Ricordo, Gift, Golden Bowl

Abstract

In Henry James's The Golden Bowl, the precluded hunt for the titular gift subverts Prince Amerigo's fantasy of a break with the past by allegorizing its critical liveliness even, or especially, in present efforts to make it nothing, to obscure its records, and to deny its eruptive traces. James plays with the value of "nothing," associating it with Amerigo's dreamt-of liberation from the burden of denying past contingencies and making it a lively allusion to the Prince and Charlotte's forestalled romance. The unbought, fissured bowl figures the impossible realization of the promise of "nothing" in all its competing resistances to sense.