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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

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might be pierced by the lightest wrong touch. It shook between them, this transparency, with their very breath; it was an exquisite tissue, but stretched on a frame, and would give way the next instant if either so much as breathed too hard. (509)

This "thin wall" seems necessary for them; it is a kind of hymen, a final barrier between them, whose piercing would bring them most perfectly together in mystic union, but which would signal the end of their innocence and the necessity of facing a sexual "knowledge" of the other that would probably destroy them both. The cost of not piercing that wall, however, is a "transmuted union" (514) - a union that has changed its form. It is more securely now a union of"blood" rather than of passion: as father and daughter, "his strength was her strength, her pride was his, and they were decent and competent together" (514). Maggie imagines herself and her father as

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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. . . . (522)

They drink together, but not from the same cup; and when they have drunk, they turn their cups over, effectively sealing them, making any further "fluid exchange" impossible.

If Charlotte has been turned into a "gilded image" (572) and Amerigo a statue, it is only as a work of art that Adam himself, finally, can be held in Maggie's arms. He has given her a painting, an "early Florentine sacred subject," and Maggie sees her father looking out at her from the painting,

as if the frame made positively a window for his spiritual face: she might have said to herself at this moment that in leaving the thing behind him, held as in her clasping arms, he was doing the most possible toward leaving her a part of his palpable self. (573)

Instead of the kind of mutual absorption all four have experienced, Maggie can experience Adam only fixed and framed, as an image she can "hold" but not take into herself, while Charlotte and Adam are as "still" as "a pair of [wax] effigies" (574). This final scene affirms Maggie's allegiance with the economy of commodification, with the old, autonomous self of liberal individualism. She and Adam look over together, for the last time, their "human furniture" and smugly reflect on their "rare power of purchase" (574). And when she is at last alone with Amerigo, it is as though he is "holding out the money-bag for her to come and take it" (579), his submission to her complete.

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

Twentieth Century Literature, Jan, 1999 by Ann-Marie Priest

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