"A Secret Responsive Ecstasy": James and the Pleasure of the Abject

James is known as a novelist of "renunciation." His characters, male and female, are notoriously passive. But in several of his female characters--Maggie Verver, Milly Theale, and Isabel Archer--renunciation of self goes beyond passivity to passion. In the second volume of The Golden Bowl there is a scene in which Maggie strolls on the terrace at the end of a leisurely summer's day at her father's country house. She is reflecting on her wrongs--her step-mother, Charlotte, is having an affair with her husband, Amerigo. Fantasizing about "the rights of resentment, the rages of jealousy, the protests of passion" (489), she finds herself "thrilling with the idea of the prodigious effect [ . . . ] she had at her command" (486) should she spring up "under her wrong and mak[e] them all start, stare and turn pale [ . . . ] sound out their doom in a single sentence" (487). But when, a little later, Charlotte comes out to her--comes out, to Maggie's view, with a palpably menacing intention--her sense of power evaporates. She goes to meet Charlotte not in a spirit of outraged decency and self-righteous anger but in absolute abjection:

Maggie came on with her heart in her hands; she came on with the definite prevision, throbbing like the tick of a watch, of a doom impossibly sharp and hard, but to which, after looking at it with her eyes wide open, she had none the less bowed her head. By the time she was at her companion's side [ . . . ] her head was already on the block, so that the consciousness that everything had gone blurred all perception of whether or no the axe had fallen. (492-93)

Maggie, like Milly Theale before her, is a lamb to the slaughter. She chooses annihilation. With her "eyes wide open," she chooses to give up her sense of wrong, her anger and outrage, and any shred of dignity she might have been able to muster. She "summon[s] all her powers" (496) not for confrontation but for submission. In the encounter which follows, she abandons her own sense of truth--indeed, her very identity--and speaks the lines Charlotte writes for her, wanting only to do, as she says, what Charlotte wants.

In her abject surrender to the woman who is at once her greatest enemy and her ideal self, Maggie finds "exaltation" and even "ecstasy." Moreover, through her abjection she accedes--as Milly, arguably, does not--to power, becoming the "knowing" woman Charlotte had modelled for her. Maggie's passivity has often been read, following Dorothea Krook, as a shining example of Christian virtue: Maggie is "poor in spirit," "pitifully weak and wretched: pitifully diffident, of course, about her power to accomplish her task; and pitifully afraid" (255). By means of her unselfishness, long-suffering, and forgiveness, Maggie is able to triumph over evil (read: Charlotte) and restore "the right relations of [the characters'] moral universe" (273). More recently, the complex relationship between Charlotte and Maggie has been read as a struggle for dominance between their competing "versions" of events, a struggle which takes place in the arena of language. According to such readings, Maggie's acts of submission to Charlotte in the novel's second book are merely strategic. For example, Leo Bersani argues that Maggie lies because she refuses to engage with Charlotte's version of events (146); Paul Armstrong suggests that she is seeking to render herself opaque to Charlotte's gaze (178); and Priscilla Walton argues that Maggie's lies are her way of allowing for multiple versions of the same story (157). For such critics, Maggie's "self-abasement," as Ruth Yeazell puts it, "is verbal only" (114), or, in Armstrong's words, is "voluntary" (179) and "feigned" (180). But such interpretations do not seem to me to account for the intense, even sexualized pleasure Maggie experiences in...