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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
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. . . . His having taken the same great step in the same free way hadn't in the least involved the relegation of his daughter. That it was remarkable they should have been able at once so to separate and so to keep together had never for a moment, from however far back, been equivocal to her. . . . (328)
For Maggie, who is a "passionate" daughter (317), her father is "deep in her heart and in her life; too deep down, as it were, to be disengaged, contrasted or opposed, in short objectively presented" (148-49). They are interconnected in a profound way, and the birth of Maggie's child only confirms "that sense of a life not only uninterrupted but more deeply associated, more largely combined" (151). It is almost as though it is "through" Amerigo that Maggie and Adam can have, vicariously, the incestuous marriage that is the real "unnameable" of the novel. This is nowhere more evident than in their joint devotion to the "Principino": "The Principino . . . might have become, by an untoward stroke, a hapless half-orphan, with the place of immediate male parent swept bare and open to the next nearest sympathy [that of his grandpapa]" (151). The theme of the devotion of the pair to each other, their continuing connection and "communion," their pleasure in and desire for each other's company, is developed in detail throughout the first volume. Attention is drawn to it by both Charlotte - who tells Fanny Assingham that Adam's affection for Maggie is "[t] he greatest affection of which he's capable" (224) - and the Assinghams themselves in their endless cogitations. Fanny Assingham insists to Charlotte that the devotion between father and daughter is "perfectly natural" (224) (thus in typical fashion herself raising the question of a possible "unnaturalness" in their relation); with her husband, however, she considers that it is after all "rather rum" (303).
In the second volume, we are privy to Maggie's struggle to keep her own suspicions about the affair from her father, and the very intensity of that struggle marks her sense of connection with him, her sense that he is able to read her face, her words, her very silences. Her assertions about her father - like so many other of her assertions - are often contradictory, but even when she claims that he does not know, must not know, she imagines herself nevertheless in silent communication with him. Toward the end of the novel, she seems to take it for granted that he does in fact "know" - though she is not prepared to say so, either to him or to anyone. She even assumes that his behavior is the mirror image of her own, that he is behaving just as she is, ending the relationship between the lovers while making sure that neither he nor Maggie need ever openly acknowledge that there has been any betrayal (see, for example, 387). In their final conversation at Fawns, when Adam tells Maggie that he will "ship" back to American City (512), Maggie is convinced that they have "deeply . . . exhaustively . . . communicated" (522), a communication facilitated by their mutual discourse of denials and evasions and unsayings, by their refusal to "name." Nevertheless, she has kept her distance throughout, making sure that they each stay in their own boat and make it safely to "port" without ever plunging into the threatening water (507), where their closely guarded boundaries might dissolve. They keep, Maggie feels, a "thin wall" between them that
