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

‘Sure. Nothing will. Good-night,’ she said. ‘She’ll die first.’
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Death, then, is no longer the potential ending that drives the action forward. Instead,
death is, like Athena in Euripides’s Ion, a deus ex machina whose purpose is to stop
the plot’s primary motion, to deny the characters the knowledge they are about to
attain. Ion, however, has more traditional epistemological concerns: the eponymous
character seems poised to learn that he is the son of the god Apollo, who raped his
mother. Athena denies him the knowledge and sends him on his way to found the
Ionian people. Fanny, by contrast, promises that the narrative logic of the novel
dictates that death will intervene not before Adam knows about the affair, but before
he signals his knowledge to Maggie. The impossibility is no longer knowledge of
infidelity—it is knowledge of knowledge. The stakes of this meta-epistemological
plot, Fanny insists, are so high that the tragic denouement would be short-circuited by
what is either incongruous objective plotting (that is, fate intervenes and causes the
death) or wholly sentimental plotting (Maggie somehow senses that a sign is about to
come from her father, and dies or wills herself to die as a consequence). That is, The
Golden Bowl will prioritize the psycho-social stakes of its meta-epistemological plot
over any adherence to objective realism or plot logic.
The dialogues between Fanny and Bob that conclude Part First, then, set up
the structure and themes of Part Second. They also, crucially, create a middle that is
not driven by traditional questions of plot—either suspense (forward-looking) or
epistemological (backward-looking). While two key objective events—Charlotte and
Amerigo’s night in an inn and Maggie’s return home—are important to understanding
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