The Golden Bowl was destined to become the very last work that author Henry Jams started and finished as a novel. The book was published in the transformative year of 1904 which also saw novels as disparate as The Sea Wolf, The Food of the Gods, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz debut. Clearly the novel was no longer quite the same thing it had been when James published his debut nearly thirty years earlier. The novel clocks in at more than 150,000 words and yet can be summarized as easily as a novella.
Prince Amerigo is an Italian nobleman whose lineage has fallen upon hard times as a result of the collapse of the aristocracies of Europe. Desperate for money to live as he is accustomed he marries the daughter of a wealthy American capitalist, Maggie Verver. Coincident with this union is Amerigo’s reconnection with an old flame, Charlotte Stant. Maggie persuades her lonely widower father to marry Charlotte. Because the father/daughter relationship between Maggie and her dad is so unusually strong, Amerigo and Charlotte wind up spending a lot of time together and eventually something happens in a cathedral which may or may not be a sexual reunion. Charlotte and Amerigo had gone off together on a shopping trip to find Maggie a wedding present where they find a crystal bowl that Charlotte wants but can’t afford and that Amerigo believes to be overpriced and not all that the shopkeeper stays. Maggie eventually becomes suspicious of the nature of the relationship between her husband and her stepmother and one day happens to enter the same shop where she learns that the shopkeeper had understood, as a result of knowing Italian, the intimacy of the conversation Amerigo and Charlotte were having inside his store. Maggie then sets out to destroy any sort of intimacy still existing in that relationship. Eventually she persuades her father to move back to America and thus put an entire ocean between Charlotte and Amerigo. It is only at this point that Amerigo realizes the innocent daddy’s girl he married is actually a woman of complex sophistication and truly falls in love with her.
The question that many readers wind up asking is why it takes hundreds and hundreds of pages to tell a story in which so very little actually happens. The answer is that James was still writing the sort of novel which exemplified the form when he began. As the other famous books published the same year indicate, the direction of the novel had evolved significantly. They were simultaneously becoming more realistic, more imaginative, and more tightly focused on narrative. None of those aspects are front and center in the novels of Henry James, but this is especially true of The Golden Bowl.
The natural assumption would be that the title object of this novel would be of great significance. The truth is that bowl—which is made of crystal, not gold—is what the story is really about more than the events that take place. Instead of focusing on a realistic tale of the emotional complexity of the interactions between the two women and two men at the center of the book, their romantic interaction exists solely for the purpose of reflecting the symbolism of the bowl. The bowl is not just one symbol, but multiple symbols depending upon the character in question. The most direct comment on this symbolic significance is when Maggie muses about “The bowl without our happiness in it. The bowl without the crack.” But the bowl does have a crack in it and that flaw in its near-perfection is the thing which makes the bowl so deeply symbolic.
The Golden Bowl was already, at the time of its publication, out of step with the general appreciation of the novel as a storytelling form. Although a great volume of words are utilized to tell the story of the four characters at the center of the narrative, they are not particularly complex characters except in relation to how they connect to the symbolism of the bowl. James was still writing the type of novel in which a whole lot is described but ultimately not much actually happens in the dramatic sense of the word. He chose the most appropriate title for his last completed novel because it really is the story of the object rather than the characters.
