39 pages • 1-hour read
The Aspern Papers
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Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
The narrator speaks with Juliana, who asks him whether he will stay another six months, and he tells her he cannot afford to do so at the price he has been paying. She asks him to make an offer, and at the same time she asks about his writing, questioning his financial success. When he says he is a critic and historian, Juliana asks if he thinks “it’s right to rake up the past” (108). He suspects she knows his secret, a belief that is augmented when she shows him a miniature portrait of Aspern, ostensibly to gain his opinion of its value. Believing that she intends to taunt him, he pretends not to know who the subject is.
Chapter 8 Summary
Later that day, Tita finds the narrator and asks him to go find a doctor, as she thinks her aunt is dying. He sends his servant, and they go to Juliana’s rooms. The narrator observes that her breath is “so slight as to suggest that no human attention could ever help her more” (118), and gazes around the room. Tita answers his unspoken question by telling him “those things” (118) used to be in a trunk, and he is concerned by her use of past tense. A doctor comes in, and the narrator goes outside to pace, smoking cigars and wondering what has happened.
Tita eventually comes out and tells him that her aunt is no longer in immediate danger. He asks about the letters, and she tells him that they’ve been moved from the trunk. She has looked for them elsewhere but finds it indecent to continue searching while her aunt is in the rooms. The narrator admits his intention in coming to the house, and his use of a false name, to Tita. They see the doctor coming back, and he leaves the house to walk around Venice, asking Tita to give him a report when he returns. On his return, he finds the house dark and doesn’t see Tita. He enters Juliana’s room stealthily and inspects a desk where he believes the papers are hidden. He is about to push a button that will open the desk if Tita has unlocked it for him, when he turns to see Juliana, who calls him a “publishing scoundrel” (127). He goes toward her, and she falls into Tita’s arms.
Chapter 9 Summary
When he learns Juliana has not died, the narrator leaves Venice and travels in the nearby cities. He returns after 12 days, when his servant informs him that Juliana has died. He goes to see Tita in the garden and can see she has been crying. As they converse, he worries that she may expect him to take over her guardianship, and he purposefully does not ask about the Aspern papers. The next day, he waits for her in the sala to discuss his tenure in the house and whether or not the papers have been destroyed.
She tells him that there are “a great many” (134) papers, but that he may not see them. He observes anguished duty in Tita, as she explains that she prevented her aunt from burning them but promised not to share them. She gives him the miniature portrait of Aspern as a gift. When he says he will leave Venice, she asks him to stay a few more days, then says it would be different if he were a relation, as “Anything that is mine—would be yours, and you could do what you like” (138), insinuating that he should marry her if he wants access to the papers. He rejects the suggestion by telling her he will sell the portrait for her, then leaves the house in his gondola. Tormented, he decides he cannot, “for a bundle of tattered papers, marry a ridiculous, pathetic, provincial old woman” (141). In the morning, he awakes having changed his mind, feeling that marrying Tita is a small price to pay for the papers, but he then decides that he can still find a way to get the papers without accepting Tita’s proposal.
The narrator goes to Tita, still undecided. Observing that her expression “of absolution made her angelic. It beautified her” (144), he is on the verge of saying yes to the proposal. Distracted, he hears her tell him goodbye. He realizes that she perceived his departure the previous day correctly as horror at her proposal, and she tells him she burned the letters, “one by one” (144) the previous night. The narrator later sends Tita money for the portrait, telling her he sold it, but admits to Mrs. Prest that it hangs above his writing table and reminds him painfully of the loss of the letters.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
As the narrative builds to a climax, James addresses the contentiousness of The Archive as a Source of Connection. In a tense conversation with Juliana, the narrator speaks for the importance of archival research, saying, “how can we get at [the past] unless we dig a little? The present has such a rough way of treading it down” (108). Juliana has accused him of “raking up” the past, a physical metaphor implying destructiveness. The narrator’s response is to suggest the opposite: The present is destructive, “roughly” erasing the past, and the archivist’s job is to undo that destruction. Critics like the narrator exist, in his view, to uncover the past, to bring it to light—precisely what Juliana does not want done with her own past. Neither participant in the argument is wrong, but their perspectives are irreconcilably opposed. Juliana’s Privacy and Reclusiveness—her only means of preserving her version of the truth—is for the narrator a form of erasure, depriving the world of vital knowledge. The literal destructiveness of this impulse toward privacy is made evident when Tita burns the papers at the end of the novella.
This section of the novella uses the setting to further emphasize the tension between what is shown and what is hidden, between social performance and private seclusion. The narrator describes the city of Venice as a theater, as the “footways [. . .] assume to the eye the importance of a stage [. . .] and the Venetian figures [. . .] strike you as members of an endless dramatic troupe” (143). This passage is self-referential as the narrator observes other players in a drama while the reader prepares to watch the climax of his drama unfold.
This section of the novella builds towards its climax, as well as emphasizing a dichotomy between representation and reality. Juliana’s decision to show the narrator her miniature of Aspern is a significant progression toward the eventual proposition she instructs Tita to make after her death. The scene is comedic in that the narrator, suspicious of Juliana, pretends not to know who Aspern is, which is ludicrous to the reader in light of the narrator’s obsession with the poet.
The climax involves important characterization for both the narrator and Tita. For Tita, the climactic character progression builds on the disparity between her own actions and those influenced by her aunt. Even after her aunt’s death, she decides to make the proposition her aunt orchestrated, though she feels pained and embarrassed to do so. James foreshadows her dilemma when they are discussing the portrait and the narrator observes that she “appeared to feel that the situation was passing out of her control and that the elements of her fate were thickening around her” (117). The apparent inevitability of Tita’s fate is a result of the passivity central to her character: Things are happening to her rather than through her actions. Even when she does take a drastic action, it is one suggested by her aunt. She follows the plan her aunt has created for her because she cannot imagine one for herself.
For the narrator, the climactic choice is whether to marry Tita for the Aspern papers. James vividly describes his difficulty making the choice, including passages in which he is certain about both options. James achieves suspense throughout this section of the novel, as the reader wonders, alongside the narrator, whether the papers will be destroyed. The stakes of the situation are heightened because of the narrator’s desperation to obtain the letters, which James represents in the first-person narrative structure. The novel concludes with ambiguity, both regarding the fate of The Archive as a Source of Connection and the narrator’s character. The fact that the narrator and reader never learn what the Aspern papers involve raises a question about whether an unseen archive should be understood as an archive at all. The narrator seems to be on the verge of accepting Tita’s proposal when she reveals that she already took his reaction of the previous day as a rejection and burned the papers. The fact that he never makes a clear choice leaves the theme of The Distorting Effects of Hero Worship open-ended, as it is unclear whether the narrator would have compromised his own future for the sake of deepening his connection with the past in the form of Jeffrey Aspern.
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