Queer Properties: Passion and Possession in The Spoils of Poynton

Often identified as the first work of James's celebrated late style, The Spoils of Poynton (1897) has been widely read as a "perversion" of the conventions of the realist novel; indeed, it is marked by a to describe the objects that James declared formed "the very centre" of it. This structuring absence mobilizes an atmosphere of a sexual secret in the novel, yet the eroticism that James associates with the objects and interiors that bring the novel's two arty women together has not been fully examined. In the context of James's passionate correspondence with the sculptor Hendrik Andersen and the late-nineteenth-century nexus of aestheticism and homoeroticism, the novel's exploration of possession and possessions is, this essay argues, inextricably bound up with James's attempt to represent the subject of same-sex desire in the wake of the Wilde scandal and on the cusp of James's belated friendships with gay men.