Stuart Burrows

The Golden Fruit: Innocence and Imperialism in The Golden Bowl

The year 1898 saw the publication of Impressions, a newly translated collection of essays by the French travel writer Pierre Loti. The foreword was supplied by Henry James, who confessed that he found Loti’s portrayal of the East “beguiling,” and explicitly linked the French writer’s artistry to the work of imperialism. Loti’s 1883 account of the “new Eden” he supposedly “discovers” in the East is inundated with depictions of golden parasols, litters, temples, palaces, and, most notably, pagodas: “A great building has been left standing in which shadows appear to be moving around a fire: inside, gilded walls, a gilded roof, the vastness of a church and the magnificence of a seraglio. It was one of the King’s pagodas” (Loti 169). French soldiers set up camp in the gilded pagoda, waiting for daybreak and the chance to attack the Chinese city of Hue, a murderous venture enthusiastically recounted in Impressions. Loti’s description of the conversion of the pagoda from shrine to stronghold presages the “impenetrable and inscrutable” (GB 303) pagoda Maggie encounters in James’s The Golden Bowl, a novel whose very form is modeled on that strange and outlandish image. Loti’s narrative is just one of a constellation of sources for the colonial figures that govern The Golden Bowl, an examination of which helps illuminate James’s paradoxical and perplexing notions of composition.1 James had first written admiringly of Loti’s portraits of the East in 1884, when he had been struck by Art’s ability to glorify the work of empire, magnifying its own importance in the process: