The Labyrinth of Form as Jame's Antidote to American Provincialism

Henry James (1843–1916) regards ‘form’ as a stratagem for counterbalancing the reader's naiveté, that is, a mode of artless simplicity which prevailed in his culture at the time. This article discusses Jame's artistic career as an endeavor to show form consciousness both as a power which redeems the artist him-/herself from the chaos of routine life and as an instrument to break the boundaries of a provincial self-sufficiency.To see how James fulfills these tasks, this article examines The Golden Bowl(1904), a novel from his later phase in which he denounced his earlier manner of storytelling andopted for what he called "scenic method," that is, a narrative style dependent on painting scenes, a strategy which James considered his final salvation and the onlymeans with which an artist may be able to vault the mind of the reader from single-mindedness to multidimensionality.