Consecrated Diplomacy and the Concretion of Self

Consecrated Diplomacy and the Concretion of Self by Marcia Ian, University of Virginia Maggie Verver "had but one rule of art—to keep within bounds and not lose her head." (GB) Henry James's readers are often distressed to find "relation" threatened in his novels by what seems to them an indecent interpénétration of moral, sexual, and psychological terminologies, and they respond accordingly by trying either to reject or redeem what they identify as Jamesian ambiguity. In The Golden Bowl, for example, it is not easy to determine whether Maggie Verver's intimacy with her husband is based on succcessful relationship with him or possession of him, and critical assessments of the novel reflect this problem.' Responses tend to be emphatic, however . When Maggie finally wins Amerigo back from Charlotte Stant, having resolutely quashed their renewed affair, we either are appalled by the moral imperialism implied by "the gradual coalescence of Maggie's and the Prince's moral consciousness," or else feel elevated by Maggie's redemptive activity as if it were the embodiment of caritas (Wegelin Ch. 6). I lean toward the former view; it seems to me that Maggie separates from her father and cleaves unto her husband mainly in order to achieve the self-possession she finds increasingly desirable and that James finds irresistible. The overwhelming desire for self-possession—and therefore for self—in The Golden Bowl is the subject of this essay. In the following pages, I will describe the eroticized solipsism this novel embodies and the process of epistemological concretion by means of which the Jamesian self cultivates, lüce Rowland Mallet in Roderick Hudson or Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove, ' 'a little plot of independent feeling' ' (RHl, 14), a "private precinct" of "solitude and security" where the mind can be alone with itself (WD II, 236). Maggie Verver establishes her own domain by means of a "reconsecrated diplomacy" strangely in accord with the "true" behavior Polonius recommends to Laertes: . . . Give thy thoughts no tongue, Nor any unproportioned tiiought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar. Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel. (Hamlet I, iii, 59-63) James uses Shakespeare's image of friends bound to each other "with hoops of steel" to describe the Prince and Maggie Verver bound together "in the steel hoop of an intimacy." Maggie has deliberately fashioned this ontological hoop out of her wül to conceal; it marks off her icy "Utile plot of independent feeling. ' ' She has discovered that her husband Amerigo and her father's wife Charlotte were lovers before their respective marriages and that they have since renewed their affair, but she artfully conceals this knowledge in order both to preserve her father's supposed ignorance of the situation and to avoid accepting or assigning blame for it. Accordingly, she labors to present to the others a "brilliant perfect surface," an appearance of equanimity behind which she can "escape from being herself suspected of suspicion" (GB II, 100): "She was keeping her head, for a reason, for a cause; and the labour of this detachment, with the labour of her forcing the pitch of it down, held them together in the steel hoop of an intimacy compared with which artless passion would have been but a beating of the air. . . . Therefore to be free, to be free to act, other tiian abjectly for her father, she must conceal from him the validity that, lüce a microscopic insect pushing a grain of sand, she was taking on even for herself" (GB H, 141-42). "The labour of detachment" is an elegant psychological /gynecological/epistemological image for the primal role of discrimination in the Jamesian consciousness. This discrimination is the opposite of "artless passion," but it is not the opposite of passion itself. It is the basis, in ^ nutshell, of artful passion. For James artful passion is the real right thing. Compared to it "artless passion would have been but a beating of the air. " The ' 'labour of detachment" is a process of epistemological contraction. It delivers into the "world' ' an aesthetic object conceived through the union...