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

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).

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.

That this "interchange" is described in strictly negative terms - that is, as vampirism - reflects, I would argue, the conventional notion that the self should be inviolable. The ideal of mature selfhood is independence and self-determination,(2) and in the light of that ideal, permeability is a threatening concept. Banta writes that

[t]he possession by the self of what is not the self was a major sin in the tradition James inherited, whether drawn from Nathaniel Hawthorne's abhorrence of the desecration of the sanctity of the human heart or his father's denunciation of 'spiritual snatching.' (83)

"Possession" is necessarily a danger and a threat in a culture that expects people to be "rational and self-conscious" (Plamenatz xx), to function as individuals with the power to think, act, experience, and decide for themselves.

There is no doubt that in James's novels the influence one person may have on another - which is at times described as "possession," or as a flow of some "essence" from one person to another - is often depicted as sinister, horrifying, and evil. In particular, the association of such an influence with sexual passion means that it tends to partake of the ambivalence so many of the novels display about sexual love. Nevertheless, the idea of selves in constant interaction and exchange with others, selves who develop and change through such encounters, is also a persistent feature of James's novels, particularly the later ones. And there is, alongside the "gothic" tradition Banta identifies, another tradition in which this idea of a permeable self, a self "in exchange" with what is around it, can be seen more positively. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) that sprang up in the last decade of the nineteenth century as a "scientific" response to the spiritualist movement, and which counted philosophers and scientists among its members, was primarily interested in the "scientific" study of those aspects of spiritualism that seemed to bear on the human psyche (Banta 9). The society's attitude to psychical phenomena seems generally to have been skeptical, but nevertheless there was a certain excitement in its approach to these phenomena, a willingness to consider the "reality" of things that, like mental telepathy, could not be explained by the laws of physics. In 1913, the philosopher Henry Bergson, assuming the presidency of the society, declared that:

It would be monstrous and inexplicable that we should be only what we appear to be, nothing but ourselves, whole and complete in ourselves, separated, isolated, circumscribed by our bodies, our consciousness, our birth, and our death. We become possible and probable only on the conditions that we project beyond ourselves on every side, and that we stretch in every direction throughout time and space. (qtd. in Banta 31)

This viewpoint is very much at odds with the "commonsense" (scientific) view of the self as, indeed, "separated, isolated, circumscribed." Bergson may have been thinking of telepathy or other psychological "powers" that seemed radically to challenge traditional ideas of the way the psyche functioned and what it was capable of. Nevertheless, his conception of a self that is not "whole and complete" in itself, that projects beyond itself "on every side," resonates with the "selves" of those characters in James's novels, particularly the lovers, who bear the visible imprint of their beloved, taking on their thoughts, feelings, and impulses, experiencing the other in "occult" ways. In such instances, the boundaries of the self are never absolute. Madame Merle, in Portrait of a Lady, seems explicitly to preempt Bergson's comment when she tells Isabel: "There's no such thing as an isolated man or woman. . . . What shall we call our 'self'? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us - and then it flows back again" (216).

In The Golden Bowl there is no question (at least overtly) of vampirism. But there is nevertheless very much the sense that the characters are in some ways open to one another, that there is a "flow," not of lifeblood but of feeling, ideas, will, intention - all those things we tend to think of as making up the "self." Sexual passion tends to be both a cause and a sign of such an expanded self, as with Charlotte and Amerigo. However, other passionate relationships, such as the passionately "filial" relationship between Maggie and her father Adam or the intense, love-hate relationship between Maggie and Charlotte, also enable a kind of "communion" in which each partakes of the other.

Bergson's comments, cited above, have a mystical ring - in the vague sense in which the word mystic is often used, implying something outside of the realm of the known and verifiable, and certainly of Plamenatz's "rational and self-conscious." There are crossovers between the kinds of phenomena being investigated by the SPR and those often designated "mystical." Indeed, William James, who was active in the SPR for some years, was very interested in mystical experience, as his book Varieties of Religious Experience (based on the Gifford lectures he gave in 1901-2) shows. As John Auchard points out, William James stayed with Henry at Lamb House for five months in 1901 while he was working on the lectures, in which he quotes extensively from the writings of mystics from different religious traditions - including the Christian mystics St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila - as well as from contemporaries with no identifiable religious affiliations who had had mystical experiences. William James's interest in mysticism cannot, of course, be seen as a guarantee of a similar interest or exposure on Henry James's part. However, John Auchard argues that "[i]n conversation, in draft, in composition, and in final published form, Varieties of Religious Experience was perhaps the work of his brother which Henry James knew on most intimate terms" (96-97). The implication is that James had at least a passing familiarity not only with his brother's definition of mysticism - a definition that has become something of a standard in philosophical analyses of mysticism in the twentieth century - but also with excerpts from mystical texts. As well as such direct influences, it seems likely that James would have encountered mystical thought and possibly mystical texts in the cultural milieu in which he lived. Auchard argues that mysticism was in the air in Europe in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In 1899, he writes,

[t]he dramatic critic Francisque Sarcey began to wonder at 'the unaccountable wind of mysticism blowing through France,' while Max Nordau decried the shade of the mystic dragged 'into everything; into magazines, both old and new; into newspapers, into poetry, the novel, criticism, songs . . . into every genre you can think of.' (95-96)

Among the avant-garde in France who had rejected the Catholic Church, there was, he argues, a "diffuse nostalgia for the supernatural" (Jean Pierrot, qtd. in Auchard 95). It is tempting to speculate that Henry James, the skeptical son of a passionate, if eccentric, Swedenborgian, might have been as susceptible to this nostalgia - to call it only that - as his brother and many of his contemporaries were.(3)

Whether or not he had any direct exposure to mystical texts, it seems clear that he was exploring, in his own genre, some of the same issues with which mystics grappled in theirs: in particular, the sense of "secret" knowledge that is not accessible to language but which is experienced (if not revealed) in an ineffable exchange between lovers. In conceiving of such an exchange, James repeats and in some cases reworks, in his own, secular context, the Christian mystic's attack on the conventional understanding of identity. The Christian mystic explicitly works against the defining characteristics of identity: instead of seeking self-determination, self-sufficiency, and the rights and powers of individual will, she seeks to empty herself of "self" in order to be filled with God. The mystic soul, writes thirteenth-century mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg, must "love the naughting, / And flee the self" (17). The mystic actively seeks possession by another - to be drained of her will, her identity, even her life. In a vision with clear vampiric overtones, Mechthild offers Christ, in the form of "a bleeding lamb," her own heart's blood: "the pure Lamb laid itself on its own image in the stall of her body and sucked her heart with its tender lips. The more it sucked the more she gave herself to it" (36). But this does not make the mystic simply a "vampire's" eager "victim," caught up in helpless, masochistic abjection. She also seeks actively to possess and absorb her beloved. Hadewijch, describing the joy of possessing her divine lover, writes: "While desire pours out and pleasure drinks, / The soul consumes what belongs to it in love / And sinks with frenzy into Love's fruition. . . . Thus is the loving soul well fed by Love alone" (qtd. in Jantzen 136). In a frenzy, she drinks and feeds on her lover, and finds "fruition" in this consumption. Again, in one of Angela of Foligno's visions, Christ thrusts Angela's "spiritual sons" into the bleeding wound in his side: "The redness of his blood colored the lips of some, and the whole face of others" (246). If the mystic is drained by her lover, she also drinks his blood, sipping from his "sacred fount" as she sips from the communion cup, transforming him into herself.

Rather than a tale of the vicious violation of the boundaries of the self (like that the narrator of Fount sets up with his everlasting "poor Briss"), the mystics tell of a loving self who is defined through a passionate, joyful relationship of exchange with her beloved. The mystic defines her self not as fixed and inviolable but as fluid: she overflows the boundaries of the self in order to become part of her lover, and this "flow" is both spiritual (intangible, in the "soul") and physical, in and of the body.(4) Thus Hadewijch writes of

how wondrously sweet the beloved dwells in the other beloved, and how thoroughly one dwells in the other, so that neither one nor the other knows themselves apart. But they possess and rejoice in each other mouth in mouth, heart in heart, body in body, soul in soul, and one sweet divine nature flows through them both, and both are one through themselves, yet remain themselves, and will always remain so. (qtd. in Vanderauwera 194)

The word flow appears over and over in modern English translations of the work of medieval mystics, and imagery associated with water - flowing, flooding, intermingling, submerging - is very common in mystic descriptions of union. Marguerite Porete describes herself as swimming "in the sea of delights, flowing and running out of the Divinity" (109), and of being "melted and dissolved" in her beloved "like a body of water which flows from the sea, which has some name. . . . And when this water or river returns into the sea, it loses its course and its name" (158). Mechthild of Magdeburg, in her book The Flowing Light of the Godhead, writes of an erotic "embrace" in which lover and beloved are "one, as water with wine" (9); and Teresa of Avila describes "spiritual marriage" as being "like rain falling from heaven into a river or stream, becoming one and the same liquid, so that the river and the rain water cannot be divided; or it resembles a streamlet flowing into the ocean, which cannot afterwards be disunited from it" (176).

Mystics are not in a state of joyous union all the time. In fact, many mystical texts document ongoing cycles of desperately painful separation followed by ecstatic communion. Nevertheless, mystic union tends to change the mystic permanently, whether or not the mystic is in a state of union at a given moment: it is very difficult to separate water and wine once they have been mingled. Mechthild of Magdeburg describes the effects of such a union in terms that prefigure Maggie's sense that when she looks in Charlotte's eyes she sees the gleam of Amerigo's:

His eyes in my eyes,

His heart in my heart,

His soul in my soul

Embraced and unwearied. (34)

Nevertheless, even in union the soul and her lover "remain themselves," as Hadewijch puts it. Angela of Foligno writes of how the soul is "[t]ransformed into God without having lost its own substance" (301). There are boundaries to the self, even though those boundaries, like those of the body, are conceived of as porous rather than as solid and impermeable. Nevertheless, the mystic's "entire life is changed" as a result of her experience of union (Angela 301). The "occult" connection between mystic and lover remains, as does the potential for "flow" through the membrane of the self. Thus Marguerite Porete writes of how she became "intoxicated" from what not she but her lover has drunk: she is so inebriated "because her Lover has drunk from it, for between Him and her, through transformation by Love, there is no difference, whatever there might be of natures" (105-06).

As a model of subjectivity this is dramatically different from what Braidotti calls the "subject" of "classical rationalism" (97). It is a different way of thinking about, and of experiencing, the relationship between self and other that, according to psychoanalysis, defines subjectivity.(5) In the mystic text, love for the other replaces the traditional psychoanalytic model of cutting off all connections with the other and appropriating the self as other.(6) Love, Kristeva writes, is "[b]oth a fear and a need of no longer being limited, held back, but going beyond. Dread of transgressing not only proprieties or taboos but also, and above all, fear of crossing and desire to cross the boundaries of the self" (Tales of Love 6). It is through a love relationship in which the "boundaries of the self' are crossed and recrossed that the mystic (and the lover) makes and loses and remakes her or his identity. She is almost a prototype of the Kristevan idea of the subject: "we are subjects in process, ceaselessly losing our identity, destabilized by fluctuations in our relations to the other, to whom we nevertheless remain bound by a kind of homeostasis" (In the Beginning 9).

Any attempt to write (about) this mystical self is an attempt to write (about) something that is largely unknown within Western thought - something that, according to philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray, has been repressed, that is unconscious and, as such, unspeakable (an arena James's texts are very familiar with). Irigaray writes that for this reason, the mystic must move beyond "light," beyond the realm of "the eye," which is "guardian to the reason," into "darkness": Mysticism

is the place where consciousness is no longer master, where, to its extreme confusion, it sinks into a dark night that is also fire and flames. This is the place where 'she' - and in some cases he, if he follows 'her' lead - speaks about the dazzling glare which comes from the source of light that has been logically repressed, about 'subject' and 'Other' flowing out into an embrace of fire that mingles one term into another, about contempt for form as such, about mistrust for understanding as an obstacle along the path of jouissance and mistrust for the dry desolation of reason. (Speculum 191)

This is not to say that the mystical self is illogical or nonsensical, but rather that it cannot be spoken about in discourses in which the relation of separation between self and other is enshrined - at least not without failures of coherence. It can be approached only indirectly, negatively. Irigaray argues that those values that come into play in mysticism are values that have been repressed within the dominant discourses of rationality, and thus they appear within those discourses either as "nothingness" or as "excess" to the patriarchal values of "property, production, order, form, unity, visibility . . . and erection" (This Sex 86). If the "subject" is defined by form, unity, and visibility, the fluid self, who is characterized by exchange, dispersal, and transformation, can be at best an inferior or incomplete subject and at worst a nonsubject, a "nothing" (and this helps to explain the mystic's "I am not" [for example, Porete 201]). Irigaray argues that the qualities that come into play in mystical discourse are associated with the feminine - the "nothing that is woman" (Speculum 166) - and her texts suggest that in bringing these qualities into play, making them the raw materials for a reworking of subjectivity, mysticism offers the possibility of a new subjectivity in which the feminine is not repressed and absent. Some of her own writing (particularly Elemental Passions) invokes a fluid, "feminine" relation between self and other that emphasizes the "mystery that woman represents in a culture claiming to count everything, to number everything by units, to inventory everything as individualities. She is neither one nor two" (This Sex 26).

In The Golden Bowl, that culture which wants to inventory "individualities" - that is, in which subjectivity is defined as individuation - clashes vividly with the mystical self that is "neither one nor two." In an essay that deals largely with The Awkward Age, Peter Conradi remarks that

[s]ex often seems in James an almost mystical attack on his notions of the primacy of liberal individualism, as though making the beast with two backs were to dehumanize each partner and - if the individual is the unit of value - provide a parody and corruption of the idea of meaning itself. (448)

It is largely through sexual relationships, particularly hidden ones, that the kind of mystical self I have been describing comes into play in James's novels; such relationships do indeed seem to challenge, even to subvert, the "primacy of liberal individualism" (though not, I would argue, in such a way as to "dehumanize" the partners). In The Wings of the Dove, the hidden sexual relationship between Kate Croy and Merton Densher makes a mockery of Milly Theale's attempts to deal with each on an individual basis. In The Ambassadors, the hidden sexual relationship between Chad Newsome and Madame de Vionnet continually foils Strether's attempts to understand either. In The Golden Bowl there is yet another dimension, suggested by Maggie's image of the medallion: for Maggie, Amerigo and Charlotte make not the "beast with two backs" but a coin with two heads - that is, a coin that has no value, that debases the currency. The hidden sexual relationship between Amerigo and Charlotte undermines the attempts of both Maggie and her father to deal with each as an "individual unit of value," and to dispose of each as an object of art. But if sex does constitute an attack on "the primacy of liberal individualism," this attack is, I would argue, by no means straighfforwardly destructive.

In The Golden Bowl, he individual appears over and over again to be at risk of being swamped, flooded, submerged in the other. The novel is full of images of fluids; in particular, its images of bodies of water and of communion cups seem to echo and even expand the mystics' use of fluid imagery to evoke a permeable self in mystic union. The sense of risk associated with submersion is brought out through an elaborate series of metaphors involving boats. When Amerigo tells Fanny Assingham that he and Charlotte are both "in Mr. Verver's boat" (228), he is not only suggesting that they are in the same situation in relation to Mr. Verver. He is also bringing into play a range of associations suggestive of the relative safety - but also the constraint - of being in the boat rather than in the water. He begins by telling Fanny that if it wasn't for Mr. Verver he himself would have sunk "to deepest depths - 'away down, down, down'" (228). Fanny understands him to be referring to his failing finances: "it had taken his father-in-law's great fortune, and taken no small slice, to surround him with an element in which, all too fatally weighted as he had originally been, he could pecuniarily float" (228). At risk of submersion, he has been "saved" (229), lifted high and dry, by Mr. Verver's money. Adam Verver's "boat," then, is a place of safety, of protection from the "deepest depths." Nevertheless, this safe place is rather constricted both for him and for Charlotte, as Amerigo goes on to explain:

The 'boat', you see . . . is a good deal tied up at the dock, or anchored, if you like, out in the stream. I have to jump out from time to time to stretch my legs, and you'll probably perceive, if you give it your attention, that Charlotte really can't help occasionally doing the same. It isn't even a question, sometimes, of one's getting to the dock - one has to take a header and splash about in the water. . . . We shan't drown, we shan't sink. . . . (230)

Despite his desire to be saved from the "depths," then, Amerigo also wants to be able to submerge himself at will, to leave the "dry" safety of the life Adam Verver offers him and "splash about in the water." The image of the boat suggests a realm of consciousness, order, and control. It is the social realm - the Symbolic, in psychoanalytic terms - where money and the values of capitalism (clear exchange values and use values for clearly distinguishable individual units) dominate. The water, that fluid, tactile medium, is the slightly threatening "underside" of that realm - the place where, as Irigaray puts it, consciousness is "no longer master." Thus Maggie, elsewhere in the novel, speaks of being swept by the "warmly-washing wave" of her passion for Amerigo, her will, her very consciousness, submerged and lost: "She . . . lived for hours she couldn't count under the dizzying smothering welter - positively in submarine depths where everything came to her through walls of emerald and mother-of-pearl" (354). In this submarine world Maggie experiences her own passion, but is quite removed from the social world of speech and action and will. She desperately desires such submersion but lives in "terror of the weakness [it] produced in her" (345). She wants to act - "she had positively something to do" (345) - and to act, even to speak, she must keep herself afloat, which means that she must keep herself separate from Amerigo. Toward the end of the novel, still struggling against this passion, she describes her need to cling to some "plank" (significantly, that of "a word," suggesting again the dominance of the social over the instinctual and the bodily) to save her from sinking into the "great sea" of her desire (568). As Yeazell writes, this sea is that of "the psyche's unspoken and only half-conscious demands" (20). Submersion is the loss of that defined social realm in which the "subject" is established; but it is also a chance to experience, in the repressed realm of passion, instinct, and touch, a self whose boundaries are permeable.

Mystical union may seem to be a fairly extreme instance of fluid interchange between self and other. For one thing, one of the lovers is not (strictly speaking) human - although it is important to note that in the writings of the female mystics I have looked at, the insistence on an experience of Christ "in his humanity," and the repeated experience of union as sexual union, in and of the body, challenges attempts to limit mystic union to the psyche or spirit. But the kind of fluid interchange evoked in The Golden Bowl is, nevertheless, in some ways very similar to that mystics experience in mystic union. The most overt instance of this occurs, perhaps incongruously,(7) between Fanny Assingham and her husband, Bob. The moment begins with, once again, imagery of boats and water. Fanny, temporarily routed by the lovers and forced to leave them together at Matcham, is deeply preoccupied, silently "wrapped in her thoughts" (297). Bob, watching her, has "a consciousness of deep waters":

She had been out on these waters for him, visibly. . . . He hadn't quitted for an hour, during her adventure, the shore of the mystic lake; he had on the contrary stationed himself where she could signal to him at need. Her need would have arisen if the planks of her bark had parted - then some sort of plunge would have become his immediate duty. . . . Before he had plunged, however - that is before he had uttered a question - he saw, not without relief, that she was making for land. He watched her steadily paddle, always a little nearer, and at last he felt her boat bump. (297)

Once again, sinking into the water represents danger; and the rescue, if it had been necessary, would have been achieved through "utterance" - by bringing Fanny back into the realm of language (the social, the Symbolic) and enabling her to construct, in and through language, a version of events that is not too threatening, which will "save" her ("so far as consistently speaking of them as still safe might save them" [306]). The "mystic lake" is a figure for Fanny's own unconscious - for all those things she has been refusing to see and to name, to bring into language and thus into the social realm in which her own power, though not insignificant, is necessarily limited. Her safe arrival at the "shore" is signaled, for Bob, by her own utterance - her escape into the comparatively solid realm of language from the threat of all she will not name. But her utterance is, typically, a denial: "We were all wrong. There's nothing" (297) - an allusion to the "nothing" (nameable) that is between Charlotte and Amerigo.

What follows is a conversation that, like so many of the conversations in this novel, is strikingly apophatic - that is, it is a quite clear and close example of the mystical "strategy" of "unsaying." Apophasis, or unsaying, enables mystics to frustrate the referential function of language, and thus to escape from what they see as language's materiality and temporality (see Wolosky 3-4), and its imposition of categories of being that are, they believe, inappropriate to the divine. To the mystic, language, as the realm of the material and the temporal, must be evaded if "true" knowledge - a knowledge not limited by "human" ways of thinking - is to be attained. But of course the only possible escape from language is into silence - and this is an option mystics take up only selectively. Instead, they use language against itself, continually challenging its capacity to fix meaning. Gillespie and Ross argue that the paradoxes that characterize mystic discourse aim to frustrate "the ratiocinative and interpretative processes of the discursive mind" (56). By offering many contradictory possibilities of meaning, mystic texts "defy or defer the lapse into linearity and monovalency that characterizes most conventional interpretation" (57).

Through "unsaying," then, mystics seek to evade received knowledge and forms and move into the realm of "unknowing," of formlessness and silence, in which mystic union can take place. Sells describes "unsaying" as a "language of ephemeral, double propositions":

a) No statement about X can rest as a valid statement but must be corrected by a further statement, which itself must be corrected in a discourse without closure.

b) The meaningfulness of the apophatic moment of discourse is unstable, residing in the momentary tension between two propositions.

c) The habits of language pull the writer and the reader toward reifying the last proposition as a meaningful utterance. To prevent such reification, ever-new correcting propositions must be advanced. (207)

The conversation between Fanny and Bob Assingham largely consists of such double propositions: Fanny will make an assertion, and then, echoed or questioned by Bob, make a second assertion "correcting" - significantly modifying - the first. That statement will then itself undergo modification later in the conversation. No statement is ever unproblematically true in itself: the "truth" lies somewhere in between the crosshatching of statement upon statement. Thus, for instance, Fanny declares:

"I think there's nothing they're not now capable of - in their so intense good faith."

"Good faith?" - he echoed the words, which had in fact something of an odd ring, critically.

"Their false position. It comes to the same thing." (304)

The idea of their "false position" must modify the idea of their "intense good faith" - both ideas have, indeed, in juxtaposition, "something of an odd ring." But neither establishes Fanny's own position. Her first statement of denial - "There's nothing" - is in no way a fixed certainty but just the beginning of endless variations, modifications, negations, denials, and speculations in which "truth" and even "reference" become hopelessly unclear. Bob repeatedly asks for clarification about the "subjects" of Fanny's sentences, as personal pronouns become multireferential and thereby all but useless. Fanny's way of proceeding is a kind of enactment of her refusal to "know" - that is, to establish (by naming) a settled interpretation of events and of her own relationship to them that is consistent with the "facts." Though she begins by declaring that at last she has "seen. And now I know" (298), she ends with the equally passionate assertion that: "Whatever they've done I shall never know. Never, never - because I don't want to and because nothing will induce me" (305). She refuses to "settle" anywhere, to make a statement that she will not, a little later, in some way modify or contradict; and thus she refuses to "lapse into linearity or monovalency." In this way, she keeps "knowledge" always at arm's length, making interpretation of her apophatic "text" extremely difficult for her faithful "reader," Bob.

But as in mystic texts, it is through this denial of "knowledge" that Fanny and Bob descend into the "darkness of unknowing" - that realm of "knowledge" that is not accessible to language and therefore to the "light" of reason. It is Fanny's refusal of "knowledge" that precipitates her into the "mystic lake" after all. And this "plunge," initially so feared, is transformed into something "beautiful":

She uttered this last with another irrepressible quaver, and the next moment her tears had come. . . . He went to her and put his arm round her; he drew her head to his breast, where, while she gasped, she let it stay a little. . . . And the beauty of what thus passed between them, passed with her cry of pain, with her burst of tears, with his wonderment and his kindness and his comfort, with the moments of their silence, above all, which might have represented their sinking together, hand in hand for a time, into the mystic lake where he had begun, as we have hinted, by seeing her paddle alone - the beauty of it was that they now could really talk better than before. . . . When he [spoke] it was quite as if in possession of what they had brought up from the depths. (305-06)

Here, the realm of language - the social, the Symbolic - gives way to the unconscious (or, rather, unspoken) realm of the passions and the body: fear and love, tears, caresses. The two sink into their own depths, entering together "without more words, the region of the understood" (305). They are enclosed together in this silent, fluid (submarine?) world with the "world of human trouble" (again, the social) only dimly visible in the distance (305). And in this submersion, face to face and hand in hand, something passes from one to the other: They bring up "knowledge" from the depths, a knowledge borne not of words but of a kind of mystic "communion." It is as though the continuing frustration of meaning, the play of assertion and denial and counterassertion, has led to a breach, a rupture in language, and the torn place opens onto a different meaning system - one that is necessarily unspeakable, however, because speech would recuperate this "difference" into the existing forms and categories of language.

This scene between Fanny and Bob Assingham in some ways echoes an earlier scene between Charlotte and Amerigo in which submersion is again used as an image of communion. In this scene - the (in)famous "pledge scene" - Charlotte and Amerigo use words to avow their loyalty to their respective spouses even as they use their bodies to express their desire for each other:

They vowed it, gave it out and took it in, drawn, by their intensity, more closely together. Then of a sudden, through this tightened circle, as at the issue of a narrow strait into the sea beyond, everything broke up, broke down, gave way, melted and mingled. Their lips sought their lips, their pressure their response and their response their pressure; with a violence that had sighed itself the next moment to the longest and deepest of stillnesses they passionately sealed their pledge. (259)

Passion is a force that "breaks" and "mingles" the lovers as the boundaries between the selves "give way." The flood of the "narrow strait into the sea" is strongly reminiscent of the flood of the Divine Lover into the soul of the mystic. Identity itself is challenged as the two "melt and mingle" and the text ceases to distinguish between them, using the plural possessive "their" in the rather odd formulation: "Their lips sought their lips. . . ." As in the later scene between the Assinghams, there are two realms existing side by side, or, rather, one below the other: There is language, which the two are using to construct a scenario in which their involvement with each other is entirely legitimate, and even noble; and then there is the extra-linguistic realm of passion, emotion, and the body, in which first hands, then lips, meet to pledge a love that is never spoken.

From this point, Charlotte and Amerigo seem to be connected (via a "mystic golden bridge" 268) to one another in just the way Maggie describes when she develops her "medallion" image - such that the ideas, thoughts, impulses of one are also those of the other. At the weekend party at Matcham, this interconnection is most explicitly discussed. Charlotte and Amerigo decide on their course of action, we are told, "practically without words, without any sort of straight telegraphy" (282). They had "these identities of impulses - they had had them repeatedly before . . . they were conscious of the same necessity at the same moment" (290). For Charlotte, their "harmonies" are "food for superstition, if you like" (293) - a reference to Amerigo's reliance on superstition as a guide for behavior in a social milieu whose conventions continue to bewilder him, but also perhaps a recognition that belief in such phenomena as mental telepathy tends to be regarded as superstition.

The image that is used to express this perfect, ultimate, and most passionate of "harmonies" is that of the two drinking together from a "great gold cup" (292). On the morning of their trip to Gloucester, "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" (290). The wordless communion that has led to this moment is described, for Amerigo at least, in explicitly sexual terms: the possibility of the two spending the day alone together "throbs" in him, under her touch ("brush"), and his "consciousness" "aches" (283); he stands on the terrace at Matcham looking at the "towers" of the distant cathedral, aware that the name "Glo'ster" is merely "another name, the pronounceable and convenient one, for that supreme sense of things which now throbbed within him" (291). As ever, the name for which "Glo'ster" substitutes is neither pronounceable nor convenient; the throb and ache associated with the distant tower are as close as the narrator will go to naming the unnameable: physical passion, sexual desire. Amerigo, instinctively shy of names, yet names the golden cup to Charlotte: "I feel the day like a great gold cup that we must somehow drain together" (292). And, indeed, as they talk together they "each find in the other's voice a taste as of something slowly and deeply absorbed" (292). In drinking, then, from their golden cup - a kind of communion chalice,(8) bloodying the lips of each - each "absorbs" something of the other, finding in the other something they have taken into themselves.

But while Amerigo and Charlotte drain their cup together, Maggie carries "in her weak stiffened hand a glass filled to the brim, as to which she had recorded a vow that no drop should overflow" (531). While they "splash around" in the water she becomes ever more determined to keep her feet on the ground (464). Though Maggie does experience her passion for Amerigo as submersion, she becomes aware, at the beginning of the second volume, that even in this submersion she is "very much alone" (356). On the evening of the very day in which Amerigo and Charlotte share their golden cup, Maggie presents her own brimming "cup" to Amerigo - but rather than sharing communion with him, she finds herself reduced to "spilling" her cup over him, a striking image of her clumsy desperation, her unsatisfied desire. She silently tells him that

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.

The novel is, at one level, the story of the clash between two different conceptions of the self: the "fluid" self, whose boundaries are permeable and who "communes" with others, and the fixed, caged, statue-like self who can legitimately be bought and sold. In some ways the golden bowl - with its association with Charlotte and Amerigo's passion, and its secret crack - is an image of the "fluid" self. The different attitudes of the characters toward the bowl reveal their allegiance to one particular model of the self. For Maggie, the bowl - a beautiful cup of gilded crystal, made by "a lost art" and belonging to "a lost time," and with an invisible crack - is, at first sight, a "rarity" (433), an "object of beauty, an object of price," just as Amerigo was. Once she learns about the crack, however, she is adamant that it "won't do" (433): The crack "impairs" the "value" of the bowl (446), rendering it useless as an object of exchange; further, it is a kind of physical symbol of the hidden flaw in her marriage, which it reveals. Later, she tells Mrs. Assingham that she wants "a happiness without a hole in it big enough for you to poke in your finger. . . . The golden bowl - as it was to have been. . . . The bowl with all our happiness in it. The bowl without the crack" (475).

Charlotte's response to the bowl, and to the crack in it, is quite different. She is entranced by the bowl before she learns of its "flaw," and knowledge of the crack does not make her change her evaluation of it. Unlike either Maggie or Amerigo, she cannot see why the flaw makes it unsuitable as a gift; she insists that it is "exquisite" (123). Much later, when she and Amerigo are at Matcham and speaking of the "golden cup" they will drain together, it is Charlotte who reminds Amerigo of the other golden cup, "the beautiful one, the real one, that I offered you so long ago" (292). His recollection of the bowl is quite different: "The treacherous cracked thing you wanted to palm off on me . . . !" (292). Tasting together their own golden bowl, Charlotte seems to insist that they together acknowledge the "crack" that is nevertheless not spoiling their pleasure. Amerigo recoils: "I hope you don't mean . . . that as an occasion [this is] also cracked" (292). It is at this point that each finds "in the other's voice a taste as of something slowly and deeply absorbed." Charlotte replies: "Don't you think too much of cracks, and aren't you too afraid of them? I risk the cracks" (292). She does not deny the possibility that their "occasion" is "cracked"; what she questions is his valuation of the "crack" as necessarily a flaw, a failure, an inadequacy. The crack in the golden bowl is the possibility of disintegration; but it is also the hidden possibility of flow, of exchange, of the "absorption" of the other that they are experiencing even as they speak.

The cracked cup is useless as an object of exchange, resisting even such an enormous "power of purchase" as Adam Verver's. But it offers all kinds of possibilities as an image of a "self' that is not, in Irigaray's terms, a "sealed vessel." Charlotte's identification with the cup is suggested when, on Amerigo's first pronouncing the word "crack," she blushes (123) - as though in half-ashamed recognition of her own affinity with cracks - and discovers in herself an interest "now made even tenderer and stranger" (123). At the level of the physical self, the "crack" - the "hole big enough for you to poke in your finger" - is the prerequisite for life: for breathing, for eating and drinking, for sex and birth. The "cracks" in the self allow for exchange between the self and what is around it. The crack in the golden bowl renders an apparently solid object permeable, suggesting the possibilities of flow and exchange that Charlotte and Amerigo, cracked and flawed as they are, actually experience. Maggie's "bowl without the crack" is the old, impermeable self without the possibility of flow. It is this self that she seeks to reinstate by fixing Charlotte behind impermeable glass and turning her husband to stone.

In that early scene in which Charlotte and Amerigo visit the Bloomsbury shop and find the golden bowl, Charlotte tells Amerigo that she is prepared to give herself away, "perfectly willing to do it for nothing" (108). Her willingness to give herself away "for nothing" is consistent with her willingness to "risk the cracks," to risk openness, to find beauty in so-called "flawed" objects. However, when it comes to the Ververs, Charlotte does not in fact "give" herself away. Both she and Amerigo are complicit in the process of freezing and fixing that occurs in the second half of the novel. Amerigo, in particular, has made no secret of his superstitious fear of "cracks" (123). What's more, his relationship with Charlotte is always, we suspect, rather calculating: He more than once hears the "chink of gold" when he looks at her (73, 282). When Maggie confronts him over the pieces of the golden bowl, his overriding concern seems to be not for her but for Adam - as though it is Adam, as his purchaser, whom he has really offended. When Maggie decides to wield her power, he submits to her immediately, far more willing - as he has always been - to give up his "freedom" than his financial security.

And if Maggie insists that Charlotte and Amerigo function as sealed, individual units, cut off from each other, stranded in boats and on dry land, she is no less hard on herself. In some ways, Maggie's own experience of fluidity and communion is the most intense and dramatic in the novel. In the second half of the novel, her identity is continually in flux - he is virtually a prototypical mystic, emptying and abasing herself in order to "receive," even to become, the other (Fanny Assingham, Adam, and, most remarkably, Charlotte herself). She uses language - continuing denials, negations, and unsayings - to "empty" herself, to destabilize subject positions, and to undermine the fixity not only of meaning but also of identity itself. It is in her relationship with her father, Adam, that this fluid communion is most apparent - and it is her "sacrifice" of this relationship that most clearly marks her final commitment to individuation. Her separation from her beloved father is the price of the separation of her husband from his lover.

When Maggie marries, Adam reflects that Amerigo has interrupted the "decent little old-time union" between him and Maggie (135). However, he finds that Amerigo, whom he figures as "a great Palladian church" erected in a "pleasant public square" (135), is after all permeable. There are openings, apertures, through which he and Maggie can pass in order to meet: "the limit stood off, the way round was easy, the east end was as fine, in its fashion, as the west, and there were also side doors of entrance between the two - large, monumental, ornamental, in the/r style - as for all proper great churches" (136). There is more than a hint, of course, that Adam takes an erotic pleasure in Amerigo that rivals Maggie's - he speaks lovingly of Amerigo's "yielding lines and curved surfaces," perfect "for rubbing against, in a man" (137) - and thus that his "permeability" may be highly valued by both Maggie and Adam in a physical as well as psychological sense. In any case, the marriage of each leaves the pair "undivided" (267): Maggie

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

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

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.

In the end, Maggie's "victory" - aging Charlotte, fixing her father into a frame, subduing Amerigo - is the victory of individualism. Banta may be right when she suggests that for James, possession of the self by what is not the self is always a "sin." But if it is evil, it is also, in many of James's novels, an abiding fascination. In The Golden Bowl, the idea of vampiric possession is transformed into what I have called the "mystic self' through a reworking of the very basis of identity: from separation and individuation to permeability, interconnection, and exchange. The characters sip from the "sacred fount" of the other without sapping the lifeblood of that other. They "splash about" together in the water, or sink to the depths, in order to dissolve the boundaries of a self repeatedly shored up by language. Through love, desire, and touch, they challenge the separation of self and other. Clearly, James's novel is not advocating a brave new submarine world in which people swim about in a kind of prenatal bliss without ever entering the social order. But it does suggest that people are more amphibious than might have been thought. Its exploration of the permeability of the self constitutes, as I have argued, a radical challenge to traditional conceptions of the self. Further, the novel demonstrates that the presence of a "mystic self' is a threat to the functioning of the social order - Irigaray might say to patriarchy itself. It is Maggie and Adam who have the most invested in the existing social order, as they are major beneficiaries, and it is they who come down so hard on the "aberration" Charlotte, with her willingness to "risk the cracks," represents. The novel ends with a return to that equilibrium so precious to Maggie; but the notion of the permeability of the self cannot be "unsaid," any more than the golden bowl can be restored to its imaginary wholeness. However gilded the bowl may be, the cracks remain.

NOTES

1 The plausibility of the narrator's psychical vampirism theory in The Sacred Fount has been debated by many critics, who have asked whether the novel can be seriously proposing that, for instance, one person may literally grow witty and brilliant by drawing those qualities forth from another, who is accordingly "idiotized." Most have argued that it does not seriously propose this. Instead, they suggest, the novel is about the way this obsessive idea influences the narrator's perception and interpretation of events. Even vampire-committed critics such as Edel have felt that the novel is not really about vampirism but about "appearance and reality" ("Introductory Essay" xvi), while Blackall's book-length study of the novel argues that it is "a source of insight into the mental processes of the artist" (36) rather than a study of the "vampire donnee."

2 John Plamenatz argues in his 1963 work Man and Society that "man's" dignity is inextricably tied to his independence:

In all societies man has a sense of his own dignity. He feels himself entitled to certain courtesies, he resents insults, he resents interference. He resents it, not only because it frustrates his desires, but because it humiliates him. As a social creature, he is both dependent and independent; he cannot live without others, and must serve them and be served by them. But his dependence is regular; it is subject to rules which both bind and protect him. Outside the sphere of his dependence, he is independent and is jealous of that independence; he is watchful to preserve it, more for the sake of his dignity than because he expects material advantages. (47-48)

3 Edel writes in Henry James: A Life that while James eschewed organized religion, he did have a "personal religion . . . a mysticism compounded of meditation and communion with spirits and forces vaguely discerned yet acutely felt, in a dim intuitional 'beyond'" (36). That James was fascinated by, and acutely conscious of, "spirits and forces vaguely discerned yet acutely felt" seems to me to be evident both in his later novels, with their near obsession with the unspoken, and in his autobiographical writing. However, I would argue that this fascination was not so much a "personal religion" as a worldview, a way of seeing and understanding consciousness and subjectivity.

4 For instance, Hadewijch describes how her beloved "came himself to me,

and took me entirely in his arms, and pressed me to him; and all my members felt his in full satisfaction, in accordance with the desire of my heart and my humanity" (qtd. in Milhaven 16).

5 Within psychoanalysis, the terms self and other are crucial in any analysis

of identity. Freudian psychoanalysis as reinterpreted by Lacan argues that the self becomes a "subject" - an "I" within the Symbolic Order - at the moment in which the child recognizes itself (or, rather, according to Lacan, mis-recognizes itself) as a distinct, individuated, and unified entity in the mirror - distinct, that is, from the mother whose body it previously could not distinguish from its own, and from the objects it incorporates and expels (see Lacan's "The Mirror Stage," in Ecrits).

Within the quite different discourse of developmental psychology, separation denotes maturity, while interconnection implies a failure to emerge from infancy. Marshall argues that developmental psychology privileges autonomy and individuation. She cites Gilligan's comment that the "developmental litany intones the celebration of separation, autonomy, individuation and natural rights" (102).

6 Mystics base their subjectivity not on appropriation of, and identification with, their own mirror image, as in primary narcissism, but on identification with an "ideal Object," that is, God. In Tales of Love, Kristeva argues that "The subject exists only inasmuch as it identifies with an ideal other" (35). For "troubadors and saints," that "ideal other" is not their own mirror image but God (161). This identification sparks "psychic space" and makes love possible (169). The mystic's love for an other who is not a mirror image of the self gives the self an "extension that could reach the other, the others - a divine extension to be sure, and a social one in passing" (167). Accordingly, the "I" of the mystical text "does not point to itself as basic identity, split as it is between the Other and the affect [that is, love]. An I that is a passion" (169).

7 Fanny and Bob Assingham are often taken by critics to be figures of fun, "parodying" the style of the novel, as Yeazell points out.

8 Bynum writes that for many mystics, "[t]o receive [communion] was to become Christ - by eating, by devouring and being devoured" (126): "One becomes Christ's crucified body in eating Christ's crucified body" (146).

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ANN-MARIE PRIEST is an editor and associate lecturer at Central Queensland University, Queensland, Australia. Her article on apophasis in Henry James's The Sacred Fount will appear in a forthcoming issue of Style. She is currently writing her doctoral thesis on mysticism and subjectivity in James and WooIf at Macquarie University, Sydney.

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