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The Economics of Love: The Production of Value in The Golden Bowl by John Alberti, University of California, Los Angeles She spoke as from the habit of her anxious conscience—something that disposed her frequently to assure herself, for her human commerce, of the state of the 'books' of the spirit. (GB 472) Throughout The Golden Bowl, Henry James uses the language of business to tell a drama of love and morality. From a conventional moral sense this seems inappropriate; business demands calculation and shrewd reason, whereas love is (or should be) spontaneous, intuitive, and even reckless. While the narrative of a novel may trace how recklessness is tempered by reason in the course of a romance , a love affair run like a business strikes us as mercenary and unemotional. This conventional reading, however, stems from a moral hierarchy that not only values love over money, but in fact sees these two areas of human relations as separable. Even those critics, Marxist or otherwise, most interested in the economic dimensions of the novel assume that any analogy drawn between business negotiations and the formation of intimate human relationships necessarily degrades the latter. Peggy McCormack, for example, argues that in The Golden Bowl "James shows society converting individuals into commodities whose value is coerced into the fluctuating terms of a market economy" (555-56). Whether this critical position ultimately accuses James of justifying bourgeois capitalism or sees him as shrewdly exposing the inhumanity of that ideology, the same a priori assumption remains of the superiority of "natural" human relations over the "artificial" demands of the marketplace.1 The Golden Bowl demonstrates, however, that James sees this as a false dichotomy. Aesthetically, James is interested in how consciousness shapes experience , and he defines experience as "our apprehension and our measure of what happens to us as social creatures" (PC 11). Thus, the morality of love, business, and art is inseparable in the real experience of any human life and, by extension, in The Golden Bowl. All three involve the creation of values, either by social convention or the imaginative intelligence of the characters of fine consciousness who populate James's novels. In the analogy drawn between business and love, neither is the prior term; as Laurence Holland said of James's artistic purpose, "Art or aesthetic reality was not for James an order of value to be ranked in relation to others but a process of creation to be engaged in, with a product—the union of form and vision which in the late prefaces he came to The Henry James Review 12 (1991): 9-19 ©1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 10 The Henry James Review call a marriage—to be fashioned and enjoyed" (xi). Writing directly about The Golden Bowl, Holland argued that for James "marriage as a constituted convention , familial affection of father and daughter, the business transactions entailed in the purchase of a work of art and an expanding imperialism, and an affair of sexual passion are interdependent, each relation contingent on the others for both the opportunity and the sanction to develop" (356). It is this opportunity of development, this creation of value itself that interested James. What is finally important for the characters in The Golden Bowl is not making an impossible separation of love, money, and art, but understanding how value systems in general are created and the economics of the risks and sacrifices they demand. In the end, any moral judgments about the propriety or emptiness of Unking the commodification of the market economy with the search for a marriage partner are themselves subsumed under the general cultural process of what Clifford Geertz calls "the imposition of meaning on life," which is "the major end and primary condition of human existence" (16). As always in James and in The Golden Bowl in particular, the final moral imperative derives from just how self-consciously that process is understood. II The prevalence of economic metaphors throughout the novel confirms the inseparability of love and money. From the first chapter, James identifies social and marital contracts with their business counterparts. We leam of Amerigo's impending marriage to Maggie Verver by hearing of the meeting of...

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