The Golden Bowl, Volume II

The Golden Bowl, Volume II is the second and concluding volume of Henry James’s last major novel, published in 1904. Volume two takes up the story from where the first volume left off and shifts the narrative perspective from the young Italian prince Amerigo to the American heiress Maggie Verver, who is now married to him.

The central situation of the book is the strange four cornered relationship between Maggie, Amerigo, Maggie’s father Adam Verver, and Adam’s wife Charlotte Stant, who had once been Amerigo’s lover in Rome before either marriage. The arrangement has settled into a kind of equilibrium in which Amerigo and Charlotte spend a great deal of time together while Maggie and Adam pursue their unusually close father daughter intimacy. The first volume showed the marriages forming. The second volume shows Maggie slowly coming to understand what has happened and slowly setting about to do something about it.

What makes the second volume so remarkable is the precision of Maggie’s slow recognition. She does not have evidence in the conventional sense. She has small impressions, half remembered conversations, a particular quality in a shared silence, the way Amerigo and Charlotte look at each other when they think they are not being observed. From these small fragments she pieces together an understanding of her situation, and she then sets about acting on that understanding without ever speaking openly about it to anyone. The famous incident of the golden bowl from the first volume returns in this volume as the moment when her gathered impressions crystallize into knowledge.

The ending of the novel is one of the most extraordinary in English fiction. Maggie achieves her goal of saving her marriage and her father’s marriage, but the cost is enormous and the moral weight of what she has done is not at all clear. James leaves the reader to judge whether her quiet manipulation has been admirable or terrible, whether her father will or will not eventually understand what she has saved him from. The volume runs about three hundred pages. For readers who completed volume one, it is the necessary conclusion. The book pairs naturally with The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors.