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The Golden Bowl and "The Voice of Blood" by Leo B. Levy, Arizona State University Many of the difficulties of The Golden Bowl arise from the complications implicit in a binding relationship turned inward, excluding others from its province. Adam and Maggie Verver, father and daughter, establish their self-sufficiency through their faith that they are all possible things to each other. James conveys the impression that the world they have made for themselves Is unassailable in its completeness and in the satisfactions it offers. Their marriages bring them even more closely together; the adultery of Prince Amerigo, Maggie's husband, and Charlotte, Adam's wife, Is a result of the lovers' exclusion from the self-enclosed world of their partners. Maggie, awakened to this reality, determines to recover the love of the Prince and restore Charlotte to her father. In the equilibrium that follows, the old and the new are strangely combined: Maggie Incorporates Charlotte's role of mistress into her marriage; Charlotte's love for the Prince continues despite their separation, and her relationship to Adam remains unchanged. This process in Charlotte, moreover, is paralleled by Maggie's separation from her father and her continuing bond with him. Behind this extraordinary plot is the principle that exogamous relationships must preserve the values of the primary ties that have been superseded. Old equations are replaced with new ones or by compromises between them. The first—and unworkable—equation is posed by Fanny Asslngham, who declares that the relationship of father and daughter is not threatened by their marriages. "'I quite hold,'" she informs her husband, "'that a person can mostly feel but one passion—one tender passion, that is—at a time. Only that doesn't hold good for our primary and instinctive attachments, the "voice of blood," such as one's feeling for a parent or a brother. Those may be Intense and yet not prevent other intensities. "Ί John Bayley supports this view, implying that it is also James's: "it Is basically right to divide one's affections between a blood relation and a husband, no matter what complications may ensue, while it is wrong to divide them between a husband and a lover."2 But James makes it unmistakably clear that the tie between father and daughter does "prevent other intensities." Maggie's assumption that she can divide her affections fails. The sense in which she succeeds, after an agonizing struggle, in sustaining filial and marital loyalties constitutes the meaning of The Golden Bowl. Bayley, however, is correct In arguing that the father-daughter relationship, despite its "appearance of monstrosity ... is surely far less sinister than is often made out" (p. 249). Its incestuous implications are Incidental to James's larger purpose of suggesting that such a union may be at once "normal," ideal, and all-inclusive. This view is based upon an hypothesis never explicitly stated but felt throughout the novel—that a close kinship tie, at least until it is interfered with, may contain all possible present and future relationships. James calls this all-embracing intimacy a "communion"—a term befitting an association founded upon such a large body of tacit agreements that the two persons communicate simply by being in each other's presence or by faint signs. The images describing Adam and Maggie suggest regression into an Infantile state: their rituals are likened to those of children: Adam resembles Maggie's son, "looking very slight and young and superficially manageable, almost as much like her child, putting it a little freely, as like her parent" (II, 82). The make-believe character of their life together has been much noted: "They 1. The Golden Bowl (New York: Scribner's, 1909), I, 395. Page references are in my text. "I" refers to vol. XXIII, »The Prince," and "II" to vol. XXIV, "The Princess," of the New York Edition. 2. The Characters of Love (New York: Basic Books, 1960), p. 249. 154 were fairly at times, the dear things, like children playing at paying visits, playing at 'Mr. Thompson and Mrs. Fane,' each hoping that the other would really stay to tea" (I, 252). This is the childhood stage out of which the evolution of...

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