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

offer an essential clue to what makes The Golden Bowl a modernist novel in structure
as well as style. Whereas Little Dorrit contrasts “Poverty” with “Riches,” separating
its books both by time and material fortune within a well-defined contemporary social
structure, The Golden Bowl offers “The Prince” and “The Princess,” titles which
suggest, combined with the contrast of the novel’s contemporary setting, a certain
timelessness and a long-gone or even mythical social structure. It is the tie of the
mythic and timeless to the contemporary and specific, as well to the minds of James’s
characters, that makes this a modernist, rather than a postmodernist, move. The Prince
of Book First is Prince Amerigo, a poor Italian of aristocratic heritage and the
primary focalizer of his Book. The Princess and primary focalizer of Book Second is
Maggie Verver, the American heiress of the wealthy American art collector Adam
Verver; she marries Amerigo early in the novel. Book Second, meanwhile, takes
place not after a lapse in time from Book First; instead, its beginning overlaps Book
First’s ending, offering, for the first time excepting a partial glimpse during Adam
Verver’s Part Second, a rendering of Maggie’s consciousness just at the moment it
begins to awaken.
This is, not coincidentally, roughly the moment of Amerigo’s consummation
of an affair with Maggie’s friend and Adam’s wife, Charlotte. Warhol associates what
she calls a “practice of […] narrative refusal” in James’s The Spoils of Poynton” with
the relegation of the marriage plot to the background. In Poynton, this is achieved
through disnarration, or saying you did not say something, and unnarration, or
narrating what did not happen (Warhol 259). The Golden Bowl, by contrast, avoids
the marriage plot largely by displacing it to before the novel’s beginning. But, just as
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