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

maneuverings more readily understandable even as they build more thoroughly to a
tragic ending which serves also as a critique of financialized capitalism and the
commodification of social relationships. However, one might suppose,
contrafactually, that such a tale might have been more readily served by a more
straightforward omniscient narrative. If Part Second turns The Golden Bowl into a
game of cards, why not show us more clearly each player’s move? Why linger on, for
example, the famous image of the pagoda that stretches across the early pages of
Book Second? Jonathan Freedman’s suggestion of why Maggie succeeds gives us a
clue: “while they play, she thinks” (Freedman, Jonathan 102). While Part Second is
not uninterested in Maggie’s social maneuverings, it is much more interested in the
thoughts that determine the play, rather than the play itself. The crucial drama of
Book Second is not the social drama of the game, but the drama of Maggie’s mind,
which is both its primary setting and its subject. It is the drama of Maggie’s
consciousness that begins in the novel’s absent middle. This division between Book
First and Book Second, between a drama of multiple points of view and a drama that
takes place within a single consciousness, structures the novel as a whole, both
separating two different approaches to an epistemological poetics and binding these
disparate halves into a single story. In his illuminating book-length study of The
Golden Bowl, Wilson argues against earlier critics who place Maggie consistently at
the novel’s center, arguing that Book Second must be read in the context of Book
First, and that Maggie is no more the novel’s protagonist than any of the others
(Wilson 64). Pick modifies this approach of reading continuity in The Golden Bowl
grounded in Book First, converting Wilson’s idea of multiple authorial stances
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