The Key to the Palpable Past: A Study of Miss Tina in The Aspern Papers

The Key to the Palpable Past: A Study of Miss Tina in The Aspern Papers by Barbara Jensen-Ostnski, Lehigh University Most critical opinion of Miss Tina, in The Aspern Papers, focuses on her fundamental innocence and what critics generally believe is her love for the narrator. Critics seem to agree that Tina's proposal to the narrator cornes as the result of her love for him or, at the very least, as her carrying out of Juliana's last command, intended to ensure her niece's security and happiness. Essentially, they concur that Tina undergoes a positive transformation at the end of the story because of her romantic interest in the narrator and the sudden realizatlon that she cannot have what she wants. It is not difficult to make a case for Miss Tina as "innocent." She does not share the narrator's manipulative and obsessive nature; she Is open to new Impressions and is eager to please. But together with these qualities, Tina possesses poetry and strength of character that do more than raise her above the level of the simple innocent. She emerges from behind the screen of misunderstanding created by the narrator to become the fascinating center of the story; she in fact turns out to be the unheeded clue to the narrator's knowledge of old Venice and Jeffrey Aspern. To find the "real" Tina, the reader has to depend solely on quotations from her; the narrator's own comments cannot be trusted. When we look closely at what Tina says rather than believe the narrator's continents, we see that, though ignorant in a worldly sense, she observes intelligently and deals sensitively with an inner struggle between inherent faithfulness to her aunt and newly awakened desire to please the narrator. We find that she appreciates and can evoke the past; she is attuned to what the narrator calls the Venice "fami Iy"; most important, she is aware that the narrator fails to respect not only her own personal limits but also those unspoken but basic societal limits that help to define Ven i ce. Tina proposes marriage neither as a result of her love for the narrator, all hints of which come only from this gentleman's observations and not from what Tina says, nor as the result of Juliana's determination to marry her off. The proposal is Tina's unrealistic but brave attempt to accomplish two things: first, to reconcile the Inner conflict with which she has been struggling, satisfying both the narrator and her aunt by giving him access to the Aspern papers while keeping the papers within the family, and, second, to give the narrator a final chance to prove his humanity by joining the Venice family, to which Tina is his key. Tina's fantastic proposal, in which she risks the indignity of rejection, is testimony to her genuine desire to set things right. It is no surprise that she has the strength to do "the great thing," that Is, burn the papers that evening. Not having accomplished her two objectives, she simply removes the cause of conflict. And, not being able to please both Juliana and the narrator, she does the bidding of Juliana and finally proves the futility of the narrator's obsessive quest. Miss Tina is a difficult character to understand because she is presented only through the editor's unreliable narrative. James does not seem originally to have intended her as a major character in the novella, and he refers to her part in the original legend that inspired the fictional account as "a trifle coarse, or at least rather vague and obscure."1 Wayne C. Booth and Henry Seidel Canby both feel that James erred In not developing Miss Tina sufficiently. Booth says that the use of the unreliable narrator is a major flaw, that the real drama Is "that of [the editor'sl unprincipled relationship with Miss Tina," and that the central drama of Miss Tina's tragedy is left unfocused. Canby feels that 1. Henry James, Preface to The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, The Liar, The Two Faces (New York: Scribner's, 1908), p. vi 11, hereafter cited parenthetically...