4 - Henry James and magical property

Summary

The classification of things reproduces the classification of men.

Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification

As in the kula, so in such tournaments of value generally, strategic skill is culturally measured by the success with which actors attempt diversions or subversions of culturally conventionalized paths for the flow of things.

Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things

Edith Wharton, discussing favorite kisses in literature with a dinner companion, gave as her “crowning” example the kiss on the stairs in James's Spoils of Pojmton. She called it “one of the most moving love-scenes in fiction”. But in spite of this impressive kiss, the love story in Poynton is a curious one. For the story of the love between Fleda Vetch and Owen Gereth is often eclipsed by a property story, the tale of the even more intimate attachment between Mrs. Gereth and her furniture. Or perhaps 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 novel's two inseparable plots. That James so tightly wove together ambiguities of marriage, sexuality, and property has earned the novel a reputation as one of his most problematic fictions. Yet for all its complexities, the novel's explicit focus on relations between people and their property throws into relief a theme that preoccupied James throughout his career.