Summary
Juliana leads the narrator to a set of chairs where they begin to discuss the narrator’s garden proposal. The narrator includes a thorough description of the various ways he attempts to appease Juliana and make her like him, and mentions how he compliments the palace and assures Juliana that he can provide many references. While he speaks, Juliana listens in silence. The narrator continues to notice how old she is, but also notes that behind her age, he can see that she used to be very beautiful.
After the narrator explains his project, Juliana questions him on his desires and motives, asking why he would want to build a garden in such a desolate palace that can only be approached by gondola. The narrator is quick on his feet and able to give her an answer to every one of her questions, although she still appears hesitant and unwilling to fully trust him. Finally, she decides to let him stay at the palace on the condition that he pays 1,000 francs per month for his lodging—an extremely large amount of money that surprises the narrator.
Despite the high sum that Juliana demands, the narrator willingly agrees to pay it, disclosing in the narration to the reader that he would be willing to pay five times as much if only it meant access to Aspern’s letters. Miss Tita comes into the room and Juliana tells her about the deal with the narrator. The narrator pays 3,000 francs—three months’ rent—upfront. He asks to shake Juliana’s hand, but she rejects his offer and he shakes Miss Tita’s hand instead.
After Juliana leaves, Miss Tita confesses to the narrator that Juliana asked for the money in order to give it to Miss Tita, as Juliana believes she is going to die soon and wants to leave Miss Tita with an inheritance. The narrator hopes that Juliana will not die, because he assumes that she will order the letters to be destroyed upon her deathbed. Miss Tita also tells the narrator that she had suggested to Juliana that she ask for a lot of money, because she had assumed the narrator was rich based on the way he talked. Miss Tita and the narrator chat flirtatiously for a while longer, with Miss Tita ending the conversation by ruefully telling the narrator that she and Juliana have no life, that they stay inside all day, and that she is forced to continuously take care of and stay with her aunt. With that thought, she quickly leaves the narrator, excusing herself to go check on Juliana once more.
Six weeks later, the narrator has made no progress in his quest to read the letters. He has had little contact with both Miss Tita and Juliana, only managing to see Juliana when he delivered the three thousand francs he owed them in rent. After Miss Tita takes the money, the narrator attempts to joke with her, but she quickly runs away and ignores his advances. The narrator begins to wonder what Miss Tita does all day; even though they live in the same house, it is so big that he rarely sees her, and he questions whether she goes out without him seeing or spends all day with her aunt.
Although he makes little progress in his attempts to get to know Miss Tita and Juliana, the narrator remains optimistic. He maintains his cover by spending time arranging the garden and writing, and often finds himself continuously captivated by the mysterious connection between Juliana and Jeffrey Aspern. He makes up theories about their relationship and tries to guess what Juliana represented for Jeffrey Aspern. He imagines that Juliana had had a former foreign lover who disgraced her, and this is why she fell out of the public eye and lost all of her fame. The narrator also notes that sometimes, he wishes that Jeffrey Aspern had never come to Europe, as the narrator would have been interested to see what the poet could have written purely on the subject of America.
Analysis
As he considers Aspern’s legacy at the end of Chapter IV, the narrator reveals that he wishes Jeffrey Aspern had never come to Europe, confessing to the reader that he originally loved Aspern’s work for its ability to capture the “native,” “nude and crude and provincial” aspect of America. The narrator, an American himself, is partially motivated to uncover the letters in order to better understand what influence Europe had on Aspern’s work. As the narrator describes the connection between Aspern and America, he romanticizes Aspern’s creative process, praising him for being one of the “first" to create in a land that was an intellectual and artistic abyss due to its separation from Europe.
This moment introduces another theme that runs throughout The Aspern Papers and a majority of Henry James’s work: the question of American and European artistic creation, as well as characters who cross over from America to Europe in pursuit of education, art, love, or knowledge. The narrator feels a deep tie to Aspern due to the purity of American identity he reads into Aspern’s work; Aspern’s own journey to Europe becomes a symbolic betrayal for the narrator, and pushes the narrator to replicate Aspern’s path in order to better understand what it was that compelled Aspern to go to Europe in the first place.
Throughout Chapters III-IV, the narrator reveals more about his character through his narration to the reader. He continuously creates his own stories about Juliana and Miss Tita, imagining a past for Juliana where she married a disgraced foreigner and traveled in artistic bohemian circles with her family, which could explain why she has so few material possessions. It is important to note how much of the narrator’s stories are fictional: as he is writing his supposedly truthful and accurate biography of Aspern, he is also revealing his own desire to fictionalize the setting around him. As a biographer studying a writer (Aspern), the narrator engages in a form of fictionalizing Aspern’s life just like a fiction writer would, despite his own confessed desire to seek the truth and facts about Aspern’s life.
Although he makes no progress with getting to know Juliana and Miss Tita, the narrator remains happy and content throughout his first six weeks in Venice, in part due to his proximity to Aspern’s life. He thinks about Aspern and Juliana constantly, and obsesses over the secrets he believes she is hiding, telling the reader that he did not grow tired of the “mystic rites” that the Bordereaus practice in order to stay so far out of his sight. He even labels those summer days some of the “happiest of his life,” as he works in the garden and writes. It is important to note that the narrator does not explicitly tell the reader what he is writing; instead, he obscures it, stating only that he is always working on “some business of writing.”
Throughout his time at the Bordereaus’, the narrator also routinely uses violent language in order to reference his attempts at meeting Juliana and Miss Tita. His language and his goal set up an ironic contrast: he plans to “batter” Juliana with lilies, “bombard” them with roses, and have them “yield to the pressure” of the carnations he will plant in their garden. While the descriptions of flowers reference images of beauty, the narrator’s desire to use the flowers in order to infiltrate the Bordereaus' secrets reveals the dark truth of his obsession with Aspern.
