39 pages • 1 hour read
Henry JamesThe Aspern Papers
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1888A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
When Mrs. Prest leaves for the summer, six weeks later, the narrator feels that he has accomplished nothing. She suggests that he should act more boldly, to which he replies that “you may push on through a breach but you can’t batter down a dead wall” (73), and that he has seen both women much less often than he expected.
However, he has enjoyed his time at the house, experiencing communion with Aspern through his proximity to Aspern’s muse, employing a gardener to keep his promise of flowers (and hopefully offer an inroad with the women), and devising theories of the relationship between Aspern and Juliana.
Chapter 5 Summary
Avoiding the apartments in the evenings due to insects, the narrator spends time traveling the canals in his gondola or sitting in a cafe in Venice’s central Piazza. Returning one evening, he finds Tita in the garden. She is pleased to see him, as being outside alone at night makes her nervous. He is surprised at her talkativeness, and that she doesn’t use any of the pauses in conversation to tell him she should be going inside. She tells him that Juliana appears to be declining in health and has been wanting less attention from Tita, whom she ordered outside. The narrator doesn’t think this story makes sense and asks himself “whether it were not a trap laid for me, the result of a design to make me show my hand” (87). Tita goes on to tell him about their more sociable times in Venice years earlier.
As she starts to move to go inside, she asks whether he’ll read or write, and he replies that he won’t due to the insects, but would often read at night in bed, and “in nine cases out of ten it’s a volume of Jeffrey Aspern” (90), to which she replies that her aunt used to know him “as a visitor” (90), but never speaks of him anymore. She asks if he writes about him, and while he knows he should lie, he finds himself unable to do so. He tells her he is in search of more material about Aspern, at which she hurries away. He doesn’t see her for another two weeks.
Chapter 6 Summary
Tita awaits the narrator one afternoon to tell him Juliana wants “to talk with you — to know you” (93). Suspiciously, he asks Tita whether she has told her aunt about what he said about looking for Aspern materials. Tita tells him she has not, and escorts him to her aunt’s rooms. Juliana says that she called him there to thank him for the flowers he has been sending, which he stopped when Tita began avoiding him. He resolves to begin again and suggests that Juliana might sit in the garden sometime. She declines but suggests that he should take Tita out in the gondola to show her what has changed in the city.
Later in the week, they set off in the narrator’s gondola for a tour of the canals. As they travel, Tita tells him she’s discovered that the change in her aunt is because she feared that he was unhappy and would leave, meaning the loss of the rent. She tells him he would be better to give up his “reasons” and leave, and again tells him her aunt will never give him the Aspern papers. Tita observes that her aunt is very suspicious and insinuates that something in her past has made her so, and the narrator asks whether she thinks the papers make reference to this mysterious incident. Tita agrees that they may, though she disputes his suggestion that they contain painful memories. He wonders whether Juliana would ever destroy the papers, and Tita confirms that she loves them too much to do so now but may when her death is imminent. He asks her to prevent this, and she tells him that while she has no control over her aunt, she will try to help him.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
The plot of this section of the novella centers around the narrator’s halting efforts to get close to Juliana and Tita in order to obtain the Aspern papers. Chapter 4 begins six weeks after the narrator has rented the rooms in the Bordereaus’ house, but he notes that, at that time, he is “a thousand miles from taking tea with my hostesses” (73). This instance of hyperbole emphasizes the Bordereaus’ Privacy and Reclusiveness: Even after living with them in their home for more than a month, the narrator has not succeeded in getting to know them at all. Wondering what Tita does with her time, the narrator notes that “I had never encountered such a violent parti pris [principle] of seclusion; it was more than keeping quiet – it was like hunted creatures feigning death. The two ladies appeared to have no [. . .] sort of contact with the world” (75). The language of violence in this description is more apropos than the narrator seems to realize: If Juliana and Tita are “hunted creatures,” he is himself the hunter, a position made almost literal near the end of the novella when Juliana collapses in fright at his appearance in her room. All the polite distance that characterizes the narrator’s relations with the Bordereaus’ in this section masks a relationship that is essentially predatory: He wants to pry open Juliana’s carefully guarded secrets, turning her private memories into public record. The predator-prey relationship goes both ways, however, as Juliana in turn seeks to ensnare the narrator as a provider for her niece. Juliana has agency—she has lived a long and rich life, and she has chosen reclusiveness in her old age as a means of protecting her memories from the industry (represented by the narrator) that would commodify them. If there is a pure victim in this hunt, it is Tita, whose youth and opportunities have been stolen from her by her aunt’s reclusiveness, which became her own. James represents isolation and privacy (of people and written materials) as double-edged: both beneficial in preserving privacy or functioning as a retreat and characterized by missed opportunities for more experiences and more knowledge.
As a novella about the lost papers of a fictional poet, The Aspern Papers includes various metafictional references to the creation of literature. While the narrator enjoys his period of reading and writing and the pursuit of “esoteric knowledge” with which his “editorial heart used to thrill” (77), he spends a great deal of time constructing imagined narratives about the women’s lives, and particularly the nature of Juliana’s relationship with Aspern. He describes the creation of narratives about who she was and how they met, noting that he has imagined a romantic element and describing elements that are essential to his hypothesis. The imagining of other people’s life stories is closely related to the hatching of plots: The narrator invents Juliana’s past and plots to get his hands on the evidence, while Juliana imagines the narrator’s future (as husband to her niece) and plots to make it real.
James continues to develop verisimilitude through the setting in this portion of the novel. The narrator reflects on sitting at Florian’s café near the Saint Mark’s basilica, orienting the reader in the novella’s real Venetian setting. Similarly, the use of gondolas as a motif in the novella serves to characterize the uniqueness of Venice as a setting. The urban setting contrasts with the insular nature of the Bordereaus’ house. The dreamlike movement of the gondola through the canals, during rare excursions, makes the interior setting appear even more starkly limited.
As the narrator spends more time with Tita in this part of the narrative, this section includes descriptions of her character from his perspective. The narrator views Tita as paradoxical, the result of an interior conflict between her true self and her aunt’s influence. The narrator describes her as “the oddest mixture of the shrinking and the direct” (85) and begins to be able to tell which of her speeches are rehearsed and which are not. This section of the novella also foreshadows Tita’s proposition of marriage at the climax of the novel. When she says that she wishes he’d come 20 years earlier, she is referring to an earlier time when Juliana spoke about Aspern, but also hinting at a sense of regret for her own lost youth.
The romanticization of the past is another subtheme of this section of the novel. As the narrator fills his time before he begins interacting with Juliana and Tita, he invents imagined narratives about Juliana and Aspern. Similarly, Tita reflects on an earlier period in their life in Venice and what her aunt used to be like, lamenting the missed opportunities of her youth. Juliana suggests that “there is no more poetry in the world” (96) during a vague conversation with the narrator about Aspern. James therefore characterizes the irony and negative effect of being so obsessed with the past that one isn’t able to enjoy or participate in the present. Each character is subject to this effect in their own way. Tita’s relationship with her aunt has limited her options for the future, and she reflects on the life of the past. The narrator’s obsession with the historical figure of Aspern dictates his choices in the present, to the extent that he considers altering his future to obtain the papers by marrying Tita. As she nears the end of her life, Juliana reflects on the past by keeping the Aspern Papers close, but is willing to destroy them to maintain her privacy and for the possibility of security for her niece. As much as it presents The Archive as a Source of Connection, the novel also sounds a warning against placing so much value on that archive that one fails to live in the present.
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