The Indeterminacy of the End: Maggie Verver and the Limits of Imagination

The Indeterminacy of the End: Maggie Verver and the Limits of Imagination by David M. Craig, Clarkson College ... we live in a place That is not our own, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days. —Wallace Stevens In the concluding moments of The Golden Bowl, Maggie Verver, resplendent in her role as Princess, has the luxury of contemplating her successful recovery of her husband's affections: "she knew at last really why—and how she had been inspired and guided, how she had been persistently able, how to her soul, all the while, it had been for the sake of this end."l Yet Maggie, whose artistry has made possible this reunion with the Prince, remains uncertain of its meaning. Having recast the form of her marriage and committed herself to its fairy-tale ideal, Maggie discovers the strangeness of her own creation: "Here it [the moment of reunion] was then the moment, the golden fruit that had shown from afar; only what were these things in the fact, for the hand and for the lips, when tested, when tasted—what were they as a reward?" (II, 367). Even in her husband's arms, Maggie finds the reforged relation unfamiliar, the hoped for consummation disquieting. Having precipitated the Prince's loving embrace, Maggie buries her head in her husband's chest in "pity and dread" of his "lighted . . . eyes" (II, 369). The Princess has glimpsed a life beyond her present knowing, entered a world that is not her own. Maggie's uncertainty about the resolution of her marital tale is mirrored in the critical controversy that James's conclusion has provoked. Few endings have elicited such contradictory interpretations. For example, while Dorothea Krook argues that Maggie has "succeeded in restoring the dignities, decencies, and serenities of their [the Verver circle's] common life, which figure the harmony and stability of the universal moral order," Philip Weinstein contends that in Maggie's machinations "the terms 'good' and 'evil' lose their meaning .'^ Like Krook and Weinstein, most critics focus on the thematic implications of the ending of the novel. In their concern about the morality of the 1. Henry James, The Golden Bowl (New York: Scribner's, 1909), II, 367, hereafter cited parenthetically by volume and page number. 2. The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (1962; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), p. 323; Henry James and the Requirements of the Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), p. 184. The divergence in Krook1s and Weinstein's views of the "morality" of Maggie's actions is part of a larger debate over the nature of James's achievement in The Golden Bowl. Representative readings critical of the Ververs or of James include F. 0. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1944), pp. 81-104; F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948; rpt. London: Penguin, THE HENRY JAMES REVIEW 133 WINTER, 1982 novel, euch analyses look for certainty in a novel that is about uncertainty. Ruth Bernard Yeazell offers a more fruitful approach to the ending when she characterizes James's concern in the novel as a problem of knowledge. More specifically, she argues that the reader, like the Prince, does not have the vision necessary to decipher and therefore to share the union that Maggie's language promises.3 To Yeazell's formulation of the problem of knowing, I would add that Maggie's vision is itself restricted, and her possibility for knowing uncertain. Henry James constructs the endipg to The Golden Bowl out of a paradox of knowledge. Maggie Verver, who invents the resolution of her relationship with the Prince, cannot know the ending she has invented—the "golden fruit" of her reunion with the Prince. Throughout her volume, Maggie has sought to fix the moment of marital reconciliation in the crystalline certainty of a happilyever -after. Yet as the resolution that she imagines unfolds, Maggie discovers a new pattern of relationships, an alien landscape, and a husband who remains a stranger. Because James allows himself to be displaced in the compositional process by Maggie, the resolution that she invents is also the ending to the novel, and thus Maggie...