Narcissism and the Gilded Image: A Psychoanalytic Reading of The Golden Bowl

Narcissism and the Gilded Image: A Psychoanalytic Reading of The Golden Bowl By Beth Sharon Ash, University of Cincinnati The most influential contemporary readings of The Golden Bowl have focused on how Maggie Verver gets what she wants rather than on why she undertakes her project—that is, on her design and not on the desire that underwrites that design. Such a critical slant makes sense to some extent since, of all the characters in the novel, Maggie alone has the blueprint for marital happiness; and she rigorously imposes this construct on those around her. Mark Seltzer therefore regards her as James's novelistic representation of the way the marital norm operates as a means of social control; and Leo Bersani interprets her as a Jamesian artist inventing novelistic reality according to her formal requirements . These descriptions of Maggie (as a socially conditioned "agent" of power, or as an intellectually self-defining "artist") seem opposed on the issue of human freedom, but in fact neither Seltzer nor Bersani is talking about subjectivity in any obvious way. Their decision to eliminate subjectivity precludes an adequate theorization of it, and they are as a result forced to claim that some metaphysical entity—namely, the a priori of power or of pure mind—determines Maggie's design. In contrast, I believe that James presents Maggie Verver as exerting an undisciplined desire to be perfect and, more specifically, that her subjective pursuit is psychologically organized in terms of an archaic structure of both oedipal and preoedipal narcissistic wishes. Maggie's desire cannot be understood simply in terms of power, of intellectually driven self-construction. The "why" of desire invites a careful psychoanalytic reading of relational subjectivity—of how The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 55-90. © 1994, The Johns Hopkins University Press 56 The Henry James Review Maggie's bond with her father shapes or patterns her subjectivity, and of how these patterns of self are enacted and repeated in her effort to shape or design her social world. Before turning to my reading of the novel, I want to explore a bit further the positions of Seltzer and of Bersani for the ways in which they implicitly invite a psychoanalytic rejoinder to their arguments for the primacy of design. For Seltzer, "method is already the goal," and by this he means that, in the novel, care is a strategy or a design of power (60). I agree with Seltzer's observation that love and control coincide in the text, and I am in other ways indebted to his reading. I disagree, however, with Seltzer's Foucauldianism, which says that any desiring relation is repressive because power is coextensive with the social. In effect, social beings are not disciplined by the repression of their desires, since they are repressed by their desires instead. As I see it, there are at least two problems with Foucault—one having to do with the constitution of the subject, and the other having to do with motivation. First, the idea that unidirectional and surveillant modes of power transform human beings into subjects is incoherent. A human being becomes a subject through interaction with other subjects, and such interaction presupposes the possibility of the reciprocal recognition of subjects. For both Foucault and Seltzer, the only reciprocity is reciprocal or reversible force that always implies a hierarchy. The result is not only that the social domain of intersubjectivity is undertheorized, but also that power, since it shapes and invents, assumes the status of a meta-subject. Second, since the entire human capacity for strategy and calculation is passed over to power, the question of whose power and for what purpose or want can never be posed. Seltzer can only tell us that "love and power in The Golden Bowl are two ways of saying the same thing" (66); he cannot tell us why, in James's depiction of the relational system of the Verver household, Maggie's love takes the form of coercion. Like Seltzer, Bersani eliminates the psychological subject. For him, Jamesian écriture has nothing to do with unconscious fantasy and is best understood according to the idea of pure intelligence—or, as he puts it, mind "liberated from...