Henry James The Aspern Papers

Narrator continues to be a prig and a fool - the readers knowing or seeing much more about him than he thinks heE is revealing - after first three sections of the novella be is distressed at how little progress he has made in his scheme so he reverts to his initial strategy - winning them thru flowers. He had wormed his way into their lives by pretending to love their garden and now he feels obligated to hire someone to landscape the whole place - what does this garden theme mean to James? Not the obvious - a locale of lost innocence as there are no innocents in this novella but I think J is interested in cultivated v natural or wild beauty. The narrator thinks he can be in control of everyone's destiny as if he can be or play a god but he is soon to learn that he is not so charming and compelling a character as he thinks. The beauty of the story is that in part we root for him and want him to succeed - uncovering a cache of letters by a great artist would be an advance to our culture so he's on the right side But his methods are nefarious - J puts us in same moral quagmire as he puts his narrator - how much can we compromise or tolerate in service to literature?

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