With The Golden Bowl, as well as with The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Ambassadors (1903), Henry James definitively established his reputation. In these novels, James’s already complex style reaches new levels of sophistication. Increasingly, the writing becomes more intricate and convoluted and it tends toward increasingly subtle levels of analysis of character and event. Gradually the “center of consciousness” in the mind of a character, which had been essential to James’s earlier works, gives way to an omniscient narrative point of view that is James’s own. Though it hardly appears so to the eye, James’s style of this period is essentially oral—he had developed the habit of dictating his material to a secretary—and reflects his characteristically ponderous manner of speech. James’s language and technique in these late novels seems endlessly to circle or enfold a subject or an idea without ever touching it directly.

With The Golden Bowl, James continues the “international theme” of Americans in Europe that had characterized his work from the beginning. Adam Verver, in particular, can be seen as an avatar of the American Adam, who recurs in James’s fiction, in search of European culture, which he then takes back to his culturally barren homeland. Prince Amerigo, linked through his name to the historic connection between America and Europe, might be seen as dramatizing a new dependence of the Old World upon the New. However, The Golden Bowl differs from the kind of international novel represented by such works as The American (1876-1877), Daisy Miller (1878), or The Ambassadors by being ultimately concerned more with individuals than with cultures. Though the Ververs begin in America and Adam returns there at the novel’s end, neither his experience nor that of Maggie or Charlotte is essentially contingent upon the sort of conflict of cultural values that is at the heart of James’s international novels and stories. The problems of love and marriage at the heart of The Golden Bowl are universal; neither their nature nor their solution depends upon an American perspective.

Like many of James’s works, The Golden Bowl began in his notebooks with the recording of an anecdote he had heard concerning a young woman and her widower father, each of whom had taken a spouse and then learned the partners were engaged in an affair. From this scant beginning, James crafted his longest and most elaborate novel. He did so not by greatly complicating the plot but by scrupulously elaborating the conflicts and resolutions resulting from the complex relations among the four central characters. By making his characters members of the wealthy leisure class, James frees them from the mundane worries of the world. He is thus able to focus his, and their, entire attention on one particular problem without regard to external complications. Ultimately, the novel poses moral and philosophical questions that transcend both the psychological and social levels of the work to confront the basic question of Maggie’s adjustment to a less-than-perfect world.

The golden bowl is James’s metaphor for the marriage between Amerigo and Maggie, and perhaps, in its larger implications, for life itself. The bowl, not really “golden” at all, but crystal gilded with gold leaf, has the superficial appearance of perfection but is, in fact, cracked. As a symbol of Maggie’s “perfect” marriage, the bowl very clearly illustrates the flaw at the heart of the relationship—a flaw that no doubt existed even before the prince and Charlotte resumed their old love affair and that represents a potential threat to the marriage. Both Maggie and her father are guilty of treating the prince as nothing more...