THE SPOILS OF POYNTON

INTRODUCTION

The Spoils of Poynton, first published in 1897, occupies a uniquely interesting place in the long history of Henry James’s literary career. It was the first substantial piece of fiction that he wrote after the collapse of his ambitions to find fame and fortune as a playwright, and the first to be written in what has come to be known as his ‘later’ manner. These two facts are connected.

In 1890 James was commissioned to adapt his early novel The American (1877) for the stage. It had a qualified success, and the experience encouraged him to try writing original plays. His career as a novelist was in the doldrums. The reception of his last two major works, The Princess Casamassima (1886) and The Tragic Muse (1890), had been disappointing, both critically and commercially. He was worried and piqued by the small financial reward he derived from his books. He saw in the theatre the chance to make a lot of money in a short space of time, enough to ensure ‘real freedom for one’s general artistic life’.¹ He accordingly wrote three comedies in the next few years, none of which managed to find a producer. All his hopes now hung upon the success of Guy Domville, a costume drama set in eighteenth-century England about a young Catholic gentleman who is torn between his vocation to become a priest and a felt obligation, on the sudden death of his elder brother, to marry and ensure the continuation of the family. A popular actor-manager, George Alexander, accepted the play for production at the St James’s theatre in London early in 1895.

The story of the first, night of Guy Domville, superbly narrated by Leon Edel in his Life of Henry James,² is itself as full of suspense, pathos, comedy and irony as any novel. Among the newspaper critics present, at that time unknown to each other and to James, were three men shortly destined to become the most celebrated writers of the age – George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells. They appreciated James’s intelligent dialogue, as did most of the stalls, well packed with James’s friends and admirers of his fiction. The gallery, however, was impatient with the play’s clumsy stagecraft and began to barrack the production in its later stages. James himself, unable to bear the strain of sitting through the performance, had spent the evening watching Oscar Wilde’s highly successful An Ideal Husband. With the applause for this play still ringing in his ears, James walked the short distance to the St James’s theatre, arriving in the wings just as Alexander was taking his bow. The actor-manager, either foolishly or mischievously, led James onto the stage, where this most sensitive and dignified of writers was roundly booed by the gallery.

Guy Domville was a flop and had to be hurriedly replaced (ironically enough by Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest), but it was the personal humiliation of the first night that determined James to abandon his theatrical ambitions. It was one of the darkest episodes of his literary life. Yet he was able to turn this apparent failure to positive account. He returned to writing fiction with a confirmed sense that this was his true métier, but he began to develop a new kind of narrative method that owed much to his experiments with drama – first in short novels such as The Spoils of Poynton and What Maisie Knew (1897), and eventually in the three great masterpieces of his mature years, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904).

On superficial inspection the later novels of Henry James seem anything but theatrical. They are much concerned with consciousness, with representing mental acts of perception, speculation and inference; and usually the story is conveyed to us through the consciousness of a single character whose understanding of the actions and motives of the others is necessarily limited and often unreliable. These are effects that are very difficult to achieve in the theatre, except by the comparatively clumsy conventions of the soliloquy and the aside.

What Henry James’s later work owes to drama is essentially structural, what he himself referred to as ‘the scenic method’. The story is unfolded in a series of scenes or dramatic encounters between the main characters, in which the issues of the plot are discussed or alluded to in dialogue. The import of what is said is often obscure or problematical, and the effort of interpreting it is depicted in the consciousness of the central or focalizing character, rendered in prose of great complexity and delicacy of nuance. Many of these scenes give the illusion of ‘real time’, like scenes in a naturalistic play. Examples in The Spoils of Poynton would be Fleda’s meeting with Owen at Ricks in Chapter VIII, and her subsequent discussions with Mrs Gereth in Chapters X and XI. There is another kind of scene in which there is more physical movement through space and a more overt condensation of real time, in which speech is more often reported than quoted. Examples would be the opening chapter at Waterbath, and Owen’s meeting with and escorting of Fleda in London in Chapter VI. Both kinds of scene may be linked by passages of introspection by the focalizing character (the whole of Chapter IX is an example) or narrative passages that summarize the actions – or inaction – of the principal characters between their important confrontations (for example Chapter V).

This method constitutes a considerable modification of the form of the classic nineteenth-century novel on which James’s earlier fiction was modelled. Instead of an even balance between ‘telling’ and ‘showing’, between expansive authorial description and commentary on the one hand, and the dramatic interaction of characters on the other, the balance has shifted radically in favour of ‘showing’. The authorial voice rarely intrudes, and when it does its comments are ambiguous. Instead of being given a detailed visual description of the physical setting of the action and appearance of the characters, we get only the impressions of the focalizing character. (Fleda’s enraptured introduction to Poynton at the beginning of Chapter III is a good example – there is not a single reference to a specific object.) One consequence of this narrative method is that the interpretative effort required of the reader becomes equivalent to that required of the central character. To James it represented an enormous gain in intensity and economy of effect, very different from the ‘loose baggy monsters’ of classic nineteenth-century fiction, from Balzac to George Eliot; and it was a gain he attributed to his experience of writing plays. ‘When I ask myself what there may have been to show for my long tribulation, my wasted years and patiences and pangs, of theatrical experiment,’ James wrote in his notebook at the time of writing The Spoils of Poynton, ‘the answer comes up as just possibly this: what I have gathered from it will perhaps have been exactly some such mastery of fundamental statement–of the art and secret of it, of expression, of the sacred mystery of structure.’³

Another distinction of The Spoils of Poynton is that James left a more detailed account of its genesis and composition in his notebooks than of any other of his novels. This, as I shall suggest later, is a double-edged tool for interpreting the story, but, supplemented by the Preface James wrote for the New York Edition of 1908, the notebook entries afford an unequalled insight into the laboratory of the writer’s mind. (They are included as an appendix to this edition.)

The original ‘germ’ of the story came to James, as so often, in the form of an anecdote related at a dinner party, in 1893. It concerned a legal dispute between a Scottish widow and her son about the possession of the family house, which was full of ‘valuable things’ collected by the former. According to James’s informant, the mother was prepared to deny her son’s legitimacy to win her case, a melodramatic twist which James characteristically eschewed, along with other particulars, in his own working out of the situation. (‘Clumsy Life at her stupid work,’ as he disdainfully observes in the Preface.)

The potential story James saw in the anecdote was about the effect of aesthetic taste on personal relationships, arising from the injury to the mother’s pride and possessiveness at being forced to relinquish the house she has made into a thing of beauty to a son who is not only indifferent to her connoisseurship, but who chooses an equally Philistine wife, instead of the discriminating protégée the mother had intended for him. According to the Preface, James at first thought of the contents of the house themselves, the ‘things’, as being the centre of the story, but quickly realized that this would not do. The things were in themselves inarticulate, and to render them with the lavish descriptive detail of a Balzac would take up far too much space for what he then conceived of as a short story, and (more significantly) would work against the interests of ‘the muse of dialogue’. Hence the ‘growth and predominance of Fleda Vetch’ as ‘a centre’ for the tale, a process which we can trace through its various stages in the notebook entries from May 1895 when, a few months after the débâcle of Guy Domville, he commenced work on the story.

From the beginning James saw the mainspring of the narrative as the mother’s removal of the ‘things’ from the house. Originally this was to have happened after the son’s marriage, and Fleda was to have assisted in their restoration out of wholly altruistic motives. When the plot was revised so that Mrs Gereth made a pre-emptive strike, removing the things before the marriage, the question of their restoration became entangled with the question of Fleda’s personal destiny, especially when James, rather to his own surprise, made Owen fall in love with her while engaged to Mona Brigstock. For Fleda the dispute between mother and son becomes morally complex because she stands to gain or lose by what she does or does not do in relation to it. The overarching narrative question of the text becomes, not what will happen to the things, but will Fleda come to possess them, along with her Prince Charming? For, like many other great English novels, from Pamela to Mansfield Park and Jane Eyre, The Spoils of Poynton is a variation on the Cinderella myth, albeit an ironic one. The crucial interpretative question is: at whom, or at what, is the irony directed?

Most of the critics who have commented on The Spoils of Poynton fall into two groups. Either they take Fleda to be the heroine of the story in the traditional sense – heroic in her readiness to sacrifice her own happiness rather than compromise her principles, sensitive and perceptive in her dealings with the other characters, to whom she is morally superior; or they have taken her to be neurotic and self-deceiving, pathologically fearful of sex, and contributing more harm than balm to the domestic row between the Gereths. According to the editors of the Notebooks, F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock, Fleda is ‘one of James’s most extreme embodiments of imagination, taste and renouncing sensibility’.⁴ Wayne Booth says she comes ‘close to representing the author’s ideal of taste, judgement and moral sense’.⁵ Philip L. Greene asserts: ‘James produces in Fleda Vetch a reliable reflector of his values. She is the renouncing sensibility who is capable of love.’⁶ According to Nina Baym, on the other hand, Fleda is ‘a stumbling bungler’.⁷ According to William Bysshe Stein, ‘She sacrifices her love for moral mummery’ and ‘her hypocritical respectability converts social behaviour into a game that is a comic perversion of life.’⁸ John Lucas claims that ‘Fleda invents most of her experience and in particular she invents Owen’s love for her’.⁹ This is only a sample of the contradictory opinions to be found in the criticism of The Spoils of Poynton (which has followed a very similar course to that of The Turn of the Screw, for similar reasons).

Both schools of thought can muster plausible arguments for their respective readings of the tale, and the impossibility of choosing between them has led some critics to conclude that here is something deeply unsatisfactory about the work. ‘If there is a line in good literature between complexity and self-contradiction,’ says A. W. Bellringer, ‘the possibility is that James’s treatment of his material has overstepped that line,’ and he cites the similar opinions of F. R. Leavis and Ivor Winters.¹⁰ A number of recent critics, however, without discussing The Spoils of Poynton in detail, have in various ways suggested that James’s later fiction constantly aspired to the condition of ambiguity – that the impossibility of arriving at a single, simple version of the ‘truth’ about any human action or experience is, in the broadest sense, what that fiction is about.¹¹ I shall argue that this is the appropriate perspective in which to read The Spoils of Poynton. What Fleda says to Mrs Gereth – ‘You simplify far too much… The tangle of life is much more intricate than you’ve ever, I think, felt it to be’ (p. 186) – could be turned against many critics of the novel. It is, however, instructive to consider the arguments that have divided them.

What one might call the pro-Fleda party relies heavily on James’s own remarks in the Preface and Notebooks. (The controversy is therefore a classic instance of a general theoretical question about the bearing of authorial intention on interpretation.¹²) It seems clear that James intended his readers to admire and identify with Fleda. ‘Fleda becomes rather fine, DOES something, distinguishes herself (to the reader),’ he writes in the notebook (p. 223). In the Preface, justifying his choice of Fleda as the story’s centre of consciousness, he describes her as a ‘free spirit’ surrounded by ‘fools’ (p. 31).

The anti-Fleda party are likely to be anti-intentionalists, arguing that whatever James thought he was going to write beforehand, or thought he had written afterwards (many years afterwards in the case of the Preface), is irrelevant to the interpretation of what he did write. In the Notebook scenario for instance, Fleda was to have demonstrated her heroism by sending Owen away from Ricks with a firm recommendation that he should marry Mona immediately. She makes no such declaration in the text. Indeed, the Fleda of the text is generally notable for what she does not do, rather than for what she does. (Matthiessen and Murdock note how many positive actions in the scenario were finally treated negatively.¹³) Fleda vacillates, hesitates, and delays rather than acts. Chapter IV concludes:

She dodged and dreamed and fabled and trifled away the time. Instead of inventing a remedy or a compromise, instead of preparing a plan by which a scandal might be averted, she gave herself, in her sacred solitude, up to a mere fairy-tale, up to the very taste of the beautiful peace she would have scattered on the air if only something might have been that could never have been. [p. 62]

This is less damaging to Fleda if we read it as rendering a self-accusation rather than as an authorial judgement, but it does seem to hold her partly responsible for the family ‘war’ that follows.

As to the Preface, James’s tributes to Fleda are in fact always equivocal, giving with one hand and taking away with the other. ‘Fleda almost demoniacally both sees and feels, while the others but feel without seeing’ (p. 31). This assertion of Fleda’s superior sensibility is qualified by an adverb that suggests all the hysteria and capacity for mischief unsympathetic readers have attributed to her. Such readers are however unable, or unwilling, to entertain both terms of the paradox; and in seeking to establish that Fleda is a deeply flawed character whose exposure is the whole point of the novel they usually overstate the case and make assumptions and inferences quite unwarranted by the text.

Central to this reading is the claim that Fleda is neurotic about sex, though the precise diagnosis of her condition varies. Either she wants Owen as a husband only as a means of bettering herself, or she desires him sexually but is guilty about her desire and represses it, or she doesn’t really want a heterosexual relationship but a lesbian or mother-daughter one with Mrs Gereth. There is some evidence for all of these interpretations (and some counter-evidence, as we shall see). In the first chapter Fleda is shown as rather priggishly disapproving of Owen’s ‘romping’ with Mona, and Mona’s physical charms and putative ‘permissions’ figure prominently in Fleda’s thoughts. She herself allows Owen only one embrace, and is most characteristically seen as running away from him or shutting doors in his face whenever he shows signs of becoming amorous. She is however constantly kissing or being kissed by Mrs Gereth.

Because of its subjective method of representing experience, the later fiction of Henry James lends itself to psychoanalytical interpretation. Whether Owen’s umbrella and the Maltese cross are phallic symbols; whether, as Arnold Edelstein has ingeniously argued,¹⁴ Fleda is arrested at the anal stage of personal development, seeking a mother-substitute in Mrs Gereth, but forfeiting her regard because she ‘holds on’ (to her modesty) when Mrs Gereth urges her to ‘let herself go’, and lets go of Owen when Mrs Gereth wishes her to hold on – these are interpretations which it is impossible absolutely to prove or falsify, and their persuasiveness will depend ultimately on the credence the reader gives to the Freudian discourse itself. But there are limits to interpretative licence. When William Bysshe Stein,¹⁵ for instance, bids us note Fleda’s ‘insidious conversion of [Owen’s] quick speech into an erotic association’ in her reflection that ‘It was usually as desperate as a “rush” at some violent game’, we must protest that there is nothing erotic about a game like football or rugby which is obviously being alluded to here, one of a string of sporting motifs associated with Owen.

Fleda is certainly sexually inexperienced, and this contributes to the difficulties in which she finds herself. She lacks confidence in her physical attractiveness, and is disturbed by Mrs Gereth’s hints that she should use it to captivate Owen. Her one embrace with Owen is, however, passionate, and rendered with an orgasmic lyricism rare in James’s writing (p. 161). Defending herself later against Mrs Gereth’s accusation that she has lost Owen by her scruples and her reserve, she says: ‘I don’t know what girls may do; but if he doesn’t know that there isn’t an inch of me that isn’t his –!’ (p. 181). The conjunction of Fleda’s confession of sexual inexperience with the assertion of her passion is significant. James was intensely and sympathetically interested in the plight of the genteel young woman or adolescent girl in late-Victorian society who, brought up largely in ignorance of the sexual life, has to make her way in a knowing and corrupt adult world. He returned to this theme again and again – sometimes combined with the ‘international theme’, as in Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady, sometimes more directly as in What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age – often increasing the vulnerability of the heroine by making her motherless, like Fleda Vetch. Critics who regard Fleda as neurotic are apt to be judging her in the light of modern sexual mores.

Her defenders often cite the speech just quoted as evidence that, within the limits of her experience, she is capable of genuine passion. But when we look at those words in context we find that their import, typically, is qualified by a suggestion of calculation on Fleda’s part:

‘I don’t know what girls may do; but if he doesn’t know that there isn’t an inch of me that isn’t his – !’ Fleda sighed as if she couldn’t express it; she piled it up, as she would have said; holding Mrs Gereth with dilated eyes she seemed to sound her for the effect of these professions.

There is a small but significant deviation in the narrative discourse, here, from Fleda’s ‘point of view’, which frames the story after the first chapter. We glimpse Fleda momentarily from some impersonal vantage-point, with her dilated eyes anxiously calculating whether Mrs Gereth is convinced. She is not. Fleda feels ‘more and more in her companion’s attitude a quality that treated her speech as a desperate rigmarole and even perhaps a piece of cold immodesty’ (p. 181). There is a poignant irony in that final phrase, since Mrs Gereth has frequently appeared in relation to Fleda as a kind of bawd or female pander. Fleda’s aposiopesis (i.e. a sentence left incomplete for rhetorical effect) echoes another in Mrs Gereth’s speech a few pages before:

‘When once I get you [and Owen] abroad together – !’ Mrs Gereth checked herself as if from excess of meaning; what might happen when she should get them abroad together was to be gathered only from the way she slowly rubbed her hands. [p. 173]

The ‘sounding’ of other people’s unspoken thoughts by observation of their body language, facial expressions, or oblique hints and allusions in speech, is a characteristic activity of Fleda Vetch, as of most Jamesian protagonists. It is how she first becomes aware that Owen is attracted to her – in Chapter VI when, on meeting her in Oxford Street, he insists on escorting her on her shopping expedition and back across the Park to Kensington.

He wanted to stay with her – he wanted not to leave her: he had dropped into complete silence, but that was what his silence said. [p. 76]

Is it? At this point the reader has no way of knowing. It could be wishful thinking, since we already know that Fleda has indulged in a fantasy of winning Owen’s love. The same question is raised, even more acutely, in Chapter VIII when, towards the end of Owen’s interview with Fleda at Ricks, he shuts the door which she has opened to let him out of the drawing room.

He had done this before she could stop him, and he stood there with his hand on the knob and smiled at her strangely. Clearer than he could have spoken it was the sense of those seconds of silence.

‘When I got into this I didn’t know you, and now that I know you how can I tell you the difference? And she’s so different, so ugly and vulgar, in the light of this squabble. No, like you I’ve never known one. It’s another thing, it’s a new thing altogether. Listen to me a little: can’t something be done?’ [p. 99]

It is easy to assume that because they appear in quotation marks these words are actually spoken by Owen. Even as careful a reader as Bernard Richards seems to make this mistake, describing the italicized ‘she’ as:

a typical Jamesian device: the unspecified pronoun. It is quite probable that Owen is referring to his mother, but readers who want a romance between Owen and Fleda will assume that he has Mona in mind.¹⁶

In fact these words are Fleda’s verbalization of what she thinks, or would like to think, Owen’s silence means, and it is the truth of her interpretation, not the reference of the pronoun, that is doubtful (Fleda is obviously interested in how Owen compares herself to Mona). That Owen himself has not spoken is confirmed as the passage continues:

It was what had been in the air in those moments at Kensington, and it only wanted words to be a committed act. The more reason, to the girl’s excited mind, why it shouldn’t have words… [p. 99]

Critics who would have us believe that Owen’s attraction to Fleda is a complete fabrication of her ‘excited mind’ have, however, some difficulty in explaining away his declaration and proposal of marriage in Chapter XVI. According to Robert C. McLean, Owen is deceiving Fleda in order to get the spoils back.¹⁷ This theory requires us to believe that, had Fleda accepted his suit, Owen, with the collusion of the Brigstocks, would have broken off his engagement to Mona, and engaged himself to Fleda, for just so long as it took his mother to return the spoils to Poynton, and then reversed the process, with all the scandal and dishonour to himself that would entail. This seems improbable, to say the least, and inconsistent with McLean’s own judgement that Owen is ‘the most humane figure in the book’.¹⁸

But if Owen’s declaration of love for Fleda is not a callous trick, why does he marry Mona after all? Fleda suggests that he recognized where his duty lay, but her words sound more like a self-justification: ‘That he has done it, that he couldn’t not do it, shows how right I was’ (p. 196). Mrs Gereth has a coarser explanation: taking advantage of Fleda’s foolish scruples, Mona compromised Owen into marrying her by seducing him (p. 197). This theory is somewhat undermined, however, when her confident assertion that Owen ‘hates’ Mona for this ploy and will not cohabit with her, is falsified, as she herself later admits (pp. 206–7).

Owen’s motivation remains an enigma till the end, but the most likely explanation is that he is a weak and, in personal relations, cowardly man. Mrs Gereth calls him ‘disgustingly weak’ (p. 186) and Fleda accepts the verdict, adding only that ‘it’s because he’s weak that he needs me’ (p. 186). This has been Fleda’s attitude to Owen from her very first encounter with him, when he strikes her as being ‘absolutely beautiful and delightfully dense… She herself was prepared, if she should ever marry, to contribute all the cleverness, and she liked to figure it out that her husband would be a force grateful for direction’ (p. 40). Such, apparently, has also been the nature of the marriage between Mrs Gereth and her late husband (see p. 186), and such, we may guess, will be the marriage of Mona and Owen. One of the many ironies of The Spoils of Poynton is the spectacle of three, in their different ways, strong-willed women fighting for the allegiance of a decidedly weak man.

The mystery of Owen’s motivation is sealed by the wonderfully ambiguous conclusion to his letter asking Fleda to choose some treasure from Poynton as a gift: ‘You won’t refuse if you’ll simply think a little what it must be that makes me ask’ (p. 209). It is an epitome of the whole book, and Fleda enacts in relation to it our own experience of reading the book:

Fleda read that last sentence over more times even than the rest: she was baffled – she couldn’t think at all of what in particular made him ask. This was indeed because it might be one of so many things.

Reviewing the critical discussion of The Spoils of Poynton reveals the difficulties and dangers of reading this text with the aim of wresting from it a single answer to the questions it raises. It is possible to make a plausible case for almost any answer by selective quotation, but as soon as we return to the text itself we find that nearly every speech or action is capable of a double interpretation, and that every hint is balanced by a counter-suggestion. At the heart of the story is the ambiguity of Fleda’s character and conduct. Does it arise from authentic conflict or neurotic contradiction? Is her anxiety to protect her ‘secret’ (i.e., that she loves Owen) reasonable and honourable (given that he is engaged to another woman) or obsessive and perverse (given that she has reason to think he loves her and is disillusioned in the other woman)? Is her refusal to take any of the several opportunities she has to attach Owen to herself and detach him from Mona indicative of high moral principle and selflessness, or of moral egotism and sexual neurosis? Is her sudden change of mind in Chapter XVIII, when she declares herself ready to ‘go to the Registry Office’ and takes steps to recall Owen, an example of moral pragmatism, responding to Mrs Gereth’s changed status as the ‘victim’ of the situation,¹⁹ or is it typical of her confused and illogical mind that she acts when it is too late to have any effect? To read the text carefully is to be swayed back and forth between these alternatives, without ever finding a conclusive answer.

Some deep imaginative fascination with symmetrically opposed ideas has left its mark on every level of the text. Rhetorical figures of parallelism and antithesis abound, for example:

If he didn’t dislike Mona what was the matter with him? And if he did, Fleda asked, what was the matter with her own silly self? [p. 105]

If her friend should really keep the spoils she would never return to her.

If that friend should on the other hand part with them what on earth would there be to return to? [p. 132]

‘Where is… your freedom?… If it’s real there’s plenty of time, and if it isn’t there’s more than enough.’ [p. 162]

‘If he’s at Waterbath he doesn’t care for you. If he cares for you he’s not at Waterbath.’ [p. 186]

This last is a good example of the figure of chiasmus (repetition of words or phrases in reverse order) which Ralf Norrman has plausibly argued is the key to James’s imagination.²⁰ The plot of The Spoils of Poynton exhibits the same pattern in the movement of the spoils themselves: present at Poynton – absent from Poynton – present at Ricks: absent from Ricks – present at Poynton – absent from Poynton. This brings us to the ending of the story, which is as ambiguous as everything else about it.

Fleda eagerly accepts Owen’s offer of a souvenir from Poynton:

The passion for which what had happened had made no difference, the passion that had taken this into account before as well as after, found here an issue that there was nothing whatever to choke. [p. 209]

The passage is typically complex and allusive, but evidently means that Fleda, who still loves Owen, in spite of his marriage, a contingency she had always taken into account, sees no reason why she should not find some relief or satisfaction of her feelings by accepting a precious gift from Poynton. When she goes to the house, in a state of high excitement, to make her choice (she inclines to the Maltese cross), she finds that Poynton and all its contents have been destroyed by fire, a disaster that is attributed by the station-master partly to the carelessness of the servants left in charge by the absent Owen and Mona.

Mixed with the horror, with the kindness of the station-master, with the smell of cinders and the riot of sound was the raw bitterness of a hope that she might never again in life have to give up so much at such short notice. [p. 213]

This conclusion can be and has been interpreted in a number of different ways: as vindicating Mrs Gereth by showing that Owen and Mona are unworthy custodians of Poynton; as implying that Fleda is responsible for the disaster because she could have been mistress of Poynton; as punishing Fleda for her pride and folly by denying her the much-desired present; as vindicating Fleda’s refusal to compromise her moral principles for the sake of worldly goods; as impressing Fleda with a final, painful awareness of the meaning of renunciation; as a judgement on all the chief characters for their egotistical obsession with the ‘things’.

It is important to realize that the latter are not major works of art, but what are usually called ‘antiques’. Discussing the original germ of the story in the Preface, James observes:

One thing was ‘in it’… on the first blush… the sharp light it might project on that most modern of our current passions, the fierce appetite for the upholsterer’s and joiner’s and brazier’s work, the chairs and tables, the cabinets and presses, the material odds and ends, of the more labouring ages. [p. 26]

Although this theme was overlaid, in the development of the story, by a concern with character, it never disappeared entirely, and the terms in which James describes it here are extremely interesting. His use of the epithet ‘labouring’ suggests a quasi-Marxist explanation of the modern cult of antiques, while his references to ‘passion’ and ‘fierce appetite’ hint at a Freudian diagnosis.

The cult probably had its origin in the aesthetic nostalgia of the Romantic Revival. Later in the nineteenth century, the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, art historians like Ruskin, aesthetes like Pater and Wilde, and the Arts and Crafts Movement led by William Morris, all contributed to a growing enthusiasm among people with claims to good taste for domestic artefacts of pre-industrial design or manufacture. By the time James was writing The Spoils of Poynton, as Bernard Richards observes,²¹ magazines were springing up to cater for the new passion for collecting (The Studio in 1893, The Connoisseur in 1901, for instance).

The overt justification for collecting antiques is that the artefacts of the past are aesthetically superior to those of the present. But James’s description of the past as ‘the more labouring ages’ implies another explanation: the value of the antique is a function of the difference between pre- and post-industrial methods of production. As industrial techniques of mass-production made domestic furnishings and ornaments cheaply and plentifully available, the upper-classes could only demonstrate their superior status in this sphere in one of two ways – either by conspicuous consumption of the products of the new technology, or by collecting the artefacts of pre-industrial times and, preferably, foreign countries. Waterbath epitomizes the first way, and Poynton the second. That the former is the object of irony in The Spoils of Poynton hardly needs to be stated: some of its funniest pages concern the vulgarity of Waterbath and its inhabitants. But it is a vulgarity perceived by Mrs Gereth and Fleda Vetch, and if we identify too uncritically with their attitude we miss the more subtle irony directed at Poynton and the cult of its ‘things’.

The cult of antiques might be described as a special case of what Marxist theory calls ‘commodity fetishism’ and ‘reification’. Commodity fetishism is the tendency of commodities to conceal the social nature of their production behind their exchange value, and reification (literally, ‘making into a thing’) is the false consciousness that allows this to happen by treating economic laws and institutions as if they are absolute and unchangeable.²² By surrounding themselves with commodities produced in the pre-industrial past, that have acquired the status of art, the Mrs Gereths of this world can suppress the knowledge that they inhabit a capitalist society based on the exploitation of labour; and their obsessive collecting is a kind of inverted reification, treating ‘things’ as absolute and irreplaceable.

‘Fetishism’ also has a meaning in Freudian discourse which seems relevant, namely, the displacement of erotic desire on to some nonsexual part of the human body (for example, the foot) or inanimate object (for example, clothing). The Spoils of Poynton is a story of erotic desire displaced on to ‘things’. All the energy of Mrs Gereth’s marriage went into collecting ‘things’. Mona is ineligible as a mate for Owen, in his mother’s view, because she does not appreciate the ‘things’, yet she covets them enough to make their possession a condition of her marriage. Fleda is made available to Owen as an alternative partner only by virtue of sharing Mrs Gereth’s taste, and reflects that, if she had been in a position to actually marry Owen, ‘she might, should she have wished to keep her secret, have found it possible to pass off the motive of her conduct as a mere passion for his property’ (p. 58). ‘Passion’ is a floating signifier in The Spoils of Poynton, attaching itself now to sexuality, now to decor, and trailing with it connotations of religious ecstasy and suffering. As noted above, Fleda’s ‘passion’ seeks its final outlet in the acquisition of one of the ‘things’ at Poynton, and if we see the Maltese cross as symbolically phallic rather than sacrificial, we may accuse Fleda of sexual fetishism too.

The word ‘fetish’ literally denotes an object invested with magic or supernatural properties in primitive religion, and when we say colloquially that somebody ‘makes a fetish’ of something, we mean they attribute an exaggerated or irrational importance to it. The religious imagery associated with the beauty of Poynton is characteristically ambiguous in import, but there are frequent suggestions that Mrs Gereth’s obsession has warped her human nature. Fleda, for instance, early on recognizes

the poor lady’s strange, almost maniacal disposition to thrust in everywhere the question of ‘things,’ to read all behaviour in the light of some fancied relation to them. ‘Things’ were of course the sum of the world; only, for Mrs. Gereth, the sum of the world was rare French furniture and oriental china. [p. 49]

It is a measure of Fleda’s moral superiority that she can take no pleasure in the things when they are illicitly removed to Ricks: ‘there was a wrong about them all that turned them to ugliness’ (p. 85). They become ‘a torment of taste’ (p. 86).

James originally thought of calling his tale ‘The House Beautiful’, the Paterian title of a lecture Oscar Wilde was trailing around the country in 1893.²³ When it was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly he called it The Old Things, and finally settled on The Spoils of Poynton for the first book publication. The shift from a metonymic to a metaphoric title suggests a wish to moralize the theme. The ‘things’ are ‘spoils’ in a multiple sense: they are booty brought back by Mrs Gereth from her Continental travels, they are the cause of a war between the principal characters to possess them (imagery of battle is persistent) and they are finally ‘spoiled’ by the fire.

This conclusion to the tale must carry some implication of vanitas vanitatum. ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labours which he taketh under the sun?’ asks the preacher in Ecclesiastes. Mrs Gereth, whose marriage had seemed to her ‘a long sunny harvest of taste and curiosity’ (p. 41), comes to acknowledge the force of this question. In that remarkable scene in Chapter XVIII, when she faces the prospect of losing the ‘war’, she reproaches herself for having adopted Fleda as her protégée in these terms: ‘It was your clever sympathy that did it – your beautiful feeling for those accursed vanities’ (p. 185). To Fleda, Mrs Gereth in final defeat seems to ‘represent the final vanity of everything’ (p. 196). Yet Fleda herself, a page or two earlier, consoles herself, in the ominous silence and absence of Owen, by imagining the restoration of the spoils to Poynton in rapturous religious language:

It was really her obliterated passion that had revived, and with it an immense assent to Mrs Gereth’s early judgment of her. She equally, she felt, was of the religion, and like any other of the passionately pious she could worship now even in the desert. Yes, it was all for her; far round as she had gone she had been strong enough: her love had gathered them in.… They were nobody’s at all – too proud, unlike base animals and humans, to be reducible to anything so narrow. It was Poynton that was theirs; they had simply recovered their own. The joy of that for them was the source of the strange peace that had descended like a charm. [p. 194]

It is difficult to decide whether this flight of fancy is sublime or ridiculous – and whether its reversal in the last chapter is a spectacle of tragic suffering or poetic justice.

In the first edition of The Spoils of Poynton James frequently describes his characters as ‘hesitating’. The text itself is continually hesitating between alternative meanings, and the attentive reader perforce must do the same. In the New York edition of 1908, S. P. Rosenbaum has noted, James substituted several variations for the verb ‘hesitated’: gasped, wondered, debated, dropped, faltered, cast about, hung fire, hung back, took it so, rather floundered, thought again, waited for thought, had a pause, failed of presence of mind for a moment, and seemed for an instant to have to walk round it. These verbs also apply well enough to the experience of reading The Spoils of Poynton.

NOTES

[Place of publication is London unless otherwise indicated.]

1. Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James (Harmondsworth, 1977), Vol 2, p. 15.

2. Ibid., pp. 137–52.

3. The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York, 1961), p. 208.

4. Ibid., p. 138.

5. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), p. 159.

6. Philip L. Greene, ‘Point of view in The Spoils of Poynton’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 21 (1967), p. 368.

7. Nina Baym, ‘Fleda Vetch and the plot of The Spoils of Poynton’, PMLA, 84 (1969), p. 106.

8. William Bysshe Stein, ‘The method at the heart of madness: The Spoils of Poynton’, Modern Fiction Studies, 14 (1968), pp. 198 and 202.

9. John Lucas, ‘The Spoils of Poynton: James’s intended uninvolvement’, Essays in Criticism, 16 (1966), p. 482. (A reply to the article by Bellringer cited in the next note.)

10. A. W. Bellringer, ‘The Spoils of Poynton: James’s unintended involvement’, Essays in Criticism, 16 (1966), p. 185.

11. Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Secret of Narrative’, in The Poetics of Prose (Oxford, 1971), pp. 143–78; Ralf Norrman, Techniques of Ambiguity in the Fiction of Henry James (Abo, Finland, 1977) and The Insecure World of Henry James’s Fiction (1982); Shlomith Rimmon, The Concept of Ambiguity: the Case of Henry James (1977); Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of The Unreal (Chaps. 6–8) (Cambridge, 1981).

12. See ‘The intentional fallacy’, in The Verbal Icon by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley (Lexington, Ky., 1954).

13. Matthiessen and Murdock, op. cit., p. 251.

14. Arnold Edelstein, ‘The tangle of life: levels of meaning in The Spoils of Poynton’, Hartford Studies in Literature, 2 (1970), pp. 133–50.

15. Stein, op. cit., p. 193.

16. The Spoils of Poynton, ed. Bernard Richards (1982), p. 189.

17. Robert C. McLean, ‘The subjective adventure of Fleda Vetch’, in Henry James: Modern Judgements, ed. Tony Tanner (1968), pp. 204–21.

18. Ibid., p. 220.

19. The suggestion of C. B. Cox (The Free Spirit (1963), pp. 52–3) who cites Henry James’s endorsement of the pragmatic philosophy of his brother William.

20. Norrman, The Insecure World of Henry James’s Fiction (1982).

21. Richards, op. cit., p. 185.

22. See the relevant articles in A Dictionary of Political Thought by Roger Scruton (1982).

23. In the Postscript to his book Appreciations (1889), Walter Pater referred to ‘that House Beautiful which the creative minds of all generations – the artists and those who have treated life in the spirit of art – are always building together, for the refreshment of the human spirit…’. I am indebted to Ian Small for this information.

THE SPOILS OF POYNTON

PREFACE

IT was years ago, I remember, one Christmas Eve when I was dining with friends: a lady beside me made in the course of talk one of those allusions that I have always found myself recognising on the spot as ‘germs.’ The germ, wherever gathered, has ever been for me the germ of a ‘story,’ and most of the stories straining to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as minute and wind-blown as that casual hint for The Spoils of Poynton¹²valuehis