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The Counterfeit Symbol in Henry James's The Golden Bowl
- The Henry James Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 25, Number 1, Winter 2004
- pp. 52-66
- 10.1353/hjr.2004.0011
- Article
- Additional Information
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Although critically freighted with all the significance of a symbol, the golden bowl in James's last completed novel fails to achieve conventional symbolic status. Fanny Assingham's decision to smash the bowl enacts a challenge to its physical integrity matched, at the level of discourse, by the competing meanings that have sought the bowl as the vehicle for their expression but which proliferate only in the bowl's absence. The gold standard debates which form the historical context for the novel highlight its dramatization of anxieties over monetary and linguistic value, expressed through the figure of the counterfeit symbol.