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Modernist Maneuverings in the Marriage Plot: Breaking Ideologies of Gender and Genre in James's The Golden Bowl

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Joseph A. Boone
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Abstract

The power of novelistic tradition to translate ideological structures of belief into narrative structures that encode and perpetuate those beliefs is ominously illustrated in the Anglo-American novel's “marriage tradition.” Novelists who have attempted to escape such strictures have had to contend not only with the socially conservative thematics of the traditional love plot but also with its highly codified, closed structural variants. The protomodernist experimentation and formal openness of The Golden Bowl provides a case in point: here James methodically explodes the premises of traditional love fiction by making the novel's experiments in form mirror its unsettling critique of the sexual codes engendering marital strife. In the process, James's attempt to plot the contradictions inherent in the conventional ideal of wedlock underscores the degree to which a traditional novelistic pattern of happy endings has always been a self-subverting literary enterprise.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 101 , Issue 3 , May 1986 , pp. 374 - 388
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1986

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