"An innate preference for the represented subject": Portraiture and Knowledge in The Golden Bowl

"An innate preference for the represented subject": Portraiture and Knowledge in The Golden Bowl Phyllis van Slyck, LaGuardia Community College Maggie found in this image a repeated challenge; again and yet again she paused before the fire: after which, each time, in the manner of one for whom a strong light has suddenly broken, she gave herself to livelier movement. She had seen herself at last, in the picture she was studying, suddenly jump from the coach....She looked at the person so acting as if this person were somebody else, waiting with intensity to see what would follow...—what in particular would the figure in the picture do ? (GB 342). Some of the most intense and powerful dramatic moments in Henry James are illuminated portraits, moments of silent awareness in which a character shatters previously constructed images and briefly confronts the essential otherness , autonomy, and mystery of another.1 Perhaps the most well known example of such a moment is in The Portrait of a Lady when Isabel Archer reviews her relationship with Gilbert Osmond in a series of visual representations.2 Such moments of vision are one of the primary ways Jamesian characters interpret (or fail to interpret) their relationships. Portraits are created, however, not only for moments of special insight in James's novels. Each time the action is momentarily suspended and one character places another within an enclosing frame, a subjective interpretation is undertaken. In many of these instances, the portrait contribThe Henry James Review 15 (1994): 179-89. © 1994, The Johns Hopkins University Press 180 The Henry James Review utes to an illusion that sustains a character's desire to believe in another, and the reader is consistently alerted to the danger of such representations.3 I wish to argue that in many of James's novels, but especially in The Golden Bowl, portraits constitute both interpretations and misinterpretations. They are sites where characters explore the fragile and illusory ways in which meaning is provisionally constructed. Through portraiture, James's characters discover that representations (like any cultural construct) define the possibilities of their knowledge: they are the lens (or language) through which they must speak. Even though characters bring tremendous effort and insight to the task of subverting images imposed upon them by creating alternative images, all such portraits expose the inevitable and necessary deformations by which we—characters and readers—must live. In the opening of The Golden Bowl, when Maggie Verver insists, at her moment of decision, that the man she has chosen is and will remain what she believes him to be, the reader is immediately wary of Maggie's need to remain outside—and thereby in control of—the very relationship into which she is presumably entering.4 In addition, as critics have noted, Maggie's attitude reflects her inability to relinquish her relationship with her father and her rather rigid moralistic need to exclude the dark side of human nature.5 But Maggie also articulates a more basic position that guides all awareness: other selves are mere objects that the perceiving self defines and believes in according to its own needs and desires. Through portraiture, James's characters impose an illusory coherence and reliability on a complex, fragmented, and only partially knowable subject. What the Jamesian portrait reveals, then, is that the "truth" of another person is something that can never fully be captured. Such truth is glimpsed, only occasionally, in silent moments of vision that lie just beyond language and almost beyond representation.6 In The Golden Bowl, when Prince Amerigo describes to Fanny Assingham his discomfort at the way he has been defined by the Ververs (in a moment that is presented as a "tableau-vivant"), Amerigo and his confidante gaze at each other in silence. "It fairly befell at last for a climax that they almost ceased to pretend—to pretend, that is, to cheat each other with forms. The unspoken had come up, and there was a crisis.. .during which they were reduced.. .to looking at each other on quite an inordinate scale" (GB 63). What this silence reveals to each of them is that all representations are dangerous, for they are created, agreed to, and...