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The Henry James Review 23.1 (2002) 38-52



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Appeals to Incalculability:
Sex, Costume Drama, and The Golden Bowl

Dianne F. Sadoff, Miami University


Sex is the last taboo in film.

--Catherine Breillat

Today's "meat movie" is tomorrow's blockbuster.

--Carol J. Clover

When it was released in May 2001, James Ivory's film of Henry James's final masterpiece, The Golden Bowl, received decidedly mixed reviews. Kevin Thomas calls it a "triumph"; Stephen Holden, "handsome, faithful, and intelligent" yet "emotionally distanced." Given the successful--if not blockbuster--run of 1990s James movies--Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Agniezka Holland's Washington Square (1997), and Iain Softley's The Wings of the Dove (1997)--the reviewers, as well as the fans, must have anticipated praising The Golden Bowl. Yet the film opened in "selected cities," as the New York Times movie ads noted; after New York and Los Angeles, it showed in university towns and large urban areas but not "at a theater near you" or at "theaters everywhere." Never mind, however, for the Merchant Ivory film never intended to be popular with the masses. Seeking a middlebrow audience of upper-middle-class spectators and generally intelligent filmgoers, The Golden Bowl aimed to portray an English cultural heritage attractive to Anglo-bibliophiles. James's faux British novel, however, is paradoxically peopled with foreigners: American upwardly mobile usurpers, an impoverished Italian prince, and a social-climbing but shabby ex-New York yentl. Yet James's ironic portrait of this expatriate culture, whose characters seek only to imitate their Brit betters--if not in terms of wealth and luxury, at least in social charm and importance--failed to seem relevant to viewers [End Page 38] in 2001. Despite its hip mix of sex with luxury, the Merchant Ivory Golden Bowl too closely resembled 1980s and 1990s quality costume drama to appeal to a mass audience used to the tarting up of James characteristic of, say, Softley's Wings. In quality costume drama--a mode of nostalgia film subsumed in Andrew Higson's "heritage film"--the costumes may get in the way of bodily pleasures, may picture sexual perversions too old-fashioned to be fun. The sexy post-national British heritage film, too, made Merchant Ivory's view of heritage Britain appear altogether too bland (see Powrie). Smoothing out the ironic edges of Henry James's The Golden Bowl made the film look outdated at millennium's end, even to the U.S. fan of British heritage culture.

As 1990s filmmakers seemed intuitively to know, Henry James's novels appear to be made for the big screen. Whereas James's novels insist upon the centrality of seeing, knowing, and spectatorship, however, the Merchant Ivory Golden Bowl goes them one better by visualizing voyeurism. In the novel, James displays a series of revelations--two of Maggie's; one, her father's--as knowledge verified by the trope of "seeing." Indeed, these revelations are preceded by two scenes of seeing. In the first, Adam Verver and Maggie exchange looks at Fawns when the daughter realizes her father is being pursued by the Miss Lutches and Mrs. Rance. Adam sees "the look in his daughter's eyes," a "look with which he saw her take in" the pursuit and his acquiescence: "he saw her see," and "she saw him" (GB 112-14). Likewise, when Fanny Assingham sees that Charlotte Stant's presence at Fawns has routed the Misses and Mrs., Fanny tells Adam that she "saw the[ir] consciousness": "one saw it come over them [. . .]. One saw them understand and exchange looks" regarding Charlotte's womanly charm; "I see, I see," Adam responds (143). This plastic play of consciousness on the face and through looks produces Adam's only revelation. "Light broke for him," our narrator says, outlining a "vast expanse of discovery," a "hallucination," a "vision" strangely delayed by his "blindness": that the "call of his future" as a father means that he must marry so Maggie appears not to have forsaken him (153-54). Seeing is...

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