The Prince
Amerigo is a Prince without a principality. He is descended from the Italian aristocracy which long ago ran out of the money necessary to finance living like a prince. The third-person narrator—almost a distinct character itself—is capable of the omniscience required to penetrate into the thoughts of characters. The thoughts of the Prince about his Italian ancestry are complicated and the author writes, “Its presence in him was like the consciousness of some inexpugnable scent in which his clothes, his whole person, his hands and the hair of his head, might have been steeped as in some chemical bath: the effect was nowhere in particular, yet he constantly felt himself at the mercy of the cause.” The references to a scent that cannot be eliminated and its connection to a chemical bath are not exactly positive and yet also not definitively negative. The lack of contextual clues within this flood of figurative description has the effect of raising questions about just how Amerigo actually feels about his cultural legacy. His name, his decision to take an American as his bride, and his overall quest to reinvent himself all point to a fundamental conflict.
The Crystal Bowl
At one of the tensest moments in the entire narrative, Maggie comments on the titular bowl as it was intended to be. She muses that in that intended state, it was “The bowl with all our happiness in it. The bowl without the crack.” The golden bowl is actually made of crystal and there is a barely detectable flaw in it; a crack in the crystal. As a symbol, the bowl accumulates several different meanings over the course of the story. It is only here when Maggie directly addresses it through metaphor that the crack becomes a symbol representing many different things. The bowl is her metaphor for the great hope of the happily-ever-after while the crack is that seemingly ever-present dose of reality introduced into the fairy tale.
Charlotte
The other woman in the love triangle is Amerigo’s once and future mistress, Charlotte. Charlotte is the embodiment of everything that Maggie fears; she is the crack in the marriage. Eventually, as Maggie loses her innocence and becomes much more adept at reading others—and manipulating them based upon that insight—Charlotte comes to be seen as something less threatening. The author writes, “She walked round Charlotte’s—cautiously and in a very wide circle; and when, inevitably, they had to communicate she felt herself, comparatively, outside, on the breast of nature, and saw her companion’s face as that of a prisoner looking through bars.” Both preceding the metaphor of the prisoner behind bars and following it is an extensive passage in which the narrator builds up a broader metaphor of cages. It is with the realization that she is a prisoner of her own making that Charlotte effectively loses all her power to engender fear in Maggie.
