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

nothing to do as yet, further, but feel what one had done, and our personage felt it
while he aimlessly wandered. It was already as if he were married, so definitely had
the solicitors, at three o’clock, enabled the date to be fixed” (4). Fixity and
aimlessness suggest the end of a goal-oriented plot, the marriage plot that precedes
the novel. But Charlotte’s arrival provides a new disruption: “A handsome, clever,
odd girl staying with one was a complication” (33).
The Prince makes various attempts to alleviate the situation, through hiding
his past relationship with Charlotte, through various hints that, perhaps, it might not
be the best idea for Adam to marry Charlotte or for Maggie to leave Charlotte and
himself alone. As Amerigo’s efforts gradually shift from avoiding or hiding
Charlotte’s disruptive presence to pursuing an affair, the question comes whether the
object of the narrative in which Amerigo is the actant is the consummation of the
affair or the preservation of his marriage. Sent off to accompany Charlotte at
Matcham, the Prince places himself as the actant who will determine the course of the
situation in which he has been placed: “Being thrust, systematically, with another
woman, and a woman one happened, by the same token, exceedingly to like, and
being so thrust that the theory of it seemed to publish one as idiotic or incapable—this
was a predicament of which the dignity depended all on one’s own handling” (245).
That is, for the Prince at this moment, the goal is neither to consummate nor avoid an
affair: it is to preserve dignity, and for that either action may serve. When Charlotte
reveals that she has anticipated Amerigo’s plan of leaving on the pretense of visiting a
cathedral in Gloucester, and that she has “wanted everything,” Amerigo’s response is
to anticipate that H will stabilize the narrative situtation: “Well, it was all right. ‘You
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