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

novel, even when that focalizer is confined to the novel’s second half. Others, such as
Schor, however, emphasize the disruptive force of the middle: “in the middle of the
novel, James pulls the rug out from under us” and asks that the reader re-assign
allegiance (Schor 241). I am not so confident that Charlotte and Amerigo ever have
the reader’s allegiance (for my own part, I find that Fanny Assingham holds mine
throughout Book First). There is not, in this novel, simply one side and then the other:
there is the side of multiple focalizers, and the side of a single focalizer. As the
various readings of the novel suggest, there is no thoroughly convincing way to
resolve the tension between Book First and Book Second—nor even to determine
whether the middle represents a fundamental disruption of the novel’s plot and
technical approach, or rather a sort of tipping point in a continuous evolution.
However, if we are to consider The Golden Bowl as a whole, it is clear that this
middle is of prime importance. The Golden Bowl is both a single novel, and a novel in
two books. While James’s prose, and his technical approach to representation in any
particular chapter, show little if any change from Book First to Book Second, the
switch from multiple focalizers to a single focalizer nevertheless has a drastic effect,
one which has been read differently by different readers. Both approaches have been
commonly used in modernist literature; by structuring this novel around a modernist
middle, James is able to combine them into a single novel. By combining the
epistemological problems of single and multiple points of view, James emphasizes
that these approaches themselves are points of view. By using the middle to structure
his novel around this contrast, James poses for his readers a third, irresolvable
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