Abstract
The Golden Bowl, James’s last completed novel, represents the apparent triumph in his art of form as content. It is a dominion achieved, for the most part, by style. Yet both James and his heroine face at the end the painful irony that even so highly wrought a form may not be adequate to what it seeks to contain.
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It helps us ever so happily to see the grave distinction between substance and form in a really wrought work of art signally break down … the sacrament of execution indissolubly marries them, and the marriage, like any other marriage, has only to be a ‘true’ one for the scandal of a breach not to show.
(Preface to The Awkward Age)
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Notes
As Eileen Watts observes in ‘The Golden Bowl: A Theory of Metaphor’ [Modern Language Studies, XIII (Winter 1987)] the actual golden bowl has the advantage of moving ‘in both worlds of art life’ (p. 174). Watts sees the development of the bowl as a vehicle that becomes ‘its own tenor’ (p. 175).
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© 1993 Mary Cross
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Cross, M. (1993). Text and Countertext: The Golden Bowl. In: Henry James. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22661-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22661-0_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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