Prince Amerigo's Borgia Heritage

Prince Amerigo's Borgia Heritage Cheryl B. Torsney, University of Florida Critics of Henry James's The Golden Bowl who comment on the significance of Prince Amerigo's given name usually link it with Amerigo Vespucci. F. 0. Matthlessen states: "Prince Amerigo's name symbolizes how he must be a redlscoverer of America, or what may prove even harder, of Americans." Citing Matthlessen, Oscar Carg 11 I expands the notion: "Like his ancestor, Amerigo, too, is a searcher not for any pristine land in the West, but for the American formula for marital happiness." Assuming Amerigo's Vespucci lineage to be of primary importance, critics have ignored another branch of the Prince's family tree. We may want to modify our reading of his character once we real I ze that Amerigo may be not only a Vespucci but also a twentieth-century descendant of the Renaissance Borgia family. James piques our curiosity about the Prince's heritage early in the novel and then builds on It. First he alerts us to the notoriety of Amerigo's family when Maggie Verver, the American Ingenue engaged to marry Amerigo, mentions the afternoons she has spent in Amerigo's family library and In the British Museum studying the tomes of his family history. In fact, Maggie marries Amerigo, Nathalie Wright insists, not so much because of her love for him as because of her attraction to his family's past, "especially to the crimes and wicked persons in it." Later Amerigo himself identifies one ancestor as "the wicked Pope, the monster most of all." And while J. A. Ward notes that the Prince's history Is "associated with violence and criminality, remotely with the crimes of the Borgias," his fleeting suggestion does not push the issue far enough since we must know more about Amerigo's heritage in order to appreciate his struggle to reject It. In other words, to contradict Sal I ie Sears, it makes a great deal of difference to which wicked Pope James is referring. Admittedly, the Borgia name appears only once in The Golden Bowl, that reference occurring in the form of a striking comparison. Fanny Assingham, during a visit at Fawns, the Ververs' country home, marvels at Charlotte's influence on the Misses Lutch and Ranee: "One saw the consciousness I speak of come over the poor things, very much as I suppose people at the court of the Borgias may have watched each other begin to look queer after having had the honour of taking wine with the heads of the family. My comparison's only a little awkward, for I don't In the least mean Charlotte was consciously dropping poison into their cup. She was just herself their poison, in the sense of mortally disagreeing with them—but she didn't know it." (I, 193-94) Fanny's comparison is unwittingly apt. Identified with Anerigo by her passion and by her ltal tanate culture, Charlotte, if not biologically then spiritually, shares the Prince's legacy of ancient crimes. 1. F. 0. Matthlessen, Henry James: The Major Phase (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1944), p. 88; Oscar CargIII, The Novels of Henry James (New York: MacmilIan, 1961), p. 390. 2. Nathal ia Wright, American Novelists in Italy (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), p. 233; Henry James, The Golden Bowl (New York: Scribner's, 1909), I, 10 (hereafter noted parenthetically within the text); J. A. Ward, The Imagination of Disaster: Evil in the Fiction of Henry James (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 145; SaIIIe Sears, The Negative Imagination: Form and Perspective in the Novels of Henry James (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968), p. 198. 126 That legacy is bequeathed to Amerigo by his ancestor "the most wicked Pope." James's use of the definite article and the superlative epithet seems to Insist upon specificity and to challenge Robert Gale's generalization that "James' ¡mages Involving Cathol ici sm, while almost uniformly respectful, remain only general and at most colorfully dramatic." 3 While several Renaissance popes qualify as wicked, only Alexander Vl, Roderigo de Borgia, leader of the Roman Church from August 11, 1492, to August 18, 1503, qualifies as "the most wicked...