conscious
from week to week of his ingenuities of intention to
make up to her for their forfeiture, in so dire a
degree, of any reality of frankness--a privation
that had left on his lips perhaps a little of the
same thirst with which she fairly felt her own dis-
torted, the torment of the lost pilgrim who listens
in desert sands for the possible, the impossible
plash of water. (II,p.281)

The imagery that surrounds Charlotte is, as in Maggie's
monologue in Chapter II, imagery of a caged animal. Both

Amerigo and Adam must control Charlotte. Amerigo accomplishes

this by confusing her:

So it was that her /Maggie'§7 inner sense, in spite of
everything, represented him as still pulling wires and
controlling currents . . . leading his accomplice
continually on to some new turn of the road. :(,pp.280-281)

Adam, on the other hand, has control of the creature out of

the cage:

Maggie had had, as we know, her vision of the gilt bars
bent, of the door of the cage forced open from within
and the creature imprisoned roaming at large-~a movement
on the creature's part that was to have even for the
short interval its impressive beauty, but of which the
limit, and in yet another direction, had loomed straight
into view during her last talk under the great trees
with her father. It was when she saw his wife's face
ruefully attached to the quarter to which in the course

208

of their session he had so significantly addressed his
own--it was then that Maggie could watch for its turning
pale, it was then she seemed to know what she had meant
by thinking of her, in the shadow of his most ominous
reference, as 'doomed.' (II,p.283)

The most striking image of Charlotte, however, is that of her
led along by Adam on a halter. The paradox of all these images
of Charlotte is that her one consuming desire was to be free:

The sposi, as Amerigo called them, under the coved
ceilings of Fawns . . .were making their daily round.
Charlotte hung behind with emphasised attention; she
stOpped when her husband stopped, but at the distance
of a case or two, or of whatever other succession of
objects; and the likeness of their connexion wouldn't
have been wrongly figured if he had been thought of
as holding in one of his pocketed hands the end of a
long silken halter looped round her beautiful neck.
He didn't twitch it, yet it was there; he didn't drag
her, but she came. (II,p.287)

When Maggie allows herself to think of Charlotte and the Prince
together, a series of images follow one another:

There had been, through life, as we know, few quarters
in which the Princess's fancy could let itself loose;
but it shook off restraint when it plunged into the
figured void of the detail of that relation. This was
a realm it could people with images--again and again
with fresh ones; theyswarmed there like the strange
combinations that lurked in the woods at twilight;

they loomed into the definite and faded into the vague,
their main present sign for her being however that
they were always, that they were duskily, agitated.

Her earlier vision of a state of bliss made insecure
by the very intensity of the bliss-~this had dropped
from her; she had ceased to see, as she lost herself,
the pair of operatic, of high Wagnerian lovers (she
found deep within her these comparisons) interlocked

in their wood of enchantment, a green glade as romantic
as one's dream of an old German forest. The picture
was veiled on the contrary with the dimness of trouble;
behind which she felt indistinguishable the procession
of forms that had lost all so pitifully their precious
confidence. (II,p.280)

209

These images are both vague and specific, as if at times Maggie
is afraid to picture vividly the adulterous relation, and at
others too romantic to see it in just relation to its evil

nature.

Maggie's images for her relationship with her father
after their talk in the park also coalesce into a series which
extends from two sociable drinkers to two tourists:

It was not really till after their recent long talk in
the park that she knew how deeply, how quite exhaustively,
they had then communicated--so that they were to remain
together, for the time, in consequence, quite in the form
of a couple of sociable drinkers who sit back from the
table over which they have been resting their elbows,
over which they have emptied to the last drop their
respective charged cups. The cups were still there on
the table, but turned upside down: and nothing was left
for the companions but to confirm by placid silences
the fact that the wine had been good. They had parted
positively as if on either side primed with it--primed
for whatever was to be; and everything between them, as
the month waned, added its touch of truth to this
similitude. Nothing truly was at present between them
save that they were looking at each other in infinite
trust; it fairly wanted no more words, and when they
met during the deep summer days, met even without wit-
nesses, when they kissed at morning and evening or on
any of the other occasions of contact that they had
always so freely celebrated, a pair of birds of the
upper air could scarce have appeared less to invite
each other to sit down and worry afresh. So it was
that in the house itself, where more of his waiting
treasures than ever were provisionally ranged, she
sometimes only looked at him--from end to end of the
great gallery, the pride of the house, for instance--
as if, in one of the halls of a museum, she had been
an earnest young woman with a Baedeker and he was a
vague gentleman to whom even Baedekers were unknown.
(II,p.285)

The summary of the symbolism is that Adam and Maggie understand

each other again, even though no explicit communication has

210

passed between them. The wealth of imagery adds a variegated
texture to the chapter and helps to explain complexities which
mere description often confuses rather than clarifies.

The themes of the monologue are the themes of the novel,
with an added comment on the Old World and the New World view
of penance. Maggie and her father stay at Fawns and watch
Charlotte suffer but Amerigo goes home to Portland Place.

Both Maggie and her father feel ashamed at what Charlotte suffers:

Maggie meanwhile at the window knew the strangest

thing to be happening: She had turned suddenly to crying,
or was at least on the point of it--the lighted square
before her all blurred and dim. (II,p.292)

The "divined anguish" pained Adam, too, and

so overcame him that, blushing to his eyes, he turned
short away.

Maggie begins, after this, to doubt the value of pain:

There was honestly an awful mixture in things, and it
wasn't closed to her /Maggie'§7 aftersense of such
passages--we have already indeed in other cases seen
it Open--that the deepest depth of all, in a perceived
penalty, was that you couldn't be sure some of your
compunctions and contortions wouldn't show for ridicu-
lous. (II,p.292)

During her soliloquy as she watches the sunrise Maggie realizes
why Amerigo goes away:

His secret was of course that at Fawns he all the while
winced, was all the while in presences in respect to
which he had thrown himself back with a hard pressure
on whatever mysteries of pride, whatever inward springs
familiar to the man of the world, he could keep from
snapping. Maggie, for some reason, had that morning,
while she watched the sunrise, taken an extraordinary
measure of the ground on which he would have had to

211

snatch at pretexts for absence. It all came to her there
--he got off to escape from a sound. The sound was in
her own ears still-—that of Charlotte's high coerced
quaver before the cabinets in the hushed gallery; the
voice by which she herself had been pierced the day
before as by that of a creature in anguish and by

which, while she sought refuge at the blurred window,

the tears had been forced into her eyes. (II,p.294)

The Prince will not desert her, but he hates to hear Charlotte's
wail. He teaches Maggie, in the end, the meaning of compassion
so that the Old World's love of life does offer something to

the New World's demand for moral order and harmony. Amerigo

is now by Maggie, both literally and spiritually:

She sank to her knees with her arm on the ledge of her
window-seat, where She blinded her eyes from the full
glare of seeing that his idea could only be to wait,
whatever might come, at her side. It was to her buried
face that She thus for a long time felt him draw nearest;
though after a while, when the strange wail of the gallery
began to repeat its inevitable echo, She was conscious

of how that brought out his pale hard grimace. (II,p.295)

The theme of forms is extended in two references. First,
the forms are what keep the family together, in any sense,
this summer. Maggie's knows
the possible heroism of perfunctory things. They
learned fairly to live in the perfunctory, they remained
in it as many hours of the day as might be. (II,p.288)
One of the values of the scene between Charlotte and Maggie is

that it supported the perfunctory:

The message of the little scene had been different for
each, but it had been this, markedly, all round, that
it re-enforced--re-enforced even immensely--the general
effort, carried on from week to week and of late dis-
tinctly more successful, to look and talk and move as
if nothing in life were the matter. (II,p.277)

212

The Prince, on the other hand, feels the perfunctory a terrible
burden:
She made him out as resting so from that constant strain
of the perfunctory to which he was exposed at Fawns;
and she was accessible to the impression of the almost
beggared aspect of this alternative. It was like his
doing penance in sordid ways—~being sent to prison or
being kept without money, it wouldn't have taken much
to make her think of him as really kept without food.
(II,p.294)

The external and internal plots are both resolved in
this chapter. Charlotte as the wicked woman of romance is
defeated and Maggie has grown to become a true, mature Princess.
At the end of the chapter as Maggie thinks of Amerigo at Port-
land Place She is beginning to move toward his vision of life.
Maggie has learned the worthlessness of punishments from him

and perhaps they are moving toward a new relationship and a

truer marriage of Old World and New than they havesflnred before.

Conclusion

The conclusions gathered during my study of the
Jamesian monologue all serve to defend James's later method.
Those who expect James to fulfill the same purposes as a
modern stream-of-consciousness writer will be disappointed.
James belongs to a more traditional school. Everything in
the Jamesian monologue is ordered toward one central purpose
whether that be the creation of an atmosphere of anxiety or
the introduction of a particular consciousness. James uses
the interior monologue both as a structural device and as a

stylistic technique. In The Golden B2 l the style which

 

formerly has characterized meditation scenes becomes the pre-
dominant style of the work.

The achievement of the monologue is the representation
of the processes of consciousness that lead to a change of per-
ception or attitude, or both. Because James is recreating the
emotional motivations for change, his later style is often
complex. The imagery through which he strives to objectify
mental states is often involved and extended to cover many
differing relationships and events. Actually it is the very
complexity of the later style which makes it highly mimetic
and the product of artistic genius. James never surrenders
coherence to an effect of the teaming consciousness as do

certain more modern writers; instead, his principle of organi-

213

214

zation within each monologue serves to control all of the
material so that the processes of consciousness have both the
dynamic quality of change and the careful architecture of a
movement toward one effect.

In definition we may say that a Jamesian interior mono-
1ogue may be one of two types: a rhetorical monologue with
extended metaphors and much foreshortened narration or a dramatic
soliloquy which presents a character at a moment of decision or
crisis. The monologue is a block of the novel in which the
character is alone; he is sometimes isolated physically, and
always psychologically. In other words, he Eggig alone, James
always creates the definite sense of a particular time and place.

The monologue has a frame; in The Goldegngwl, for example, this

 

frame is three times a terrace in front of a grand mansion.
The character is working through a specific problem. The mono-
logue has a definite start, turn, and finish. Often the turn
involves a moment of insight or decision. These are the skeleton
characteristics of a Jamesian monologue. Of course these will
vary from character to character and from novel to novel, but
they are, in some sense, present in all of the monologues.

The later method of James provides a superb blending
of the conventions of the romance and the mimesis of realism.
It also brilliantly recreates mental process and individual
consciousnesses. The Prince is both an individual man in a

specific situation and the archetypal Renaissance man with

215

the consciousness and emotional patterns of an aristocrat.

In the consciousnesses of Maggie Verver and Amerigo James has
found his objectification for his international theme. Their
marriage is a metaphor for the wedding of the Old World and
the New.

James's most compelling concern in both The Golden Bowl

 

and The Ambassador§_is the faithful creation of an individual

 

consciousness. This consciousness becomes both the centre
through which the story is told and the subject of the novel.
The interior monologue which, traditionally, unveils conscious-
ness is an important vehicle through which James achieves his
purpose. The genius of the later method is the portrayal of
consciousness through a highly technical art with the reality

of mental process faithfully executed.

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17""?

 

 

30

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