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

consciousness itself seems to control the narrative. I will argue, instead, that Maggie’s
consciousness is the narrative’s primary setting, that the story is no longer so much
about the arrangement of the principle characters, but about the development of
Maggie’s thoughts on that arrangement. From this perspective, however, even access
to the Prince and Charlotte’s thoughts would not represent the events of the absent
middle. That is, if we view the story of The Golden Bowl as occurring in the primary
narrative frame—that is, in the minds of the characters that recollect past events,
rather than in those events themselves—then fabula and syuzhet are in concordance,
producing a linear narrative with a temporal ellipsis between Book First and Book
Second as well as a shift in focalization.
At the beginning of Book Second, Maggie has already begun to realize that
her friend and husband, and the world at large, may be less than worthy of her trust. If
this were a simple epistemological problem—Maggie gathers enough impressions to
make an observation about the world—The Golden Bowl would resolve in Book
Second rather neatly in a story of detection and social maneuverings: epistemological
problems about the outside world, ontological problems about how to use that
knowledge to effect change. Indeed, Jonathan Freedman offers a brilliant analysis of
Maggie’s (and, to a lesser extent, Charlotte’s, Amerigo’s, and Adam’s) social
maneuverings in the context of game theory. In Freedman’s reading, Maggie
eventually wins back her husband because she “possesses both the epistemological
and financial power […] to change the rules of the game” (Freedman, Jonathan 109).
As regards the fabula of Book Second, Freedman’s reading is stunning in its depth
explicatory power, as concepts such as the prisoner’s dilemma make Maggie’s murky
77