The Golden Fruit: Innocence and Imperialism in The Golden Bowl

The year 1898 saw the publication of Impressions, a newly translated collection of essays by the French travel writer Pierre Loti. The foreword was supplied by Henry James, who confessed that he found Loti's portrayal of the East "beguiling," and explicitly linked the French writer's artistry to the work of imperialism. Loti's 1883 account of the "new Eden" he supposedly "discovers" in the East is inundated with depictions of golden parasols, litters, temples, palaces, and, most notably, pagodas: "A great building has been left standing in which shadows appear to be moving around a fire: inside, gilded walls, a gilded roof, the vastness of a church and the magnificence of a seraglio. It was one of the King's pagodas" (Loti 169). French soldiers set up camp in the gilded pagoda, waiting for daybreak and the chance to attack the Chinese city of Hue, a murderous venture enthusiastically recounted in Impressions. Loti's description of the conversion of the pagoda from shrine to stronghold presages the "impenetrable and inscrutable" (GB 303) pagoda Maggie encounters in James's The Golden Bowl, a novel whose very form is modeled on that strange and outlandish image. Loti's narrative is just one of a constellation of sources for the colonial figures that govern The Golden Bowl, an examination of which helps illuminate James's paradoxical and perplexing notions of composition. ¹

James had first written admiringly of Loti's portraits of the East in 1884, when he had been struck by Art's ability to glorify the work of empire, magnifying its own importance in the process:

[in Loti's work] the nation or the group becomes a great figure operating on a great scale, and the drama of its literary production [. . .] a kind of world-drama, lighted by the universal sun, with Europe or America for the public, and the arena of races, the battle-field of their inevitable contrasts and competitions, for the stage. (FW 483)

At the very moment James was writing his foreword to Impressions, America was becoming just such "a great figure operating on a great scale," wresting possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from Spain in the years between 1898 and the publication of The Golden Bowl. As has been well-documented in recent studies by Margery Sabin and Thomas Galt Peyser, James, though he loathed the Spanish-American war and hated the idea of "US remote colonies run by bosses" (Skrupshelis 47), was fascinated by the spectacle of an emerging American imperialism, describing it as "a drama of great interest" (LHJ 295). The drama was particularly close to home in the summer of 1898, for John Hay--U.S. ambassador to Great Britain and an important participant in the debate over American expansion--had set up headquarters at the rented summer estate of Senator Donald Cameron, Surrenden Dering in Kent--just seventeen miles from Lamb House. James visited Hay at least twice that summer, and, according to Bernard Richards, used Surrenden Dering as the model for Fawns, Adam Verver's country estate in The Golden Bowl.

Although Hay and James differed over the necessity of American colonial expansion, James believed their shared nationality resulted in a common purpose, writing to his old friend in July 1898 that he was "working [. . .] to keep [America] in such credit or renown, in spite of everything, as may help it to add a little to yours" (Monteiro 121). This notion of the writer as an adjunct to the state department surfaces again in a 1904 letter to the now Secretary of State Hay, in which James, just after completing The Golden Bowl, proclaims: "I think indeed I ought to become the special ward, pupil, pensioner [. . .] of the Department of State, & that under some such fostering care and cultivation I might be made, somehow, internationally to pay" (133). James directly links the processes of composition and...