James and the Tribal Discipline of English Kinship

James and the Tribal Discipline of English Kinship By Nancy Bentley, University of Pennsylvania Edith Wharton, discussing famous kisses in literature with a dinner companion , gave as her "crowning" example the kiss on the stairs in James's The Spoils of Poynton. She called it "one of the most moving love-scenes in fiction" (Novellas 949). In spite of this impressive kiss, however, the love story in Poynton is a curious one. For the story of the love between Fleda Vetch and Owen Gereth is all but eclipsed by a property story, the tale of the even more intimate attachment between Mrs. Gereth and her furniture. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that the love story is utterly entangled with the property story: Fleda, with her complex passion for both the Poynton property and its legal owner Owen, fuses the two inseparable plots of the novel. That James so tightly weaves together ambiguities of marriage, sexuality, and claims to property has made the novel one of his most problematic works. Yet for all its complexities, the explicit focus of the novel on relations between people and their property throws into clear relief a theme that preoccupies James throughout his career. From The American, in which James first subtly examines the parallel acquisition of art and women, to The Golden Bowl, where links between kin, marriage, art, and wealth multiply exponentially, James developed a narrative form in which "relations stop nowhere" in order to represent a social circuit crossing even the boundary between people and things. But as original as James's narrative is, there emerged in his era another discourse that similarly represented a seamless web of relations between sexualThe Henry James Review 15 (1994): 127-40. © 1994, The Johns Hopkins University Press 128 The Henry James Review ity, families, and property. I speak of the ethnographic language of kinship, a specialized discourse that Victorian anthropologists invented to speculate about the social and familial systems of so-called primitive peoples. Henry James owned a copy of one of the most famous kinship studies of the time, J. F. McLennan's Primitive Marriage.1 McLennan, along with American scholar Lewis Henry Morgan, started scientific debates about prehistoric "horde marriage," wife purchase, totemism, and other speculative features of savage life. Certainly the widespread interest in such subjects owed something to the possibilities for exotic titillation. But early studies also had enormous theoretical ambitions; models of kinship were constructed so as to explain the interdependent origins of marriage, paternity, and property. As recent histories of anthropology have shown, kinship studies provided Victorians with a way of rehearsing from a relatively safe remove some of the changes redefining their own family institutions. For instance, ethnographic works began to represent the family as a product of human history rather than wholly design. Attacking Henry Maine's theory about the foundations of law and the state in the family, McLennan argued that Maine made the "fundamental error" of assuming that "history opens with perfect marriage, conjugal fidelity, and certainty of male parentage" (107). Kinship studies provided scientific language for re-examining the Victorian propertied family, refracting it through a lens of an imagined prehistory. Edith Wharton offers a retrospective picture of this decentering of hearth and home in The Age of Innocence. Newland Archer is an avid consumer of "the books on Primitive Man that people of advanced culture were beginning to read" (Novels 1018), and as he begins to question the ways of his small New York circle, he increasingly thinks of his family as governed by "inscrutable totem terrors" and "tribal ritual": "He supposed that his readings in anthropology caused him to take such a coarse view" of practices he used to see as a "simple and natural demonstration of family feeling" (Novels 1051,1069). The shift from a language of natural "family feeling" to estranged "totem terrors" marks for us an important revision of the domestic sphere. "The family," McLennan announced, "is not the primary unit it is assumed to be" (107). In The Spoils of Poynton, the family is no longer the "primary unit" either. In its place James presents a cultural order in which the bonds linking kin...