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

singular, centered focalization—a shift from a drama that that is seen through
consciousnesses to a drama centered in consciousness. Even more, the middle
represents the emergence of a consciousness worthy of being a center. And Maggie is
not only worthy of being the center, she actively asserts her own centrality. As S.
Salina Jamil argues, however, the shift in focalizers is also a shift in narrative
authority, an authority which Maggie exerts to a much greater degree than Amerigo
(Jamil 112). This shift in authority moves from male to female, from author to
character, and from group to individual. The last is perhaps the most important if we
are to understand The Golden Bowl as a modernist examination of the individual
consciousness. In its very structure, The Golden Bowl announces the end of the
Victorian social novel and announces that the novel will be ruled by individual
mental processes. James makes this shift not with a piece of transitional narrative, but
with an unnarrated middle, the space between Book First and Book Second. The
Golden Bowl’s middle marks a shift in narrative form more than of plot. The narrator,
then, is absent at the very moment in which he cedes many of the traditional grounds
of his authority: his ability to shift between characters at will and his control over the
story, as Maggie’s mental processes take increasing control of both action and
narration.
The Golden Bowl is not James’s first novel structured around a crucially
absent event at its middle. The Princess Casamassima is structured around a vow that
the reader never sees. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, vows to commit
an act of violence, later revealed to be an assassination, to the shadowy revolutionary
leader Hoffendahl. As Kent Puckett argues, the placement of this crucial event, which
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