Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton
James, Henry. The Spoils of Poynton. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963 (1897).
Simultan's sharp theory about Jane Austen is that those characters who violate ethical norms themselves suffer the most from it. Something like that principle is still at work in George Eliot; Gwendolyn's punishment for marrying Grandcourt is half Grandcourt himself, half her own conscience. James's characters, on the other hand, finds themselves in an ethical landscape that is losing its perspective and breaking up into a Cézanne painting. Our heroine Fleda is tempted by a moral transgression that would benefit everyone she cares about and injure no one other than some unpleasant people whom we hardly encounter in the book. The only thing holding her back is her own principle, and without a social canvas to back it up it's easy for that principle to look like perversity; all the more so since the scheme of values we do encounter most often is the aesthetic, and both James and Fleda are quite aware of the tie between aestheticism and the Hobbesian marketplace.
Simultan's sharp theory about Jane Austen is that those characters who violate ethical norms themselves suffer the most from it. Something like that principle is still at work in George Eliot; Gwendolyn's punishment for marrying Grandcourt is half Grandcourt himself, half her own conscience. James's characters, on the other hand, finds themselves in an ethical landscape that is losing its perspective and breaking up into a Cézanne painting. Our heroine Fleda is tempted by a moral transgression that would benefit everyone she cares about and injure no one other than some unpleasant people whom we hardly encounter in the book. The only thing holding her back is her own principle, and without a social canvas to back it up it's easy for that principle to look like perversity; all the more so since the scheme of values we do encounter most often is the aesthetic, and both James and Fleda are quite aware of the tie between aestheticism and the Hobbesian marketplace.
It should go without saying that Fleda maintains her integrity at the cost of everything else. Virtue for James is its own punishment, and in that respect his books are as black as Candide - but here no one is snickering in the gallery.Close to Fleda's present abode was the little shop of a man who mounted and framed pictures and desolately dealt in artists' materials. She sometimes paused before it to look at a couple of shy experiments for which its dull window constituted publicity, small studies placed there for sale and full of warning to a young lady without fortune and without talent. Some such young lady had brought them forth in sorrow; some such young lady, to see if they had been snapped up, had passed and repassed as helplessly as she was now doing. They had never been, they never would be, snapped up; yet they were quite above the actual attainment of some other young ladies. It was a matter of discipline with Fleda to take an occasional lesson from them.
