5. Masterpieces

‘Masterpieces’ focuses on three of Henry James’s novels that are generally considered his greatest: The Ambassadors (1902), The Wings of the Dove (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). The Ambassadors is a meditation on the nature of ambition, destiny, and what makes a life meaningful. The Wings of the Dove deals with illness and suffering, and the moral conundrum presented by a dying girl possessed of great wealth she cannot enjoy, and her needy friends who seek to inherit it. The Golden Bowl is about the institutions of marriage and family, and how they are disrupted by passion. The chapter also examines James’s travel narrative, The American Scene (1907).

Temporality and the Unconfident Heroine in Henry James's The Golden Bowl

Readers traditionally associate heroism with risk and confidence in one's abilities. Yet within the realist tradition, Henry James creates a portrait of an unconfident heroine. The Golden Bowl's Maggie Verver demonstrates she has the ability to become an effective actor, and she can be read as a special case within the underdog character type. Despite being caught in a deception plot, she surprises readers with the pleasure of a “win” by developing a specific know-how that relies on reading temporal tensions. The article uses theoretical work on temporality by Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Lacan, and Alain Badiou to explore how Maggie's confidence and courage emerge from the depths of anxiety and how this process allows James to create a narrative in which the reader learns to gauge and appreciate human action in process.

Plastic Form

This chapter discusses Henry James's The Golden Bowl (1904). It shows how James's sculptural aesthetics, elaborated through a series of ornate metaphors, encompasses not only sculptural objects but also the viewing practices and temporalities associated with sculpture. Such viewing in the round, with its frequent retreading of old ground, creates the surface texture of James's, at times, almost impenetrable prose. Viewing in the round also activates a narrative temporality that renders the novel as a dynamic form to be processed over time, revisited, and reviewed. The Golden Bowl thus helps one to see that novelistic engagement with the fine arts does not produce self-contained, static, spatial form. Instead, shifts in perspective and point of view as James's characters circle sculptural objects—and as readers make their way around the novel—reinvent the novel as an experiment in plastic form.

Impressions New and Used in The Golden Bowl

Chapter 7 acts in part as a conclusion. It shows how The Golden Bowl not only codifies but also extends the impressions of the previous two novels. Maggie Verver uses cognitive impressions to discover that her husband, Prince Amerigo, is unfaithful. She then uses performative impressions to manipulate him. Like Milly Theale, then, she employs impressions as both critic and artist. Again, like those of Milly, her performative impressions refute empiricist recognition by adhering so tenaciously to deceptive, aesthetic surfaces that they become a reality. But, unlike Milly, Maggie is always aware of the depth she glimpses through recognition, and so does not become seduced by the surfaces of her own impressions: she manipulates them in a pragmatist manner, not to create a brittle artefact, like Densher’s love for Milly’s memory, but to save her marriage. Unlike in the previous two novels, Maggie’s performative impressions impose a composition that is both moral and aesthetic.