Towards the end of The Golden Bowl, Maggie visits the Prince in his self-imposed isolation in his study to discuss the possible arrangements for the final meeting with her father and stepmother before their departure for American City. During this encounter, the husband and wife are clearly sounding each other out, trying to accommodate themselves to the change in their relationship, and to establish what interpretation is to be given to the recent sequence of occurrences which has produced it. At one stage, Maggie says of Charlotte's predicament, ‘I see it's always terrible for women’; and the Prince replies, ‘Everything's terrible, cara - in the heart of man.’ From a certain point of view, these are moving insights into the plight of all human beings and the uncertainty that clings to their most strenuous efforts; from another perspective, the same comments are irritatingly smug and banal in their acceptance of a vague, amorphous existential anguish. This apparent dichotomy points up the central problem which The Golden Bowl presents to its readers. The extreme complexity of the work makes it unusually difficult to locate and probe the novelist's informing concerns; the interaction of the four central characters is woven into a subtle web of language which at once envelops their thoughts and responses, while also creating, undermining and transforming the entire universe of personal involvement.

Because the novel is so firmly embedded in the relations which it depicts - both those among the characters themselves, and those between its linguistic surface and the evolution of the plot - a helpful key to its perplexities seems to lie in the detailed exploration of James's sense of the fundamental functioning of relationships.