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"A mistress of shades": Maggie as Reviser in The Golden Bowl by Priscilla L. Walton, Carleton University, Ottawa When Mark Seltzer notes that, traditionally, The Golden Bowl has been regarded as the "large problem child in James's writings" (66), he draws attention to the critical controversy that novel has generated. Traditional critics have tended to be divided in their assessments of The Golden Bowl, depending upon whether they approve or disapprove of its protagonist, Maggie Verver. Recent critics, who often offer intriguing interpretations of the novel, have moved away from moral judgments of Maggie, but their readings of her character continue to diverge. John Carlos Rowe, Leo Bersani, and Mark Seltzer all perceive Maggie as a textual reviser and suggest that Book II, written from her perspective, manifests her revision of Book I. These male critics, however, display a disturbing tendency to denigrate Maggie and to minimalize her artistic process; they perceive her revisions as circumscriptive and dangerous. Bersani views Maggie with suspicion and suggests that she is a referential reviser: "She does absolutely nothing but wait for the single fiction she promotes—that of her own and her father's happy marriages—to stifle every other way of living the story" (150-51). Along the same line, Seltzer contends that Maggie is involved in a "normalizing process" that is reductive since "[t]o rectify and to normalize, all in the name of love: this is to exercise power in the very act of disowning power" (95). Rowe believes that Maggie is destructive, for "[t]he lies she attempts to hide and then sustains—symbolized in her effort to put the shattered bowl together again—reflect the destructive and subversive qualities of her art" (204). There are other critics, like Elizabeth Allen, who view Maggie's behavior in a more positive light and who draw attention to the depiction of the sexes in the novel. Allen argues that James's last novel dramatizes feminine subjectivity, which "takes into account a perpetual tension between self as other, between being defined as sign and yet attempting to assert subjectivity through multiplication and mystification of the signified, thus focussing attention back to the signifier" (207). But Allen ignores Maggie's act of revision and, hence, The Henry James Review 13 (1992): 143-53 © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 144 The Henry James Review the textual multiplicity. Rather disappointingly, she decides that Maggie reasserts the status quo in Book II because she has learned to accept the dictate that "all women ... must suffer" (200). I agree with the above critics' contentions that Maggie is a subjected character who later performs as a textual reviser. But I also believe that her behavior foregrounds a problem that has escaped critical attention. My reading differs from those male critics of the novel, for I do not perceive Maggie's revisions as destructive or confining. On the contrary, I would argue that these revisions constitute her means of opening the closed text of Book I. Indeed, her methodology is in accord with the tenets of post-structuralist feminism since her revisions disrupt the masculine referentiality of Book I by privileging the pluralizing nature of the feminine Other in Book II. As such, she feminizes the script written by the Prince, her father, and even Charlotte, who subscribes to their view.1 There is, however, a disparity that exists between Maggie's procedure , which is open and inclusive, and her actions, which are not. I would suggest that this disparity lies at the root of the divergent critical assessments of Maggie, for if critics focus on what she does, they perceive her as manipulative; if they focus on how she does it, their response is quite different. Maggie's behavior is contradictory, for while her revisions are liberating, they do not change or modify the oppressive social structure in the text. In this, The Golden Bowl broaches a larger issue, for it allegorizes a potential problem in the practical application of post-structuralist feminist theory. Maggie's fate may serve as a warning that a method that lacks agency may also lack the ability to effect change. Theoretically, the discourses in The Golden Bowl conform to...

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