Writing and the Dispossession of Woman in The Aspern Papers

Man has been given arbitrariness, and to him, godlike, has been given higher power to command and to accomplish, and therefore has language, most dangerous of possessions, been given to man, so that creating, destroying, and perishing and returning to the everliving, to the mistress and mother, he may affirm what he is.

—Hölderlin, fragmentary sketch (IV, 246 [])

“Nothing here is mine,” she answered, … “the house doesn't belong to me.”

—James, The Aspern Papers

Hölderlin's claim expresses an androcentric impulse in romanticism that continues to menace woman. For romantic man, language is the “most dangerous of possessions” because his very being is the product of discourse, of letters, of a notoriously unstable process of representation that might at any time give way and leave him stranded or worse. Yet however dangerous for man, language appears thoroughly deadly to “everliving” woman, for although it is always turned toward her and thus gynetropic, man's language—his own “creating,” his being a matrix—depends upon her absence, her being dispossessed of letters. Insofar as she represents the beginning and the end of writing, and so ultimately signifies a terrifying absence, such writing depends upon a negation of her (negation of negation) even as it endlessly attempts to forestall her return. As Margaret Homans has remarked of another romantic (Shelley), it is woman's “association with death—and therefore I would suggest her death itself—that motivates and makes possible his song” (10).