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

Chapter 2: Modernist Points of View:
A Middle Without Text in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl
Henry James’s The Golden Bowl has, in some ways, the most conventional
middle in this study. Although its structure has been the subject of a good deal of
scholarly discussion, The Golden Bowl’s reputation as an early or proto-modernist
classic lies primarily in the late James style, with its labyrinthine sentence structures,
heavy abstraction, and, most importantly, its restricted point of view which, coupled
with an obsessive attention to the details of mental processes, creates a modernist
Impressionism that often borders on a stream of consciousness style. Where Lord Jim
introduces a new character to forcibly arrest the novel’s narrative direction and genre
in a pivotal scene, The Golden Bowl builds to a crisis in the plot at the novel’s
structural middle, which clearly identified by conventional markers. 6 The novel’s
forty-two chapters are divided among six Parts, which are in turn divided evenly
among two Books. The chapters generally narrate a scene, or a few closely connected
scenes, and they generally take the point of view of one (and occasionally two)
characters in that scene. Longer scenes may take up more than one chapter.
Significant events or lapses in time take place between the Parts.
So far, there is nothing unusual here: the two-volume novel may have been
less common than the three-volume novel in the nineteenth century, but Dickens’
Little Dorrit, for example, used the two-volume format in an apparently similar
manner to The Golden Bowl. Both novels even title their Books. However, the titles
6 Wilson offers an acute summary of the function of the novel’s middle in terms of the novel’s outward
plot: “Book First will set out the origin and development of the crisis, Book Second will trace the
course and nature of its resolution” (60).
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