ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

aren’t to understand that The Golden Bowl literally has no plot, no objective world in
which actions take place. Nevertheless, we are told that this world, and particularly
Charlotte and Amerigo’s place in it, are increasingly irrelevant. The novel’s stakes are
now stakes about knowledge—or, more precisely, signs of knowledge. Fanny insists
that Maggie will watch her father “[f]or the first faint sign. I mean of his noticing”
(295). Fanny herself is confident that Adam has not noticed because she has been
watching Maggie—and sees no sign in Maggie that she has seen a sign from her
father: “Nothing—from him—has come” (295). Once again, the driving force and
epistemological question posed is not one about the state of the objective world.
Instead, this is a recursive epistemological problem about knowledge and thought. It
is not even that Adam must be kept ignorant—but that Maggie must receive no sign
that he is anything but ignorant. Knowledge, thoughts, and the social cues that
communicate them are the keys to Book Second. Fanny announces, then, that Book
Second will pose epistemological problems about thought. The mind, then, rather
than the external world, becomes (if it was not already) the setting for The Golden
Bowl’s story.
In the final line of Book First, Fanny underlines how much objective reality
and its plot elements have become subsidiary to subjective consciousness and its
internal drama. Fanny asserts to Bob her certainty that Adam has given no sign that
he knows anything of his wife’s infidelity:
‘Nothing—from him—has come.’
‘You’re so awfully sure?’
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