"To suffer like chopped limbs": The Dispossessions of The Spoils of Poynton

James everywhere explores the implications of possession and possessions, of treating others as things even as things are granted sovereign value. Yet The Spoils of Poynton holds a special place in his career as a novel that pursues "possession" so persistently as to rethink all the word's implications--legal, spiritual, psychological, sexual--even as its meaning seems increasingly obscure in conventional terms. Anticipating the moral conundrums of the late novels, James for the first time elaborates an ethos that commends our treatment of others as things, valuing our mutual possession of each other as a necessary, even beneficent, process. This essay explores the novel's elusive central ethical issue: how do we possess one another, and what might a marriage of equals require from one to preclude being simply possessed?