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

If this image, however, may represent our young woman’s
consciousness of a recent change in her life—a change now but a few
days old—it must at the same time be observed that she both sought
and found in renewed circulation, as I have called it, a measure of
relief from the idea of having perhaps to answer for what she had
done. The pagoda in her blooming garden figured the arrangement—
how otherwise was it to be named?--by which, so strikingly, she had
been able to marry without breaking, as she like to put it, with her past.
(James, Golden Bowl 300)
The image here is referred to is not actually the static visual image. Instead, it is a
scene suggested by the narrator, complete with action—and with figurative language
nested again within the scene: “She had knocked, in short—though she could scarce
have said whether for admission or for what; she had applied her hand to a cool,
smooth spot, and had waited to see what would happen. Something had happened; it
was as if a sound, at her touch, after a little, had come back to her from within; a
sound sufficiently suggesting that her approach had been noted” (300). A change in
Maggie’s consciousness is figured as an action within an image. And within that
action, there is not so much a sound as a further layer of Maggie’s consciousness, as
the Maggie within the image imagines a sound, or has an experience that to the
narrator suggests a sound. And this whole elaborate image is itself a way of
describing Maggie’s consciousness as she thinks back on the last few days: her mind
contains not only the plot of the novel, but contains its own evolution.
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