Conserving/Confronting the Past: The Roles of Letters and Ageing in Society in The Touchstone and The Aspern Papers

Letters in literature intimately convey information to both the characters and the reader; letters in literature also represent captured moments that the characters can revisit over and over again to relive memories of themselves and the letter’s author from the vantage of temporal distance. When characters keep letters into their old age, the letter becomes a catalyst for reflection on who they have become in their society. In Henry James’s novella The Aspern Papers, the titular papers are in possession by a famous author’s former lover, now an old woman, and a young man is trying to purchase them for their literary value. The old woman uses the letters as leverage to claim power for herself and her niece. Edith Wharton’s novella The Touchstone similarly focuses on the letters of a famous dead author, but in this case, it is a man having to confront the passionate affair of his youth, when wanting to settle into the prescribed social views on marriage and career. Both of these works use the letter as a way to explore the tensions that come with having a record of cavalier youthful behaviors with the desire to maintain a position in society – the tension between dissention and conforming. These two novellas take two different positions on this tension with James favoring the former and Wharton the latter. Both illustrate the complicated cultural forces that shape perceptions of ageing