The Golden Film: Charlotte Stant and the Palace Guards

In the inspired scene with which they open their adaptation of The Golden Bowl, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and James Ivory stage a cautionary legend. Guards wielding broad axes rush up the stairs of a palace, bursting in upon a pair of adulterous lovers in flagrante delicto. Following them is the woman's husband, a nobleman who pronounces a death sentence upon her and her young consort--his own son. The guards hustle the two to their executions, but not before the woman can damn her husband and spit in his face, "You're no man. Your son is a better man." This startling scene, which led one critic (Joan Mellen) to wonder if she had wandered into the wrong movie, is actually part of Prince Amerigo's family history. As Ivory cuts to the present, he depicts Amerigo (Jeremy Northam) himself just finishing the story, while he tours Charlotte Stant (Uma Thurman) around the Palazzo Ugolini, which has fallen into serious disrepair. ¹ Inculcated in the Prince and still embedded in the palace, this original legend helps to explain why Amerigo "sticks" with his marriage, and it clarifies a key issue that the film puts in play--the relationship between women and patriarchal power.

Indeed, Charlotte might have benefited from paying more careful attention to this story, because it lays the foundation of her own eventual punishment for a similar transgression--committing adultery with her husband's son-in-law and by this act of cuckoldry calling into question her husband's manhood. Jhabvala indicates that she included this scene to show "who this prince is and where he comes from," and she acknowledges that Adam Verver (Nick Nolte) comes to resemble the duke of the legend (qtd. in Horne). Furthermore, the film uses this cautionary tale as a choral element by repeating it twice: once as part of a slide show tour of the Palazzo (that Maggie Verver and Fanny Assingham attend) and once as a flashback. ² In the modern version of the legend, it should be noted, punishment will be meted out less evenly; for Amerigo will be spared the wrath of the father. Indeed, his father-in-law's money will enable him to restore the Palazzo Ugolini--a sign of both Adam's power of the purse and of the bargain Amerigo has struck with him--and thereby reconstruct the manhood coincident with the family palace. Restoring the palace also means restoring the patriarchal foundations that Amerigo's abjection before Adam's money signifies. That condition of abjection is much clearer in James's novel than it is in the film--a sign, I think, that the film displays more interest in preserving male authority. ³ Adam's departure for American City will give Amerigo pride of place in the film's Italian City, whereas James leaves him in a much more ambiguous position at the end of the novel and without a palace of his own.

Despite the different threats they face in the film (as in the novel), both patriarchs--Adam and Amerigo--find their authority restored by film's end. From another point of view, we might say that the Merchant Ivory Golden Bowl explores and polices the consequences of granting women the power to judge manliness and male sexual potency. As the modern counterpart to the opening legend's adulterous wife, Charlotte is the only woman with the experience and the authority to call each man's masculinity into question. And while it seems probable that Charlotte would echo her predecessor by telling Adam that his son-in-law is the "better man," Amerigo's treatment of her in every scene, except the passionate interlude at Gloucester, might make her wonder what a woman has to do to find a good, much less a better, man. Nevertheless, by the end of the film both men have been restored to potency, and Charlotte...