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

The Golden Bowl’s absent middle, they are by this middle already in the novel’s past.
Rather than a plot development, what has happened in this empty space is a change in
narrative form and interest. In Book First, The Golden Bowl is a novel of multiple
points of view, building our knowledge of four characters and their relationships as it
builds to a single act of infidelity. Book Second might have centered itself with
reference to this infidelity, now in the novel’s past, playing out its consequences on
multiple characters. It might even have become the story of Maggie-as-detective, and
there are still elements of this particular plot. However, by delaying the novel’s
middle until after the infidelity has occurred and been discussed, and after Maggie’s
possibly-simultaneous decision to return home that night, James fills the absent
middle not with actions but with thoughts. Fanny may speculate about these
thoughts—but we do not know yet how they have developed in Maggie’s mind. And
we anticipate a plot driven by what she thinks of what her father thinks. The absent
middle, then, contains a shift in the novel’s form that allows us to shift from
epistemological concerns about the objective world to epistemological concerns that
occur within and between consciousnesses. Rather than a sexual act, there is a shift
between Books First and Second not of consciousness. This is a shift both in
Maggie’s consciousness and in the novel’s consciousness, as it rearranges its form
and point of view, rewriting Book First in the process, and plunging deeper into
modernist concerns with consciousness and epistemology.
The beginning of Book Second marks clearly the change that has happened in
both the novel and in Maggie Verver:
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