One of the greatest of Henry James’s prolific output of novels, The Golden Bowl focuses on the relationship between a widower, Adam Verver, and his daughter, Maggie. The Ververs are wealthy Americans, freed for a life of cultivated leisure by their financial security; they live in London and spend their time collecting art objects. Adam Verver intends to place these in a museum he plans to donate to his hometown. Their lives are complete, and their father-daughter relationship is completely fulfilling to them, so they maintain only a limited social circle.
Maggie’s best friend is Mrs. Assingham, an American married to a British military officer. Through this friend, she meets the impoverished Italian aristocrat Prince Amerigo. Although she is not passionately in love with him, she thinks he would make a suitable husband; her father arranges the match, essentially adding the prince to the Ververs’ large collection of European valuables.
Unknown to Maggie, the prince is already in love with Charlotte Stant, who had been a schoolmate of Maggie’s but who is herself impoverished like the prince. They both realize that a marriage between them is impossible. They spend their last day together, the day before Maggie’s wedding, shopping for a suitable gift from Charlotte. She selects the golden bowl of the title—actually a glass bowl painted with gold leaf—but the prince points out that it has a flaw and relates his fear that the cracked bowl will bring bad luck. Charlotte does not buy the bowl.
The next day, Prince Amerigo and Maggie are married; however, for the Ververs, very little changes. Father and daughter continue their close association, enjoying their shared pursuit of antiquities, collectibles, and art objects. Eventually, Maggie comes to think that her father needs a marriage of his own, and she recommends poor Charlotte Stant to him. Circumstances repeatedly throw Charlotte and Prince Amerigo together as the representatives of Maggie and Adam, who prefer spending quiet time together to socializing.
Slowly Maggie realizes that this four-adult family is unusual, and she begins to wonder whether there is a connection between her husband and the friend who has become her stepmother. When she purchases a golden bowl—the same one Charlotte had passed over—a conversation with the shopkeeper arouses her suspicions. But she also realizes that she has played a key role in whatever connection might exist between Charlotte and the prince; her own self-centered behavior in continuing her comfortable connection to her devoted father has helped to undermine her marriage.
A parting of the ways becomes inevitable, and the double challenge for Maggie is to let go of her attachment to her father and to ascertain whether her husband loves her for herself or merely for her money.
The Golden Bowl is one of Henry James’s finest examples of psychological realism. His complex and indirect style, relating the story through an omniscient third-person narrator, draws out the details and nuances of his characters’ thoughts, feelings, motivations, and behaviors. The story contrasts the artificial perfection of material beauty—the things the Ververs collect—with the natural imperfection of human relationships. The golden bowl is a material object of beauty, but its hidden flaw makes it into a metaphor for the relationships in which Maggie is involved. She has tried to convert human beings into collectibles, but the ineradicable nature of human flaws dooms this enterprise. She must learn to deal with people as people, not as objects, and she must accept the flaws ingrained in other people’s identities.
The Golden Bowl became the basis of a film adaptation in 2000, with a screenplay by the noted writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
Bibliography
Gargano, James W., ed. Critical Essays on Henry James: The Late Novels. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.
Jones, Granville H. Henry James’s Psychology of Experience: Innocence, Responsibility, and Renunciation in the Fiction of Henry James. The Hague: Mouton, 1975.
Macnaughton, William R. Henry James: The Later Novels. Twayne’s United States Authors, 521. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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