| Most of the criticism on Henry James characterizes him as apolitical or merely ignores the political implications of his fiction. Moreover, the category of the aesthetic, one of the central concerns and themes of James's work, is generally regarded, in both his life and his fiction, as a refuge from politics and history. But contrary to prevailing critical opinion, the political traverses and implicates the aesthetic, not only in James's most explicitly political novel, The Princess Casamassima, but also in such quintessentially "apolitical" and ostensibly socially quarantined novels like The Spoils of Poynton and The Golden Bowl. In the first novel, the aesthetic itself acts as a dubious vehicle for political solidarity and revolution. Meanwhile, read in the context of both political and psychoanalytic theories of "fetishism," The Spoils of Poynton reveals a distinct homology and interpenetration between art and the commodity, as well as between what James calls "the sublime economy of art" and the more mundane market economy against which art attempts to define itself. Finally, in The Golden Bowl, Adam Verver's career and his daughter's efforts to preserve the "equilibrium" of their domestic and social relations suggest a similar homology and relationship between the aesthetic and ideology. |
