• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.55 no.1
• /
• pp.153-176
• /
• 2009

This paper attempts an allegorical reading of female sexuality in Henry James' The Aspern Papers, wherein the narrator reveals his obsession with the love letters of the dead poet, Jeffrey Aspern. Not only the old papers, but does he also fetishize female protagonists in order to maintain his belief in the "great poet." Discussing such fetishistic elements in the novella is in order firstly to reveal the self-splitting logic of phallocentric language, and secondly to analyze the limitation of such language, which resonates with the Freudian construction of female sexuality as critically presented by Irigary. The first part of this study explains the binary structure of The Aspern Papers crystalized in the symbolic courtship in the Bordereaus' garden. It also represents the psychological mindset of the narrator/protagonist: symbolically located "outside," the narrator describes the two Bordereaus as being closed "inside" in a dark mansion, concealing the precious papers from him and the public. In other words, the women are nothing but the obstacle for the self-elected agent, the narrator, from the publication of the language and ideas of the "great man". The women are associated with secrecy and surreptitiousness, while the man with transparency and the truth. Second part of this paper mimics this In/Out binary as a means to reveal insufficiency, if not impropriety, of the predominant discourse of female sexuality constructed and controlled from the male perspective. Employing Irigary's argument, this paper reads the female characters as allegory for female sexual organs, which explains the narrator's inevitable failure. That is, female sexuality is something that cannot be articulated by the intruding language of a masculine subject. since the female sex as such is not only plural but also harmonious and self-contained,