Henry James, I think, is an acquired taste that I never did acquire even though I was diligent in reading his major works when in graduate school. I didn’t like him because he was artful in the bad sense of the word. He arranged his stories so as to make a moral point after having clinched his case with an O’Henry twist so that James made sure you got the moral. The shorter works were better but had the same failing. “Washington Square” makes sure you know that it would have been kinder and more moral to allow the ugly duckling heiress to marry her male gold digger. In “The Beast in the Jungle” the young woman tells her friend in the end that he never actually committed to do something, which is to show he loved her, and the moral is that actions of omission are just as devastating and significant as acts of commission. The longer James novels, such as “The Golden Bowl”, are insufferable with their ambiguity and ambivalence strewn in every page, these clever people less clever than their inventor. Who cares to parse the characters because all it means is that they can reverse yet another time on the next page? That is different from Jane Austen, whose characters are set even if they are also ambivalent and rendered ambiguous because each one of them also has his or her own central spine, people just being that way. But I have recently come across James’ “The Spoils of Poynton”, another short novel, and it does have its virtues, even if overly contrived in that every outcome is preordained however much people are wills of the wisp.
A young man who is a bit of a ninny is involved with three women. There is his mother, Mrs. Gareth, who badgers his son and who he believes badgers her back but doesn’t seem to. There is Mona, the girl to whom he is engaged, and who assumes that when she marries him, will also henpeck him. The third woman is a Miss Vetch, a reserved woman who has become close to the mother, looking for a mentor, perhaps, to replace her father who is declining. She becomes taken with the son but cannot proceed further because he is, after all, engaged, and so Fleda Vetch (I don’t know if the name is meant as a joke) insists that he go back to Mona and break up with her before going on with this new love. But when he goes back, she seduces him and there is nothing to be done but for him to marry her, which leaves mother and miss Vetch devastated, mulling over what had befallen them. Mrs. Gareth blames Miss Vetch for having not been courageous enough to seduce the son, too principled by far or maybe too cold or not enough calculating, and Miss Vetch takes the same lesson, thinking herself a silly goose, though a reader might gather, at James’ insistence, that she is well rid of his fickle ways, were it not that Miss Vetch has insisted that she is in love with him and very much wants to win him over. The two women sit disconsolate when Mona and Owen go off to the registrar and then a church to marry, Mrs. Gareth insists she will soon die and Miss Vetch will meanwhile travel with her, both of them mourning the marriage they had both by now had very much wanted.
The title of the novel refers to the art objects the mother had accumulated during the course of their marriage. Her objection to Mona is that his intended daughter in law has no taste and she considers replacing her art objects with a billiard table so that men could spend their afternoons that way, men nor women of this class having no business or professional concerns, just objects of leisure, as are the art objects. Then Mona is understood to want to sell her objects and some make some profit, after which Mrs. gareth absconds the objects and puts them in a sma;;er more removed home, a place of which Miss Vetch had never been aware There is even a threat of a criminal charge at her reappropriation of these objects because the title of those are part of the house that will be entailed to the new owner, her son, and therefore at the disposal of his new wife, and so not to be alienated from the house, whatever are the emotional ties that Mrs. gareth has to them.. But the delay in the marriage makes Mrs. Gareth thinks that her son has now taken with Miss Vetch, and he does say that he wished he had met her earlier. That mismatch of timing frequently occurs in Jane Austen, whose prior romances are to be untangled, as in “Emma” or “Sense and Sensibility”, before their true object is to be realized. At which point, she acts impulsively, however much she thinks she acts deliberately, and sends all the objects back to Poynton, these now to reside in what would be the home of Miss Vetch, who would be Oven/s wife. But strict to her principals, miss Vetch sends Owen back to see Mona so as to finally break with her to assure that he is no longer in live with her, and Owen fails at the test, becoming involved or perhaps being seduced by Mona, there talk about going through with things, and Mona no caring about the art objects now that he has gained the main prize, which is her husband. So Miss Vetch and Mrs. Gareth are left to grieve as life has moved past them. The O’Henry twist is that all of those objects are consumed in a fire, down to the very last one, and so Miss Vetch returns home to London, left with nothing but her memories and, as in Jane Austen, memories run deep and are not readily extinguished and that is why suitors have to be not to trifle with young women. They are so deeply hurt when romance goes off the tracks.
This closet drama of five people (Mona’s mother to be included) is given enough detail so that James is able to place these people where they stand in society. Mrs Gareth says that miss Vetch has overcome her birth in Kensington, which at that time was regarded, as it had been by Wilkie Collins, as a suburb, and therefore disdained for its middle class respectability, when people of a higher class, like Mrs. Gareth, who owns two homes, though not particularly elaborate ones. Middle class respectability however dominates Miss Vetch. She will not abandon her principals, whether of respect for Own’s prior engagement to Mona, or to a standard of sexual propriety, when a higher class women would be more willing to bend moral standards so as to get her way, which is what Mrs. gareth says is the right way to act, people following their interests rather than their principals. So Miss Vetch comes to think she has been silly about her principals even though she is well rid of Owen, except that she loves him. She is willing to accept that Owen is a weak man who will forever be henpecked. Moreover, women are not the silent people found in Jane Austen, biding their time until men put themselves on the scene and court them, if they ever do. Rather, women will dominate the families in which they enter, which is clear with Wilkie Collins, previewing D. H. Lawrence’s view that women rule the night, even if Charles Dickens treats women as victims or as emotionally loyal to the male who serves as protagonist, whether as Pip in “Great Expectations” or the father in “Little Dorrit”, who is imprisoned for debt and whose daughter remains with him there as part of his household. Men can romanticize, but women drive as hard a bargain as they are able to.
Henry James is a direct descendant of Jane Austen in his subject matter of domestic relations and in his theme that character is complex, full of ambiguities and ambivalences. Moreover, both James and Austen have dramatic structures in each of their work, while Dickens and Eliot are lapidary and so suitable for being read aloud as distinct passages while in the midst of the multiple settings and interrupted story lines characteristic of what would become film screenplays. But James is also very different, a completely different kettle of fish, because James’ characters are mercurial, always full of impulse, while Jane Austen’s characters have solid cores where people bend only after long reluctance, as when Elizabeth bends to Darcy without ever giving up her unearned hauteur, and so her novels can be considered romantic comedies in that they are like plastic dummies who always straighten up after having been punched down, while James’ characters are melodramatic and even tragic because they can be flattened, as happens to in “Washington Square''. The Jamesian strategy can be appreciated by consulting the texture of a short passage of the novel in point, something not usually done in the criticism of novels, “texture” to be taken to mean the intersecting assumptions about life that make a work of art to have its own specific universe in which its characters are immersed. Here is an early on paragraph from “The Spoils of Poynton”:
“…an even livelier impression of Mrs. Gereth’s intervention from the fact that ten minutes later, on the way to church, still another pairing had been effected. Owen walked with Fleda, and it was an amusement to the girl to feel sure that this was by his mother’s direction. Fleda had other amusements as well: such as noticing that Mrs. Gareth was now with Mona Brigstock; such as observing that she was all affability to that young woman; such as reflecting that, masterful and clever, with a great bright spirit, she was one of those who impose themselves as an influence; such as feeling finally that Owen Gareth was absolutely beautiful and delightfully dense. This young person had even from herself wonderful secrets of delicacy and pride; but she came as near distinctness as in the consideration of such matters she had ever come at all in now surrendering herself to the idea that it was of a pleasant effect and and rather remarkable to be stupid without offense-- of a plesanter effect and more remarkable indeed than to be clever and horrid.”
James says very overtly what his characters are up to while Jane Austen has to infer their characters. In this case, James presents a tableau vivant: the way people are arranged to be will have consequences or are circumstances to be avoided and that these arrangements are deliberate rather than incidental, people more or less up to the task of intruding in other people’s lives. Mrs. Gareth gets Owen to walk with Fleda partly so he will come to like her, a design of a mother to make a match she prefers, and also to have a deeper sense of the girl to which Owen is attached so as to decide whether or how to manipulate her. Everything is subtle in that a gesture or a remark can make its mark, and some people are more aware than others that these are the ways of the world. Most disquieting, however, is the astute and candid observation, however disquieting it might be to say about one’s own son, that Owen is dense and that Mona is astute enough to think that a man like preferable to being ‘clever though horrid”, which, one presumes, are many of the suitors with which one might encounter. Marriage is a bad bargain but there are definite marriages that are less suitable than some others.
I am not at all sure that James’ point of view about the human condition is a very pleasant one even if he does seem to invoke a sense of natural justice whereby people get their deserts, even Miss Vetch, who cannot allow herself to act impulsively. It isn’t just that everyone is manipulating one another and doing so through the most delicate and barely perceived manners, everyone extending their antenna so as to have a faint signal of what they can incorporate., minor inflections as well as major ones having an impact on the outcome, so that Mrs. gareth sensing her distaste with Mona leading eventually to a catastrophe in that she had pinned her sights on one woman only to have her son go with the other and leaving her bereft rather than just affronted. Both successes and failures are matters of feeling tones rather than just getting realty or wealth or position.