Risking the Cracks: The Mystic Self in Henry James's The Golden Bowl

there comes a day when something snaps, when the full cup, filled to 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. (337)

This is the last time that she is prepared to let her "cup" "spill over." From this point on, all her effort is directed toward separating herself from Amerigo, controlling her desire, "resisting him," as she puts it. She comes to deal instead in the imagery of enclosure - closed doors, sealed rooms, cages - as far as both Charlotte and Amerigo are concerned. She begins to insist, as the "owner" of two splendid pieces of "human furniture" (574), that each fulfill its function as a purchased object, an individuated entity with a designated value and purpose.

Amerigo, an "object of beauty, an object of price" (49), gets off much more lightly than Charlotte; his purpose is not so much to fulfill any particular office as to be merely decorative, and his purchase price after all included an aristocratic title and an instant "history." He seems to have always understood the nature of his relationship with the Ververs, father and daughter, speaking at one point of how he has "in a manner sold himself' (291), and even of his disappointment that his relationship with Adam Verver has always been defined by this purchase. The "terms and conditions" of his relationship with Adam were, Amerigo reflects, "finally fixed and absolute," as they would be for any other "collectible" Adam has bought, and when Adam looks at Amerigo it is precisely at an acquired object that he looks - or, rather, Amerigo feels, at "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" (268). In such an economy, there is no possible place for something that is "neither one nor two." As the second volume of the novel progresses, the fluid imagery associated with the Prince in the first half dries up until he is "as fixed in his place as some statue of one of his forefathers" (548). He is, Maggie realizes, in "prison" (559), caged, bored, bewildered, but ultimately submissive.

Charlotte, however, is not so much an "object of beauty" as a servant: she has been "'had in,' as the servants always said of extra help" (341) to "give [the Ververs] a life" (390). With her highly developed sense of social relations, Charlotte has always been acutely aware of the fundamentally economic nature of her contract with the Ververs. When Adam proposes to her, a decision that is closely paralleled in the text with his decision to buy a set of ancient files for his museum, she tells him frankly that: "I might get what I want for less" (194). After her marriage, she speaks of "the conditions of her bargain" (225), of "going through with everything" because "it's so plain a part of one's contract" (263). She deals "always, from month to month, from day to day and from one occasion to the other, with the duties of a remunerated office" (263). Indeed, for Charlotte, the purely economic basis of her contract with Adam and Maggie seems to serve as a justification for her affair with Amerigo - she believes that as long as she fulfills her "bargain," which she magnificently does (from her own point of view), she should be allowed, as Amerigo puts it, "a certain decent freedom" (229). It is just this "freedom" that threatens the Ververs and their power of capital. Charlotte, like Amerigo, must perform her duties, but from her cage; and in the second half of the novel, as Charlotte and Amerigo separate, she is repeatedly described as "caged" or "bound" even as, at Fawns, she continues to do her "job" of adding to the social consequence of the Ververs. Maggie even figures her as behind "glass" and "frantically tapping from within" (552), an image that suggests that Charlotte has joined those of her husband's other valuables that he keeps locked in glass cabinets, and which reinforces the similarity of her fate with Amerigo's transformation into a statue.