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Fleda Vetch and the Plot of The Spoils of Poynton
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
HENRY JAMES found writing The Spoils of Poynton very difficult, and for this reason he devoted more space to it in his notebooks than he did to any other work. The seven entries mark places in the composition where James was trying to work his way out of dilemmas in the plot.1 These entries, proposing lines of action often abandoned in the final work, contain an action of their own: the evolution of Fleda Vetch's character. Originally she was put into the story in a minor capacity, but her functions in the novel multiplied, and James had to spend unanticipated pages rendering her character more fully.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1969
References
1 In this counting I am considering sections separated from a major entry by a row of xxxxx's but without separate dates to belong to the major entry. This situation occurs in entries II and iv. I am also discounting an entry which falls between entries in and iv and considers the question of length only. The entries, from The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and K. B. Murdock (New York, 1955) are as follows:
Entry i, 24 Dec. 1893, pp. 136–137.
Entry ii, 13 May 1895, pp. 198–199.
Entry iii, 11 Aug. 1895, pp. 207–209.
Entry iv, 15 Oct. 1895, pp. 214–219.
Entry v, 13 Feb. 1896, pp. 247–251.
Entry vi, 19 Feb. 1896, pp. 251–254.
Entry vii, 20 March 1896, pp. 255–256.
Hereafter page references to these entries will be included in the text.
2 Three studies are particularly concerned with the interrelation of the text and notebooks. First are the extensive editorial comments of the notebook editors, which vividly keep the reader in mind of the great increase in the novel's length. The interpretation of Fleda presented there is based on James's description of her in the preface to the New York Edition, and also draws heavily on entry iv.
Emily K. Iszak, in “The Composition of The Spoils of Poynton,” TSLL, vi (Winter 1965), 460–471, attributes most of James's difficulties with Fleda to the pull between his desire to treat the novel dramatically and the “inner” nature of Fleda's character. The alteration in Owen's feelings for her are seen as important mainly for Owen's character. S. P. Rosenbaum, in “Henry James and Creativity: ‘The Logic of the Particular Case’,” Criticism, vii (Winter 1966), 161–174, also stresses James's desire to write dramatically in this novel. He also compares the preface and the first notebook entry to point out disparities in James's account of the “germ” of the novel.
3 Most critics seem to share with Matthiessen and Murdock the belief that James's prefatory remarks about Fleda as a free spirit are the best description of her, although definitions of that freedom vary from one critic to the next. Patrick F. Quinn, in “Morals and Motives in The Spoils of Poynton,” SR, lxii (Autumn 1954), 563–577, sees Fleda as destructively rigid in her ethical absolutism; Edmund Volpe, “The Spoils of Art,” MLN, lxxiv (Nov. 1959), 661–668, and Alan H. Roper, “The Moral and Metaphysical Meaning of The Spoils of Poynton,” AL, xxxii (May 1960), 182–196, develop modified versions of this idea. A recent article by Stephen Reid, “Moral Passion in The Portrait of a Lady and The Spoils of Poynton,” MFS, xii (Spring 1966), 24–43, takes a psychological approach and argues that Fleda's moralism is rationalization. Other lines of criticism are those which see Fleda as an unreliable narrator and reconstruct various versions of the real action of the book—e.g., Robert C. McLean, “The Subjective Adventure of Fleda Vetch,” AL, xxxvi (March 1964), 12–30; and those which, following another remark in the preface, see Fleda as spokesman for the inarticulate spoils which are really the novel's core—e.g., Lotus Snow, “A Story of Cabinets and Chairs and Tables,” ELU, xxx (Dec. 1963), 413–435.
4 All references are to pages in the New York Edition of The Spoils of Poynton, Vol. x (New York, 1908). The revisions James made in the earlier text for this edition all intensify the effects, insofar as they are relevant to them, discussed in this paper.
5 In later entries the story is so far out of hand that the “act” analogy has to be abandoned: the dramatic unit is now the “scene.” The emphasis also changes from structural neatness to momentary intensities.
6 Matthiessen and Murdock hold that the Fleda of entry rv is the Fleda of the novel, because they believe that this entry supports the preface on which they found their interpretation. But there is a disparity between the entry and the preface, for in the preface Fleda is described as inactive consciousness, while in the entry her heroism is clearly linked to an action, i.e., getting the spoils back to Poynton.
7 Some critics argue that Fleda's motive is her belief in the sanctity of an engagement because James himself always prefers inapplicable idealism to worldly compromise. The question in this novel is less idealism versus compromise than the spirit versus the letter (insofar as the engagement, in its moral aspect, is relevant to Fleda's behavior); it is difficult, after Quentin Anderson's analysis in The American Henry James (New Brunswick, N. J., 1957), to maintain that James prefers the letter.