Tea and Henry James's 'Scenic Method' in The Awkward ... - subsite

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Fiction”, James points out the strange gap that exists between “that which people
know and that which they agree to admit that they know”(Miller, 43). A tea
scene can be the medium that reveals the gap. When pressure is placed on this
polite social discourse, it gives way to reveal the abyss beneath: sex is so taboo a
topic in relation to the unmarried girl, that it creates absurd and often
ungrounded speculation around her. Nanda’s “tea of her own” and Fleda’s
“piece of tea biscuit”, damn them and destroy their possible marriages. James, in
these two novels, exposes the cruelty in the way the taint of sexual knowledge or
experience is used against the innocent under the cover of the beautiful and
polite tea table; the giving and taking of tea, becomes a two–edged sword, a
battle–ground and in becoming so, James expresses his indignation at the
hypocrisy and immaturity of British pharisaism, and the sexual corruption and
material greed that underlies it.
WORKS BY HENRY JAMES
AA – The Awkward Age. Ed. Vivien Jones. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
SP – The Spoils of Poynton. Ed. David Lodge. London: Penguin, 1987.
OTHER WORKS CITED
Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. London: Penguin Books, 1985.
Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. New York: Anchor Books, 1997.
Blackall, Jean F. “The Experimental Period.” A Company to Henry James Studies.
ed. Fogel, Daniel Mark. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993.
Braddon, Marry Elizabeth. Lady Audley’ Secret, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991.
Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and
the Mode of Excess. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995.