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Risking the Cracks: The Mystic Self in Henry James's The Golden Bowl
Twentieth Century Literature, Jan, 1999 by Ann-Marie Priest
When Maggie Verver, in Henry James's novel The Golden Bowl, first begins to suspect that her husband, Amerigo, is having an affair, it's not because of his unexplained absences or his evident predilection for the company of his beautiful young mother-in-law, Charlotte. Such material "clues" as these mean less than nothing to her. They can be explained by the cozy "arrangement" among the four (Maggie, Amerigo, Charlotte, and Maggie's father, Adam), in which Maggie is a willing participant - and which, however curious it may appear to the uninitiated, satisfactorily accounts for such apparent oddities as Amerigo's repeated public appearances with his mother-in-law. In fact, it is not any action of Amerigo's that arouses Maggie's suspicions - she catches him in no furtive look of love, no subtle betrayal of hidden passion. Instead, she simply has a growing sense that her husband and her stepmother are connected in some way. She begins to recognize in Amerigo expressions, phrases, and attitudes that she has seen in Charlotte: to identify a "kinship of expression in the two faces" (349) and "identities of behavior, expression and tone" (350). The two seem to have the same impulses, the same words, and, worst of all, the same way of "treating" her (353). Their "kinship" comes to seem, for her, like "a medallion containing on either side a cherished little portrait": "The miniatures were back to back, but she saw them for ever face to face, and when she looked from one to the other she found in Charlotte's eyes the gleam . . . that had come and gone for her in the Prince's" (350).
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The narrator of The Sacred Fount, who, like Maggie in The Golden Bowl, becomes absorbed in trying to identify the existence of hidden passions and illicit affairs by tracing their effects, comments that:
It was of course familiar enough that when people were so deeply in love they rubbed off on each other - that a great pressure of soul to soul usually left on either side a sufficient show of tell-tale traces. (16)
For the narrator, the idea that a passion sufficiently intimate and intense enables some kind of transfer between the lovers is "familiar enough." But he takes this "familiar" idea further, speculating that passion between lovers opens a kind of "channel" between them through which the very essence of each may flow into the other, as "the full-fed river sweeping to the sea" (245). Sexual passion, he suggests, is transformative: youth, energy, beauty, charm, and intellect may flow from one person to another, resulting in visible, tangible changes in each. Thus the narrator, when he confronts one of his "suspects," Gilbert Long, uses very similar words to those Maggie finds to describe her sense of a foreign influence in her husband: "He faced me there with another light than his own, spoke with another sound, thought with another ease and understood with another ear" (163).
This aspect of The Sacred Fount has been seen by Leon Edel as one of the most explicit developments of the so-called "vampire theme" in James's work (Henry James 16). This is because of the emphasis in the novel on the "draining" of one partner by the other: in the process of "exchange," one person becomes "bloated" (67) while the other is sucked dry (81); "[o]ne of the pair . . . has to pay for the other" (29). Indeed, in developing his theory about the Brissendens, the narrator tells his friend Obert that what Mrs. Brissenden, who appears to have suddenly acquired a youth and beauty she has never had before, has extracted from her husband, who appears to grow older by the minute, is "new blood"; and he, to supply her with "her extra allowance of time and bloom," has "had to tap the sacred fount" (29) of his own energy, indeed, his very life, and is thus visibly depleted. While the vampirical Mrs. Brissenden is "the flooded banks into which the source had swelled" (245), her victim-husband, the "source," is "paying to his last drop" (30).
In her study of the occult in James's work, Martha Banta argues that James was heir to a "vampire heritage" in which the blood-sucking gothic ghoul had been replaced, in the nineteenth century, by
the vampire-like creature that takes possession of the soul of the living person and, by drawing forth its force, causes the victim to waste away. . . . The 'new supernaturalism' . . . portrayed baleful but quite human 'sponges' that drew away strength, thoughts, and souls of others in recognizably psychological terms. (89)
Several of James's novels and stories, she writes, explicitly draw on this tradition. It manifests itself often as a push by one character for "possession" of another, as in the struggle between Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransome for Verena Tarrant's "soul" in The Bostonians (Banta 96-97), or the governess's battle for Miles's "soul" in The Turn of the Screw (127).
In a consideration of James's later fiction, the question of vampirism - one person feasting, physically and/or psychically, on another, destroying that person in the process - is less important, I would argue, than what the possibility of vampirism suggests for the kind of "self" that appears in James's work.(1) More significant than the ghoulish tale of depletion and replenishment is the assumption that necessarily underlies any vampirism: that the self is permeable. Banta's image of the sponge is a telling one; a sponge is porous, able to be completely permeated by fluid, and this contact changes its whole character - it becomes soft and flexible where before it was hard and rigid - even while it remains what it has always been. What the "human sponge" soaks up, according to Banta, is the "strength, thoughts, and souls of others," taking them into itself, changing accordingly, but nevertheless remaining recognizably itself. The characters in The Sacred Fount appear to be similarly permeable: there is flow from one to another, whether imaged as a "sipping" from the sacred fount or the flooding of a river, and this flow leads to ongoing transformations of the self.
