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

accomplish, who she will meet, what she will read, how she will navigate her difficult
situation, what she will be like when she reaches Mme Merle’s age. The ending of
The Golden Bowl, however, leads us only back to its middle, where Maggie’s mind
expanded to take in a world, and the world shrank to fit inside her mind. In the
ending, as in the middle, the sexual consummation of a new arrangement of people
remains outside the narrative, beyond both narrative proprieties and, perhaps, James’s
method of thought report to represent.
The Golden Bowl’s middle has multiple structural functions that encompass
both traditional plotting and modernist poetics. The middle may be read, as Wilson
has argued, as the crisis in a fairly simple plot, in which an unusual arrangement of
the four principle characters, developed over the novel’s first half, leads to an extramarital
affair that destabilizes the situation until its final resolution in the novel’s end.
The middle is also the sexual consummation of that affair itself: an empty space for
the unnarratable. However, the middle is also a transition between narrative methods:
between a Book First that includes multiple focalizers to a Book Second that includes
only one. The use of multiple focalizers in Book First poses particular
epistemological questions, as we understand particular developing events through the
point of view of Amerigo, Adam, Charlotte, and (briefly) Maggie. The emphasis,
then, is on the incomplete knowledge and varying motivations of each, as well as on
the reader’s task of constructing a sequence of events from a narrative discourse that
consists mostly of dialogue and the narration of subjective thought. In Book Second,
by contrast, Maggie is the sole focalizer, and the implications of James’s internal
focalization become quite different. Rather than an extra-diegetic narrator
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