Henry James and the Plunder of Sentiment: Building the House of Modernism from The Spoils of Poynton

This essay outlines an unorthodox literary genealogy. By examining the vestiges of the sentimental plot in Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton it demonstrates that domestic fiction, written primarily by a cluster of American women authors in the nineteenth century, played a formative role in the advent of literary modernism. While the novel displays James’s evolving focus on perception, it simultaneously reflects on sentimental ideology as a cultural and literary phenomenon, satirizing the domestic genre even while memorializing it. In James’s generic conversions, the domestic interiors devoutly composed by sentimental authors emerge as models for the ornate psychic interiorities fashioned by modernist investigations of consciousness.