Feats of Heroinism in The Spoils of Poynton

Feats of Heroinism in The Spoils of Poynton by Paula Marantz Cohen In The Spoils of Poynton, Henry James places a new emphasis on his heroine as the "central intelligence" or directing consciousness of the novel. "From the moment of Fleda's meeting with Mrs. Gereth," he writes in the Preface, "from that moment the progress and march of my tale became and remained that of her understanding."! Indeed, James so insists on the heroine's centrality in the novel that he hurries to anticipate his critics: "Why the deuce then Fleda Vetch, why a mere little flurried bundle of petticoats, why not Hamlet or Milton's Satan at once, if you're going in for a superior display of 'mind'?" To which I fear I can only reply that in pedestrian prose, and in the "short story," one is, for the best reasons, no less on one's guard than on the stretch; and also that I have ever recognised, even in the midst of the curiosity that such displays may quicken, the rule of an exquisite economy. The thing is to lodge somewhere at the heart of one's complexity an irrepressible appreciation, but where a light lamp will carry all the flame I incline to look askance at a heavy. (AN, 129) Clearly, the argument here does not account in full for James's attachment to the heroine as a center for his novel. It does, however, tie her to a point of form which is more or less initiated in this novel and will be crucial to James's developing method--this is the principle of economy. The drive to economize becomes a drive to discover authentic relationships, to reduce the novelistic canvas to its essentials. Light-weight petticoats are more "economical " than heavy-weight Hamlets and Satans because they are not overburdened with conventional associations. Of the four elements contributing to the design of the novel (the four being Mrs. Gereth, Owen Gereth, Fleda Vetch, and the spoils themselves) only Fleda is possessed throughout with the superior status of "free spirit." "Thus we get perhaps a vivid enough little example," explains the author, "in the concrete, of the general truth . . . that the fixed constituents of almost any reproducible action are the' fools who minister at a particular crisis, to the intensity of the free spirit engaged with them" (AN, 129). Both in the reduction of characters and in the arrangement of "fixed constituents" The Spoils of Poynton departs from the more traditional panoramic structuring of plot and character still discernible in The Portrait of a Lady. This is to give the heroine an unchallenged structural authority in the novel and permit a more concrete and particularized treatment of her case. In accordance with this principle of economy, James removes the contrivances which gave Isabel Archer's freedom its essentially abstract and contradictory character. Like Isabel, Fleda Vetch is unconnected, without home or 1. Henry James, The Art of the Novel, ed. Richard P. Blackmur (New York: Scribner's, 1934), p. 128, hereafter cited parenthetically as AN. THE HENRY JAMES REVIEW 108 WINTER, 1982 parents to speak of. Yet the circumstances that allowed Isabel to stand aloof from particulars are not present for Fleda: Fleda, with her mother dead, hadn't so much even as a home, and her nearest chance of one was that there was some appearance her sister would become engaged to a curate whose eldest brother was supposed to have property and would perhaps allow him something. Her father paid some of her bills, but he didn't like her to live with him; and she had lately, in Paris with several hundred other young women, spent a year in a studio, arming herself for the battle of life by a course with an impressionist painter. She was determined to work, but her impressions, or somebody's else, were as yet her only material. Fleda is clearly "into it all" in a way that Isabel was not. She has been on her own for an indeterminate period before the novel begins, and her poverty has forced her to acknowledge sordid details and to work piece-meal with impressions (her own and others...