The Golden Bowl

Fanny and Bob are well-matched in their differences and even their somewhat non-traditional gender roles work well together. Bob is the great manager who keeps them well, for the level of his income, while Fanny is the brilliant mind who is admired by her husband who is even, at times, incapable of following all her brilliant strokes. They view themselves as a team. And, even though she is sometimes impatient with him, the combination of her subtlety and his bluntness enables them to 'work out' the intricate implications of their friends' situation. Thus, it is long before Maggie has come to the realization of what she has done in urging the marriage of her father and Charlotte, that Fanny and Bob tease out the meanings and the dangers of what she has done. Their conversation about the Ververs' blindness and the peculiar manner in which this caused Charlotte and the Prince to be "afraid for them," is a perfect example of the benefit

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y not inconvenient, fact impinging upon, but not disrupting, their relationship. Maggie similarly built up a structure, by encouraging Charlotte's marriage to Adam, in order to be "able to marry without breaking, as she liked to put it, with her past" (328). Her fear of this structure now arises from the fact that she has begun to perceive what she has unwittingly done to their respective spouses by placing them in their new relationship and increased contact with each other. The whole of the second volume deals with Maggie's grappling with the problems she has created and the structural metaphor is gradually turned inside out as she finally begins to see how, in order to save all of them from the 'situation' she has had to arrange the imprisonment of the Prince and Charlotte. Near the end of the book the Prince has left Fawns in order to be able to escape Charlotte. He is at the Portland Square house, ostensibly for the purpose of uncrating his book purchases, and as Maggie pictured him there, "it was like his doing penance in sordid ways--being sent to prison or being kept without money" (528). As she contemplates this vision of her husband as preferring the penance and the prison she understands that his departure was to
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Fanny Maggie, Prince Palladian, Maggie Verver, Portland Square, Fanny Amerigo, European American, Europeanized American, Charlotte Amerigo, Charlotte Fanny, Fanny Bob, golden bowl, fanny bob, amerigo charlotte, marriage adam, european american, maggie's suspicions, american mores, structure maggie, assimilate europe, novel evolution,
Approximate Word count = 2953
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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