Study Guide to The Aspern Papers by Henry James

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645421955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Henry James' The Aspern Papers, considered to be one of James' most acclaimed novellas.

As a tale of the nineteenth century, James continues his theme of evaluating society and its effect on other individuals. Moreover, The Aspern Papers gives readers the opportunity to compare the cultures and customs of both America and Europe from an American's perspective. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Henry James' classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains:

- Introductions to the Author and the Work

- Character Summaries

- Plot Guides

- Section and Chapter Overviews

- Test Essay and Study Q&As

The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION

BIOGRAPHY

Henry James was America’s first great international novelist. While others before him (Hawthorne, Melville) had written remarkable fiction, they had not left their impress on the universal form of the novel. As Leon Edel, the famous James critic, remarks: “There are few novelists writing today who have not, directly or indirectly, absorbed some of James’s methods of story telling.” Henry James devoted his adult life to the exploration and understanding of the art of fiction. He conscientiously sought new forms, new modes of expression, new methods of setting down sensation and experience. We are accustomed to thinking of great writers in terms of fascinating adventurous biographies—Byron, Yeats, Lorca, Goethe —but James’ private history is singularly undramatic and unremarkable. His great adventures were cerebral.

CHILDHOOD:

James was born on April 15, 1843, in Washington Place, New York City. His father, Henry Sr., had been left independently wealthy by the death of his merchant father. Secure of his fortunes, Henry Sr. had devoted his life to the study of religion, philosophy and humanity. He firmly believed that his children’s education should include a thorough, firsthand understanding of their European heritage (grandfather William had arrived in America from Ireland at the end of the 18th century). He acted on this theory with great promptness. When Henry Jr. was in his first year, and his older brother William still a toddler, the family journeyed to France and England. On their return to America, Henry and William received their early education in New York and Albany. In 1855, when Henry was 12, the family once again crossed the ocean. For three years the children were educated by a tutor, by their father and in schools in Geneva, London and Paris. During 1858-59 the family stayed in the fashionable resort of Newport, Rhode Island, where Henry and William studied painting with the well-known artist John LaFarge. But in 1859-60 they were back in Europe again, this time in Bonn and Geneva. By now, at the age of 17, Henry was discovering his great passion for books and writing. In 1862, he enrolled for a brief time in the Law School at Harvard. The same year he sustained a mysterious injury in a fire which kept him out of the Civil War.

LITERARY BEGINNINGS:

Living with his family in Cambridge, James began to meet the important literary minds of the time. Charles Eliot Norton, James Russell Lowell and William Dean Howells were all visitors to the James’ drawing room. Exposed to such great stimulation, young James, at 20, resolved to commit his life to writing. This was not the commitment of an idealistic, eccentric young romantic, but rather the mature resolve of a thoughtful intellectual.

James began his public career with a review in the prestigious North American Review in 1864, and a story in The Atlantic Monthly in 1865. But his first book, a collection of tales, wasn’t published until ten years later.

Henry Sr.’s theory of education-by-travel made a great impression on his son. Between 1869 and 1875, Henry Jr. made three trips to the continent. He apprenticed himself to an impressive list of writers in Paris and London: Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Ruskin, Tennyson and Browning were among his friends. He knew George Eliot, Renan, Gladstone. James learned his craft in the company of experts.

EXPATRIATE:

An avid traveler, James explored Italy, Germany and France and more and more he discovered that he felt at home in Europe. In 1876, he established himself permanently in London and he continued to live there and in Sussex for the rest of his life.

In 1904, when he returned to America after a twenty-one-year absence, James had mellowed in his harsh opinion of his native land. He agreed to revise and edit his major fiction for a New York publisher and although he returned to England, he made his next trip to America within six years, bringing home his dying brother, William, now a famed philosopher and psychologist.

James was back in England when war broke out in 1914 and with shock and horror he witnessed the holocaust. Outraged at America’s refusal to enter the war, James became a British citizen in 1915. The next year he grew weak and ill, and on his deathbed he, was awarded England’s Order of Merit. By February of 1916, James was dead.

UNEMBROILED LIFE:

The outward architecture of a man’s life sometimes reveals a great deal about his inner existence. Such was not the case with James. His life was devoid of dramatic climactic moments although his literary achievement altered the course of English literature. James had many friends and crowds of acquaintances, but he never married. Among his many friends were a great number of exciting and interesting women, but no letters or gossip give any indication of romantic liaisons. From surviving momenti and from his autobiography, it is clear that James remained, throughout his life, deeply involved with his family. He traveled extensively, he read voluminously, and he labored incessantly at his writing desk. His devotion to his self-designated task at the age of 20 remained constant until his death. And yet, beneath this undramatic architecture lay a mind in continual turmoil and adventure. Behind the almost religious commitment to literature lay doubts, fears, confusion and genius.

PROBLEMS OF SUCCESS:

Public appreciation was elusive and unpredictable throughout James’ career. His early writings— tales, essays, travel accounts—appeared with great frequency in important journals, but they gained little following for the young writer. Then, in 1879, with the publication of Daisy Miller and again in 1881, with Portrait of a Lady, James became an international celebrity. But rapid fame was followed by public disinterest and disfavor. As his works became more complicated, the writer became less understood: his following dwindled. Always sensitive to the reality that a novel must be read in order to be important or influential, James frequently became disheartened at the size of his audience. Although he always had a devout core of eager readers, generally intellectuals appreciative of his master craftsmanship, when the public rejected him, James became despondent. He moaned that he was “condemned apparently to eternal silence,” that his finest work “reduced the desire, and the demand, of [his] productions to zero.” When the sumptuous New York Edition came out (1907-1917) James called it a “complete failure” and he complained that he was left “high and dry—at my age … and after my long career, utterly, insurmountably, unsaleable.”

The rejection of the artist by society occupied James in many of his stories and tales, and he explored minutely the role of the creative mind struggling in the non-creative world.

James’ battle for popular success goes on even today. His modern following is huge and devout—summed up in the English critic F. R. Leavis’ words: “What achievement in the art of fiction—fiction as a completely serious art addressed to the adult mind—can we point to in English as surpassing his?” And yet his detractors are still legion. He is accused of failing to come to terms with life, of producing tales of nothingness, and, most damagingly, as Van Wyck Brooks has said, of “magnificent pretensions, petty performances!—the fruits of an irresponsible imagination, of a deranged sense of values, of a mind working in the void, uncorrected by any clear consciousness of human cause and effect.”

James, particularly in his later works, is an extremely difficult writer. He insisted that a work composed with care should be read with care—and it takes great care indeed, and very close reading, to reap the rewards of a James work. The reward, however, is well worth the labor.

STYLISTIC PERIODS:

As Leon Edel points out, it is impossible to speak of “a Henry James novel” in the same sense that one speaks of a “Dickens novel” or a “Mark Twain novel.” James was continually growing and developing throughout his life and at different phases of his creativity he worked on very different stylistic and theoretical problems. Modern James criticism generally divides his body of works into the following reasonably distinct periods:

1. 1870’s: In his late 20’s and 30’s, James was already a prolific writer. He turned out numerous reviews and articles for the leading periodicals of the day. At the same time he produced major works of fiction: The American (1877); Daisy Miller (1879); The Europeans (1878). In these early years, James was yet a traditional novelist. His characters were straightforward and clearly drawn, lacking the ambiguity and complexity of later heroes. His style was still in the making. Because of their relative simplicity and the themes they explored, The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and Washington Square (1881) are usually grouped with these early works.
2. 1880’s: During these years, James turned his attention to the larger issues in the social world surrounding him. He began to experiment with the involuted style and complicated sentences. The Princess Casamassima (1885); The Bostonians (1886); The Tragic Muse (1887) are the major works of this period. The Aspern Papers (1887) belongs to this period by chronology and style. Thematically, however, it belongs to the next decade.
3. 1890’s-THEATRE: During this decade, James turned his hand, with disastrous results, to dramatic writing. Much that he wrote went unproduced, and what productions there were, were miserably received. In 1895, at a production of Guy Domville, James was humiliatingly jeered at the final curtain.
4. 1890’s-FICTION: These were the years in which James explored in probing detail the qualities of evil and the corruption of innocence. As noted, The Aspern Papers belongs, thematically, to this decade. Chronologically, the increasingly complicated works of the period are: The Spoils of Poynton (1897); What Maisie Knew (1897); The Turn of the Screw (1898); The Awkward Age (1899).
5. 1900’s: Ever since the critic F. O. Matthiessen labeled it, this has been known as James’ “major phase.” Within a few years he published The Sacred Fount (1901); The Wings of the Dove (1902); The Ambassadors (1903); The Beast in the Jungle (1903); The Golden Bowl (1904); The American Scene (1905). His burst of creative energy at this time is awesome. The novels of this period are complex, massive and difficult. They are considered by some to be the best of James, the works of his accomplished maturity. In addition to these major fictions, in 1907, James began the prodigious task of editing and prefacing his own works for a New York publisher. Each preface is an essay on the novel, on the problems of writing, and on the origins of the work under question. The prefaces are masterful studies on the art of fiction, even when considered apart from the works they preface.
6. FINAL PHASE: In the last years of his life, James turned his attention to himself in autobiography. In 1913, he published A Small Boy and Others, in 1914, Notes of a Son and Brother, and at his death he was working on The Middle Years. Also unfinished were two large novels: The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past.

STYLE

Because of his endless tinkering with technique and his continual experimentation with style, James won and lost audiences at a dizzying rate. He was addicted to changes of subject and mood and to variations in method. His problem, and he often expressed it through his stories, was how to turn out an artistically satisfying work while at the same time pleasing the public. His conflict of “potboiler vs. art” was not really much of a contest since art nearly always won out. While his audiences may have been frustrated by his unpredictability, James’ experimentation ultimately brought him the reward of true innovation.

The most important innovation, as Leon Edel notes, “was to free the novel, and the short story, of the traditionally ubiquitous and often garrulous narrator who used to interpose his own personality and preachments between the story and the reader.”

POINT OF VIEW:

James achieved, in his maturity, the direct involvement of his readers with his characters. He came to call this technique the “point of view,” and it was his special method of achieving a thoroughgoing reality. In eradicating himself as omniscent author, James maneuvers us into the consciousness of his characters. We are made to experience events and thoughts directly through the characters and not through the author as interpreter. Thus, in The Aspern Papers we only learn of the events as they strike the narrator. We are at all times in his consciousness and we learn only the things he wishes us to know. The problems of this technique are legion. The greatest difficulty is to create a character whose consciousness is interesting enough to sustain us through the novel. If we are to be trapped within one mind for a hundred or more pages, if everything we learn is to be filtered through one awareness, then it had best be a clever awareness. And yet, to maintain his desired level of reality, James cannot present an endless parade of characters of high perception, fluency and literacy—we simply wouldn’t believe in them after a while. The critic in The Aspern Papers is highly ironic, witty and literate, but he is not altogether sensitive and insightful. The first qualities maintain our interest, the second two help us believe in his reality. Of course the great challenge of this tec...