The Traces of Capitalist Patriarchy in the Silences of The Golden Bowl

James Society Meetings, 1983: Henry James and Contemporary Critical Theory Editor's note: We are pleased to present all of the papers and responses delivered to the fifth annual meeting of the Henry James Society at the 1983 MLA centennial convention , HJS President Daniel D. Fineman presiding. The authors were given the option of eschewing formal documentation in the printed versions of their talks, and, to varying degrees, they have done so. Some of the papers are revised and expanded versions of those read at the meeting. Session I: The Sociological-Political The Traces of Capitalist Patriarchy in the Silences of The Golden Bowl by Mimi Kairschner, University of California, San Diego Much of Henry James's fiction—and particularly the work of his late perioduses metaphors of money and economic exchange to illustrate the social and familial relations among his characters. Such a constellation of images serves to suggest a reading of his fiction as mediated both by class relations and by the dynamics of the Victorian family, as well as by the place of that family within, and its contribution to, the development of finance capital. These symbols of money and acquisition are not the only clues to the connection between the family and the intricate network of bourgeois social and economic relations, however. Rather, it is often the absences and silences within James's text—the gaps within the plot; the moments of mere suggestion and innuendo on the part of his characters; the hints at motive, often deferred or left unfulfilled; the lacunae embedded in the narrative itself—that most clearly illuminate, by virtue of what they conceal, the configuration of Victorian social arrangements and the economic and political basis of his social organization. As a case in point, The Golden Bowl ostensibly a drama of heightened psychological tension among four characters, the participants in dual marriages, reveals, nevertheless, the culturally idealized patriarchal and bourgeois familial relations of late nineteenthcentury England—at the same time that it necessarily distorts and conceals their fundamental socioeconomic basis. The theoretical framework within which this study begins concerns the divergence between ideological constructs and the social reality they conceal—and concerns as well the problem of the referentiality of language. My interest here is the interrelationship of both patriarchal and class forms of societal organization. To examine textually the interpénétration of these two structures leads one to a dual paradox concerning both class and gender, if one is to take seriously Pierre Macherey's and Frederic Jameson's work, for each infers that a text necessarily will mask by what it says rather than fully reveal its historical content—that there is always a political subtext of class relations operating underneath the author's use of linguistic /cultural modes of expression—and if one is to take seriously, in addition, the structure of gender relations that form a major aspect of the political content of any period. To the extent that a text depicts, mirrors, but at the same time distorts and conceals the materials of a culture, it will therefore express the ideological divergence between the prevailing discursive practices and the fundamental structuring elements of power in the society—in terms of both class and gender. Thus a rhetorical "aporia" or "gap" Volume V 187 Number 3 The Henry James Review Spring, 1984 appearing in a text from the late Victorian period, I suggest, will reveal both class and gender related structures of domination, for in these silences lie clues to the distorted— and hidden—social relations inscribed in the language of the period. At such a historical moment, when the myth of the woman was so highly idealized, yet when the perpetuation of existing familial interconnections supported the systems both of patriarchy and of inherited property, the fundamental social relations that remained unspoken allowed surface relations to appear natural, and thus the foundation of these interrelations remained unquestioned. Since my assumption is that these lacunae serve to mask all forms of institutionalized domination, then the very strategy of James's narrative, I contend, is to conceal these underlying social relations— as they were likewise concealed within the culture. This very concealment constitutes James's artistry and...