The Golden Bowl - Henry James [4]
At first the bowl enchants Charlotte. But the shop owner overdoes it when he says that he has been saving it for a special customer. Charlotte knows then that there must be a flaw; and says as much. The dealer rises to the challenge: ‘But if it’s something you can’t find out, isn’t it as good as if it were nothing?’ Charlotte wonders how – or if – one can give a present that one knows to be flawed. The dealer suggests that the flaw be noted to the recipient, as a sign of good faith. In any case, the bowl is a piece of solid crystal and crystal, unlike glass, does not break; but it can shatter ‘on lines and by laws of its own’. Charlotte decides that she cannot afford the bowl; she joins Amerigo, who has been waiting for her in the street. He had seen the flaw at once. ‘Per Dio, I’m superstitious! A crack is a crack – and an omen’s an omen.’
For the moment, that is the end of the bowl itself. But James has now made the golden bowl emblematic, to use a Dickens word, of the relations between the lovers and their legal mates. To all appearances, the world of the two couples is a flawless rare crystal, all of a piece, beautifully gilded with American money. Of the four, the Prince is the first to detect the flaw; and though he wanted no part of the actual bowl, he himself slips easily into that adulterine situation which is the flaw in their lives. Charlotte refused to buy the bowl because she could not, simply, pay the price; yet she accepts the adultery – and pays the ultimate price.
In due course, Maggie acquires the bowl as a present for her father. Although she does not detect the flaw, the dealer believes himself mysteriously honour-bound to come to her house and tell her that the flaw is there. During his confession, he notices photographs of the Prince and Charlotte; tells Maggie that they were in his shop together. Thus, she learns that they knew each other before her marriage and, as she tells Fanny, ‘They went about together – they’re known to have done it. And I don’t mean only before – I mean after.’
As James’s other triumph of knowledge gained through innocence was called What Maisie Knew, so this story might easily have been called When Maggie Knew. As the bowl is the symbol of the flawed marriages, so the line: ‘knowledge, knowledge was a fascination as well as a fear’, stands as a sort of motto to this variation on one of our race’s earliest stories, Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit of knowledge which, once plucked, let the first human couple know both the joys of sex and the pain of its shadow, death. But if James was echoing in his last novel one of the first of all our stories, something is missing: the serpent-tempter. Is it Adam Verver? Or is he too passive to be so deliberate an agent? Actually, the shop owner is the agent of knowledge; but he is peripheral to the legend. Fanny Assingham has something slightly serpentine about her. Certainly, she is always in the know, but she is without malice. In fact, she prefers people not to know; and so she makes the splendid gesture of smashing the bowl and, presumably, the knowledge that the bowl has brought Maggie. But it is too late for that. Maggie moves into action. She sets out to rid herself of Charlotte because ‘I want a happiness without a hole in it . . . The golden bowl – as it was to have been.’
In the first of a series of splendid confrontations, Maggie tells the Prince that she knows. He, in turn, asks if Adam knows. ‘Find out for yourself!’ she answers. Maggie is now having, as James colloquially puts it, ‘the time of her life – she knew it by the perpetual throb of this sense of possession, which was almost too violent either to recognize or to hide’. Again, ‘possession’. When the suspicious Charlotte confronts her in the garden