May Skelton's Reviews > The Golden Bowl

The Golden Bowl is certainly characteristic of James’ oeuvre as a whole—stylistically, structurally, and thematically. In typical James fashion, the prose is very meandering. It can feel, at times, excessively, even insufferably so, particularly to readers who are accustomed to the clarity and succinctness that have become the hallmark of modern American literature. Many of us are used to evaluating writing based on its ability to convey the most amount of information in the fewest words possible—and judged according to this standard, its unsurprising that James frustrates many modern readers. James’ writing style is the opposite of concise. He can spin a small observation into a pages long dissection of the potential meanings of a single untoward glance, can stretch out the almost unbearable tension of a brief conversation into an entire chapter.

Don’t enter into a James novel, particularly this one, expecting it to be a straightforward journey from point A to point B. Don’t even expect a slightly indirect route with a few detours here and there. James’ work is almost all detour—but detour that is gorgeously written, brilliantly conceived of, and remarkably insightful. If you want a book that never deviates from the direct course of its narrative, that moves from plot point to plot point with speed and unwavering focus, this isn’t it. If you’re willing to trust James, though, to entirely give yourself over into his hands and follow his thoughts where they lead—not constantly holding your breath and waiting for the next big event to take place, but simply marveling at the richness of the prose, the impossibly enigmatic moral ambiguity of the characters, the mind-bogglingly complex and nuanced interpersonal interactions—I promise you won’t be disappointed.

The beauty of The Golden Bowl isn’t in the so-called “big” moments, the shocking revelations or the seismic shifts in relationships. The beauty is in the details, even those that feel superfluous at the time. Perhaps it is precisely in those details that seem least important that the most beauty lies, in fact. It is in the incredible intricacy, the exquisite subtlety of the narrative that such a richness of meaning lies. It is a novel that demands a wealth of careful attention, of the sort we rarely are willing to expend in our fast-paced modern world. But it also a novel that recompenses the reader tenfold for their efforts. The book itself is like the site of an archeological dig, filled with a wealth of precious artifacts quietly begging to be unearthed. It is a mine of a novel, patiently waiting for the reader to excavate and examine all of the glittering gems that James has so artfully embedded and concealed throughout.

It was all, at bottom, in him, the aesthetic principle, planted where it could burn with a cold, still flame; where it fed almost wholly on the material directly involved, on the idea (followed by appropriation) of plastic beauty, of the thing visibly perfect in its kind; where, in short, in spite of the general tendency of the “devouring element” to spread, the rest of his spiritual furniture, modest, scattered, and tended with unconscious care, escaped the consumption that in so many cases proceeds from the undue keeping-up of profane altar-fires.

Like most of James’ novels, The Golden Bowl centers around a cast of meticulously drawn and deliciously ambiguous characters, whose convoluted relationships with one another are riddled with duplicity and haunted by the specter of secrets locked away in dusty rooms, just waiting to reemerge. The story follows a rich American businessman and widower, Mr. Verver, and his daughter Maggie, as they both enter into seemingly perfect marriages that later reveal themselves to have built upon a foundation of lies more extensive and convoluted than either of them could have fathomed. The credulous and kind-hearted Maggie, the youthful picture of American innocence, first weds an impoverished but elegant Italian prince Amerigano, who, on the surface, appears be a faultless spouse. A few years later, Mr. Verver becomes enamored of the formidable Charlotte, a brilliant young woman of little means but great ambition and a friend of his daughter. The two marry after a brief but tender courtship, and Maggie gives her blessing, hoping the companionship of a beautiful and clever wife will provide him with protection from the importunate advances of scheming and seductive fortune-hunters. More importantly, however, she imagines that it will be a consolation to him for the loss of his daughter to her own marriage, a marriage that has taken her away from her familial home and divided her love, once wholly the possession of her father, between the two most important men in her life.

Little do either of the good-natured Ververs know, however, that the Prince and Charlotte were previously attached to one another, and only abandoned their relations in the face of insurmountable pecuniary difficulties that made marriage to one another a dreary prospect for the two natural voluptuaries, if not an altogether impossibility. And while the bond between these charming figures may be hidden in the past as far as the rest of the world is concerned, it is far from forgotten, the passion between them anything but extinguished. The ill-fated foursome—the father, the daughter, and their two beguiling spouses—come to constitute the central cast of the novel, and the complexity of the dynamics between them makes the typical love triangle look like child’s play. Witnessing the odd and convoluted web of connections between the four precariously form, and then slowly but irreparably devolve, is fascinating. It is utterly enthralling to watch as the tangle of relationships, poisoned by deception and secrecy, quietly but bitterly implode at their core, retaining every outward appearance of respectability while contempt and wounded outrage smolder imperceptibly under the surface.

She was keeping her head for a reason, for a cause; and the labour of this detachment, with the labour of her forcing the pitch of it down, held them together in the steel hoop of an intimacy compared with which artless passion would have been but a beating of the air.

Also central to the narrative is an inanimate object—the beautiful but flawed golden bowl from which the novel takes its name—that serves not only on a literal level as an important plot point, but also a profound symbol for the elegant deception around which the tale revolves. The portentous bowl is introduced at the very beginning of the novel, its significance almost immediately apparent. It is found by the Prince and Charlotte in a curious antique shop a day before the Prince’s wedding, where the pair claim to be shopping for a gift for Maggie—a clever ruse that allows them to spend a few more gloriously free and unobserved hours together before their inevitable and (so they believe) irrevocable separation. The bowl, which appears to be made entirely of glistening gold, catches their eye amongst the age-worn trinkets and trifles of the strange little store, and the shopkeeper, an old man as enigmatic as the mysterious golden goblet itself, tries to sell it to them. Ultimately the two leaved empty handed, but possessed of the knowledge that the golden bowl, which appears at first glance to be a luminous and flawless treasure, is not pure gold, but mere gilded crystal. The crystal is, moreover, cracked—albeit imperceptibly, its tiny fissure covered by sparkling gilding but ominously ever-present nonetheless.

“A crack is a crack—and an omen’s an omen.”

Explicit mention of the golden bowl subsequently disappears from the narrative for a time (though it does menacingly reemerge later in the book to serve a crucial role), but the well of symbolism the object provides is embedded in almost every page, begging the reader to drink from it deeply. The connection is instantly clear between the lustrous goblet—beautiful at a glance but flawed beneath its meticulously-applied gilding—and the seemingly perfect marriages of the Verver father and daughter to young consorts who make elegant figures in the world and yet harbor dark secrets under their exquisitely refined exteriors. Like the bowl itself, the seemingly harmonious relations binding the four central characters to one another are little more than a brilliant counterfeit—a dazzling show of manners and unanimity, put on for each other as much as for the outside world, that serves only to disguise the corruption and claustrophobia poisoning the relationships from within.

“I want a happiness without a hole in it big enough for you to poke in your finger.”

“A brilliant, perfect surface—to begin with at least. I see.”

“The golden bowl—as it WAS to have been.” And Maggie dwelt musingly on this obscured figure. “The bowl with all our happiness in it. The bowl without the crack.”

What I particularly loved about this novel, and why I think it is ultimately more interesting and nuanced than James’ better-known work The Portrait of a Lady, is that it is profoundly morally ambiguous. Where the reader is clearly meant to feel compassion for Isabel Archer and loathe Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady, it is entirely unclear where our sympathies are supposed to lie in The Golden Bowl. In The Portrait of a Lady, as in most novels, the protagonist and antagonist are clearly delineated—the straightforward line between good and evil crisply and unwaveringly marked in a steady hand. In The Golden Bowl, on the other hand, no such clear line is ever drawn—and the reader searching for moral clarity or resolution is left entirely at sea, tossed relentlessly upon the shadowy gray waves of uncertainty.

Who, ultimately, is at fault in the novel? Is it, as it would seem at first glance, the two worldly and secretive lovers, mutely standing guard at the locked door of their shared past, guilty of fresh acts of infidelity? Is the mere fact of their duplicitousness enough to condemn them, even in the face of their noble intentions to do no harm? The Prince and Charlotte entered into their respective marriages believing themselves strong enough to renounce one another—a sin, perhaps, of overconfidence in the strength of their own resolves, but certainly not one of meticulously planned deception or malevolent scheming. Can we truly blame them for crumpling under the weight of the circumstances, which seemed bent on constantly and painfully throwing the pair together? When it almost seemed as if fate were arranging things just precisely so as to reunite them, are they entirely at fault for giving in to what they viewed as its inexorable and alluring dictates?

Nothing stranger surely had ever happened to a conscientious, a well-meaning, a perfectly passive pair: no more extraordinary decree had ever been launched against such victims than this of forcing them against their will into a relation of mutual close contact that they had done everything to avoid.

And, equally as important, are the seemingly naive American father and daughter duo really so innocent? Do these two avid collectors, of human beings as well as antiques, not bear some of the blame for viewing their charming spouses as the crowing acquisitions to their glorious collections of priceless artifacts? Are they not at fault for treating their partners as objects rather than people, for holding the Prince and Charlotte in bonds as if they were mere toys that had been purchased and paid for? For it becomes clear, as the novel progresses, that the Ververs ultimately view their young consorts as their possessions—beautiful and docile ornaments that will complete the perfect picture they aim to make of their lives. Is it not a sin, too, to believe that human souls can be bought and sold if only the price is high enough?

Mrs. Verver and the Prince fairly “placed” themselves, however unwittingly, as the high expressions of the kind of human furniture required, esthetically, by such a scene. The fusion of their presence with the decorative elements, their contribution to the triumph of selection, was complete and admirable; though, to a lingering view, a view more penetrating than the occasion really demanded, they also might have figured as concrete attestations of a rare power of purchase. There was much indeed in the tone in which Adam Verver spoke again, and who shall say where his thought stopped? “Le compte y est. You’ve got some good things.”

Maggie met it afresh—“Ah, don’t they look well?”