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The Golden Bowl
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2023
My fifth chapter analyses a very different kind of vow: what philosophers refer to as a wicked promise – a pledge to do harm. I argue that the self-defeating logic of such promises explains the peculiar form of James’s last completed novel, The Golden Bowl. The world the wicked promise conjures into being is described by one character as “Evil – with a very big E,"a world in which keeping one’s word becomes almost inconceivable. This explains why the novel ends with another promise altogether– that made by the Prince, who waits to see what world Maggie has prepared for him. The fact that this promise comes due beyond the end of the text suggests the limits of a promise to which no obligation attaches.
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