The Aspern Papers

“One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defence.”

Throughout the text, James employs religious imagery to emphasize the narrator’s obsession with Aspern. The sentence uses chiasmus—a rhetorical device in which one clause is structurally the inverse of another—to mimic the tone of a biblical aphorism, highlighting The Distorting Effects of Hero Worship.

“Every one of Aspern’s contemporaries had, according to our belief, passed away; we had not been able to look into a single pair of eyes into which his had looked or to feel a transmitted contact in any aged hand that his had touched. Most dead of all did poor Miss Bordereau appear, and yet she alone had survived.”

This passage includes corporeal elements of looking into eyes and touching hands, which emphasizes the intimacy with which the narrator and Cumnor view Aspern. The final sentence emphasizes Juliana’s age, particularly as it begins with an allusion to death, before concluding with her survival.

“It was a large shabby parlour, with a fine old painted ceiling and a strange figure sitting alone at one of the windows. They come back to me now almost with the palpitation they caused, the successive feelings that accompanied my consciousness that as the door of the room closed behind me I was really face to face with the Juliana of some of Aspern’s most exquisite and most renowned lyrics.”

James introduces conflict between the setting’s previous glory and its current state using diction, particularly “shabby” as opposed to “fine.” This foreshadows the conflict between representation and reality that occurs throughout the narrative between the long-ago Juliana of Aspern’s lyrics and the Juliana who exists in the present.