The Saddest Chapter

Charlotte's sentence comes due in these chapters of The Golden Bowl, and Garth Greenwell takes it straight. James writes the punishment in pictures: a bird in a cage, a rope nobody has to pull. Greenwell reads them plainly, then asks the harder question: is the woman who arranged all this cruel, or something stranger? After that, a last meeting in the summer heat at Fawns, where the whole book narrows to one line and one ambiguous pronoun: somebody pressed the spring. Whose hand was it? Greenwell thinks the grammar answers, and that the answer decides what kind of heroine Maggie gets to be.