Henry James’ The Golden Bowl, The American Scene, and the New York Edition

Henry James’ The Golden Bowl, The American Scene, and the New York Edition

In the letter he wrote to Scribner's in 1905 proposing that he "furnish" each volume of his forthcoming deluxe edition with a preface, Henry James portrayed his novels and stories as disenfranchised beings patiently awaiting a "chance" for their cause to be righted. James would be their advocate and the prefaces the texts with which he would demonstrate his novels' worth (367). In this paper I will argue that the writing of The Golden Bowl and The American Scene were essential precedents and complements to this project of self-vindication. Reading The Golden Bowl through its preface shows that beneath the narratives of familial and marital relations in the novel run stories of a writer's contention with a misapprehending audience--the same struggles out of which James spun creative autobiography and a theory of fiction in the prefaces to the New York Edition. Through his indirect critique of his readership in The Golden Bowl and the fierce challenges he delivered to his compatriots in The American Scene James laid essential groundwork for the lessons in reading and creative production he would later offer in the New York Edition.

Paul Armstrong has argued that James's prefaces require the same "doubled reading" his novels require, that while the reader is absorbing James's account of his writing experience and his theory of writing, the reader is also responding to James as a centering consciousness whose "interpretive attitudes . . . are as much on display and as much an object for the reader's scrutiny as the impressions of a Lambert Strether or a Maggie Verver" (128). As comparable centering consciousnesses, James the preface-writer and his heroine Maggie Verver make common assertions. Both figures demonstrate the power of the creative deed. Paralleling James's affirmations about "doing" in the preface to The Golden Bowl is Maggie's discovery in the novel of her own brilliant capacity for action. After the assignation of the Prince with Charlotte in Gloucester, Maggie begins "to doubt of her wonderful little judgement of her wonderful little world" (307). She begins to "put" things both to herself and the people around her. She contrives gestures to effect a change in her "practically unattackable" situation.