Introduction

Abstract

I read the novels of the major phase, The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1904), as a finely calibrated exploration of fin-de-siècle experience, a framework within which they form a cumulative, coherently evolving corpus. The late novels invoke familiar western polarizations — spirit and matter, mind and body, subject and object — in order to grapple with a psycho-cultural impasse. Jamesian decadence is seen, in this light, as the expression of an impulse toward dissolving rigidified polarities; this impulse reflects a current of morbid anxiety, but also fosters emergent modes of psychocultural regeneration.¹