Henry James claims in “The Art of Fiction” that the duties of the novelist and the historian are essentially the same.1 But James himself has often been berated for neglecting social and political matters in his fictions. Apparently thinking of the international theme, Ford Madox Ford calls James “the historian of one, of two, and possibly of three or more, civilisations.”2 James defines his own artistic program in social and historical, if not political, terms when he declares: “I want to leave a multitude of pictures of my time.”3 But many of his critics reply that James “knew nothing at all about the life of his time.”4 Following the argument laid out by Van Wyck Brooks, they call James “a stranger in a strange land” whose self-imposed exile from America left him forever an alien in his adopted country—a “homeless man” locked almost solipsistically in the private world of his art but unfortunately out of touch with the wider world.5 Brooks and others blame this isolation for the excesses and eccentricities of James’s late style. They also fault it for James’s narrow concentration on the drama of the private life—a concentration that “implies an antihistorical attitude,” according to Philip Rahv, because it turns its back on the larger drama of social and political change.6
Still, James values private experience for political reasons that respond to social history as he understands it. Expressing sentiments that James often repeats, one of his characters explains that “it was the inner life, for people of his generation, victims of the modern madness, mere maniacal extension and motion, that was returning health.”7 But this justification nevertheless depicts private experience as a withdrawal from social storm and stress. It leaves open the question of whether a preoccupation with private experience—with the intimate realm of consciousness, for example, or with personal dramas of imagination, freedom, and care—compels James to neglect matters relevant to the politics of social reality and decisive for the course of history. History, society, and politics do not make up the strongest of James’s intentional foundations. His stance toward them does deserve scrutiny, though, because we are all in history and because, even when we abstain from political activity, we help to define ourselves by the attitude we take toward our social situation.
Like James, phenomenology has also been accused of emphasizing the private and the personal at the expense of the social and the political. Herbert Marcuse and other Marxist critics of phenomenology complain that, in giving primacy to the experience of the thinking subject, Husserl overlooks man’s fundamental social being. Husserl ignores history, Marcuse argues, because he grants the status of an eternal, universal absolute to the isolated self of bourgeois individualism.8 Phenomenology replies that man is indeed a political animal, as Marx and Aristotle contend, and that Husserl’s work helps to explain the lived experience of our social being as participants in history. According to Mikel Dufrenne, and as we saw in the last chapter’s study of personal relations, the subject is never an isolated individual but is always “social, that is, living among other subjects and participating with them in a certain style of life.”9 Social reality as a whole lies on the horizon of my day-to-day experience with groups in which I am involved in particular, historically significant ways. We participate in history through the temporal horizon of our experiences with groups—the horizon that joins the past, present, and future of individuals to the past, present, and future of their social world. Politics similarly goes back to our lived experience with others. As Ricoeur explains, “politics is the sum total of activities which have for their object the exercise of power.”10 There is a continuity between the politics of power on the vast stage of social history and the struggles for ascendancy that, as we have seen, decide the fate of freedom and care in personal relations.
As Marx describes it, for example, the politics of the class struggle is an abstraction from the concrete experience of workers who find their labor-power alienated from them at the hands of capitalists. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and others have in fact argued that Marx and phenomenology have much in common, including this insistence on grounding abstract concepts in concrete experience. The argument of some Marxists that economic conditions are all-determining might seem incompatible with phenomenology’s emphasis on freedom. But Marx himself argued that “men make their history upon the basis of prior conditions.”11 In phenomenological terms, this means that economic circumstances contribute to the historical, social situation that people must accept as a ground for their freedom; but although these “prior conditions” set limits to our possibilities, our circumstances do not deprive us of the choice of how to respond to them, and we may decide to seek to transform them. Marx is not the rigid determinist he is sometimes made out to be. His work need not compete with phenomenology, then, but can instead help with its sociology.
It is not immediately obvious, though, how a reconciliation between Marx and phenomenology can help clarify the place of history, society, and politics in James’s world. As many have noted, James is deeply conservative—even at times antidemocratic—in his explicit pronouncements about politics and society. In The American Scene, for example, James speaks his views clearly—criticizing the leveling effects of democracy as opposed to the value of aristocratic discriminations, bemoaning his country’s lack of traditions to defend against “the dreadful chill of change,” and declaring his preference for a community of “organic social relations” of a quasi-feudal kind sustained by “the squire and the parson” and unified by a national church.12 What matters, though, is the relevance of James’s political statements to his art. Here a curious contradiction seems to emerge. James’s aristocratic feudalism and disdain for change seem to contradict the allegiance to transcendence that, as we have seen, informs his epistemology and his moral vision. James’s wish to freeze the flow of history, for example, seems at odds with his delight in the process of “going-beyond”—the teleological process that lends power to the impression and that makes the imagination wonderful. His preference for aristocratic social differences seems incompatible with his joy in freedom’s possibility and his awareness of the dangers in personal relations when distances between people allow opacity to prevail over mutual transparency.13 This divergence between James the artist and James the social commentator suggests that his statements of political conviction may diverge from the kind of social criticism implicit in his art.14
A major obstacle to understanding the implied social criticism in James’s art has been the tendency to limit study of the politics of his fiction to works with overtly political subject matter. When critics like Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe ask about James’s attitude toward social issues, for example, they turn immediately to The Princess Casamassima and The Bostonians, the two works in his canon with the most explicitly political themes.15 Recent theorists of literary history like Goldmann, Jauss, and Weimann have suggested, however, that a literary work’s themes are not the only or even the best indication of its social, historical significance. Even a more traditional sociologist of literature like Ian Watt does not limit himself to political or commercial subjects when he elucidates the importance of free-market individualism for the rise of the novel as a literary form.16 We need not accept the thematic limits that Trilling and Howe impose on themselves. Instead, since phenomenology argues that social reality as a whole is an extrapolation from our day-to-day relations with others, we might ask whether the relations between characters in a novel can be seen to capture in paradigmatic form the social structures dominant at its time. The relations between a novel’s characters need not be homologous with contemporary social structures, of course, but any parallels that do exist have political importance regardless of the work’s thematic focus. An inquiry of this kind could allow itself to take up those many works in James’s canon with themes that seem remote from historical issues.
The Spoils of Poynton is one such work. As we shall see, though, its characters’ relations with one another, themselves, and the objects in their worlds offer a paradigm of social processes that extend beyond their personal horizons. Thematically, the political relevance of the novel seems limited to the laws of inheritance in Britain that dispossess the mother in favor of the son. In the original germ as in the plot James constructed from it, these laws prompt the mother to protest against the injustice she feels done to her. But if, following Ricoeur, we see the roots of politics in questions of power, then The Spoils of Poynton is an immensely political novel because, like so many of James’s fictions, it is a work about struggles over control and ascendancy. At the center of these battles are the spoils, and we shall ask how these objects act as mediators in Mrs. Gereth’s relations with others and with herself. Like Marx in his analysis of social structures at roughly the same period, James describes a situation in which the products of human activity—the things through which we express and objectify ourselves—control us more than we control them because they mediate in the service not of community but of power.17 Our reading of Poynton will conclude our study of James by revisiting the areas of experience that have concerned us thus far—consciousness, the imagination, freedom, and care—only this time in the setting of the politics of experience.
In order to avoid confusion, let me emphasize that James is not Marx. That may seem obvious, but what is surprising, I think, is the extent to which a social theorist like Marx—a thinker so alien, it would seem, to James’s sensibilities and convictions—can be brought to bear sympathetically rather than antagonistically in interpreting his work. Through his artistic exploration of personal experience in the world around him, James seems in fact to have grasped intuitively a state of affairs remarkably similar to problems Marx identified theoretically. Although more concerned with James’s millionaires than with his understanding of social structures, Edmund Wilson argues that “it seems . . . foolish to reproach Henry James for having neglected the industrial background. Like sex, we never get very close to it, but its effects are a part of his picture.”18 Wilson contends, though, that James restricts his art unfortunately by not pursuing social and political issues more aggressively and more openly. It is also a limit to James’s phenomenological significance that he explores such matters less forcefully than he does the other aspects of experience that we have considered. James is hesitant about larger social matters in his art—but not so hesitant that a work like The Spoils of Poynton fails to make a significant comment on the politics of experience.
According to James, the disputed objects are “the real centre” and “the citadel of the interest” in The Spoils of Poynton. In his preface to the novel, James even claims to have conceived Fleda Vetch only because “the spoils of Poynton were not directly articulate” and thus, unlike his heroine, could not function as the work’s central consciousness although they deserve that role.19 Apparently following James’s hint here, Stephen Spender goes so far as to argue that “it is the things themselves, the Spoils, which are evil, which destroy the happiness of all the people who are interested in them. ... At the end of the story, when the house with all its treasures is seen in flames, one becomes aware of what was always wrong; it was the Spoils themselves.”20
Spender’s argument is misleading, though, because inanimate objects are incapable of “evil.” They become implicated in “evil” only through their involvements in the lives of people. Spender has fallen victim to the kind of mystification that Marx describes when he explains how, in commercial and industrial societies, objects can seem to take on a life of their own independent of the human beings who are the source of their meaning and value—an independence that obscures the social processes indirectly embodied in those objects.21 James leaves the artistic value of the spoils unspecified, so that some critics argue whether they are ugly or beautiful.22 But by leaving these objects vague, James emphasizes that they matter less for their intrinsic value than for the way they participate in the relations that his characters have with one another and themselves. Our attention is directed toward the manner in which objects like the spoils come to embody human investments of meaning and value.
We have already seen how a cultural object like the golden bowl can act as a mediator in personal relations because it can offer to us the veiled presence of others who have dealt with it in the past. James seems to invoke this mediating role when he praises “the value derived from the social, the civilizing function” of “interesting objects.”23 But The Spoils of Poynton shows how objects that could open other worlds to us and that might enhance our possibilities for meaning and value can close those worlds off and even estrange us from ourselves. This occurs when, rather than furthering care and freedom, they serve conflicts over power for the sake of individual ascendancy.
Marx’s analyses of private property and capitalism also describe how objects that might serve freedom and community are involved instead in conflicts over dominance and personal advantage. According to Marx, man produces himself in action and, thanks to his powers of “self-objectification,” expresses himself in the products of his activity. In capitalism, however, where laborers sell their productive power to an employer, workers still objectify themselves but no longer control the results of their work, their “self-objectifications.” Consequently, Marx argues, “mans own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him.”24 In this process of alienation, mans freedom and power to objectify himself are placed in bondage to another; the workers product mystifies him because it is not an expression of his freedom but evidence of another’s dominance. It mystifies the capitalist too who values a commodity mainly for its power on the marketplace.
The products of human activity seem of primary importance to both worker and employer—to the worker because they enslave him and to the employer because they provide him with profits. Accordingly, the more important process of self-objectification underlying any commodity is obscured, Marx argues, and regarded at most as secondary rather than primary.25 When Marx claims that “only in community . . . is personal freedom possible,” he means in large part that our powers of self-objectification will belong to us individually only when their products mediate positively among us as a group.26 But products must fail in this mediating role as long as they are valued primarily as tokens that enhance individual ascendancy instead of as ways through which we express ourselves to others. Although Marx’s analyses of alienation and mystification are basically economic, they are just as fundamentally political because they center on questions of power— and particularly on the struggle for control over others’ capacity for self-objectification.
The Spoils of Poynton is certainly not a novel about capitalists and workers. But the problems that Marx describes are not limited to factories or the marketplace. In Marx’s view, his analyses laid bare basic structures of free-market, industrial society which could be found in various forms in all aspects of social life. James’s novel may help us understand how social relations far removed from the factory may still suffer from the difficulties in self-objectification and mediation that Marx found pervasive in the world of industry and commerce.
Almost all of the characters in The Spoils of Poynton are known through the objects that express them. Although almost completely absent from the novel, for example, Fleda’s father is still suggestively present through “the objects he was fond of saying he had collected— objects, shabby and battered, of a sort that appealed little to his daughter: old brandy-flasks and match-boxes, old calendars and hand-books, intermixed with an assortment of penwipers and ashtrays, a harvest gathered in from penny bazaars.”27 Here and elsewhere, in a manner reminiscent of Anne Thackeray Ritchie spinning out aspects implied by the perspective she has, a characters things can provide a clue that opens the way to his whole being. They testify to the activity through which he has embodied in objective form his capacities, values, and aspirations. For Fleda and Mrs. Gereth, at least, the “horrors” at Waterbath tell us as much about the Brigstocks as direct encounters with them do. Mrs. Gereth has a “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” (p. 24). Mrs. Gereth takes to an extreme, almost caricatured form our ability to understand others through the things that represent their being.
She does so because the process of objectifying herself through her possessions is all-important to her own sense of who she is. “Poynton was the record of a life” (p. 22), a place “charged with memories” where “everything was in the air—each history of each find, each circumstance of each capture”—all combining to throw “out a radiance in which the poor woman saw in solution all her old loves and patiences, all her old tricks and triumphs” (p. 58). The intrinsic value of the things, whether beautiful or ugly, matters less than the way they embody Mrs. Gereth’s very self as products of activity in the past that express and preserve that activity for the present and the future. “They’re living things to me,” Mrs. Gereth claims; “they know me, they return the touch of my hand” (p. 31). Although inanimate, the things “live” because they carry traces of her life. It is herself she touches in touching them and herself who returns her touch. She revives her past self with the touch of her present being, and her past self responds by confirming and sustaining her sense of identity. Fleda finds Mrs. Gereth’s “passion” for the things at Poynton “absolutely unselfish—she cared nothing for mere possession” (p. 214). “Mere possession” may not be at stake in the dispute over the spoils, but Mrs. Gereth’s self is because they are embodiments and expressions of her existence.
Mrs. Gereth takes her self-objectifications so seriously, however, that they actually alienate her from herself. Although not always a reliable observer, Fleda senses correctly that “the piety most real to [Mrs. Gereth] was to be on one’s knees before one’s high standard” (p. 30)—in the older woman’s case to worship at the altar of the deified things. Mrs. Gereth’s “high standard” is her own creation, though, just as her things are manifestations of her life. In her “piety,” then, she worships herself. Mrs. Gereth makes a fetish of the things in much the same way that, according to Marx, workers and employers make a fetish out of commodities by regarding “the products of men’s hands” as “independent beings endowed with life” and with meaning and value independent of man.28 As a result, she is confused about and even enslaved by the spoils in a way that Marx’s theories of mystification and alienation can help to explain. She is mystified by the spoils because, by deifying the products of her life’s work, she undervalues the more decisive process of self-objectification to which they owe their meaning and value. When she fights to keep control over the things, she fears that she will be deprived not only of precious expressions of her being but, even more, of her powers of self-creation because the products of her work have taken alienating precedence in her mind over the process of making and manifesting her identity.
Fleda thinks that “in the event of a surrender the poor woman would never again be able to begin to collect: she was now too old and too moneyless, and times were altered and good things impossibly dear” (p. 147). Age and lack of means might prevent Mrs. Gereth from duplicating Poynton, and she does deserve sympathy for having her life’s work taken away from her without adequate recompense. But Fleda’s observation here makes the mistake of emphasizing the results of Mrs. Gereth’s labor more than the processes of self-creation and self-expression that are embodied in the things. For example, Mrs. Gereth inadvertently shows that those powers still belong to her—and that age and lack of means matter less than she and Fleda think— when she unwittingly works wonders with “the wretched things” (p. 248) that the maiden aunt left at Ricks. Mrs. Gereth need not lose her freedom and power for the future, then, when she loses the objects that manifested them in the past. In moving the things to and from Ricks, in setting up house there, and in mapping her devious strategies, Mrs. Gereth puts on an impressive, even intimidating, display of her powers of self-objectification; with “a sort of arrogance of energy,” she shows that “what she undertook was always somehow achieved” (p. 231). The threat to the spoils prompts a forceful response from Mrs. Gereth that indicates, perhaps ironically, how much they owe to her ability and strength of will even though she feels that she would be nothing without them. But since she has invested exclusive meaning and value in the products of her labor, it is not surprising that she feels totally deprived of possibilities for action and expression at the end when she is finally deprived of her things. Her worship of the spoils is a vain act of self-glorification. But it is also an alienating sacrifice of herself to their control. She feels all her freedom and power taken away from her at the end only because she vainly identified her very being with the things in a mystifying manner.
The dispute over the spoils is not the first time that they have acted as symbols of power. In fact, the dispute only brings into the open the disguised value of the things as tokens of individual ascendancy that they seem to have had for Mrs. Gereth all along despite her claim of caring selflessly for them with a noble devotion to the ideal they represent. For example, Mrs. Gereth complains that few others understand her devotion or share her deep appreciation of the things. But her superiority of knowledge, sensibility, and commitment represents power here because it gives proof of her special ascendancy over others. This may be one reason why such a cultivated mother has such an uncultivated son. In his obtuseness, Owen offers Mrs. Gereth more evidence of her privileged uniqueness than he might as a rival in appreciation.
Furthermore, Mrs. Gereth’s collection at Poynton is itself an act of power over others’ powers of self-objectification. Mrs. Gereth does not make the things herself but collects them, which is to control the self-expressions of others and to put them to the service of her own project of creating an identity. Collecting might not constitute an assertion of power if the collector sought to devote himself to bringing out the presence of others that lies dormant in his pieces as the source of their meaning and value. But Fleda complains that “somehow there were no ghosts at Poynton” (p. 250), by which she means that the things fail to resonate with the voices of others who had cared for them before Mrs. Gereth. The presence of others in the things has apparently been stifled by Mrs. Gereth’s domineering will that allows only her being to emanate from them. “Poynton, moreover, had been an impossible place for producing,” Fleda feels; “no art more active than a Buddhistic contemplation could lift its head there” (p. 148). As testimony to the exclusive powers of Mrs. Gereth, the things do not call forth the expressive capacities of others in response to them any more than they enable the voices of those behind them to speak.
Fleda wonders why Mrs. Gereth, with her noble aesthetic ideals, should welcome an open battle, complete with “the constables and the dragging,” in order “to make Owen and Mona do everything that will be most publicly odious” (p. 48). But there is no essential contradiction between Mrs. Gereth’s commitment to the things and her eagerness for the police because both signify a contest for power. Mrs. Gereth may be ready to understand the threat to the things as a threat to her freedom and agency because, even before open warfare over them begins, the spoils have been a means for appropriating and dominating others’ powers of self-objectification.
All of this helps to explain why the things fail to mediate positively between people. If Poynton lacks “ghosts” and Fleda feels her creativity stifled there, then the things, in Mrs. Gereth’s hands at least, do not open the worlds of different subjects to one another but leave them inaccessible and opaque. Another reason for Owen’s blindness to cultural value may be that the value-generating acts embodied in his mother’s things are not allowed to speak to other subjectivities because her will to power does not let her possessions function as inter-subjective mediators. The things speak to Fleda, of course, but with a voice that testifies almost exclusively to Mrs. Gereth’s powers of self-objectification. Mrs. Gereth collected the things with her husband, but even his presence seems oddly absent from them. They are not depicted in any important sense as a sentimental link between the departed husband and his survivors.
Mrs. Gereth and her son Owen do not have much in common, but they do share a lack of imagination about the worlds of other selves. “Poor Owen went through life with a frank dread of people’s minds” (p. 42) because of the fearful complications with which they threaten to surprise him. Mrs. Gereth “had no imagination about anybody’s life save on the side she bumped against” (p. 138). But her blindness to the hidden sides of others, to the unfathomable depths beyond their surfaces, goes hand in hand with the solipsistic vanity of her concern over her powers of self-creation. Unlike the more imaginative Fleda (perhaps extravagantly imaginative, in fact), Mrs. Gereth does not feel the “dim presence” of “the character of the maiden-aunt” during their first trip to Ricks (p. 54). And it seems that only a lapse of will on Mrs. Gereth’s part after the defeat of her strategies allows the presence of the aunt to emerge in her arrangement there at the end. “We’re in fact just three” (p. 249), Fleda exclaims because, for the first time, Mrs. Gereth had allowed the “ghost” of another to make itself felt through her hands.
We saw with Maggie Verver how, by giving us mediated access to the worlds of others, an object like the golden bowl can help to overcome the opacity that hampers personal relations. But Mrs. Gereth’s objects disguise rather than reveal the presence of others because, like Marx’s similarly mystifying commodities, they act as mediators in conflicts over power. Such battles thrive on opacity, but care demands that we work toward transparency. The spoils bring the characters in James’s novel into relation with one another—but as negative mediators that serve opacity rather than transparency, conflict rather than care.
The things mediate between Mrs. Gereth and Mona Brigstock, of course, in just such a negative manner. In the atmosphere of obscurity that surrounds their struggle, we (along with Mrs. Gereth and Fleda) are kept largely in the dark about what Mona really thinks about the spoils. Mona rarely appears in person and never speaks her mind, but Owen reports that “she thinks they’re all right” (p. 29) and even that “she was awfully sweet on them” (p. 91). The intrinsic value of Mrs. Gereth’s objects seems to matter little to Mona. Once again, though, what does count is that to possess them means to have power. “She never wanted them particularly till they seemed to be in danger,” Owen explains; “now she has an idea about them, and when she gets hold of an idea—oh dear me!” (p. 161). Mona’s “idea” seems to be like Mrs. Gereth’s—that ownership of the things is crucial for her individual ascendancy. Mona does not seem to desire the spoils with any fervor until she learns that they are the object of another’s fervent desire. The things seem to take on meaning and value for her because Mrs. Gereth identifies her own power with them so closely and, by refusing to give them up, challenges Mona’s dominion. (Mona responds similarly later to Fleda’s apparent challenge as a rival for possession of Owen. Mona seems willing to let him go until Fleda’s threat to take him away makes Owen the stake in a battle to prove personal ascendancy.)
Now according to Marx, the intrinsic worth (or “use-value”) of commodities matters less in free-market societies than their capacity to purchase other commodities (their “exchange-value”); considerations of inherent utility are driven out by considerations of power.29 Mona shows that she is more concerned with the “exchange-value” than the “use-value” of the spoils when she travels with Owen after their marriage: “It was a piece of calculated insolence,” in Mrs. Gereth’s view, “a stroke odiously directed at showing whom it might concern that now she had Poynton fast she was perfectly indifferent to living there” (p. 258). By refusing to use Poynton, Mona displays her ascendancy over Mrs. Gereth more forcefully than she would if she seemed to show she cared for the things themselves. She also announces clearly that personal hegemony was her goal all along.
Both Mona and Mrs. Gereth are mystified by the spoils, though, because having them does not enhance Mona’s powers of objectifying herself in future action any more than not having them should prevent Mrs. Gereth from creating and expressing herself after her defeat. Mona has only the objects that embody Mrs. Gereth’s past activities but does not have control over her rivals capacity to objectify herself in the future. Monas indifference to Poynton shows that her victory is a dead-end that does not point to productive possibilities beyond itself. In Marx’s view, the employer’s power over his workers is defined less by his ownership of their products than by his control of their power to produce. Mona has power over Mrs. Gereth’s products, but not over her productivity. Their relation shows the futility of mystifying power by making it an end in itself.
Power is also at the heart of Fleda’s and Mrs. Gereth’s relationship. Apparently brought together by their appreciation of the beautiful and disgust at the tasteless, these two women might seem positively mediated by their mutual care for the things at Poynton. Fleda understands that Mrs. Gereth “had taken a tremendous fancy to her, but that was on account of the fancy—to Poynton of course—taken by Fleda herself” (p. 37). Mrs. Gereth “fancies” Fleda in large part out of vanity, inasmuch as her young friend glorifies her when she celebrates the things in which the older woman has manifested her being. Mrs. Gereth claims unselfishly to prefer Fleda over Mona as the future custodian of the spoils because “there’s a care they want, there’s a sympathy that draws out their beauty” that “a woman ignorant and vulgar” could not give (p. 31). But if Mrs. Gereth finds Mona objectionable as much for the strength of her will as for the vulgarity of her tastes, then Fleda is acceptable to her as much for her seeming weakness as for all her apparent refinement. Fleda obligingly imagines that “if she were mistress of Poynton, a whole province, as an abode, should be assigned there to the great queen-mother. She would have returned from her campaign with her baggage-train and her loot, and the palace would unbar its shutters and the morning flash back from its halls” (pp. 146-47). Fleda envisions not how she will care for the things with an appropriate sympathy but rather how she will take care not to usurp Mrs. Gereth’s ascendancy at Poynton as Mona would. Unlike Owen’s fiancée, Fleda does not threaten to take from Mrs. Gereth’s control the things that are her self-objectifications and that represent to her her power to continue exercising her will.
In the meantime, Mrs. Gereth expects Fleda to submit quietly to schemes aimed at defeating Mona—and to submit with the same unquestioning acceptance that the young woman imagines giving to her friend’s dominance at Poynton afterwards. Fleda soon realizes with dismay “that her own value in the house was the mere value, as one might say, of a good agent” (p. 36) who is expected to sacrifice her freedom to the bondage of her friend’s power. Again and again Mrs. Gereth makes demonstrations of care to Fleda that betray a quality of aggression that shows the two friends to be in conflict—”suddenly inflicting on Fleda a kiss” at one point, for example, “intended by every sign to knock her into position” (p. 31) to take Owen away from Mona. Again and again Fleda has “the sense of being buried alive, smothered in the mere expansion of another will” (p. 209) because, in a Sartrean manner familiar to us from the last chapter, her subjectivity has been made the object of another’s ambitions in a way that makes the young woman feel deprived of her freedom. Fleda has become subservient to Mrs. Gereth, of course, because the poor young woman prefers the role of companion to the other prospects open to someone in her penniless state. Without capital of her own, to paraphrase Marx, she has nothing to sell but her labor-power—her powers of appreciation, for example, and her capacity to act as Mrs. Gereth’s accomplice. By taking Fleda under her wing, Mrs. Gereth assumes that she has purchased control of those powers. And in her alienated state, with her capacities made over to the power of another, Fleda would seem unable to protest.
Fleda does protest, however. She resists the dominance of her benefactress and insists on her freedom to create herself for herself by keeping secrets, telling lies, and mapping strategies toward Owen, Mona, and Mrs. Gereth that defy Mrs. Gereth’s plans for her. Many factors are at work here, including Fleda’s delicate moral scruples, her love for Owen, her highly ambivalent and thickly disguised sexual feelings, and her wonderful yet dangerous imagination. But one major factor in Fleda’s duplicitous diplomacy between Owen and his mother is simply self-defense; if her benefactress claims control over Fleda’s powers, then this young woman’s schemes and secrets represent an attempt to create her own objectifications (the achievements of her diplomacy) safe behind a cloak of opacity from Mrs. Gereth’s usurpation. Some of the most dramatic scenes in the novel involve Fleda desperately trying to protect her secrets from Mrs. Gereth’s penetrating gaze—the secret of her love for Owen, for example, then of his love for her and of the likelihood that Mona will drop Owen if his mother holds out long enough. Fleda resents “the chill of her exposed and investigated state” and takes offense at the way “Mrs. Gereth popped in and out of the chamber of her soul” (p. 132). Attempting to close the door to that chamber by lying and putting on an act, Fleda tries to make herself more knowing than known and thus struggles against Mrs. Gereth’s presumption of hegemony.
Fleda finds “a high brutality” in Mrs. Gereth’s “good intentions” (p. 131) because they inform a stifling rather than liberating solicitude. The older woman’s presumably helpful acts repeatedly defy her young friend’s wishes and plans—as when, for example, in “an indirect betrayal” of “the spirit of their agreement” (pp. 153-54), Mrs. Gereth tells Owen Fleda’s address in London, or when, with “a calculated, . . . a crushing bribe” designed “to make sure of her” (p. 212), the older woman returns the spoils to Poynton in anticipation of Owen’s and Fleda’s marriage. Mrs. Gereth may seem justified in her impatience at the extraordinarily delicate, sexually ambivalent Fleda’s indecisiveness toward Owen. But Fleda seems justified too in resenting and resisting the power Mrs. Gereth assumes she has the right to exercise over her son and her agent.
Fleda’s schemes and secrets transcend Mrs. Gereth’s transcendence by foiling her plans more completely than the young woman herself had foreseen. Fleda sheds her protective cloak of opacity and confesses her secrets only when all has gone too far and Mrs. Gereth, without her things and with Owen and Mona probably married, seems powerless. After her confession, Fleda prepares “for penal submission—for a surrender that, in its complete humility, would be a long expiation” (p. 233). This final “surrender” confirms that Fleda had been resisting “submission” all along. Fleda practices her secretive, duplicitous diplomacy in the role of mediator between the parties in conflict over the spoils. It is a strange mediator who increases the atmosphere of obscurity that surrounds mutual misunderstanding and who adds to the conflicts that embroil the opposing sides. But if the spoils mediate negatively between those they bring together, Fleda could hardly be expected to reverse their effect all by herself.
The Spoils of Poynton ends with less hope than The Golden Bowl that positive acts of mediation in the future might replace conflict with care—or, to recall James’s words, might lead to “fusion” and “abridge old rigours of separation.” The fire that consumes the spoils does not purge the novel’s world. Rather, it reflects the incendiary value that the spoils have taken on as embodiments of the violent battles for power that have revolved around them. After these objects are gone, though, the dilemmas of power, freedom, and community that they objectified still remain. When Fleda says at the end, “I’ll go back” (p. 266), she does not specify what she will return to. But her most obvious alternatives do not seem particularly promising—back to Mrs. Gereth at Ricks in an estranged relation based “almost wholly on breaches and omissions” (p. 253), or back to a penniless, dependent existence with her father or her sister and with as little freedom and power as ever to attain the possibilities her imagination so richly projects. Maggie’s and Amerigo’s final embrace is ambiguous, as we saw, because it contains elements of both conflict and care. But it at least offers the possibility that they might work toward a mutually liberating union.
For Marx, individuals can enjoy personal freedom and caring rather than exploitive relations with others only after fundamental social and economic changes have cleared the way. When Sartre describes how the Self and the Other might reconcile their differences, he argues that transparency cannot triumph over opacity until “there has been a change in the economic, cultural, and affective relations among men, beginning with the eradication of material scarcity.” With Marx, he regards economic inequities as “the root of the antagonisms among men, past and present.”30 James understands how “material scarcity” and economic inequities contribute to conflict and interfere with care in personal relations. Let us remember, for example, how the inequality of Maggie’s and the Prince’s financial positions interferes with reciprocity and thus with intimacy in their relationship’s early stages. Or recall how Fleda’s poverty allows Mrs. Gereth to feel entitled to manipulate her young friend with impunity. Still, James would probably agree with Ricoeur and Sartre that problems of power and conflict will continue to threaten the ideal of harmonious personal relations even if material inequities are ever overcome.31 If antagonism isolates Fleda and Mrs. Gereth from each other at the end, or if conflict still threatens Amerigo’s and Maggie’s union as they embrace, perfect harmony fails these characters less because of the divisive impact of economic inequity than because of the disruptive role battles for power can always play in relations between ourselves and others. James shares the ideals of freedom and community, but both The Spoils of Poynton and The Golden Bowl demonstrate the distance that in his view exists between these ideals and their possibility of attainment.
Our analysis of the politics of The Spoils of Poynton has led us to reconsider aspects of experience familiar to us from earlier chapters. The failure or success of mediation, for example, helps to decide whether conflict or care, opacity or transparency, will prevail in personal relations. The process of self-objectification implicates both freedom and perception—the possibility of producing ourselves in action and the ability to recognize ourselves and others through the products of our activity. Mystification is an epistemological dilemma— a failure to know ourselves, others, and our objects for what they are— which also hampers freedom and care by thwarting self-expression and community. The ability to create and recognize ourselves in the objects we make also requires the use of the imagination, as both Fleda and Mrs. Gereth amply show in their successes and failures in exercising this faculty. Once again we have seen, then, that there is a unity of knowing and doing in James that extends from his notion of the “impression” to his “moral vision,” including his portrayal of the politics of experience.
Although The Spoils of Poynton does not address overtly political themes, it proved particularly felicitous for an analysis guided by Marxian concepts because of the role objects play in its characters’ relations with themselves and others. This novel offers no more, though, than an extreme case of an abiding interest throughout James’s canon with cultural objects like the spoils. Readers acknowledge this interest, for example, when they note the recurrence of collectors like Mrs. Gereth and Fleda’s father in James’s works—collectors like the Ververs in The Golden Bowl, Gilbert Osmond and Ned Rosier in The Portrait of a Lady, or even Rowland Mallet in Roderick Hudson.32 In fact, even beyond the collection of collectors in these works, the notions of objectification, mediation, and mystification could be employed to interpret all of the novels we have considered. Roderick Hudson objectifies himself in his sculpture, but his works fail to mediate between himself and others so that he becomes increasingly, tragically isolated in his own world, immune to help from his friends and relatives. When Gilbert Osmond insists that Isabel Archer sacrifice herself completely to his will, he demands that she cede to him all control over her power to create and express herself. Without any independent ability to objectify herself, she will become object-like—”her intelligence” like “a silver plate,” to recall a description quoted eariler, and her entire self “as smooth to his general need of her as handled ivory to the palm.” When the Ververs appropriate the Prince as “a morceau de musée,” they mystify themselves about him and lead him to protest in his adultery with Charlotte because they deny his power to express himself—to reciprocate their benevolence, for example, or to act the “galantuomo.” No more than The Spoils of Poynton do these novels precisely reproduce Marx’s analysis of “commodity fetishism.” But all of these works, each in a different way, show a profound awareness of the processes responsible for the alienation and mystification that Marx’s analysis uncovers: a confusion about the relation between the human world and the world of objects, the contest for control of others’ powers of self-objedification, and the failure of mediation to which this confusion and this contest can contribute.
Maxwell Geismar sees no political or social significance in James’s writings but argues instead that this novelist received the acclaim of the New Critics because both he and they isolated art from experience and history. “Henry James was, above all, the pure artist,” Geismar claims. “Just the thing for the new criticism with its own stress on method which also negated, or obliterated, the historical and the human elements alike in the ’pure’ work of art.” Geismar calls “the cult of James” in the 1950s “a revealing symbol and symptom of an age and a society which wanted to dwell like him in some imaginary world of false art and false culture” far removed from “the realities of world history which a large sector of the American intellectuals no longer wished to understand and deal with.”33 There may be a grain or two of truth in Geismar’s angry, overly general sociology. He is right, for example, about the ahistorical bias inherent in the New Critics’ method of viewing the literary work “sub specie aeternitatis” as a self-contained and self-sufficient “verbal icon,” with no need to refer for its meaning and significance to its author (the “intentional fallacy”) or its readers (the “affective fallacy”).34 Geismar is unfair, of course, in downplaying the interpretive rigor and depth that the New Critics gained by virtue of the very restrictions they placed on their definition of the work. Even more, though, he is unfair to Henry James.
We have seen in this chapter that James’s work can be read for its social and political significance with a method derived from Marx’s concern with “the realities of world history.” And we have seen in this study as a whole that James’s art need not be isolated from experience. Our survey of the intentional foundations that support the world of James’s art has taken us through a full range of the aspects of experience—from his concern with consciousness to his “moral vision,” from matters of knowing to matters of doing, from his fascination with the “impression” to his understanding of the imagination, freedom, personal relations, and the politics of social reality. A phenomenological reading of Henry James emphasizes rather than “obliterates” the “human elements” in his work. If James’s art had little or nothing to do with experience, then the unity of knowing and doing that we have explicated in his work would not share so much with phenomenology’s understanding of the epistemological and existential dimensions of our worlds. To understand James as a phenomenological novelist, however, means to understand him as a novelist of experience.