A "Witless" Woman and her valiant Masquerade: Miss Tina in "The Aspern Papers"

Inhaltsangabe oder Einleitung

1 Introduction

"[I]n fact I afterwards found [Miss Tina] the bigger of the two in inches.”
- narrator in The Aspern Papers (1888)

At first glance, Henry James’ novella The Aspern Papers seems to be a story about a conquering heroic narrator, who copes with several problems during the story, solves them by implementing a tremendously brilliant plan, and at the end firmly believes to have reached his goal – the long-desired Aspern Papers.
However, James does not simply narrow down his novella to a plain adventurous story à la Indiana-Jones, he rather embellishes it with ingenuity and brilliancy. In order to reveal this brilliancy, the attentive reader will soon realize that it is important for this novella to read between the lines, rather than being just impressed by the artful acting of the narrator. As Gargano once stated: “James’ narrator prepares the reader for the ‘big’ scenes, for James himself the small and transitional scenes tell the fuller truth […]”. Hence, even the spaces within the novella seem to be fraught with tension.
When analysing James’ novella, one will soon realize that there is a quite significant complexity within the text. Indeed, it seems that the characters of the story are so close connected in their thinking and their action that it becomes quite difficult for the reader to distinguish between the person who dupes and the one who is duped at the end of the story. This complexity becomes clear by analysing the story of Juliana’s niece, Miss Tina. Although Miss Tina is not presented as the typical mighty heroine right at the outset of the story, and is often initially seen as a simple-minded minor character, whose only function is to serve as a tool for the narrator to achieve his goal, there is so much more about her. During the novella this “futile spinster” turns into a “clever manipulator” , using the narrator’s obsession with the papers to assert her claims, and finally turns out to be the true heroin of the story.