从《阿斯彭文稿》看亨利.詹姆斯的心理现实主义及其性别意识

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Chapter One Introduction

§1.1 Henry James and The Aspern Papers

Henry James is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest novelists and

critics in American literary history, although he spends most of his time in Britain. He is

a diligent and prolific writer and keeps writing during all his life. He has left the

descendants wealthy literary heritages which covers many fields of literature, including

novels, tales, travels, literary criticism, dramas, biographies, letters and reading notes.

As one of the three greatest American realists in the 19th century (the other two are

William Dean Howells and Mark Twain), he attempts to carry out reforms on novel

writings. Laying stress on the characters’ psychological description and analysis, James

achieves a special recognition to human being’s behavior and initiates a new era of

modern novels represented by James Joyce and William Faulkner; consequently he is

regarded as one of the inaugurators of psychological novels, a forerunner of modern

novels in the early 20th century and enjoyed the name of “the father of modern novels”.

Yale professor William Lyon Phelps calls him “the best example of the psychological

realist that we have in American literature (Phelps 788).” Joseph Conrad observes that

James is the “historian of fine consciences”(Conrad 44). Ezra Pound shows great

enthusiasm for James’s international quality for “string in every way to bring American

on the side of civilization (Pound 28).” F. R. Levis, in his The Great Tradition, places

Henry James with Jane Austin, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence as the

“great English novelists”, who stand as the representatives of the great tradition of

English literature (Levis 39). James is also the major concern of many critics, like W.C.

Booth, Geoffrey N. Leech. Indeed, Henry James is such an indispensable figure in

English literature that no critics can afford to neglect him.

What most exhibits James’s sophisticated and finished literary achievements is his

novel writing. During his fifty-year writing career, James has written twenty-one long

novels and more than one hundred novellas and short novels all told. Henry James’s

novels have profound themes, extremely visual characters and distinctive language style.

His narrative technique shows his originality and creativity. Critics tend to focus on his

early periods and late period, considering the fact that the middle period of his literary

Psychological Realism and Gender Consciousness — A Critical Study

of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers

career comes out as an absolute failure when he shifts his interests to playwriting.

However the tales in the middle period shouldn’t be ignored. Many of them make

preparations for the later novels. The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw are the

superb examples. Distinguished literary critic, poet and professor R.P. Blackmur wrote

the introduction for The Aspern Papers and considered The Aspern Papers, “which one

might say was an early, or primitive” novella for the late great novels (Blackmur,

Introduction 6). Henry James is famous for his psychological analysis. He attaches great

importance to the inner awareness and inward movement of his characters in face of

outside occurrences rather than merely delineates their environment in any detail. He

has become “probably the first of the modern psychological analysts in the novel and

anticipated in his works the modern stream-of-consciousness technique so widely

employed in the first decades of this century ( 常128).” As the masterpiece of his

novella, The Aspern Papers is a distinctive representative of his psychological novels.

After his first period on the international novel writing, James began to shift into a new

experimental writing period and tried to write some new subjects. During 1886 to 1887,

he stayed in Italy, and later he wrote a series of short novels, which was called James’s

“Italian phase” (Edel 214). Among these novellas, The Aspern Papers is one of his

finest.

The Aspern Papers was written in 1888, originally published in Atlantic from

March to May in serialized form. Later in the early 20th century, when Henry James was

in his sixties, he spent four years to re-anthologize his novels and published his New

York Edition The Novels and Tales of Henry James (from 1907 to 1909). The Aspern

Papers was selected into the twelfth volume of New York Edition. American famous

scholar and well-known Henry James’s biographer Leon Edel called “The Aspern

Papers Henry James’s masterpiece of short novels of his 1880’s”(Edel, Critical 172)

and “Henry James’s most brilliant of all of Henry’s tales”(Edel, Middle 217). With a

poetic narrative style, the novella tells us a seemingly simple story, which is actually

rich in content. An American critic came to Venice with disguise as a traveler in order to

look for the deceased great romantic poet Jeffrey Aspern’s papers, which belonged to

two elderly ladies, Juliana and Tina Bordereau, the former, the other’s aunt and guardian,

having been Aspern’s mistress. He successfully lodged in their house and began the

dramatic fights with Juliana. At the same time he used Tina to approach the papers step

by step. But finally the precious papers were just destroyed with the old times. The

Chapter One Introduction

narrator suffered defeat on the verge of victory and had to leave Venice with

disappointment. Because of James’s successful psychological depiction and unique

narrative style, he knits an exquisite plot and portrays characters successfully in a

limited length. This novella has enjoyed popularity ever since its appearance and drawn

critics’ attention as well.

§1.2 Literature Review of Henry James and The Aspern Papers

Until now it has been more than 100 years about Henry James’s studies. James is

perhaps the most thoroughly commented-on novelist of the nineteenth or twentieth

centuries, and one of the most volubly written-about authors of any time (Freedman

248). In the 19th century, the critics about James and his works were fragmentary. Most

of them were the critics about his single works, among which there were critics who

opposed his literary style and his attitude towards American culture or praised his

experimental and creative literary techniques (such as Howell’s critics about Henry

James). Most of these critics were collected in The Critical Heritage (by Gard)

published in 1968. Since 1920s, immediately after James’s death, some of the most

elegant responses towards his work emerged from the classic high modernist – Eliot,

Pound, etc. Yet the critical tide quickly turned against him, as Van Wyck Brook in his

work The Method of Henry James (1918) and Verson Parrington’s The main Currents in

American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginning to

1920 (1930) showed disparaging views on him.

With the appearance and development of the western modern literature the

essences of Henry James’s works were re-dug out. From 1940s, He became the center of

critical practice undertaken via New Criticism. James works were closely read. The

theme and imagery, the method and the manner, as well as critics of the formalistic

method were well treated. F. O. Matthiessen wrote Henry James: The Major Phase

(1944). British biographer F.W. Dupee finished Henry James in 1951. Later the

American scholar and famous biographer Leon Edel won The Pulitzer Prize and

National Book Awards in 1963 for his compilation of Henry James with 5 volumes.

Moreover, Edel compiled The Selected Letters of Henry James (1956) and Henry James:

A Collection of Critical Essays (1963). All these works laid a foundation for the study of

Henry James. Thence, many critics like W. C. Booth, Oscar Cargill, Dorothea Krook,

Psychological Realism and Gender Consciousness — A Critical Study

of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers

Laurence Holland began to make Jamesian studies in a variety of issues.

From 1970s, Jamesian studies were theorized under the impact of the turn to theory.

At the time, although the study of Henry James was still formalistic orientation, the

narrative theory, psychoanalysis and deconstruction theory were introduced to Jamesian

studies. In the 1980s and 1990s, James’s work has been theoretically reread. The power

of the society in the making of literary form and values, the construction, deconstruction

and reconstruction of gender identities, the role of the author in the literary marketplace

were all stressed. Judith Fetterley’s The Revising Reader (1978) was a forceful

interpretation of James’s fiction from the feminist point of view. Virginia Fowler’s

Henry James’s American Girl (1984) was another feminist reading of James’s

interpretation of women. Mark Seltzer, in his work Henry James and the Art of Power

(1984) demonstrated that Henry James’s aesthetic art was a discursive weapon contrived

within the power of representation. John Carlos Rowe’s The Theoretical Dimensions of

Henry James (1984) was a postmodern analysis of Henry James. Daniel Mark Fogel’s

Covert Relations called attention to James’s influence on James Joyce and Virginia

Woolf.

Up to the end of 20th century, more than one hundred academic works about

Jamesian studies have been produced, and the symposia about Henry James were also

convened frequently. The studies of Henry James, just like the studies of Shakespeare,

has become not only an academic work to dig out James’s literary achievements, but

also a mirror to reflect different cultural and theoretical viewpoints by the scholars from

one generation to another. It has become a media for the scholars’ intellectual

communication.

In China, according to Dr. Dai Xianmei’s work Between Tradition and Modernness:

Henry James’s Theory of Fiction, Henry James’s study in China began in the 1980s and

could be divided into three aspects ( 代4). The first one is the general and overall

introduction of Henry James’s writing features in the American literary history and

some of his critical articles. The second one is about the studies of James’s single works

in 1990s. The third is some master’s theses and doctoral dissertations in the universities

about the studies of Henry James in 1990s. With the introduction of James’s works into

China, recently there had appeared a lot of critical papers, such as On Henry James’

Culture Psychology by Wu Caiya, Structuralism and Henry James’s Theory of Fiction

by Cui Shaoyuan, An Initial Study of Henry James’s Theories on Novel by Chen Ping,

Chapter One Introduction

and Henry James: Realism, Psychological Realism and Stream of Consciousness by

Wen Liya etc. They made analysis towards James’s writing theory from different

perspectives.

The Aspern Papers, as an excellent novella of Henry James, has its own undeniable

influence although the quantity of the critical essays on the novella cannot compare with

his famous long novels. In the western world, some critics showed interests in the

narrator and commented the novella from the narrative point of view. W.C. Booth in his

famous book The Rhetoric of Fiction took The Aspern Paper as an example to illustrate

the unreliable narrator of fiction. He made a detailed analysis on the narrator in The

Aspern Papers and found that the narrator “I” was an unreliable one, so James couldn’t

provide a reliable narrator for the whole development of the story, which left some

unanswered questions for the readers. While Danniel J. Schneider in his article The

unreliable Narrator: James’s the Aspern Papers and the Reading of Fiction brought

forward an idea contrary to Booth’s. He thought The Aspern Papers contained clear and

definite meanings and James had provided the readers with enough necessary

information to promote the production of meaning. The problem with Booth was that

his reading method couldn’t truly understand James’s image pattern and the opposite

relations among the characters in the novella (Schneider 43). The different versions of

The Aspern Papers also attracted critics’ interest. Ellen Brown made a comparison

between the 1888 version and the later New York Version in his article Revising Henry

James: Reading the Spaces of The Aspern Papers and thought that the New York

Edition was not a simple revision of the original version. James’s re-tailoring of the tale

became a new narrative in itself: a narrative in which the author tried to control his text

and to direct his readers’ responses to it (Brown 64). About the three main characters in

the novella, the narrator, Juliana Bordereau and her niece Miss Tina, their relationships

were always the focus of the readers and the critics. Edward Wagenknect analyzed their

fighting and contradictory relationship in his The Tales of Henry James. Jeremy

Tambling talked about the monomania and the American past in The Aspern Papers in

his book Critical Issues-Henry James.From the feminist perspective Jeanne Campbell

Reesman argued that The Aspern Papers attacked the women and the reality at that time.

From the same perspective, John Carlos Rowe in his book The Theoretical Dimensions

of Henry James made a judgment that The Aspern Papers,The Bostonians and The

Spoils of Poynton could be the representatives of Henry James’s feminist works, which

Psychological Realism and Gender Consciousness — A Critical Study

of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers

reflected the women’s fate, status, oppression they received and their rebellions.

Laurence Holland made his research toward The Aspern Papers and its New York

Edition preface. He reckoned that the form of James’s novels had deep historical and

cultural meanings. Susanne Kappler used Olric epic law and archetype theory to analyze

The Aspern Papers in Writing and Reading in Henry James (1980). From the above, it

is obvious to see that its unique charms attract the critics to make comments from

different perspectives despite the fact that The Aspern Papers is only a novella.

In China, The Aspern Papers as a novella hasn’t received sufficient attention since

what most of Chinese readers and critics are familiar with are the long novels in his

early and later periods. But there are still some scholars who have interests in this

novella. The famous scholar Mr. Zhu Wan published his Chinese translating version of

The Aspern Papers in World Literature in 1982, which provided more opportunities for

Chinese readers to know and read this excellent novella. After Mr. Zhu’s translation

work, the famous scholar Mr. Zhao Luorui also wrote The Central Idea of The Aspern

Papers in the same volume to illustrate the central idea of the novella. When Chinese

translating version The Aspern Papers was published as a book in 1983, Zhu Wan wrote

his postscript in order to help more readers to know the writing background of the

novella better. With the introduction of The Aspern Papers into China, in the special

column Essays on the Art of Foreign Novels, the famous scholar Li Zhi published On

the Artistic Space of The Aspern Papers to give high praise to the novella. He thought

that “this masterly and profound novella showed the author’s artistic style and features

fully and perfectly; it also showed his practice on his art and theory of novels

completely. At the same time, it was the direct exhibition of author’s quality”(李知 10).

He explored the unique artistic space in The Aspern Papers. Xiong Yi and Yin Lijun

analyzed the hidden gender sense in the novella in their paper Interpretation of Sense of

Gender in “The Aspern Papers” and found that the sense of gender in The Aspern

Papers was not stated directly but it was implied through the “implied writer” in the

novella (92-94). Shen Weiwei published A Narrative Perspective on Indeterminacy in

The Aspern Papers on World Literature Criticism, analyzing the indeterminacy of The

Aspern Papers from the narrative perspective and revealing James’s complex attitude

towards first-person’s limited point of view and his ambivalent writing style. Mao

Liang’s article Henry James: The Ethnical Imagination in Literary Reading on Foreign

Literature Review tried to find James’s literary and cultural ethics through analyzing

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摘要：

ChapterOneIntroduction1ChapterOneIntroduction§1.1HenryJamesandTheAspernPapersHenryJamesisuniversallyacknowledgedasoneofthegreatestnovelistsandcriticsinAmericanliteraryhistory,althoughhespendsmostofhistimeinBritain.Heisadiligentandprolificwriterandkeepswritingduringallhislife.Hehasleftthedescendantsw...

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