• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7036 0

(of Eden?) at Fawns, Maggie lies superbly; and keeps her enemy in ignorance, a worse state – for her – than even the United States. Finally, Maggie’s great scene with her father is significant for what is not said. No word is spoken by either against Charlotte; nor is there any hint that all is not well with Amerigo and Maggie. But James’s images of Maggie and Adam together in the garden – again the garden at Fawns (from the Latin fons: spring or source?) – are those of a husband and wife at the end or the beginning of some momentous change in their estate. The images are deliberately and precisely marital: ‘They were husband and wife – oh, so immensely! – as regards other persons.’ The reference here is to house party guests but the implication is that ‘other persons’ include her husband and his wife. They speak of their social position and its ambiguities; of the changes that their marriages have made. She is a princess. He is the husband of a great lady of fashion. They speak of the beauty and selfishness of their old life.

Maggie remarks of her husband that ‘I’m selfish, so to speak, for him.’ Maggie’s aria on the nature of jealousy (dependent in direct ratio on the degree of love expended) is somewhat mystifying because she may ‘seem often not to know quite where I am’. But Adam appears to know exactly where he is: ‘I guess I’ve never been jealous.’ Maggie affirms that that is because he is ‘beyond everything. Nothing can pull you down.’ To which Adam responds, ‘Well then, we make a pair. We’re all right.’ Maggie reflects on the notion of sacrifice in love. The ambiguities are thick in the prose: Does she mean, at one point, the Prince or Charlotte or Adam himself? But when she says, ‘I sacrifice you,’ all the lines of the drama cross and, as they do, so great is the tension that James switches the point of view in mid-scene from daughter to father as James must, for an instant, glimpse Adam’s response to this declaration: ‘He had said to himself, “She’ll break down and name Amerigo; she’ll say it’s to him she’s sacrificing me; and it’s by what that will give me – with so many other things too – that my suspicion will be clinched.” ’ Actually, this is supposed to be Maggie’s view of what her father senses, but James has simply abandoned her in mid-consciousness for the source of her power, the father-consort. How Adam now acts will determine her future. He does not let her down. In fact, he is ‘practically offering himself, pressing himself upon her, as a sacrifice . . .’ The deed is done. He will take Charlotte back to American City. He will leave the field to Maggie.

Adam has been sacrificed. But has he? This is the question that reverberates. Maggie finds herself adoring him for his stillness and his power; and for the fact ‘that he was always, marvellously, young – which couldn’t but crown, at this juncture, his whole appeal to her imagination’. She gives him the ultimate accolade: ‘I believe in you more than anyone.’ They are again as one, this superbly monstrous couple. ‘His hands came out, and while her own took them he drew her to his breast and held her. He held her hard and kept her long, and she let herself go; but it was an embrace that august and almost stern, produced, for its intimacy, no revulsion and broke into no inconsequence of tears.’

Where Maggie leaves off and Adam begins is not answered. Certainly, incest – a true Jamesian ‘horror’ – hovers about the two of them, though in a work as delicately balanced as this the sweaty deed itself seems irrelevant and unlikely. It is enough that two splendid monsters have triumphed yet again over everyone else and, best of all, over mere human nature. But then Maggie contains, literally, the old Adam. He is progenitor; and the first cause; fons.

It is Adam who places Charlotte in her cage – a favourite Jamesian image; now James adds the image of a noose and silken cord by which Adam leads her wherever he chooses – in this case to the great republic of which Fanny observes to Maggie: ‘I see the long miles of ocean and the dreadful great country, State