Select a Specific Incident in The Aspern Papers that you believe to be a particular significance to the overall book and review its importance. The Aspern Papers is a novella written by Henry James.

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Oyinkan Oladitan        Page         2/27/2008

Select a Specific Incident in ‘The Aspern Papers’ that you believe to be a particular significance to the overall book and review its importance.

        The Aspern Papers is a novella written by Henry James. It is based on an anecdote that James heard about someone who tried to obtain some valuable letters written by the poet. An unnamed narrator goes to the beautiful Venice to locate the old lover, Juliana Bordereau of Jeffrey Aspern, a famous and dead poet. The narrator presents himself to Juliana Bordereau as a prospective lodger and is prepared to date Juliana Bordereau’s niece, Tina Bordereau, a plain and naïve spinster in order to get hold of the Aspern Papers.

In the novella, there are a lot of incidents where the theme of greed is profound. The unnamed narrator is described as a ‘publishing scoundrel’ by Juliana Bordereau who is the greedy and domineering old lover of Jeffrey Aspern. This paints the image of the narrator and his painstaking efforts to receive the Aspern Papers in anyway or form. If he had got hold of the papers, he would have published them for the whole world and not even taking into consideration of Miss Juliana Bordereau. Jeffrey Aspern wrote these papers to express his love and devotion to his fellow lover, Miss Bordereau. The papers were personal to both lovers and they kept the great emotion between them, the narrator would have just published these personal documents on account of them being very good pieces of literature not putting into consideration the history and emotional connection between two people just to satisfy his greed. This is exactly what James set out to portray the conflicts involved when biographers (the unnamed narrator) seek to pry into the intimate lives of poets.

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The scene that I have specifically chosen to focus on is in chapter 8 from the middle of page 123 to the end of the chapter. This scene is a very dominant in what happens there forth. It describes how the narrator goes into the personal area (the room) of Miss Juliana Bordereau when she and Miss Tina are asleep. He jumps to the conclusion that Miss Tina had deliberately left open the door between the sitting room and the sala and left the secretary where Miss Juliana Bordereau kept her personals open. He felt that Miss Tina had done ...

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