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

epresenting multiple points of view, the extra-diegetic narrator represents a single
point of view, which in turn constructs the multiple points of view. The story, as I
have argued, is encompassed by Maggie’s mind, so much so that it is useful to think
of Maggie’s mind as being the primary setting of the story, and its development the
narrative’s plot. Yet, Maggie’s mental development seems to consist entirely of her
developing thoughts about the narrative’s external plot. Thus, the shift in the narrative
discourse in The Golden Bowl’s middle represents a sort of collapse of the internal
and the external, multiple points of view and the single point of view, the mind and
the world. Book First reminds us that the world is populated by multiple minds, each
attempting to understand and manipulate that world through a partial point of view.
Book Second reminds us that no single point of view is static, that the mind itself is a
developing, dynamic thing, not simply a focalizer through which the world may be
narrated, but a world unto itself. Book Second, however, is also an exploration of the
limits of narrative’s power to represent multiple points of view. For the reader of The
Golden Bowl is, like Maggie, only a single mind; any attempt to cross the chasm that
separates that mind from the world and the other minds that occupy it occurs
ultimately within that single mind, as a second-order point of view. This is a middle
that, by re-arranging the modernist representation of the mind, highlights both its
powers and its limitations.
104