Henry James and the Supernatural

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Author: Anna Despotopoulou and Kimberly Reed (editors)

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Henry James and the Supernatural

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Previous works by the editors Chryssoula Lascaratou, Anna Despotopoulou, and Elly Ifantidou, eds. Reconstructing Pain and Joy: Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Perspectives, 2008. Kimberly C. Reed and Peter G. Beidler, eds. Approaches to Teaching Henry James’s “Daisy Miller” and “The Turn of the Screw,” 2005. Kimberly C. Reed, ed. The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories, 2010.

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Henry James and the Supernatural

Edited by

Anna Despotopoulou and Kimberly C. Reed

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henry james and the supernatural Copyright © Anna Despotopoulou and Kimberly C. Reed, 2011 All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-11526-2 Cover image: James McNeill Whistler, The Doorway, print (etching) Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-25264 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: August 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Note on the Texts

ix

List of Contributors

xi

Abbreviations

xv

Introduction: “I see ghosts everywhere” Anna Despotopoulou and Kimberly C. Reed 1

2

3

4

5

1

“The complexion of ever so long ago”: Style and Henry James’s Ghosts Greg Zacharias

13

Immensities of Perception and Yearning: The Haunting of Henry James’s Heroes Kristin Boudreau

35

Haunting the Churches: Henry James and the Sacred Space in “The Altar of the Dead” Hazel Hutchison

59

Mysterious Tenants: Uncanny Women and the Private or Public Dilemma in the Supernatural Tales Anna Despotopoulou

79

John Marcher’s Uncanny Unmanning in “The Beast in the Jungle” Kathy Justice Gentile

97

6

Homospectrality in Henry James’s Ghost Stories Diane Long Hoeveler

113

7

Second Thoughts: “Queer ‘Maud-Evelyn’” Kevin Ohi

137

8

Uncanny Doublings in “Owen Wingrave” Gert Buelens

149

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vi

9

contents

The Afterlife of Figures Sheila Teahan

165

Epilogue: Ghost Writing Nicola Bradbury

183

Index

191

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Acknowledgments We wish to thank Brigitte Shull, our editor at Palgrave Macmillan, for her encouragement and help with this project, as well as the Palgrave Macmillan readers, for their thoughtful suggestions that helped enrich the manuscript. We are also grateful to the essayists for this book; their collegiality, creativity, generosity, and patience made editing this volume a pleasure. —Anna Despotopoulou and Kimberly C. Reed I am thankful for having colleagues, family, and friends who have eagerly encouraged my continued interest in Henry James and who have provided a conducive environment for my interest to flourish. I am particularly grateful to Kimberly Reed who graciously invited me to collaborate with her in this project, and I dedicate my work on this book to my teachers of James, Valli Hazandra-Despotopoulou and Nicola Bradbury. —A. Despotopoulou As always, my husband and daughter are marvels of understanding each time I find myself captivated by Henry James. I appreciate the support I receive at Lipscomb University for research, especially from the provost, Craig Bledsoe; my dean, Norma Burgess; and my department chair, Matthew Hearn. Anna Despotopoulou’s collaboration on this project gave it a much richer dimension than it would have otherwise had. My warmest thanks go to Peter G. Beidler, whose mentoring friendship has been a serendipitous joy for many years. My work on this book is for him. —K. Reed

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Note on the Texts To facilitate cross-referencing among the chapters in this volume, the editors have used Henry James’s original New York Edition (Scribner’s) of novels and short stories for works cited, with the exception of four stories that James did not include in the New York Edition. For those tales— “De Grey: A Romance,” “The Third Person,” “Maud-Evelyn,” and “The Ghostly Rental”—the texts are from the Library of America collection of James’s works.

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Contributors Kristin Boudreau is Professor of English and Head of the Department of Humanities and Arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Her publications include Sympathy in American Literature (University Press Florida, 2002); The Spectacle of Death (Prometheus, 2006); and Henry James’s Narrative Technique: Consciousness, Perception and Cognition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); as well as essays published in The Henry James Review, Contemporary Literature, American Literature, ESQ, and Early American Literature. A coedited classroom edition of “Daisy Miller” is forthcoming from Broadview Press. Nicola Bradbury is Lecturer in English at the University of Reading. She is the author of Henry James: The Later Novels and has written widely on Henry James and Charles Dickens. She is currently working on The Ambassadors for the Cambridge edition of the fiction of Henry James. Gert Buelens is a Professor of English at Ghent University and Director of RAP: Research on Authorship as Performance. He is the author of some 60 essays in collections and journals, including PMLA, Textual Practice, and Diacritics, and of Henry James and the “Aliens,” which won the American Studies Network Book Prize. He serves on the Advisory Board for the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James, and is Book Review Editor for the Henry James Review. Anna Despotopoulou is Assistant Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Athens, Greece. She is the author of several articles on Henry James in journals and collections including The Review of English Studies, English Language Notes, The Yearbook of English Studies, A Companion to Henry James (Blackwell), and Approaches to Teaching Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw (MLA). She is the coeditor of Reconstructing Pain and Joy (Cambridge Scholars) and has also published articles on Jane Austen, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, and Peter Shaffer.

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xii

contributors

Kathy Justice Gentile is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She has published a book on Ivy ComptonBurnett and has an edited collection forthcoming, Sexing the Look in Popular Visual Culture (2011). Her other publications include essays on Jane Austen, as well as articles on gothic masculinity, gothic film, and the uncanny. Diane Long Hoeveler is Professor of English at Marquette University, where she regularly teaches a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses on the Gothic. Most recently the author of Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780-1820 (Ohio State University Press, 2010), she is also author of Gothic Feminism (1998) and Romantic Androgyny (1990). She is currently working on a study of the gothic and the British anti-Catholic campaign, 1780–1829. Hazel Hutchison teaches British and American literature at the University of Aberdeen. She is the author of Seeing and Believing: Henry James and the Spiritual World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and a number of articles on James, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Rupert Brooke. She is currently researching American literature of the First World War and has edited Mary Borden’s war memoir The Forbidden Zone (London: Hesperus, 2008). Kevin Ohi is the author of Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and of Henry James and the Queerness of Style (forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press, 2011). He teaches English at Boston College and is currently writing a book about literary transmission. Kimberly C. Reed is Professor of English and French at Lipscomb University. She coedited Approaches to Teaching Henry James’s “Daisy Miller” and “The Turn of the Screw” with Peter C. Beidler (2005) and edited The Turn of the Screw and Other Tales for Broadview Press (2010). Sheila Teahan teaches English at Michigan State University. She is the author of The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James and of essays in The Henry James Review, Arizona Quarterly, Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies, Bedford/St. Martin’s Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism edition of The Turn of the Screw, Henry James in Context, and elsewhere. She is completing a scholarly edition of James’s William Wetmore Story and His Friends and writing a book on tropology and causality in James.

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contributors

xiii

Greg W. Zacharias is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Henry James Studies at Creighton University. He is project director and cogeneral editor of The Complete Letters of Henry James (2006–present), editor of A Companion to Henry James, coeditor of Tracing Henry James, and author of Henry James and the Morality of Fiction. He is currently Executive Director of the Henry James Society.

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Abbreviations AD AM AN AS BJ CN DG EO GGP GR HJL LAD ME NSB OW PL RRT SB TP WD

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“The Altar of the Dead” The Ambassadors The Art of the Novel The American Scene “The Beast in the Jungle” The Complete Notebooks of Henry James “De Grey: A Romance” “Sir Edmund Orme” “The Great Good Place” “The Ghostly Rental” Henry James Letters “Is there a Life after Death?” “Maud-Evelyn” Notes of a Son and Brother “Owen Wingrave” The Portrait of a Lady “The Real Right Thing” A Small Boy and Others “The Third Person” The Wings of the Dove

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INTRODUCTION

“I see ghosts everywhere” Anna Despotopoulou and Kimberly C. Reed

Henry James’s statement that he sees ghosts everywhere, written in a tone of resigned self-awareness at the end of a letter in 1895,1 might be said to encapsulate the main motive of this book’s editors and most of the essayists: in scrutinizing James’s oeuvre, one does indeed see ghosts everywhere. James may have written that “the supernatural story, the subject wrought in fantasy, is not the class of fiction I myself most cherish,” even going so far as to dismiss his most famous of ghost stories, The Turn of the Screw, as “a shameless pot-boiler”2; but the persistence of ghostly presences in his fiction proves otherwise. Yet this book will deal with the ghostly not only in terms of the supernatural but also as a narrative strategy that nuances James’s realistic-protomodernist technique, giving it the profound elusiveness it is celebrated for. As T. J. Lustig put it in his Henry James and the Ghostly (1994), “At a very general level a great deal of James’s fiction is ghostly in its enigmatic impalpability, its vague precision, its subtle allusiveness, its hovering uncertainty, its fascination with anxiety and awe, wonder and dread.”3 In his autobiography, James remembers the original uncritical affection in which, as a boy, he first held Nathaniel Hawthorne and his writings, as well as the sharp pang of loss he later felt when, just embarking on a literary career, he learned that Hawthorne had died. As John Carlos Rowe has demonstrated, Hawthorne’s fictional legacy of the American romance loomed before the young James as he shaped his sense of himself as an American and international artist.4 Despite the influence of the romance—or perhaps because of it—James often disparaged the ghost story as a mode or genre; after his disparaging comments to one correspondent about supernatural tales (cited previously), he described The

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Turn of the Screw to another friend as a “very mechanical matter,” an “inferior, a merely pictorial, subject.”5 If we think of the straightforwardly supernatural tale in James’s dismissive terms—as a “potboiler” mode to which writers often turned in an attempt to sell their work in the literary marketplace—then his spate of ghost stories that appeared in the 1890s made good pecuniary sense: they granted him a degree of financial assistance while he tried to recoup financially after the poor sales of his novels from the late 1880s and his problematic ventures as a playwright. He made no secret of this strategy, writing to his close friend William Dean Howells that he was grateful for Howells’s kind words about what James labeled his “Literature drivel”—such as The Turn of the Screw, which he again called a “potboiler” and the most “abject” work that “a proud man brought low ever perpetrated”—but of a type that he would be willing to repeat regularly, “even for the same scant fee: it’s only a question of a chance!”6 Those chances came about thanks to the dozens of periodicals that solicited tales of terror as literary lures for their reading public; so great was the demand, as Lustig notes, that ghost stories were written by almost all major British and American writers in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth.7 Throughout his career, James was drawn to the popular mid- and late-Victorian ghost story genre, producing tales—“The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” and “The Ghostly Rental” are good early examples—with supernatural concerns and often sensational content. This cultural appetite for ghost stories to which James and others responded was also whetted by a number of organizations and movements, including the Society for Psychical Research, established by a group of academics in England in 1882 and in the United States in 1885, which published their proceedings to a receptive audience. That concern for scientific investigation of the otherworldly fed the enormous growth of interest in spiritualism, which in the United States was also influenced by the loss and destruction suffered by survivors of the Civil War.8 James reaped some benefit from his contributions to this surge of interest in the supernatural, enjoying at least a modicum of success with the sales of his ghostly tales in the 1890s to periodicals. Although his short stories were generally not reviewed, book-length collections of them did receive critical attention. “The Altar of the Dead,” which was published in a collection titled Terminations in 1895, often received rather ambivalent reviews. The Atlantic Monthly said that the story “carries us into a sombre and fantastic land where Daisy Miller never came.”9 Another supernatural tale, “The Private Life,” evoked a more prescient comment: “A more elusive tale in its actuality it would be hard to find; yet one


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“I see ghosts everywhere”

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might affirm with considerable confidence that he saw clearly what was the moral contained in it. Is it not the result of a steadfast search for the real thing that Mr. James has finally come very near to squaring the circle in fiction?”10 The Turn of the Screw, first serialized in Collier’s Weekly and then published in The Two Magics, occasionally elicited appraisals that echo through the chapters in this volume, as exemplified by this critic’s response: “Here the author makes triumphant use of his subtlety; instead of obscuring, he only adds to the horror of his conception by occasionally withholding the actual facts . . . A touch where a coarser hand would write a full-page description, a hint at unknown terrors where another would talk of bloody hands or dreadful crimes, and the impression is heightened in a way which would have made even Hawthorne envious on his own ground.”11 The reviewer’s comment about Hawthorne being envious (had he been alive) of James’s artistry with the supernatural reminds us that it can be treacherous to take James’s assertions about his “potboilers” at face value; indeed, a central thrust of this volume is that James’s use of the ghostly was in fact not a mode, or class, of fiction for him, but in fact intensified in importance throughout his career until it was central to his purpose as an artist. T. J. Lustig observes that as James’s career progressed, his ghosts move from the exterior of his texts to the interior, where they are frequently connected to the figure of the writer; likewise, in his late autobiographies and prefaces, James himself seems to haunt his writings.12 In his autobiographical text A Small Boy and Others, James uses the metaphor of the ghost to illustrate the ethical petition that his dead are making to him: “I feel that at such a rate I remember too much, and yet this mild apparitionism is only part of it. To look back at all is to meet the apparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an appeal. When I fix it, the hovering shade, whether of person or place, it fixes me back and seems the less lost—not to my consciousness, for that is nothing, but to its own—by my stopping however idly for it.”13 James’s thinking about the uses of the ghostly may have been germinating as early as the 1860s, when, as in his 1865 review of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novel, Aurora Floyd, he pondered on the differences between the contemporary literary interest in the supernatural and older gothic examples in order to mark out the new writing tendencies. In 1862 Margaret Oliphant had already published an article in Blackwood’s where she had diagnosed the new trend for sensation novels as “the need of a supply of new shocks and wonders” felt by a race “blasée and lost in universal ennui.”14 Like Oliphant, who saw the best sensation writers of her time producing thrills and terror by means not of “miraculous”


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and “ghastly” machineries but of common, everyday occurrences and characters, James astutely observes in his review that the “literature of horrors” of the period had shifted its locality, concentrating on “the terrors of the cheerful country-house and the busy London lodgings” rather than the improbable settings of gothic stories of earlier periods. In fact, as James acknowledges, such bourgeois domestic and urban settings are “infinitely the more terrible.” In locating terror in the familiar in this early review, James was articulating a critical angle that was to determine his later fictional preoccupation with the ghostly, which similarly was to be “connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life” and “derived from its prosaic, commonplace, daylight accessories.”15 Familiarity, in James, either of character or of setting and situation, often produces the haunting effect of his stories exactly because it is too homely, and as such it may harbor a secret or even a ghostly presence. Such an uncertainty about the boundaries between familiarity and strangeness shifts the attention of character and reader inward, obliging them to deal with the unpredictable stirrings and recapitulations of consciousness and memory. Think, for example, of Isabel’s vigil in The Portrait of a Lady that is instigated by the familiar scene of Osmond and Madame Merle engaged in mute communication; or of Milly’s haunting uncertainty about Kate and Densher’s relationship in The Wings of the Dove following the Bronzino incident when Kate casually, yet uncannily for Milly, amuses herself by exposing the painting and its likeness to others: “[S]omething that was perversely there, [Milly] was more and more uncomfortably finding, at least for the first moments and by some spring of its own, with every renewal of their meeting.”16 In James, therefore, we see how the familiar causes an uncanny disturbance, which is sometimes more effective than that caused by the appearance of ghostly others. “If we have a sense of the uncanny,” writes David Punter, “it is because the barriers between the known and the unknown are teetering on the brink of collapse.”17 It is this sense of the uncertainty of borders and of the collapse of distinctions between the knowable and the unknowable that James explores with his obsession with the ghostly, where the ghostly, as we are going to see, is not always a ghost; but more often than not, it is an idea that springs to the mind without warning. As Terry Castle has put it, “[T]hinking itself [becomes] an act of ghost-seeing.”18 In this respect James was not interested so much in the fantastical or supernatural aspect of the ghostly but in its obscurity, one that is linked to his very modern view of everyday reality as pliant, mysterious, and lawless. It is no wonder then that in the preface to The Turn of the Screw he laments the rationalization of his contemporary ghost stories, which had


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been “washed clean of all queerness as by exposure to a flowing laboratory tap,” and which would no longer “rouse the dear old sacred terror” because they had been “respectably certified” by the materialist epistemological impulse of James’s very scientific generation.19 Such “recorded and attested” ghosts, as described not only in fiction but also in contemporary narratives published by the Society for Psychical Research, were inexpressive.20 Ghosts, in so far as they could become conceivable figures in his stories, “would have to depart altogether from the rules” set out by such narratives that tried to demystify the ghostly by sorting its appearances under categories of this or that “true type”21; true types had little to do with James’s sense of a very subjective reality. Ghostly tales, James writes in his preface to “The Altar of the Dead” and other stories, constitute “the most possible form” of fiction that satisfies “the need and love of wondering,” but his ghost stories would have to be “thick” in terms of the complex consciousness processing them and in terms of the deep and subtle engagement of the subject with the uncanny forces that the story introduces: “[T]he spirit engaged with the forces of violence interests me most when I can think of it as engaged most deeply, most finely and most ‘subtly’ (precious term!).”22 By choosing terms that may be used interchangeably (“spirit” can stand for consciousness just as much as it can stand for ghost, and the same applies to “forces of violence”), James points at the crux of the matter in his supernatural tales: the distinction between the ghost and its other is not always clear, the spectral is not always violent, and the forces of violence are not always spectral. In other words, the “spirit” in James, in as much as it may be either spectral or human, is always ghostly in the sense that it is represented as an immaterial consciousness. One might be tempted to argue that James is reclaiming the spiritual vision of Carlyle’s Teufelsdröckh who asks, “Are we not Spirits”; “O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are in very deed Ghosts!”23 And perhaps anticipating Sigmund Freud, James is one of the first writers who acknowledged that we are primarily and most devastatingly haunted from within rather than from without. As Virginia Woolf maintained, James’s ghosts “have their origin within us.”24 Spectrality, therefore, explored by James as a liminal state of existence, gradually became the fictional means of rendering the breakdown of all certainties and the impossibility of plain answers that rely on a binary logic—a thematic and stylistic preoccupation linked to modernity. At the same time it enabled him to experiment with the much celebrated subjectivity of vision and the style of indeterminacy. Spectrality offered James opportunities for experimenting with dialogical structures, allusions,


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resonances, and associations rather than closed forms and meanings. In other words, the ghostliness of James’s fiction and nonfiction is constituted not only by the invocation of unexplained presences and the construction of uncanny, scary moments, but also most grippingly by the pervasiveness of ghostly “elsewheres” that are conjured by writing that relies on absence, omission, and silence. The lack of narrative knowledge turns omitted or evaded scenes, thoughts, and words into imagined experiences taking place in imagined localities. Experience in James is as impalpable as consciousness; and if the “chamber of consciousness” is ghostly, occupied merely by the finely sensitive and at the same time barely perceptible, translucent, and quite eerie spiderweb, then the experience of both character and reader is similarly ghostly, devoted to guessing “the unseen from the seen” and tracing “the implication of things.”25 That is, the narrative opaqueness of James’s style either mirrors or is derived from the visual opaqueness of the ghostly. And it seems to be this narrative opaqueness that also makes reading Henry James ghostly. As Gert Buelens and Celia Aijmer suggest, the ghostly that is evoked by both acts of writing and reading, since characters inscribed in writing and resurrected through reading are “doomed to a spectral existence,” is related to the indeterminacy of the writing.26 Surely, then, Henry James ranks high among novelists who concern themselves with how, quite simply, to read. To paraphrase James, we must never say that we know the last word about any human heart—yet James exhorted would-be writers to be the kind of person on whom nothing is lost. How to reconcile those two imperatives—to combine the observational perspicuity to which James aspired with the poignant acknowledgment that any human heart is, in the final analysis, a closed book—was one of James’s great ethical and aesthetic challenges. Throughout his career, he turned again and again to the supernatural, especially the ghostly, as a way of figuring the conflict between what can be known and what must remain mysterious in human relations. With the remarkable exception of James’s novella The Turn of the Screw, relatively little critical attention has been directed toward James’s ghost stories or his use of ghostly elements in his other fiction. Two excellent works, Martha Banta’s Henry James and the Occult: The Great Extension (1972) and T. J. Lustig’s Henry James and the Ghostly (1994), are the only book-length studies of his ghostly fiction that do not focus exclusively on The Turn of the Screw. That particular tale has generated hundreds of articles and many books devoted solely to it, notable among which are Thomas Mabry Cranfill’s An Anatomy of “The Turn of the Screw” (1972), Shoshana Felman’s Turning the Screw of Interpretation (1977) (actually a


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novella-length article of seminal importance in the history of the tale’s critical reception), Terry Heller’s The Turn of the Screw: Bewildered Vision (1989), Peter G. Beidler’s Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James: The Turn of the Screw at the Turn of the Century (1989), and Robin P. Hoople’s Distinguished Discord: Discontinuity and Pattern in the Critical Tradition of “The Turn of the Screw” (1997). Because of the wealth of criticism on The Turn of the Screw, then, this volume does not include essays focusing solely on it. Nevertheless, quite a few of the contributions refer to the novella, either taking their cue from its themes and the critical attention it has received or paying homage to its enduring appeal and relevance to any project that aims at unraveling James’s ambiguity. As one of the Palgrave reviewers of this volume very poignantly noted, The Turn of the Screw cannot help but have a ghostly haunting effect on any attempt to tackle the uncanny in James’s oeuvre. The essays that follow consider various manifestations of the ghostly throughout James’s oeuvre, examining both the texts traditionally categorized as ghost stories and those regarded as (for lack of a better term) realist or autobiographical. Just as James’s ghost stories do not always feature a literal “ghost,” so the essayists vary in their application of that term. For some, the ghostly refers to the appearance in spirit form of a human being who has died. Other critics use the term to indicate a general, foreboding sense of hauntedness, while for others “ghostly” suggests a paradoxical presence of absence, trace, and disappearance. Several essayists deal with the ghostly as a narrative strategy that allows James to explore various issues (often overlapping): sexuality, privacy, marginalization, and estrangement. The placement and organization of the essays in the volume are aimed at developing thematic and stylistic investigations that shed light on James’s philosophical engagement, historical and cultural situatedness, concerns with gender and sexuality, and rhetorical methods. Greg Zacharias, in Chapter 1, examines how for James memory becomes a retrospective strategy—a means of making public what is most private, revealing his own ghosts of the past as a way to overcome them through the power of consciousness, representing them as being conquered by his own consciousness, and thus his articulation or rearticulation—all these being fundamental elements of his late style. Zacharias’s essay focuses on a variety of James’s texts, ranging from The Portrait of a Lady to the prefaces to the New York Editions of his fiction, and from the late fiction to the autobiographical writings such as The American Scene and A Small Boy and Others. In Chapter 2, Kristin Boudreau places James’s writing within the context of philosophical questioning originating in Kant and perpetuated by


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the romantics and the transcendentalists on the reliance or not of speculative reason on sensual perception. She traces this philosophical debate in The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove, novels that are not often associated with the ghostly, and argues that for James truer vision is often reached through “sightless eyes.” In exploring Milly Theale’s corpselike life and her animated afterlife, Boudreau examines both James’s 1910 essay about postmortem consciousness, “Is there a Life after Death?,” and the Kantian tradition of human thought, particularly its incarnation in a text that deeply influenced James, Emerson’s “American Scholar,” whose Kantian distinction between the “dead fact” and the “quick thought” is an important background source for The Wings of the Dove. In Chapter 3, Hazel Hutchison examines the way James’s preoccupation with church buildings in his fiction and nonfiction challenges the boundary between the material and the conceptual. In his descriptions of churches, James often describes the living as ghostly, reversing and destabilizing our experience of the world rendered in the text. Sacred space therefore enables a kind of transference of energy between outer and inner. Through an examination of Swedenborgian and transcendentalist metaphors of space and drawing on James’s travel writing, his essay “Is there a Life after Death?,” and on recent critical work on his treatment of space, Hutchison reads the interplay between the material and the spiritual in “The Altar of the Dead” as James’s exploration of mortality and of the potential experience beyond the material. In Chapter 4, Anna Despotopoulou argues, through a Freudian and sociohistorical perspective, that James found the Gothic to be a particularly appropriate means of negotiating the conflict between privacy and publicity that appears in many of his works and especially the equivocal position of women within this conflict. In stories such as “The Ghostly Rental,” “The Real Right Thing,” “The Third Person,” and “The Author of Beltraffio,” James makes women the source and not the victims of terror by emphasizing, through the gothic medium, their unknowable, unpredictable, and ultimately uncanny behavior. His stories appear to adopt a position of oscillation, hovering between cultural tropes of femininity, and in essence emphasizing woman’s liminality and her precarious position between the private and the public, not quite belonging to either. Kathy Gentile also focuses on Freud’s concept of “das Unheimlich,” or the Uncanny, in her essay in Chapter 5 on “The Beast in the Jungle.” She reads John Marcher’s long-awaited supernatural visitant, which he metaphorically visualizes as a beast in the jungle, as James’s figuration of the concept of the Uncanny that Freud later investigated in his 1919 essay. Freud’s definition of the uncanny—“that class of the frightening, which

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leads back to what is known of old and long familiar”—suggests that the possibility of such an event occurring in Marcher’s sterile life is remote since he is a man without felt memories, even while believing himself to be “haunted.” Ironically then, because Marcher’s mind is not haunted, not peopled by the spectral presence of others, he is unable to experience the event for which he sees himself as destined, since the uncanny marks the destabilizing eruption of repressed fears and desires into everyday life. Diane Long Hoeveler reads James’s ghost stories as focused on homosexual desire. In her essay in Chapter 6, she examines a quarter of James’s stories featuring a dead male as examples of “phobic enchantment”—the feelings experienced by a dominant culture when they reject an other that is nevertheless powerfully desirable, so that they find themselves simultaneously enchanted and repelled. Her readings of “De Grey: A Romance,” “The Ghostly Rental,” “Sir Edmund Orme,” and “Owen Wingrave” show that early in his career, James was aware of the dangers of same-sex attraction and sought ways to tame that attraction, sometimes even by eliminating the masculine before it erupted in full textual presence. In Chapter 7, Kevin Ohi argues that James’s strange late story “MaudEvelyn,” with its treatment of dissimulation and absence, aligns it with the thematic of the closet rather than with the more usual implications of same-sex desire found in most of James’s ghost stories. By untangling the complicated verb tenses that help tell the story of a young man who “marries” a dead woman, Ohi exposes the text’s temporal structures and voluble silences that reveal the erasures inherent in the closet—and in the ghost story. Gert Buelens, in Chapter 8, argues that the ghost story “Owen Wingrave,” often cited as an example of one of James’s failures, actually succeeds as a shrewd exposure of buried assumptions about social and gender identity and, in particular, the military temperament. Buelens traces the uncanny doublings and repetitions in the story through Judith Butler’s notion of performativity to reveal the paradoxical pacifism that Wingrave enacts in his battles against his family’s military ethos and that perhaps exposes the artificiality of social norms. In Chapter 9 Sheila Teahan examines “The Great Good Place,” a late tale that is enigmatic even by James’s standards. The numerous unfinished phrases and sentences exemplify the trope of aposiopesis, the figure of interruption or silence, which causes an uncanny disruption of temporality, like a ghost. The protagonist George Dane’s search for the “missing half ” of his sentences conjures the figure of the “Brother,” a specular double whose stichomythic and absurdist dialogue with Dane anticipates Samuel Beckett. The “great good place” is the locus amoenus of classical


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rhetoric, and the story plays throughout on the spatial metaphoric of topos, the “place” of rhetoric itself. Finally, in her epilogue Nicola Bradbury works through a synthetic reading of the volume, and in particular its nuanced reading of the ghostly, in order to explore the interplay of consciousness and bewilderment as the necessary condition for the sense of reality that grows from the apprehension of the hypothetical that abounds in James’s late fiction and in The Ambassadors in particular. Between the wishful “Live all you can,” uttered by Lambert Strether, and the regretful “Too late” lies an area of hypothetical development, writes Bradbury: “the ghost of a chance.” For James, then, the formal conventions of the ghost story invited particular kinds of manipulation of the interpretative enigmas that he fashioned with such skill in all his fiction. Likewise, for James’s critics, his use of the ghostly, given the ghost story’s reification of the essential and omnipresent uncanniness of literature, complicates and enriches our readings of his other texts. The manifestation of the ghostly in James— whether in traditional ghost stories, in ostensibly realistic tales, in letters, or in autobiographical texts—is ripe for new readings of the varied ways in which the ghost story’s generic conventions both articulate and interrogate the anxieties of turn-of-the-century Anglo-American culture. Notes 1. Henry James, Letters, vol. 4, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1984), 24. 2. Henry James, Letters, vol. 3, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1984), 277; Henry James, Letters, vol. 4, 88. 3. T. J. Lustig, Henry James and the Ghostly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2. 4. John Carlos Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). 5. Henry James to Frederic William Henry Myers, 19 December 1898, in Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (New York: Viking, 1999), 314. 6. Michael Anesko, ed., Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 309. 7. Lustig, Ghostly, 87. 8. Sheri Weinstein, “Technologies of Vision: Spiritualism and Science in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Madison: University of Madison Press, 2004), 124–40 (125). 9. “Comment on New Books,” The Atlantic Monthly 76, no. 456 (October 1895): 563–9 (565).


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10. “A Few Story-Tellers, Old and New,” The Atlantic Monthly 72, no. 433 (November 1893): 693–99 (696). 11. “Mr. James’s New Stories,” Athenaeum 3704 (22 October 1898): 564–65 (564). 12. Lustig, Ghostly, 4. 13. Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (New York: Scribners, 1913), 92. 14. Margaret Oliphant, “Sensation Novels,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 91, no. 559 (1862): 564–84 (564). 15. Henry James, “Mary Elizabeth Braddon,” in Literary Criticism, vol. 1 (New York: Library of America, 1984), 741–6 (742). 16. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 19 (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), 225. 17. David Punter, “The Uncanny,” in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London: Routledge, 2007), 129–36 (130). 18. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 17. 19. Henry James, Preface, The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, “The Liar,” “Two Faces,” in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 12 (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), v–xxiv (xv). 20. Ibid., xix; see also Peter G. Beidler, Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James: The Turn of the Screw at the Turn of the Century (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 38. As Beidler and other scholars have shown, James was acquainted with some of the founding members of the Society for Psychical Research and had read their narratives of paranormal activity. 21. Henry James, Preface, The Aspern Papers, xx. 22. Henry James, Preface, “The Altar of the Dead” and other stories, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 17 (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), v–xxix (xxi). 23. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 194, 195. 24. Virginia Woolf, “Henry James’s Ghost Stories,” in The Turn of the Screw, ed. Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1999), 159– 60 (159). 25. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in Literary Criticism, vol. 1 (New York: Library of America, 1984), 44–65 (52, 53). 26. Gert Buelens and Celia Aijmer, “The Sense of the Past: History and Historical Criticism,” in Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies, ed. Peter Rawlings (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), 192–211 (204, 206).

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CHAPTER 1

“The complexion of ever so long ago” Style and Henry James’s Ghosts

Greg Zacharias

One of James’s best known and perhaps most important ghost stories, his “dream of the Louvre,” comes not from a published tale or novel but first from his most private writing (his notebooks) and then from the private-gone-public autobiographical volume A Small Boy and Others. The migration of the story from James’s private conversation with himself in the notebook entry to the publication of his memoir is significant because it serves as an emblem of how the ghostly functions in James as a conversion from the very private to the very public. In addition, there seems to be something fundamentally therapeutic for James in the conversion process that signals James’s conversation with his past and provides him with a way to understand that experience. James’s account of the dream of the Louvre appears in his July 21, 1910, notebook entry in which he recorded that he “woke up in great relief ” following a prolonged and severe depressive episode.1 This is probably the same dream James describes in his memoir A Small Boy and Others, a dream that is important because its location, “the wondrous Galerie D’Apollon,” constituted for James “Style.”2 It is important, too, because in the recorded dream James faces down the ghost (“the awful agent, creature or presence”), causing it to run away in order to gain control of and safety in that room (SB, 348–49). So not only does the ghost supply James with a therapeutic process, but the therapy itself may serve to help James articulate, identify, confront, and overcome his anxieties and fears. Crucial in that process is not only the stylized objectification


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of those anxieties and fears in the ghostly figure in memory but also an objectification—even ironization—of himself. James stylizes the dream, which he calls “the most appalling yet most admirable nightmare of my life,” thus: “The climax of this extraordinary experience—which stands alone for me as a dream-adventure founded in the deepest, quickest, clearest act of cogitation and comparison, act indeed of life-saving energy, as well as in unutterable fear—was the sudden pursuit . . . [by] the awful agent, creature or presence” (SB, 347–48). Trying to protect himself from the “awful agent,” James first holds shut the door that separates him from it. Then, in “a triumph of my impulse,” he throws open the door and confronts the ghost face to face, which causes it to run away through the Galerie. He continues, “The lightning that revealed the retreat revealed also the wondrous place and, by the same amazing play, my young imaginative life in it of long before . . .” (SB, 348, 349). James thus possesses the room, the Galerie that he equated with style since boyhood to confront and face the apparition that had pursued him. The dream stands as an emblem of the way the ghostly—an element of “my young imaginative life”—functioned for James as a representation of memory. Such an understanding of the ghostly as a particularly persistent memory that insists on its own confrontation could also explain the appearances of ghosts in James’s fiction, which also stand for elements of the past in the characters’ lives, just as it does in the dream in the notebooks and A Small Boy and Others. The ghostly as I use the term extends William Righter’s point that the ghostly element of James’s style stands as part of his aim “to turn the moment, the fact of process, into a form of intelligible community.”3 Such an effort, as Righter continues, addresses “the late Jamesian sense of loss of context, the half-articulated crisis with its conversion of historical sense into things and place, talismanic objects.”4 At the same time, the ghostly plays an important role in James’s earlier fiction too. James’s retrospective strategy—making public what was most private, revealing his own ghosts as a way to overcome them through the power of consciousness, representing them as being conquered by his own consciousness and through articulation—is a characteristic of James’s late style in which coming to terms with memory is central. Understanding how James employs memory, especially those memories that haunt him, provides insight to his narrative style. This is particularly true in the late fiction, autobiographical writing, prefaces, and The American Scene, all of which function through a similar strategy of retrospect and reconsideration and of controlling the past through consciousness, thus casting light on the meaning of Jamesian style, both earlier and later. That technique


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of the later writings also appears in at least two well-known passages in The Portrait of a Lady from James’s middle period: Isabel Archer’s vigil and Isabel’s haunting memory of Gilbert Osmond sitting and Madame Merle standing.5 In A Small Boy and Others, James writes of his relation to a sequence of ghostly moments: “I feel that at such a rate I remember too much, and yet this mild apparitionism is only part of it. To look back at all is to meet the apparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an appeal. When I fix it, the hovering shade, whether of person or place, it fixes me back and seems the less lost—not my consciousness, for that is nothing, but to its own—by my stopping however idly for it” (SB, 92).6 The ghostly in James stylizes and defines the record of experience through memory. What was experienced is recalled through a process of rearticulation and confrontation with the stylized product of that rearticulation, which produces a representation of truth. Indeed, James’s commitment to that process in the autobiographies brought him trouble with his nephew, William James’s son, Harry, just after the publication of A Small Boy and Others. James is explicit about that path to “truth” in a letter to Harry, who had become impatient with his uncle’s particular way of using family letters, especially William’s, in the autobiographies. Wrote James to his nephew: That my procedure, as applied, has been a mistake from the point of view of the independent giving to the world of your Father’s correspondence as a whole I entirely agree—in light of what you tell me of the effect on you of the cumulative impression you get from individual retouchings often repeated . . . in the absence of your entering into the only attitude and state of feeling that was possible to me by my mode of work, and which was one so distinct, by its whole “ethic” and aesthetic (and indeed its aesthetic, however discredited to you in fact, was simply its ethic) from what I should have felt my function in handling my material as an instalment merely of the great correspondence itself, just a contribution, an initial one, to the long continuity of that. (HJL, 4: 800)

But James continues that had he omitted that aspect, which he identifies with his “aesthetic” and to which he believes Harry objects, “[t]hen the case would have been for me . . . free of all living back imaginatively . . . into one’s earliest and most beguiling, and most unspeakable (for actual explainings and justifyings) contemporaneities with the writer.”7 Yet, however elaborately James tries to explain his use of the material (especially William’s letters) to Harry, he repeatedly falls back on his commitment to the ghostly—the examination of the past through his own stylized representation of it, “the considerations and emotions that


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have been intense for one in the long ferment of an artistic process” (HJL, 4:801). It is via that process of the ghostly that James could show what he came to regard as “perfect truth.” By reading his brother’s letters, he says, he seemed to experience the truth of William’s presence: “I found myself again in such close relation with your Father . . . I seemed to feel him in the room and at my elbow . . . as I worked and as he listened” (HJL, 4:802). Here, then, James articulates and rationalizes the ghostly. As he opens A Small Boy and Others, James mentions that such a confrontation with the ghosts of memory means “to live over the spent experience itself ” (SB, 1). He continues, “I struggle under the drawback, innate and inbred, of seeing the whole content of memory and affection in each enacted and recovered moment, as who should say, in the vivid image and the very scene; the light of the only terms in which life has treated me to experience” (SB, 3). Just as he seeks and confronts the ghost in the Louvre so he seeks the meaning of experience in memory, which then helps organize his life. In A Small Boy and Others he describes the effect of his apprehension of those ghostly memories on the very ghosts that, like emblems of his experience as he recalls it, organize his memory and thus sections of the book. Those emblems, those ghosts, and those ghostly moments, then, operate as “portico[s] of history,” which enable access to other regions of memory (SB, 96). One of these porticos is the playbill that organizes several sequences of A Small Boy by enabling James to recall the experiences associated in his memory with the advertisement (SB, 101, 113, 154). Similar ghosts of memory—a view in Venice, a square in Florence, for example—organize sections of the New York Edition’s prefaces because they, like the ghost of the playbill, permit James access to a cascade of affiliated memories. The process of such recovery and representation in writing was congenial for James: “I confess myself embarrassed by my very ease of re-capture of my young consciousness; so that I perforce try to encourage lapses and keep my abundance down” (SB, 276). Those memories, then, establish and constitute truth of experience. In Notes of a Son and Brother, James renames a particularly significant memory with his brother William and their experience in New York as children as an “apparition” that itself carries “dignity.”8 Importantly, the sum of that memory was generated by a letter, bundles of which comprise the bases from which James develops the autobiographies. For the ghostly to be read as truth it must be read ironically, as if it happened to someone else. This is why the master narrator of the ghostly in James is able to narrate his own participation in the remembered, now stylized, event. James writes, “The beauty of the main truth as to any remembered matter looked at in due detachment, or in other


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words through the haze of time, is that comprehension has then become one with criticism, compassion, as it may really be called, one with musing vision, and the whole company of the anciently restless, with their elations and mistakes, their sincerities and fallacies and vanities and triumphs, embalmed for us in the mild essence of their collective submission to fate” (SB, 111–12). “Shades” (SB, 237; NSB, 114), “ghosts” (SB, 133, 410; NSB, 8, 261), “lividly dead . . . picture” (SB, 267), “apparitions” (SB, 48, 374; NSB, 249, 320, 339); “figures spring[ing] up” as if from the grave (NSB, 457), and similar terms all stand for the ghostly in James’s fiction, autobiographical, and private writings. Other similar terms reveal the irony that James can find in his past, in the truth, in the ghostly as he views the ghosts of memory “in due detachment.” Typical of James’s representation of the ghostly are his depiction of the ghostly moment in its pastness, in similes that attempt to represent a fuller truth than a literal description presumably could, and in picturing a version of himself in the scene. Finally, the trilayered narrative, explicit or implicit, is typical. In the following passage, the master narrator, whom I call the author, describes primarily a ghostly Henry James who delights in his first payment for writing and at the same time feels reservations, generated by the commercialism of his act. Yet there is a third narrative or narrated level: a Jamesian ghost that exists or existed after the moment being narrated, who is aware of the complications produced by the “fabulous felicity” and “sordid gain,” but who himself, having accepted “other guerdons, of the same queer, the same often rather greasy, complexion,” now exists as a ghostly presence in the author’s narrative. Thus, the vision, quickened by a wealth, a great mixture, of new appearances, became such a throbbing affair that my memory of the time from the spring of ’64 to the autumn of ’66 moves as through an apartment hung with garlands and lights—where I have but to breathe for an instant on the flowers again to see them flush with colour, and but tenderly to snuff the candles to see them twinkle afresh . . . I see before me, in the rich, the many-hued light of my room that overhung dear Ashburton Place from our third floor, the very greenbacks, to the value of twelve dollars, into which I had changed the cheque representing my first earned wage. I had earned it, I couldn’t but feel, with fabulous felicity: a circumstance so strangely mixed with the fact that literary composition of a high order had, at that very table where the green backs were spread out, quite viciously declined, and with the air of its being also once for all to “come” on any save its own essential terms, which it seemed to distinguish in the most invidious manner conceivable from mine. It was to insist through all my course on this distinction, and sordid gain thereby never again to seem


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so easy as in that prime handling of my fee. Other guerdons, of the same queer, the same often rather greasy, complexion followed; for what had I done, to the accompaniment of a thrill the most ineffable, an agitation that, as I recapture it, affects me as never exceeded in all my life for fineness, but go one beautiful morning out to Shady Hill at Cambridge and there drink to the lees the offered cup of editorial sweetness?—none ever again to be more delicately mixed. (NSB, 403–5)

James’s ghosts also point a way through his memory, mark truths of experience, and organize The American Scene. The American Scene’s narrative relies on strategies similar to those in the autobiographies: James the author distances himself from James the subject through time and irony; impressions remembered are analyzed for meaning by the “author” at a distance after the fact, “the Author’s point of view and his relation to his subject.”9 The meaning or truth of the impression is thus discovered through the analysis of the recalled impressions, which reappear in memory, available both for analysis and for its ability to organize and motivate a chain of other memories that are now available for analysis through a “sense of aspects and prospects.”10 James explains in the preface to The American Scene, I would take my stand on my gathered impressions, since it was all for them, for them only, that I returned [to the United States]; I would in fact go to the stake for them—which is a sign of the value that I both in particular and in general attach to them and that I have endeavoured to preserve for them in this transcription. My cultivated sense of aspects and prospects affected me absolutely as an enrichment of my subject, and I was prepared to abide by the law of that sense—the appearance that it would react promptly in some presences only to remain imperturbably inert in others. (AS, v–vi)

In slightly different language for and with illustrations of the prevalence of the ghostly, James describes the same process as the recognition of the ghostly’s value to the author following an analysis of the aspects of the “painter” and “artist.” James writes as the “author” in the preface to What Maisie Knew as he considers the ghosts of that novel’s development: Sketchily clustered even, these elements gave out that vague pictorial glow which forms the first appeal of a living “subject” to the painter’s consciousness; but the glimmer became intense as I proceeded to a further analysis. The further analysis is for that matter almost always the torch of rapture and victory, as the artist’s firm hand grasps and plays it—I mean, naturally,


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of the smothered rapture and the obscure victory, enjoyed and celebrated not in the street but before some innermost shrine; the odds being a hundred to one, in almost any connexion, that it doesn’t arrive by any easy first process at the best residuum of truth.11

Such an awareness of the division in his narrative selves and the need to manage that division is most evident in James’s writing from the major and fourth phases of his career. Yet it had been with James since 1868, at least, when, in his review of George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy and recalling the very language of “due detachment” he used in A Small Boy and Others, he wrote that “in every human imbroglio, be it of a comic or a tragic nature, it is good to think of an observer standing aloof, the critic, the idle commentator of it all, taking notes, as we may say, in the interest of truth.”12 While James here imagines the “aloof ” observer, he invokes the triple narrative that would mark his ghostly style most clearly. The “aloof ” critic must stand apart from those he realizes are more engaged in the scene than he. The master author, then, standing apart from the aloof observer and those whom the observer had observed (even if the observer watches himself in memory), shapes “truth” through the ghosts of the experiences of those who participated in the scene the observer watched and also through the ghosts of those recorded impressions laid down by the observer. That process of reading ghosts, which Peter Rawlings sees containing “documents and the history to which they have given rise,” is one of “appropriation and fabrication rather than of the pursuit of facts and of the truth.”13 While I would agree with Rawlings that James often requires “documents” to help him begin a foray into the ghostly past, I would not oppose but would rather connect “appropriation and fabrication” to “facts” and “the truth.” For James, such appropriation and fabrication is the way to his realized truth.14 In James’s first two extant letters following his awareness of the death of his cousin, Minny Temple, James quickly moves from grief to ghostly. In the first of the two, addressed on March 26, 1870, to his mother, James writes in the sixth sentence of the letter: “I have been spending the morning letting the awakened swarm of old recollections and associations flow into my mind—almost enjoying the exquisite pain they provoke . . . It comes home to me with irresistible power, the sense of how much I knew her and how much I loved her. As I look back upon the past, from the time I was old enough to feel and perceive, her friendship seems literally to fill it up” (HJL, 1:218, 219). Three days later, writing to his brother William, James finds, having “awakened swarm of old recollections and associations,” that “a vast amount of truth appears now in all the common-places that she used to provoke” (HJL, 1:223). Not surprisingly,


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given the strategy of the ghostly, one of those truths has to do with himself as he narrates a version of his life with Minny: “Looking back upon the past half-dozen years, it seems as if she represented, in a manner, in my life several of the elements or phases of life at large—her own sex, to begin with, but even more Youth, with which owing to my invalidism, I always felt in rather indirect relation” (HJL, 1:224). Not surprisingly, the same process of recall, examination of memory, and articulation of the examination and/or confrontation with the past can explain the appearance of ghosts in James’s fiction as well, such as in The Jolly Corner, The Turn of the Screw, and The Sense of the Past. In this way, for either James’s characters or for James himself, the ghostly offers a manifestation of James’s understanding of the truth from the past. This is a truth he marks out for his own particular investigative and analytic talents in the preface to The American Scene: “There are features of the human scene, there are properties of the social air, that the newspapers, reports, surveys and blue-books would seem to confess themselves powerless to “handle,” and that yet represented to me a greater array of items, a heavier expression of character, than my own scales would every weigh, keep them clear as I might” (AS, vi). Facing and describing ghosts of the past also organize a number of the prefaces to the New York Edition, allowing James a way to access, understand, and explain a past in which the conception, writing and revision of novels and tales—as well as the events and personal details associated with a literary life—offered a rhetoric, a style, for writing about himself. Typically, the prefaces open with a memory, a ghost that locates the origin of the volume to follow. “The need of renewing acquaintance” with his books and stories not only introduces James’s method and rationale in the preface to Roderick Hudson, the first preface in the New York Edition, but also represents his method in nearly all of the prefaces.15 Key is James’s conversion of the private to the public through style, through “art.” This preface is remarkable for the way James uses it to display the importance of the ghostly to his art, at least: The revival of an all but extinct relation with an early work may often produce for an artist, I think, more kinds of interest and emotion than he shall find it easy to express, and yet will light not a little, to his eyes, that veiled face of his Muse which he is condemned forever and all anxiously to study. The art of representation bristles with questions the very terms of which are difficult to apply and to appreciate; but whatever makes it arduous makes it, for our refreshment, infinite, causes the practice of it, with experience, to spread round us in a widening, not in a narrowing circle. Therefore it is that experience has to organize, for convenience and cheer, some


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system of observation—for fear, in the admirable immensity, of losing its way. We see it as pausing from time to time to consult its notes, to measure, for guidance, as many aspects and distances as possible, as many steps taken and obstacles mastered and fruits gathered and beauties enjoyed. Everything counts, nothing is superfluous in such a survey; the explorer’s note-book strikes me here as endlessly receptive. This accordingly is what I mean by the contributive value—or put simply as, to one’s own sense, the beguiling charm—of the accessory facts in a given artistic case. This is why, as one looks back, the private history of any sincere work, however modest, its pretensions, looms with its own completeness in the rich, ambiguous aesthetic air, and seems at once to borrow a dignity and to mark, so to say, a station. This is why, reading over, for revision, correction and republication, the volumes here in hand, I find myself, all attentively, in presence of some such recording scroll of engraved commemorative table—from which the “private” character, moreover a considerable course, the continuity of an artist’s endeavour, the growth of his whole operative consciousness and, best of all, perhaps, their own tendency to multiply, with the implication, thereby, of a memory much enriched. Addicted to “stories” and inclined to retrospect, he fondly takes, under this backward view, his whole unfolding, his process of production, for a thrilling tale, almost for a wondrous adventure, only asking himself at what stage of remembrance the mark of the relevant will begin to fail. He frankly proposes to take this mark everywhere for granted.16

It is the ghosts of memory that constitute experience, consciousness, and truth. “Tell me what the artist is,” James famously wrote as he concludes the metaphor of the house of fiction in the preface to Portrait, “and I will tell you of what he has been conscious.”17 Here James’s attention to the pastness of the experience (“of what he has been conscious”), even stressing the role of memory with italic pointers (“has been conscious”), and underlining his own strategic staging in the present as the author of the preface “of what he has been conscious,” foregrounds the importance of the ghostly in later James as a way to organize and represent the near present, the immediate past, as well as the past of his youth. He recalls a composite of his many walks during “the first year of a long residence in London” as a ghostly presence through which he can discuss The Princess Casamassima: “One walked of course with one’s eyes greatly open, and I hasten to declare that such a practice, carried on for a long time and over a considerable space, positively provokes, all round, a mystic solicitation, the urgent appeal, on the part of everything, to be interpreted and, so far as may be, reproduced.”18 In fact, as he recalls the genesis of his main character, it is as if he were confronted by an apparition: “I arrived so at the history of little Hyacinth Robinson—he sprang up for me out of the


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London pavement . . . Face to face with the idea of Hyacinth’s subterraneous politics and occult affiliations, I recollect perfectly feeling, in short, that I might well be ashamed if, with my advantages—and there was n’t a street, a corner, an hour, of London that was not an advantage—I should n’t be able to piece together a proper semblance of those things, as indeed a proper semblance of all the odd parts of his life.”19 Of the strangeness of the development of The Tragic Muse, James explains, “Suffice it just here that I find the latent historic clue in my hand again with the easy recall of my prompt grasp of such a chance to make a story about art,” and “the more I turn my pieces over, at any rate, the more I now see I must have found in them.”20 And thus the text of the story, like the text of a letter, presents as the ghostly.21 The pages “themselves admonish me, however, in fifty interesting ways, and they especially emphasise that truth of the vanity of the a priori test of what an idée-mère may have to give.”22 These ghosts then become coordinates by which James (or his characters who encounter their own ghosts of memory) can understand themselves in terms of their own histories. In this way, the ghostly maps the history of consciousness and thus of memory. In the preface to The Spoils of Poynton, James stages the way the ghostly operates as the “truth” of the novel’s “germ,” “a mere floating particle in the stream of talk,” and develops into the novel itself: What above all comes back to me with this reminiscence is the sense of the inveterate minuteness, on such happy occasions, of the precious particle— reduced, that is, to its mere fruitful essence. Such is the interesting truth about the stray suggestion, the wandering word, the vague echo, at touch of which the novelist’s imagination winces as the prick of some sharp point: its virtue is all in its needle-like quality, the power to penetrate as finely as possible.23

James continues by saying that what enables one to identify “the merest grain, the speck of truth” as that which will grow into the finished work is art itself. In this, James once again reminds us of the precise connection between the ghostly—that speck of recalled experience—and his art. The one cannot exist without the other. The ghostly inspires and (in)forms; but like James’s dream of the Louvre—or work with his brother’s letters for his autobiographical books, the words he hears in a conversation, his memories of Minny Temple, or the memories of his 1904–5 trip to the United States, which became The American Scene—the artistic consciousness must recognize and accept the ghostly in order to face it and convert it into art: “There had been but ten words, yet I had recognised in them, as in a flash, all the possibilities of the little drama of my


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‘Spoils,’ which glimmered then and there into life.”24 Note the similarity between the development of this recognition into “life” and that of his memories of the London street, which sprang into being in Hyacinth Robinson or the way James claims he “saw, on the spot, little Morgan Moreen” and “all the rest of the Moreens”—an “experience of the suddenly determined absolute of perception.”25 In any of these cases, as in his description of William’s ghost to his nephew, Harry, the presence or value of the ghost is recognized at once, almost emotionally, as it “touch[es] the fancy to the quick and strike[s] one as the beginning of a story.”26 In the preface to The Aspern Papers—itself a tale that relies on the narrator’s apprehension and enjoyment of those vestiges of meaning he attaches to the sign of Juliana Bordereau that could be explained in terms similar to those James uses repeatedly to explain how he locates and generates meaning—James touches on his preference for putting himself in circumstances where he may be visited by the ghostly: I delight in a palpable imaginable visitable past—in the nearer distances and the clearer mysteries, the marks and signs of a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table . . . That, to my imagination, is the past fragrant of all, or of almost all, the poetry of the thing outlived and lost and gone, and yet in which the precious element of closeness, telling so of connexions but tasting so of differences, remains appreciable.27

In the preface to “The Lesson of the Master,” James articulates the relation of the ghostly to the historian’s job of work. But his phrasing reveals that it is not an exploration of events that have happened in the world as much as it is an exploration of his own memory, his own experience; that is, an exploration of the ghostly: “I make the most of this passage of literary history—I like so, as I find, to recall it. It lives there for me in old Kensington days; which, though I look back at them over no such great gulf of years . . . have already faded for me to the complexion of ever so long ago.”28 Thus James follows this remark of the remoteness of the experience with a detailed and emotion-filled description of the origins of “The Death of the Lion.” The nature of the ghostly, as I have been calling it, changes in the prefaces for the late novels. In the preface to The Wings of the Dove, for example, the ghostly aspect represented is not one of circumstances. Perhaps the process of composition is too close to James despite the qualification for time he makes in the preface to “The Death of the Lion” previously mentioned. Instead, the ghostly exhibits itself in the working out of the novel itself. For example, James recalls that situation of the


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novel was “always present.” And there is an allusion to the ghost of himself, “the author,” as in “the author’s accepted task at the outset has been to suggest with force the nature of the tie formed between the two young persons first introduced—to give a full impression of its peculiar worried and baffled, yet clinging and confident, ardour.”29 However, James’s style, in terms of the ghostly, in the prefaces to The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl is quite different from that in any of the previous prefaces. That is, the ghostly is almost completely absent. Such a splitting, represented in time and style, with the current writer looking to the named “author” over layers of past-tense verbs, I’ve tried to show, dominates The American Scene in which James carries out the narrative not with two authorial personalities—one contemporary with the writing of the final narrative and the ghost of the first recalled from memory—but with three personalities, each representing a state of composition and a state of consciousness. The controlling voice of the narrative is that of the “author,” the narrator who opens the preface by declaring that “the following pages duly explain themselves, I judge, as to the Author’s point of view and his relation to his subject” (AS, v). This narrative persona locates himself in space and time (but only in the American edition): “Rye” on “September 28, 1906.” The author, writing in Rye, Sussex, in early autumn 1906, depends fundamentally on the notes taken by another narrative persona, “the restless analyst” or the “brooding analyst” or any other of some dozens of names James gives to the ghost of himself, whose original, as it were, actually traveled in the United States and took notes of what he saw.30 The “author” or master narrator is read as that figure who, sometime after the analyst has absorbed impressions of a given event, works to shape impressions into art. The role of the author is analogous to James’s later novel narrators, who interpret and shape the experience of central novel characters, rendering that experience in their own words. The author, then, is acutely aware, via memorized impressions released by the notes, of the ironic separation of himself from the various versions of the notetaker, the traveler, and the analyst on the scene in the United States. In this, the relation of the master narrator of The American Scene to the narrated self in that text is similar to that in the prefaces and the fiction. (Though in the fiction, the one recalling ghosts from memory may not be as aware as James himself of the nature of those memories, those ghosts.) What distinguishes the ghostly in The American Scene is the emphasis on and development of a third narrative level, the pastness of the past, a ghost of a ghost, both of which are read by the “author.” Viewed from this angle, The American Scene may be read most directly—but not differently from


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the ghostly elsewhere—as a study of James’s imagination, his ghosts, of the United States, than of the United States itself. For example, in the opening sentence of The American Scene, James signals his narrative style: “Conscious that the impressions of the very first hours have always the value of their intensity, I shrink from wasting those that attended my arrival, my return after long years, even though they be out of order with the others that were promptly to follow and that I here gather in, as best I may, under a single head” (AS, 1). James here establishes the master narrator (“Conscious . . . I shrink”) who looks at the ghosts of his “arrival, [his] return after long years.” Verb tenses are crucial to distinguishing the author who speaks in the present tense, from the “analyst” whose past “arrival” in the United States, like his entire tour, was “attended” by impressions both recorded and recalled by the author now writing and thinking in another place and at another time. Yet the impressions of the analyst were also affected by the ghosts of his own past, the ghosts of ghosts, and the past of the past are now evident under the scrutiny of the author: “They referred partly, these instant vibrations, to a past recalled from very far back; fell into a train of association that receded, for its beginning, to the dimness of extreme youth” (AS, 1). For it is in that “dimness of extreme youth” that James opens “New England: An Autumn Impression,” the opening chapter in The American Scene. Tellingly, in a narrative that investigates and depends on James’s ghosts, that opening chapter locates the narrative geographically and then imaginatively not only in New England but first in the place of his birth and earliest youth, New York City. Given this reading, the “restless analyst” is seen as a fictive character analogous to James’s later central novel characters, whose impressions are reported in the narrator’s own words rather than in their own. Conclusions drawn by that analyst, then, should belong to the analyst rather than to the historical “James.” This distinction is especially crucial when issues of class and race are the subjects of scholarly investigation and historical reputation. In addition, both the “restless analyst” and the “author” narratives thus generate a figure James identifies with the first-person singular pronoun, the “I.” Since the I appears in both the analyst and the author narratives, the I becomes a hybrid of the identities of analyst and author. Past-tense verbs, which locate the experience of the gently ridiculed restless analyst, and present-tense verbs, which indicate subsequent embroidery of the restless analyst’s notes by the author, not only separate narrative layers in The American Scene. Verb tenses also define and preserve the temporal spaces between the United States observed by James in 1904–5, the analysis of those observations, and the later representation of

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those observations, some of which were written as late as 1906 by James at home in England, when, as he anticipates in his notebooks, in the full summer days of L[amb] H[ouse], my long dusty adventure over, I shall be able to [plunge] my hand, my arm, in, deep and far, and up to the shoulder—into the heavy bag of remembrance—of suggestion—of imagination—of art—and fish out every little figure and felicity, every little fact and fancy that can be to my purpose. These little things are all packed away, now, thicker than I can penetrate, deeper than I can fathom, and there let them rest for the present, in their sacred cool darkness, till I shall let in upon them the mild still light of dear old L[amb] H[ouse]—in which they will begin to gleam and glitter and take form like the gold and jewels of a mine. (CN, 237)

As the private ghosts of his life with his brother and his dream of the Louvre were converted into elements of his autobiographical volumes, so did his private musings in his notebooks trace his conversion of ghosts into The American Scene. James mentions the preservation of the temporal separation and thus the space between the narrative layers in the preface to the 1907 American edition of The American Scene, which concludes with “HJ September 28, 1906” (AS, vi). Such a conclusion implies not only the time elapsed between the observed events in the United States during 1904–5 and the later writing of The American Scene. The preface itself emphasizes in its combination of factual references to dates and names and fictionalizations of narrative personae that what we will read—The American Scene itself—was written not on the scene but after and in another culture that was not “alien” (as James calls the United States in the same preface) to the fictionalized primary observer, the overwhelmed and nervous restless analyst. Moreover, the specific and recurrent articulation of the temporal separation should remind readers that James is not writing on the American scenery but on the way that scenery affected the particular “restless analyst” and on the way the analyst’s experiences shape the author’s meditation on them. So while Ross Posnock reads James as a flaneur (a strolling observer) of the American scene,31 my reading of the narrative would offer James as a flaneur of his own memory. Thus The American Scene is as much a literary and political deployment of the analyst character (who, in the 1907 narrative of The American Scene, exists only as a memory and notes) and of the author (whose narrative Henry James, the I, also controls as he prepared the volume), as it is of the 1904–5 American scenery itself.


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Verb tenses and the narrative voices of The American Scene move us readers back and forth from the earnestness and intensity of the analyst’s past impressions to the author’s ironic recollection of and amusement from them to the author’s anxiety over finding the correct form for representing the earnestness, the irony, and the amusement. In that narrative space, where we readers move between narrators and their assigned places in time, and where James as the I exists too between narrative versions of himself and between the times assigned to those versions, the text represents the intricacies of identity formation, not only for the analyst himself on the tour (the author who tries to put experience to paper) and for James (the so-called I) but also for residents and marginalized citizens of and recent immigrants to the United States in 1904–5. At the same time, the I—a hybrid of ironic narratives—is itself ironic, inconsistent, and contradictory and seems to announce those features of James’s own represented identity. Memories taken from the recent past of the restless analyst, of the artistic author’s struggles at cool analysis and literary representation of the analyst’s impressions, combined with deep memories of the United States formed before he left his home for France and then England and shared by both the analyst and the author. The deep memories, the ghosts that are held in common, help to define and to unite the author’s and restless analyst’s narratives and also to compose the I. That same I layer of The American Scene depends on “the chord of remembrance,” which both analyst and author must inevitably “play” (AS, 5) and which becomes the subject of The American Scene. Deeply held memories from childhood, more recent memories recorded by the restless analyst, and the author’s “free[dom] to reflect” all enable James, representing himself as the I, to choose from an abundance of remembered impressions, which “could deliciously be left to ripen, like golden apples, on the tree . . .” in order to represent himself (AS, 6). The irony of the I is that the restless analyst’s attitude identifies more with the dominant cultural group than the dominated, although the dominated, the immigrant or the cultural other, is often the subject of the analyst’s impressions. The author’s attitude, however, tends to sympathize with the other, although he forms that sympathy at a temporal and spatial distance. The I, then, sympathizes with both the dominated and the dominator, becoming at once both and neither. In the opening pages of The American Scene, James as the so-called author announces anxiety over the difficulty of finding the proper “form” for representing impressions of the “human scene” (vi). Anxiety is also seen clearly in James’s “American Journals,” where James the actual visitor and the “original” of the restless analyst recorded notes, which were


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later used for The American Scene. Contemplating Harvard’s growth since his days there, the historical James strains in his journal to find a way to represent his impressions: “I should like some SPECIAL FIGURE, of a fine high application [to represent his impression]; something about the way such an (American) institution sits and looks across the high unobstructed table-land of its future in a manner all its own.” James follows immediately this notebook entry with another. The second entry helps me read the narrative layering in The American Scene because it too indicates the anxious division as the impressionist (ironized later in The American Scene through the restless analyst figure) and the artist (ironized later through the author figure) within James himself. James continues thus, THAT, something of that—which calls up within me, however, such a desire for the glimmer of a glance at the “sinister,” the ominous “Münsterberg” possibility—the sort of class of future phenomena repres[en]ted by the “foreigner” coming in and taking possession; the union of the large purchasing power with the absence of prejudice—of certain prejudices . . . In addition to which I seem to myself to “hang over” 2 other interwoven strands—my own little personal harking back to the small old superseded Law School (in presence of the actual—the big new modern); and some sort of glance at one’s old vision of Memorial Hall—with something to be gouged out of it—as a ramification of the image and a suggestion of the Union. Then the Cambridge fantastication seems to have only too much to “give”—God help me! It gives and gives; everything seems to give and give as I artfully press it. And what pressure of mine isn’t artful?—by the divine diabolical law under which I labour. (CN, 236–37).

While The American Scene’s analyst is “restless” because the intensity of experience and “the assault of suggestion” (87) prevent him from doing anything but submitting to the assault of what he takes in through his eyes, ears, nose, and skin, the authorial or artistic James attempts to regain control, even as that control involves representing the restless analyst’s sheer enjoyment of the aesthetic experience. Yet in the notebook passage previously cited, which shows the very division within James that will come to shape and even define the narrative of The American Scene, the duality of the restless analyst/author is contained by the I. In the same way, the interaction in The American Scene of the restless analyst and the author, as the I labors “under the divine diabolical law,” will produce a hybrid narrative. In this way, then, The American Scene, like all of James’s ghostly writing, becomes a search for the logic of the self, the I. In that search, the pastness and the presentness of the narrative each throws the other into greater relief, with neither gaining priority over the other. This


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is a search, moreover, in which James refuses to allow either the emotional or aesthetic immediacy of the impressions recorded by the restless analyst to dominate the representational capacity of the author’s narrative, or the latter to dominate the former. As a result, we readers are left to move between the presentation of experience and its representation, just as the I must move between them as he surveys his notes, reexperiences the impressions, and amuses himself when he looks back over months and years and smiles at that earlier self absorbing those impressions or looks back over just a few hours or minutes and smiles at another version of himself straining to represent the fundamentally unrepresentable that is intensely felt personal experience. Stephen Greenblatt wrote in Shakespearean Negotiations, “I began with the desire to speak with the dead.”32 Like Greenblatt and also The Aspern Papers narrator, as Julie Rivkin, reminds us, James through his ghostly writing shows us that he too, like so many of us, seeks a “dialogue with the dead.”33 To conduct that dialogue, James resorted to his memory, imagination, and his style of knowing, understanding, and representing. The dialogue with the dead, the consideration of whether “there is or isn’t,” as he put it in an essay titled “Is there a Life after Death?,” was “the most interesting question in the world.”34 But just as his ability to confront ghosts (or enjoy them) depended on the fact that “it is my . . . sensibility that is involved and at stake,” so the ghostly in James is, essentially, an examination of himself in the case of his writing about the past or of his characters when they accept their ghosts. This is especially so for the artist, whose work of life depends so fundamentally on consciousness: “His case, as I see it, is easily such as to make him declare that if he were not constantly, in his commonest processes, carrying the field of consciousness further and further, making it lose itself in the ineffable, he shouldn’t in the least feel himself an artist. As more or less of one myself, for instance, I deal with being, I invoke and evoke, I figure and represent, I seize and fix, as many phases and aspects and conceptions of it as my infirm hand allows me strength for.”35 Notes 1. Henry James, The Complete Notebooks, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 318 (hereafter cited in text as CN). The quotation in the title is from Henry James, Preface, The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 15 (New York: Scribner’s, 1907–1909), v. 2. Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (New York: Scribner’s, 1913), 346 (hereafter cited in text as SB).


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3. William Righter, American Memory in Henry James, ed. Rosemary Righter (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 6. 4. Ibid., 7. 5. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 4 (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), 164–65, 331. What in the opening pages of The Wings of the Dove can Kate Croy be said to be looking at in the mirror if not the ghostly? Using the three-part narrative strategy typical of the ghostly style, James’s master narrator narrates Kate who faces her past in the mirror. The description of Kate at this point in the novel as she considers herself in relation both to her past and future, facing, much as James did in his dream, the ethereal “worst”: “She stared into the tarnished glass too hard indeed to be staring at her beauty alone . . . She had stature without height, grace without motion, presence without mass.” Both James and Kate Croy, each ghostly in their own dreams, confronts an apparitional but, because so meaningful to them, significant past through which each seeks to come to terms with themselves. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 19 (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), 4, 5. 6. David McWhirter, “‘A Provision Full of Responsibilities’: Senses of the Past in Henry James’s Fourth Phase,” in Enacting History in Henry James, ed. Gert Buelens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 148–65 (152–53). McWhirter puts the investigation into the past in James’s fourth phase this way: “The question for James is, I think, less ‘what it was’ than ‘who I am.’ And this latter question depends for James not on a sense of the past, on a totalizing narrative of what was, but on a capacity for establishing multiple, often contradictory lines of connection, relation, and responsiveness to the past . . . What James seeks, in other words, is not a completed image of the past, but a modus operandi for investigating the complex, unsettled and often unsettling, relationships between ‘what it was’ and ‘who I am’” (152–53). Yet the ghostly in James suggests that James exercised such a capacity through much, if not all, of his career. 7. Henry James to Henry (Harry) James III, in Henry James’s Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974–84), 4:800 (hereafter cited in text as HJL). 8. Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother (New York: Scribner, 1914), 266 (hereafter cited in text as NSB). 9. Henry James, The American Scene (London: Chapman and Hall, 1907), v (hereafter cited in the text as AS). 10. In American Memory, 10, Righter notes this complication, though he recognizes only a double rather than, as I contend, a triple narrative, because he overlooks the complication of the ghostly experience being narrated and the master narrator’s distancing from them: “Of course, the James who reflected on his own experience was not the James who experienced. The authenticity of those experiences is modified by memory—and memory implies necessarily a double perspective.”


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11. Henry James, Preface, What Maisie Knew, “In the Cage,” “The Pupil,” in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 8 (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), v–xxii (vi). 12. Henry James, Essays on Literature: American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), 956. 13. Peter Rawlings, Henry James and the Abuse of the Past (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 11. 14. In Abuse of the Past, 24, Rawlings seems to map this when he quotes James’s “delight in the ‘associations awakened by things,’ and in the extent to which ‘the magic of the arts of representation’ trace ‘these associations into the most unlighted corners of our being, into the most devious paths of experience.’” Later, Rawlings moves closer to my sense of James’s location of the ghostly. Of James’s negotiation of the real and the symbolic in terms of Henri Bergson, Michel de Certeau, Roland Barthes, and James’s essay “Frances Anne Kemble,” Rawlings writes: “If the real has no place in the symbolic order, relics are incommensurable with narrative representation; they function as the return of the repressed to evacuate the site of writing from which they have been excluded, reintroducing ‘the real that was exiled from language’ . . . But these relics, like Aspern’s papers, are now only the ‘present’ signs of ‘dead’ things . . . ; their ‘sense’ is always ‘after sense,’ for ‘relics are apt to be dead’” (29). 15. Henry James, Preface, Roderick Hudson, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 1 (New York: Scribner’s, 1907), v–xx (v). 16. Ibid., v–vi. Such language, such style, in the representation of the effect and affect of the ghosts of memory recur again and again in the Prefaces. See, for example, Henry James, Preface The American, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 2 (New York: Scribner’s, 1907), v–xxiii (v): “I make myself out in memory as having at least for many months and many place given my Providence much to do: so great a variety of scenes of labour, implying all so much renewal of application, glimmer out of the book as I now read it over. And yet as the faded interest of the whole episode becomes again mildly vivid what I seem most to recover is, in its pale spectrality, a degree of joy, and eagerness on behalf of my recital, that must recklessly enough have overridden anxieties of every sort, including any view of inherent difficulties.” In Henry James, Preface, The Portrait of a Lady, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vols. 3–4 (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), v–xxi (vi–vii), James notes: “Trying to recover here, for recognition, the germ of my idea, I see that it must have consisted not at all in any conceit of a ‘plot,’ nefarious name, in any flash, upon the fancy, of a set of relations, or in any one of those situations that, by a logic of their own, immediately fall, for the fabulist, into movement, into a march or a rush, a patter of quick steps; but altogether in the sense of a single character . . . I have always fondly remembered a remark that I heard fall years ago from the lips of Ivan Turgenieff in regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture.” And then he quotes the Turgenev ghost from his memory, much as he used the ghosts recalled by William’s letters to guide him in the construction of the autobiographical volumes. 17. Henry James, Preface, The Portrait of a Lady, xi.


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18. Henry James, Preface, The Princess Casamassima, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vols. 5–6 (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), v–xxiii (v). 19. Ibid., vi, xxii. 20. Henry James, Preface, The Tragic Muse, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vols. 7–8 (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), v–xxii (vii, ix). 21. Righter finds that “collected artifacts and residue, towards what Nietzsche called ‘monumental’ history” (American Memory 14) focus James’s attention to the past. In Alfred Habegger, “New York Monumentalism and Hidden Family Corpses,” in Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship, ed. David McWhirter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 185–205 (185), Habegger reminds us that “monuments, as James admitted in calling Paul Bourget’s collected edition his ‘mosaic sarcophagus,’ tend to be tombs.” Yet for James the monumental may exist as language as well as the literal tomb. What matters is that it should exist as a sign of the past. The pages of The Awkward Age confront James with another kind of ghost: that of his own limitations. 22. Henry James, Preface, The Awkward Age, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 9 (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), v–xxiv (viii). 23. Henry James, Preface, The Spoils of Poynton, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 10 (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), v–xxiv (v). 24. Ibid., vii. 25. James, Preface, What Maisie Knew, xv. 26. Ibid., v. 27. Henry James, Preface, The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, “The Liar,” “The Two Faces,” in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 12 (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), v–xxiv (x). 28. Henry James, Preface, “The Lesson of the Master,” “The Death of the Lion,” “The Next Time,” and Other Tales, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 15 (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), v–xviii (v). 29. Henry James, Preface to The Wings of the Dove, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vols. 19–20 (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), v–xxiii (xix). 30. That gentle amusement which James projects toward the analyst is represented most succinctly for me in the terms James selects to describe his remembered self in the United States. James as author gives a series of other names to the figure of memory, but “restless analyst” is by far the most frequent (e.g., AS, 7, 24, 31, 54, 310, 323, 354, 367, 369, 376, 388, 398, 407, 448). Other names depend on the irony James as author seems to want to produce, and that irony is determined in part by the situation of the traveler. Some of these other names are “the brooding analyst (179), “cold-blooded critic” (11), “fond critic” (422), “story-seeker” (12, 35, 42, 313), “earnest observer” (84), “the observer” (372), “shuddering pilgrim” (94), “the pilgrim” (429), “our anxious explorer” (368), “the observer whose impressions I note” (107), “the expatriated observer” (366), “restored absentee” (118, 125), “the reinstated absentee” (362), “he” (125), “the student of the scene” (130), “student of manners” (389), “picture-seeker” (160, 403), “starved story-seeker” (244), “musing moralist” (383), “the visitor” (167,


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367, 449), “Mr. Auctioneer” (184), “that perverse person” (273), “the critic” (348). Ross Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1988, 1. Julie Rivkin, “Speaking with the Dead: Ethics and Representation in The Aspern Papers,” The Henry James Review 10, no. 2 (1989): 135–41 (136). Henry James, “Is there a Life after Death?,” in Henry James on Culture, ed. Pierre A. Walker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 115–27 (115). Ibid., 124.

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CHAPTER 2

Immensities of Perception and Yearning The Haunting of Henry James’s Heroes

Kristin Boudreau

When Isabel Archer asks her cousin Ralph whether his English manor, Gardencourt, is haunted by a ghost, Ralph answers that, if so, Isabel will not be able to see it: ghosts are discernible only to people who have “suffered greatly.”1 The ability to see ghosts, Ralph suggests, is not a power of ordinary sense perception but rather a rare and privileged faculty, a susceptibility to something that lies beyond mere appearance. This unenviable privilege is not given to a “young, happy, innocent person” like Isabel, but only to those who have “gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it,” Ralph says (PL, 3:64). Ralph’s metaphor of opened eyes belies the fact that he is describing an experience that is not visible—or at least, is not visible in ordinary ways and to ordinary mortals. The “ghost” of Gardencourt is not a commonplace phenomenon. Rather, it lies in the world of things that Immanuel Kant called “noumena,” “certain creations of the understanding” rather than “appearances . . . , which make up the sensible world.”2 Ralph’s distinction between ordinary sense perceptions and extrasensory intuitions recalls the terms of Kant’s philosophy, where Understanding, the faculty of judging by unifying sensible impressions (a faculty that is available to many animals as well as to humans) is distinct from the more extraordinary and higher (though perhaps unreliable and frequently deceptive) faculty of pure Reason. Unlike empirical cognitions,


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pure Reason does not involve sensible impressions. For Kant, all human knowledge is limited to experience, which is in turn determined by appearances. While Kant acknowledges that human nature is drawn toward seeking knowledge beyond “the field of all possible experiences,” which we “hold to be far more preeminent in their importance and sublime in their final aim than everything that the understanding can learn in the field of appearances,”3 he emphatically “den[ies to speculative Reason] all advance in this field of the supersensible,”4 maintaining that Reason can offer us no knowledge about anything other than what is available to us through our senses. Thus, whatever lies behind appearances—those unspecifiable things to which appearances refer—are forever unavailable to human knowledge in spite of our all-too-human desire to reach such knowledge. Speaking perhaps on behalf of all of Kant’s intellectual heirs, Stanley Cavell complains that Kant’s settlement is deeply unsatisfying. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason attempts to demonstrate the limits of pure Reason by laying out in detail precisely what sorts of things human beings can and cannot know; as Kant puts it, he has set out to “deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”5 To allay our doubts, “to assure us,” as Cavell writes, “that we do know the existence of the world or, rather, that what we understand as knowledge is of the world, the price Kant asks us to pay is to cede any claim to know the thing in itself, to grant that human knowledge is not of things as they are in themselves.” Cavell’s rather petulant reply to Kant’s “settlement”: “Thanks for nothing.”6 There is reason to believe, however, that nonphilosophers who were drawn to Kant’s Critique were less troubled than Cavell by what Kant withheld from them. This should not surprise us, since even Kant’s apparent warning contains within it the energy of an intellect excited by the possibility of forbidden sallies. Here is Kant reminding us of the many temptations to venture toward the place that he will rule off limits: “The charm in expanding one’s cognitions is so great that one can be stopped in one’s progress only by bumping into a clear contradiction. This, however, one can avoid if one makes his inventions carefully . . . Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding.”7 Kant’s image of the winged Plato recalls Icarus, that mythical image of forbidden human flight, as it illustrates both the threat of disaster and the exhilaration of exploring unfamiliar spaces. Like Prometheus and Eve, Icarus was a favorite romantic emblem of human curiosity, presumption, and tragic punishment. It would make sense not only that Kant’s readers would respond


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to his Icarian warnings with the same ambivalence with which humans have always regarded these tragic figures, but also that they would be no more successful obeying Kant’s strictures than humans have ever been in responding to their lawgivers. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a great admirer of Kant, was less distraught about the constraints that Kant imposed on human knowledge than he was intrigued by the very realm of thought that Kant had pronounced inaccessible to genuine knowledge. Coleridge, identifying one of the traditional forms of forbidden knowledge (the mind of God) as the fruit of Reason, described Reason as a “quickening inter-communion with the Divine Spirit,” clearly elevating Reason over the Understanding, whose judgments he saw as “binding only in relation to the objects of our senses.”8 While Coleridge considered that the Understanding depended “on the representations of the senses,” he believed Reason to be “independen[t] and anteceden[t]” to that inferior form of cognition, suggesting his clear disdain for the kind of knowledge that Kant allowed humans could possess without contradiction.9 Nor did Emerson, who learned Kant’s terms from his friend Coleridge, heed the German’s warning about the limits of human Reason: while Emerson regarded the “outward” objects of the Understanding as “phenomenal . . . an intricate dream,”10 he insisted that “Reason is potentially perfect in every man.”11 Gone is Kant’s persistent warning that human Reason is far from perfect, that “through no fault of its own” it falls into unavoidable “perplexity” when it tries to answer questions it is unequipped to answer.12 When Emerson complains that Understanding, “that wrinkled calculator,” “contradicts evermore these affirmations of Reason,”13 he indicates that Reason is superior to the Understanding and that the contradictions of the latter are mere jealous attempts to keep us from realizing our own divinity. But Kant’s project centered on the effort to restrain speculative reason within the “boundaries of sensibility,” beyond which it encountered unavoidable errors.14 As Bruce Kuklick has observed, Coleridge and his contemporaries “overlooked Kant’s strictures on reason. For Coleridge understanding yielded truths about the natural world. Reason provided timeless insight about the realm beyond nature, grounding morality and religion in the spirit.”15 Because Coleridge’s 1829 Aids to Reflection sought to explain Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to an English-speaking audience, his mistakes and simplifications—Kuklick charges that Coleridge “reduced [the] complexities” of Kant’s great work16—were passed on to Emerson and others. Another possible explanation for this persistent Romantic misreading of Kant was that Emerson and Coleridge were meanwhile avid readers of Emanuel Swedenborg, the philosopher and religious mystic


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who may have provoked Kant to so strictly limit the uses of Reason. In his Economy of the Animal Kingdom, a book that both Emerson and Coleridge studied thoroughly, Swedenborg insisted on the superiority of Reason over the more sensible faculties—though, as Kant’s predecessor, he used the word “soul” to indicate what Kant would later identify as “Reason.” “The spirituous fluid,” Swedenborg wrote, Is the first of the organs, or the supereminent organ, in its animal body. And as it is the soul, it is seated so high above all the other faculties, that it is their order, truth, rule, law, science, art. Consequently its office is, to represent the universe; to have intuition of ends; to be conscious of all things; principally to determine. It is a faculty distinct from the intellectual mind, prior and superior to, and more universal and more perfect than, the latter.17

While Swedenborg did not have the benefit of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which was published nine years after Swedenborg’s death, his intellectual heirs did, though it hardly mattered. We have seen how Emerson and Coleridge disregarded Kant’s proscription, and we shall see how Henry James’s most romantic characters do the same. James’s Ralph Touchett, a devout if cynical romantic, concedes that there are different kinds of knowledge, though he distinguishes between “happy knowledge” and the kind that comes of suffering (PL, 3:64). Neither kind is off limits, though humane natures like Ralph can hope that not everyone will live to see ghosts, since this ability comes at a dear price. The great point in life is not, as Kant would have it, to try to avoid making intellectual mistakes by limiting speculation to what we can with certainty know. For Ralph, “the great point’s to be as happy as possible” (PL, 3:65). If certain kinds of knowledge—the knowledge of ghosts, for example—are to be avoided, it is not because some God or philosopher has declared them forbidden territory for human knowledge. It is simply because they are fatally connected to human unhappiness. For Ralph, suffering opens the soul to communication with the spiritual world, and though the contents of that world may defy scientific investigation and explanation, they are none the less real and available to the intuitions of remarkably susceptible individuals. Although Isabel has not yet earned the privilege of communicating with this spiritual world, she will do so before the novel closes. James’s Bildungsroman traces her development from a woman of Understanding—a woman who “possess[es] a finer mind” and a “larger perception of surrounding facts” than her companions (PL, 3:66)—to one of Reason, which Coleridge called “the source and substance of truths above sense.”18 As a reader of


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the “history of German thought,”19 Isabel should know the difference between these two modes of knowledge, even if she lives initially more in the world of Understanding than of Reason. As Ralph’s theory about the ghost suggests, it will take Isabel a great deal of sorrow before she can master the use of her Reason. Perceptive of facts, she can only dimly discern less sensible impressions, and she does not always know how to interpret them. When, for instance, she happens upon her husband and Madame Merle in a “desultory pause” of conversation, there is “something new” (PL, 4:164), “something detected” (PL, 4:165) in what she sees. The observable details are not, in themselves, out of place; and her “impression had, in strictness, nothing unprecedented” (PL, 4:164). But beyond her senses she intuits something else, a cognitive impression “like a sudden flicker of light” (PL, 4:165). Again James draws on a visual metaphor to describe an impression that is beyond vision, that is intellectual rather than sensible: when the truth finally dawns on Isabel—that her husband and Madame Merle have been lovers—she recognizes that this truth had been barely appreciable to her all along, just beneath the surface of the perceptible. Her “world [now] illumined by lurid flashes” (PL, 4:388), a world full of the same facts she had always seen, is now saturated with an extrasensible truth (what Kant called “certain creations of the understanding”).20 Looking backwards on her life through the light of this supersensible intuition, she sees it as an unfair game, “an attempt to play whist with an imperfect pack of cards” (PL, 4: 391). The details that she had so closely observed in the light of her mere senses now take on a new meaning as “the truth of things, their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness. She remembered a thousand trifles; they started to life with the spontaneity of a shiver. She had thought them trifles at the time; now she saw that they had been weighted with lead” (PL, 4: 391). If the sensible facts of Isabel’s world have not changed, she now sees them in the light of Reason, not as they merely appear but as they really are. Kant, of course, maintained that “things as they are” cannot be grasped by mere mortals. But when Isabel reflects on her life, she does so through “sightless eyes” (PL, 4: 390), as if her perceptions of the sensible world have given way to a truer vision. If such truer vision does indeed require an apprenticeship of suffering, as Ralph maintains, then when we see Isabel at the end of the novel, she has “fulfilled the necessary condition” for the sighting of ghosts; “for the next morning, in the cold, faint dawn, she knew that a spirit was standing by her bed” (PL, 4: 418). Isabel first feels and then sees Ralph’s ghost, but her visitation is primarily intellectual rather than sensible, a matter of inner knowledge rather


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than perception. She “started up from her pillow as abruptly as if she had received a summons. It seemed to her for an instant that [Ralph] was standing there—a vague, hovering figure in the vagueness of the room. She stared a moment; she saw his white face—his kind eyes; then she saw there was nothing. She was not afraid; she was only sure” (PL, 4: 418). Henry James, a latter-day Romantic who seemed not to trouble himself about what Kant had declared off limits to human knowledge, was attracted to the possibility of seeing “the truth of things” rather than their mere appearances, and his preoccupation with ghosts as a trope for this higher power of the mind lasted his entire life. In these explorations, he was more concerned with the mind of the living subject who perceives the ghost than with the enduring consciousness of the ghost itself—or, rather, he saw these two entities merged in a single consciousness, as they are in this scene, where Ralph’s presence blends into Isabel’s certainty that he has died. Henry James never saw a ghost. He had received what he regarded as a plausibly authentic communication from his dead mother in 1906, and the experience led him to entertain the possibility of ghosts. When he and his brother William approached old age, they agreed that whichever one died first would try to return to the other, while the survivor would do what he could to be present and receptive to his brother’s ghost. Henry James outlived his brother William, whose death in 1910 he found emotionally devastating. He waited eagerly for the all-but-promised appearance of his brother’s ghost some months after William’s death, but to his great disappointment it never did come.21 Still, the novelist grew more interested in the possibility of ghosts as he approached old age, and like his brother William he always entertained a vague belief in postmortem consciousness.22 In his 1910 essay “Is there a Life after Death?”— published only months before his beloved brother’s death—the novelist imagined a posthumous extension of consciousness that would “spread the protection of its wings” over “immensities of perception and yearning.”23 Like Kant, James is extremely tentative about what we can know about such a thing as the afterlife, given that it lies entirely beyond the bounds of our experience. The first installment of this two-part essay, indeed, is thoroughly pessimistic about the chances of life after death. In that first half, James dwells on what he calls the “grim view,” the sense that we are rigorously defined by our physical nature and thus almost inevitably doomed to the same “spectacle of decay” that we see everywhere. This grim view seems to confirm our fear that consciousness ceases utterly at death (LAD, 117). James considers the facts of human experience: the apparent absoluteness of death in our friends, whom we thought


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we could count on to pay us spiritual visits; and the fact that even at our most sublime, we are really made “of the stuff of the abject actual” (118). Based on these considerations, James regards the “grim view” as the more plausible answer to the question of immortality. Before concluding that first section and leaving his readers to wait for the next month’s installment of Harper’s Bazaar, where the essay first appeared, James introduces the conflict: on the one hand, we are confronted with the grim facts pointing to the permanence of death; on the other, we persist in our hope in an afterlife. It hardly seems like a fair battle. While “our faith or our hope may to some degree resist the fact, once accomplished, of watched and deplored death,” James finds that “they may well break down before the avidity and consistency with which everything insufferably continues to die” (LAD, 121). Perhaps James was looking ahead to his impending disappointment in the face of his brother’s failure to appear in his ghostly form. Of course he could not know for certain that he would outlive William, who would die within months of the appearance of his essay. But given the nonappearance of ghosts in the past, James must have known that there was a good chance that whichever James brother survived the other would be disappointed in his hope for a spiritual visitation. In his essay on the afterlife James notes that disappointment is the habitual attitude of those who outlive their loved ones. “‘They must be dead, indeed,’ we say; ‘they must be as dead as “science” affirms . . .’ We think of the particular cases of those who could have been backed, as we call it, not to fail, on occasion, of somehow reaching us. We recall the forces of passion, of reason, of personality, that lived in them, and what such forces had made them, to our sight, capable of; and then we say, conclusively, ‘Talk of triumphant identity if they, wanting to triumph, haven’t done it!’” (LAD, 120–21). This distinction between grim knowledge and undaunted hope was familiar to Immanuel Kant, whose major publications move from the limits of knowledge to the possibilities of faith. Toward the end of the Critique of Pure Reason, when Kant turns from the unsupportable uses of speculative Reason (which pretends to tell us things about the spiritual world that we cannot know) to the defensible uses of practical Reason (which helps us to live moral lives), he suggests three questions that Reason is often called on to answer. The first question, what can I know? has been the subject of the preceding six-hundred-plus-pages; his answer is that judgments about the external world can never extend beyond our senses. The second question, what should I do? he dismisses as “merely practical” and therefore not the subject of his Critique of Pure Reason. But the third question, what may I hope? is “simultaneously practical and


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theoretical, so that the practical leads like a clue to a reply to the theoretical question and, in its highest form, the speculative question.”24 Kant advanced from limits in his first Critique to hopes in his second. Likewise, although James acknowledges that we can know nothing about a possible afterlife, he turns from knowledge to hope in the second installment of his essay, where he points to a “‘mild but firm’ refusal to regard [the question] as settled” by mere grim facts (LAD, 122). He is careful to keep these facts separate from his unruly emotion of hope, which “carries me beyond even any ‘profoundest’ observation of this world whatever, and any mortal adventure, and refers me to realizations I am condemned as yet but to dream of ” (LAD, 124). Here James concedes that the grounds for his hope will not hold under the requirement of empirical proof; his hope derives from mere feeling, a sense that he is in “communication with sources.” These sources give James “the apprehension of far more and far other combinations than observation and experience, in their ordinary sense, have given me the pattern of ” (LAD, 124). Observation and experience, of course, can tell us nothing about the possibility of postmortem consciousness, but James, like Kant, continues to hope for something he cannot count on. He admits that “it isn’t really a question of belief ” for him but rather one of desire, though the distinction hardly matters: “If one acts from desire quite as one would from belief, it signifies little what name one gives to one’s motive” (LAD, 127). In this essay, the possibility of life after death occurs to James not because of his experience with suffering, but because of his experience as an artist. But in both cases the effect is the same, as the observing mind turns from what can be empirically and definitively known to something different, something that enters consciousness through an extrasensible impression. Although “the constant and vast majority” of people (LAD, 116), like those who cannot see ghosts, are insensible to the kind of impression James is describing,25 the artist experiences an extension of consciousness that, like the sighting of a ghost, dimly intimates the existence of a world beyond human experience. If ghosts violate the boundary between the living and the dead, the artistic consciousness that James describes violates the boundary that ordinarily surrounds and protects a personal identity, leaving the artist both vulnerable and alive to what James calls “invasive floods” (LAD, 124). He is not referring explicitly to ghostly visitations but is hinting at something akin to haunting: the artist’s susceptibility to other fields of consciousness or what James calls “sublime relations” with the universe and its inhabitants (LAD, 126). Given this strange experience—we might call it an imaginative rather than a spiritual visitation—James wonders what other “fields of experience, past


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and current,” might be open to us (LAD, 127). He ends his essay affirming the possibility of a different kind of consciousness after death, one in which “immensities of perception and yearning” beyond all previous experience are open to the susceptible soul (LAD, 127). For James, the transition that enables his hope in an afterlife is the transition from material to mental existence. Of course, humans occupy both the realm of matter and that of thought, but they do not always do so in equal measure. When James despairs of the possibility of an afterlife, it is because he sees how the “soul” is “abjectly and inveterately shut up in our material organs,” and that organs, like all matter, are subject to “personal decay” (LAD, 117). When his hope triumphs over the evidence of his senses, it is because by living more intentionally in his consciousness he “react[s] against so grossly finite a world” (LAD, 123). In deliberately moving from the material to the mental realm, James repeats a trick he has learned from Emerson, who, as we have seen, did not trouble himself to observe the limits to transcendence that Kant had delineated. Emerson imagined a transition from death to life that could take place in rare and almost mystic acts of reading. For Emerson, the mind of a longdead person could be restored to life by means of an encounter between that person’s material remains (typically a written text) and the mind of a receptive being living in the present. The “mind of the past,” Emerson maintained, was a “great influence into the spirit” of an attentive person, whom Emerson named the “scholar.”26 Emerson’s choice of words suggests an occult transaction very like mesmerism, where the spirit of a living person passively accepts the flow of another long-dead spiritual being into its living substance. The attentive and fully receptive person enables something like a partial and temporary metempsychosis: though he does not give up his own mental processes, his living mind becomes a place where the mind of the past can live again. The artifacts of the past— books, art, institutions—are mere remnants of a former thought or deed. As such, they are nothing but the material remains of something once alive, merely “dead fact”27 or a “record”28 of some great thought. When they encounter a receptive mind, they enjoy a new life within that mind, as the “dead fact” becomes “quick thought.”29 Just as James thought that ghosts were more likely to appear to a “sympathetic” witness,30 so does the immortality of a mind depend on the “active soul” that encounters it in its artifacts.31 Emerson describes the moment of receptivity as a nearly sublime event: “There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise” when we encounter a living mind in a dead text; then “the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.”32


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Emerson often imagined these moments as ascensions into a different element than the earthly; he called them “the sublimest flights of the soul.”33 James, too, saw flight as a metaphor for sublime escape from material existence. After “sublime occasion[s]” enable us to “flutter away” from the grim, materialistic view of human existence, he wrote, we often “come back to [the grim view] with the collapse of our wings” (LAD, 117). But the proper “mental relation” to the question of immortality will, James assures us in the end, “spread the protection of its wings” (LAD, 127). James’s late novel The Wings of the Dove appeared in the New York Edition of his works just a year before he published “Is there a Life after Death?”34 If in that essay he explored the “immensities of perception and yearning” that resist the idea of mortality, his novel dramatizes the possibility of consciousness so immense and implacable that it extends beyond the body.35 Merton Densher, like Isabel Archer, comes to sense the presence of immaterial beings. If the beings that appear to him are not always the ghosts of dead persons—in some cases we might call them the ghosts of past experiences—they nonetheless assume the identity of disembodied consciousnesses. James’s novel poses an Emersonian question about the relationship between “quick thoughts” and “dead facts”: What is the connection between life and death? Is life after death possible? Can death in life be avoided? These questions at first emanate from the vibrant and yearning Milly Theale, who worries not only about what it will be like to be dead but also more troublingly what it will be like to have outlived a remarkable experience. The last survivor in her family, Milly suffers from precarious health, and perhaps her meditations on mortality prompt these questions. But her reflections seem to gain urgency at Lord Mark’s Matcham estate, where she finds herself surrounded by dull eyes. She recognizes “the particular bland stare” as the “mark” of “civilisation at its highest.”36 Many of the people she encounters, though kind, seem hardly alive. The feeling is amplified when she looks on her likeness in the form of a Bronzino portrait and immediately recognizes in it not the woman herself but the condition of inevitable mortality: not only of our bodies but also of our subjective experiences. The woman, of course, is “dead, dead, dead”; she looks out from her frame with “eyes of other days” under a “mass of hair” that has “fad[ed] with time” (WD, 19: 221). But what seems to trouble Milly is not simply that she herself, like her counterpart in the portrait, will one day be dead, but that even during her own lifetime she will outlive her moments of transcendent thought and feeling. Milly knows that the woman in the portrait was alive when her likeness was painted, and


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yet the painting fails to convey any idea of the woman’s subjectivity. The closest Milly comes to knowing what the woman was feeling is to know what she lacks: she is “unaccompanied by a joy” (WD, 19: 221). The woman’s “recorded jewels” (WD, 19: 221) seem to stand in for the entire portrait, which is merely a record of some once-living being, like the “literature, . . . art, . . . [and] institutions” that Emerson saw as constituting the “form” in which a deceased “mind is inscribed.”37 If the portrait conveys anything to the immensely yearning Milly, it is the mortality rather than the former life of its subject. Like Emerson’s active reader, Milly reanimates this portrait with her own lively feelings. The tears in her eyes lend the portrait the animation it lacks, making it “so strange and fair.” Her one remark on the painting is both relevant and irrelevant to Bronzino’s subject: Milly “recognized her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her. ‘I shall never be better than this’” (WD, 19: 221). The words are beside the point because they concern Milly, not Bronzino’s subject; by “this” Milly seems to mean this moment, not “this woman in the painting.” And yet her words “recognized [the portrait] exactly” because they identify what the portrait captures: the impossibility of preserving human subjectivity. Whatever she once was, the woman in Bronzino’s painting is “dead, dead, dead,” like the “dead fact” of Emerson’s essay. Milly’s gloss on the painting and on herself reiterates Emerson’s insight that a sublime thought or feeling never outlives the moment of its experience. Milly knows that she must live entirely in the present, as she will “never be better than this.” Lady Aldershaw, a guest in Milly’s company, confirms Milly’s thought when she recognizes the superiority of the living woman over the dead masterpiece. She “look[s] at Milly quite as if Milly had been the Bronzino and the Bronzino only Milly” and murmurs her admiration for the living subject: ‘Superb, superb’” (WD, 19: 223). Milly’s friend, Merton Densher, does not at first share her anxieties about the transience of mental experience. A man of thought, Densher has a more fundamental problem: his experience is sharply curtailed in exactly the ways Kant describes. Densher is an intellectual from the beginning of the novel, an “irregularly clever” (WD, 19: 48) newspaper man who represents to Kate Croy the “high dim things . . . of the mind” (WD, 19: 50). He compensates for what he thinks of as his “weakness . . . for life” with a “strength . . . for thought” (WD, 19: 51). But like Isabel before she learns great sorrow, he seems to be a man of more Understanding than Reason, for he cannot grasp the subtle things to which his beloved Kate alludes; he can only compose ideas of impressions he already possesses. When Kate vaguely describes her plan—that Densher is to woo the dying


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heiress, Milly, in order to prepare to marry Kate in later years—Densher complains that he doesn’t “see how [Milly] can understand enough, you know, without understanding too much.” Kate replies, “You don’t need to see” (WD, 20: 105). Densher’s complaint of blindness is not, like Isabel’s, the sign of some deeper insight; rather, he is bewildered by the world Kate concocts in her mind. Complaining that Kate’s ideas are “cryptic” (WD, 20: 244), he learns to regard his blindness to her plan as his “stupidity” (WD, 20: 246). But in the course of time, the light breaks upon him and he learns insight. The sign of this insight is that Densher becomes sensible to invisible presences more subtle than Kate’s ideas; he intuits the ghosts of people who have died and of experiences that have transpired. Although Henry James’s ruminations on postmortem consciousness remained predictably vague—he never came closer to an analysis of the topic than to call it an “unlimited vision of being” (LAD, 123), and he was content merely to consider the possibility of unlimited being without explaining what might account for it—his brother William gave considerable attention to the matter. William concluded in an essay from 1909 that ghosts are something halfway between a living person and a memory; they are the residue of past events that leave a material trace in the universe: If an act of yours is to be consciously remembered hereafter, it must leave traces on the material universe such that when the traced parts of the said universe systematically enter into activity together the act is consciously recalled. During your life the traces are mainly in your brain; but after your death, since your brain is gone, they exist in the shape of all the records of your actions which the outer world stores up as the effects, immediate or remote, thereof, the cosmos being in some degree, however slight, made structurally different by every act of ours that takes place in it.38

Because, as James concludes, the brain of a survivor can bear these traces, a departed friend can take the form not merely of a memory but of a memory with a pseudomaterial presence. Memories that make this impression can look, feel, and seem almost tangible. As we shall see, Merton Densher becomes a man haunted by his memories, and he is haunted precisely in the way that William James describes. The first of these hauntings takes place immediately after Kate leaves Venice for London. She has stayed for just one sexual encounter with Densher, unrepresented in the pages of James’s novel. Their one intimate encounter is the price of Densher’s fidelity to Kate’s plan, and once it becomes a “historic truth” rather than just a “luminous conception” in his mind, the experience assumes a bodily form that resembles that of a


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supernatural creature (WD, 20: 258). Of course, Kate does not intend to leave a record of their encounter, but she fails to consider that she may have left a material trace of it on her lover’s brain. Densher learns the truth of what William James proposed: that the cosmos he inhabits is indeed “made structurally different” by this act of theirs. The difference resembles a ghost in his rooms. “What had come to pass within his walls lingered there,” “liv[ing] again”; a physical thing, it “importun[es] . . . all his senses.” It seems to have its own mind as well, assuming a “conscious watchful presence.” And this consciousness might easily turn on Densher, for it is “active, . . . for ever to be reckoned with” (WD, 20: 257). This spirit is not exactly Kate, for it embodies the union of Kate and Densher, but it is partly Kate, “what survived of her” (WD, 20: 258). The “value” of their encounter “possesse[s]” Densher, who thinks of this new presence in his rooms as a “hallucination” of “intimacy” (WD, 20: 259). He associates this presence with a “spell,” and though there is “not a ghost of [Kate]” left for Milly’s palatial rooms, she is “all in his poor rooms” (WD, 20: 261). Densher considers the remnant of this single experience as a being that permanently occupies his rooms, waiting for him when he is absent and greeting him when he returns. It has substance, for not only does he think of it and wait on it, but he “turn[s] round and round it and mak[es] sure of it again from this side and that” (WD, 20: 258). If this reified memory is not more real than the other things that happen to Densher, it does “ma[k]e everything but itself irrelevant and tasteless” (WD, 20: 257), like a spiritual visitation that reveals ordinary experience as hollow and unimportant. The living and watchful ghost of Densher’s encounter with Kate is displaced only by another and equally ghostlike image, associated this time with Milly. Densher has been careful to keep visitors away from his rooms. In the presence of that first ghost, the ghost of his passionate encounter with Kate, “he couldn’t for his life, he felt, have opened his door to a third person . . . Such a person . . . would have profaned his secret” (WD, 20: 259). But after he has been turned away without explanation from Milly’s door and has waited three days without a sign from her, Milly’s friend Susan arrives in Densher’s rooms to deliver the news that Milly has become suddenly worse. At first it is Susan’s presence that overcomes the ghostlike remainder of Kate, but soon after, Densher finds himself confronting another figure in his imagination, the “image” that Susan had “evoked” of Milly, an image that “loom[s]” large in his dim rooms: “She has turned her face to the wall” (WD, 20: 298). Densher sits


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gazing at this image, seeing it “with the last vividness”; “Milly’s ‘grimness’ and the great hushed palace were present to him” (WD, 20: 299). Though Kate’s memory has never been present to Densher at Milly’s Venetian palace, it has reigned without rival in his apartments. During Susan’s visit, however, he becomes aware that it has abruptly vanished, “suddenly . . . having swooned or trembled away” (WD, 20: 307). Kate’s ghostly presence succumbs to Susan’s flesh-and-blood presence, which “had cast on it some influence, under which it had ceased to act,” so that for the first time since Kate’s actual departure from his rooms, she is “absent to his sensibility” while in his apartment (WD, 20: 307). Later, once Susan has departed, the ghostly image of Milly continues to loom. After Milly’s death, Densher’s friends regard him as “a man haunted with a memory” (WD, 20: 372), and indeed his thoughts of the dead Milly occupy him intensely. The precise meaning of this “memory” emerges only gradually, as Densher lives with and meditates on his memory of the dead woman. His friends mostly consider his haunted memory in a conventional way, assuming that he has been in love with the woman whose death he now mourns. But as Densher assures Kate, “I never was in love with her” (WD, 20: 438). Kate has a more complicated idea about what constitutes Densher’s memory. She understands it as something that doesn’t exactly correspond with Milly as Densher knew her when she was alive. Further, she concedes that Densher wasn’t ever in love with Milly “for the time she lived” (WD, 20: 438). Rather, his memory of Milly is the product of Milly’s transformation in his imagination, something like the process Emerson describes when he meditates on the alchemy that the scholar’s mind performs on the “dead” ideas written in a book. It might not be too much to claim that Milly is like a “dead fact” to Densher while she lives. She is certainly not the bewildering creature who inspires romantic passion. James devotes only a very few pages to the three weeks that occupy Densher between Kate’s departure from Venice and the moment when he is refused entrance to Milly’s palace. His apparent thoughts and feelings during those weeks confirm that he is not in love with Milly. He is careful and highly conscious about his movements and their likely effect on her. He is diligent about being gentle, “careful also to talk pleasantly” (WD, 20: 277), but if he is overcome by a passion it is fear for Milly’s safety—and an uneasy consciousness about his own responsibility for her danger. Though he gradually relaxes a bit, he does so only into the provisional relief that he has so far “avoid[ed] a mistake” (WD, 20: 279).


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In those three weeks Densher primarily recognizes in Milly her “deep dependence on him. Anything he should do, or he shouldn’t, would have reference, directly, to her life, which was thus absolutely in his hands” (WD, 20: 275). Because it occurs to Densher that “he might kill her,” that “a single false motion might . . . snap the coil,” he begins to practice “going on tiptoe,” meaning primarily that he must “simply . . . be kind” (WD, 20: 275–76) and practice “perfect tact” (WD, 20: 277). The perilously poised Milly resembles nothing to Densher so much as she does the “pale personage on the wall” in Bronzino’s portrait (WD, 19: 225): a figure fixed forever in Densher’s imagination as Bronzino’s subject is fixed in her “recorded jewels” and “livid . . . hue” (WD, 19: 221, 220). Indeed, Densher thinks of himself during these days as a person “shut up to a room on the wall of which something precious was too precariously hung. A false step would bring it down, and it must hang as long as possible” (WD, 20: 276). Kate Croy accepts Densher’s claim that he was never in love with Milly, but she modifies it: “I believe it at least for the time you were there. But your change came—as it might well—the day you last saw her; she died for you then that you might understand her. From that hour you did” (WD, 20: 438). Densher, as we have seen, has understood Milly merely as a dying woman, a woman who, while alive, enjoyed in his imagination an existence as constricted as the painted figure whose being is bounded by a frame. He knows nothing of her “immensities of yearning,” as James names it in his essay on life after death. He does not know that the only thing Milly lacks is, as she herself puts it, “the power to resist the bliss of what I have!” (WD, 19: 131). Instead, he sees her in only the starkest of terms, those that have direct bearing on his own guilty and anxious relation to her. Milly’s postmortem development in Densher’s consciousness can be partly explained by the things he has discovered about her since her death. Densher has already known that Milly found him out, discovering that his attentions to her were part of a plan he and Kate had put into action. When she invites him for one last visit, he misunderstands it as an act of weakness: he is being summoned in order to save her life by making his implicit lie an explicit one. “I had no doubt,” he later tells Kate, “of its really being to give me, as you say, a chance. She believed, I suppose, that I might deny; and what, to my own mind, was before me in going to her was the certainty that she’d put me to my test. She wanted from my own lips—so I saw it—the truth. But I was with her for twenty minutes, and she never asked for it” (WD, 20: 354). Densher later learns that Milly had not wanted him to lie to her. Far from fragile, she wanted not to be handled gently but to be gentle herself. He comes to recognize


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that final meeting as something “too beautiful and too sacred to describe. He had been, to his recovered sense, forgiven, dedicated, blessed” (WD, 20: 372). He learns only later—after Milly’s death—that she had been defending his interests all along. When Lord Mark came to Venice to betray Kate and Densher, delivering the news that would be Milly’s death blow, Milly lied to Mark in order to save her friends. Milly, Kate discerns and explains to Densher, “convinced” Lord Mark that Densher was “sincere. That it was her you loved” (WD, 20: 414). If Densher once thought of Milly as a precious thing hung precariously on the wall, he learns that she was the one walking on tiptoe to save him. But there’s more at stake in Kate’s words than a simple misunderstanding. When she says that Milly died that Densher might “understand” her, she seems to be giving an Emersonian reading of interpersonal relations, as if to suggest that people, like texts, cannot have any real existence to each other as objects but must be somehow converted into a piece of the subject in order to live fully. Milly, that is, must be dead in order to give Densher’s imagination full play. The youthful Henry James thought something very similar about his cousin Minny Temple, whose death enabled her to be “translated from this changing realm of fact to the steady realm of thought. There she may bloom into a beauty more radiant than our dull eyes will avail to contemplate.”39 Though James assigns stasis to thought rather than to fact, his terms resemble those of Emerson’s early lecture, where the “dead fact” on the page becomes a “quick thought” in the receptive mind. Whatever Milly meant to Densher when she was alive, after her death she becomes not the “dead fact” of her former existence but the “quick thought” of Densher’s imagination. The conventional sense of “memory”—an unchanging record of an event or person—is distinct from “memory” as Densher experiences it as a vital and changing thing. Emerson’s sense of a textual afterlife seems to press heavily on the way that James imagined the afterlife in his own experience as well as that of his invented characters. The young Henry James had been traveling in Europe when news of his cousin’s death reached him in 1870. He had missed Minny Temple’s final, painful days, and though he was glad to have been spared the grief of seeing her suffer, he felt “immensely curious for all the small facts and details of her last week,” and begged his mother to “try and remember anything she may have said and done.”40 In England and far from anyone who could share memories of Minny, all James had to draw on were his cousin’s recent letters to him, which, though “full of herself—or at least of a fraction of herself,” did not fully contain her. “Poor living Minny! No letters would hold you. It’s the living ones that


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die; the writing ones survive.”41 Here James betrays a sense of inadequacy in his own writing—even in the long, anguished letters he writes home after learning of her death. (As he ruefully remarks at the end of one such long letter to William, “With this long effusion you will all have been getting of late an ample share de mes nouvelles.”42) Writing rather than living, or writing words that lack life, he can only look miserably into the void that has been left by Minny’s death. Words, in this context, are like Emerson’s “dead fact” or like the “dead, dead, dead” subject of Bronzino’s painting. Merton Densher—the writer who exhibits a weakness for life—at first seems as though he will replicate this dilemma, mirroring Henry James’s youthful image of himself as a person who writes rather than lives. But when he receives a letter from Milly Theale on Christmas Eve, Densher discovers that Milly’s words are more to him than mere “dead” facts. He learns the next morning of Milly’s death, which coincided with his receipt of her letter. But even before making this discovery, he discerns something vital in her letter, as if the document itself not only is Milly’s mortal remains but also contains a trace of her living self—body and spirit— as well. Kate had already drawn for Densher the connection between letters and sexual intimacy, insisting that any exchange of letters between them would be off limits after their actual sexual encounter. Her last words to him before leaving Venice are a prohibition against writing: “Letters? Never—now. Think of it. Impossible” (WD, 20: 292). When Milly’s letter arrives in Densher’s rooms on Christmas Eve, it confronts him with a kind of awe that keeps him awake through the night. “His intelligence and his imagination, his soul and his sense, had never on the whole been so intensely engaged” as they are by the thought of this letter (WD, 20: 381). Though Densher, to Kate’s astonishment, sits awake all night without breaking the seal, he does not refrain from touching Milly’s letter. “Oh yes,” he later tells Kate, “I’ve touched it. I feel as if, ever since, I’d been touching nothing else. I quite firmly . . . took hold of it” (WD, 20: 405). Kate, for her part, regards the letter with reverence as well as jealousy. “Inordinately grave” at Densher’s invitation to her to open the letter, Kate demurs. Visibly reluctant to “break the seal of something to you from her,” she is perhaps thinking of her own broken seal, the result of her earlier tryst with her lover (WD, 20: 417). Densher is also thinking of that encounter, for he regards Milly’s letter as something equivalent to Kate’s “sacrifice” to him in Venice and he reluctantly gives the letter to Kate because he has nothing more worthy to give her: “You played fair with me, Kate, and that’s why—since we talk of proofs—I want to give


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you one.” Milly’s letter, something he “feel[s] as sacred,” is “a tribute, . . . a sacrifice” equivalent to Kate’s “own sacrifice,” her “act of splendid generosity” (WD, 20: 418–19). The letter serves as a kind of metonymy not only for sexual intimacy but also for Milly’s vital character. In this respect it is not simply an inert record of the once-living woman, like Emerson’s “dead fact,” but it seems to have captured some of Milly’s own vitality. Kate and Densher marvel over the dead woman’s “sacred script” (WD, 20: 419) and when they use the metonymic term, “hand,” to describe her handwriting, they seem unsure whether to regard it in the past or present tense. When Kate asks Densher whether he “know[s] her hand very well?” Densher assures her that he knows it “perfectly.” The writing of this last letter “has its usual look”; Densher tells Kate “It’s beautiful.” Kate both agrees and corrects him: Yes—it was beautiful” (WD, 20: 404). If by “hand” they mean penmanship, then Kate’s choice of verb is mistaken; the “hand” is still beautiful, though Milly is dead. If, however, they mean to equate the living woman with her writing, then, she being dead, her “hand” is also a thing of the past. The “fine characters” (WD, 20: 419) of her letter suggest this conflation of writing with person, for if Milly’s “hand” connects her body with her letter, her “character” extends that relation to include her personality, her spirit. If she is to enjoy a postmortem existence that transcends the inert form of the mere (dead) word, she will do so in the letter she writes to Densher and the “consequences” that grow for him out of her letter (WD, 20: 381). These consequences are very like the consequences of Densher’s sexual liaison with Kate, which, as we have seen, are almost supernatural. Milly’s letter, too, leaves its mark on Densher, becoming the ghost that will haunt him in the novel’s closing pages. Because Kate is fearful of the letter’s totemic powers, she tells Densher that she will not “break your seal” (WD, 20: 417), and in any case she knows that the power of the letter extends beyond its words. “You have your instinct,” she tells him; “You don’t need to read” (WD, 20: 417). Even for Kate the letter has a magical power to impress itself: “To hold it . . . is to know” (WD, 20: 419). When Kate decides the fate of Milly’s letter and tosses it into the fire without first breaking its seal and reading its message, she perhaps thinks that she will thereby destroy the spirit embodied in the letter. Its material form annihilated, she hopes it will leave no ghost. But a ghost is precisely what the letter does leave for Densher. Like Milly herself, unmentioned by the couple but present nonetheless—she lingers around their conversations “only by the intensity with which [she] mutely expressed [her] absence” (WD, 20: 422)—the letter leaves its trace for Densher in his


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rooms, exactly as the ghost of his encounter with Kate had lingered in Venice. Like a ghost, it resides in his wounded memories, and although Densher thinks of it as “only a thought” (WD, 402), it is a thought with a distinctly material existence. Like “a favorite pang,” it is part of his bodily impressions (WD, 20: 429). But like the reified memory of Kate that resided in his Venetian rooms, it also has its own substance and identity, like the ghost of a departed soul. Though it is independent of Densher, he nevertheless thinks of it as something all his own, something that remains in his private rooms even in his absence. He “left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home again the sooner for the certainty of finding it there. Then he took it out of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one, handling them, handling it, as a father, baffled and tender, might handle a maimed child. But so it was before him—in his dread of who else might see it” (WD, 20: 429). If it were “only a thought” then Densher would not be troubled that someone else should see it, but this weird thought—“that he should never, never know what had been in Milly’s letter” (WD, 20: 429–30)—seems to have a physical, embodied character. His dread of its being seen suggests that this thought is not a mere memory but something with an objective reality, something both of him (like a child) and separate from him. Densher’s thought has detached itself from his mind and lingers about his rooms whether he wants it or not. In this regard it also enjoys a supernatural status, like a ghost that may or may not appear to others. The thought that haunts him derives its ghostliness, too, from the way that it represents as presence a thing that is fully absent. It is even more radically ghostlike than conventional ghosts. Unlike the ghost of Ralph, which appears to Isabel in the guise of a familiar figure, Densher’s reified thought represents pure lack, a reminder of the thing he will never know.43 To be present to him as a haunting thing, it takes on a substance with which Densher endows it, a character entwined with his own consciousness about what he has missed: The intention announced in it he should but too probably know; only that would have been, but for the depths of his spirit, the least part of it. The part of it missed for ever was the turn she would have given her act. This turn had possibilities that, somehow, by wondering about them, his imagination had extraordinarily filled out and refined. It made of them a revelation the loss of which was like the sight of a priceless pearl cast before his eyes—his pledge given not to save it—into the fathomless sea, or rather even it was like the sacrifice of something sentient and throbbing, something that, for the spiritual ear, might have been audible as a faint far wail. This was the sound he cherished when alone in the stillness


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of his rooms. He sought and guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh, should smother and deaden it—doubtless by the same process with which they would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was somehow one with it. (WD, 20: 430)

Densher’s imagination, unable to bear the thought of the precise expression and sentiment of what he has missed in Milly’s letter, fills out that gaping loss. But Densher endows his loss not with content but only form. Milly’s lost words are a “priceless pearl,” a “sentient and throbbing” sacrifice, something whose distant lament marks the loss without specifying what was lost. William James wrote about spiritual communications with the living as phenomena that depended on two components: an “external will to communicate”44 with the living and a similar will on the part of living beings to speak to the dead. If the will of the dead spirit were strong enough, that spirit might find “that by pressing, so to speak, against ‘the light,’ it can make fragmentary gleams and flashes of what it wishes to say . . . The two wills might thus strike up a sort of partnership and stir each other up.” The dead Milly Theale, unlike the dead Ralph Touchett, does not merely slip from death into the world of the living in order to communicate with a survivor. Rather, James represents the material traces of Milly’s will, embodied in her letter and now destroyed, as having moved from that letter to another material component of the surviving world. William James declared that all significant human acts leave “traces on the material universe,” since “the cosmos [is] in some degree, however slight, made structurally different by every act of ours that takes place in it.”45 Densher’s life seems to have been riven with an actual hole, a hole that he can fill only by imagining the reified form, but not the content, of what he has lost. For Emerson, a text without a receptive reader is a mere “dead fact.” We might suppose that there is no more inert text than a dead letter, a document written for a particular person who never receives it. Milly’s letter is not exactly a dead letter, since Densher does receive it and “touch” it excessively, feeling its totemic power through the envelope. Though he never learns what she has written there, her letter continues to haunt him in an Emersonian way, becoming “luminous with manifold allusion.”46 If Milly’s greatest fear was to be “dead, dead, dead” like the corpselike subject of Bronzino’s portrait, she has found an animated afterlife—has realized the “immensities of perception and yearning”—in the receptive imagination of Merton Densher.


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Notes 1. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vols. 3–4 (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), 3:64 (hereafter cited in text as PL). 2. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 1783, section 32, 61–2. 3. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 128. 4. Ibid., 112. 5. Ibid., 117. 6. Stanley Cavell, “Emerson, Coleridge, Kant (Terms as Conditions),” in Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, ed. David Justin Hodge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 59–82 (63). 7. Kant, Critique, 129. 8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. H. N. Coleridge (London, 1839), rpt. in Documents in the History of American Philosophy from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey, ed. Morton White (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 100. 9. Ibid., 105. 10. Morton White, ed., Documents in the History of American Philosophy From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 147. 11. Ibid., 148. 12. Kant, Critique, 99. 13. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, 148. 14. Kant, Critique, 114. 15. Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 76. 16. Ibid., 76. 17. Emanuel Swedenborg, The Economy of the Animal Kingdom, trans. Augustus Clissold (London: W. Newberry, 1846), 2:253. 18. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, 99. 19. Ibid., 79. 20. Kant, Prolegomena, section 32, 61–2. 21. Somerset Maugham recalls how Henry had been staying with William’s widow for six months after William’s death awaiting William’s ghostly return. I discuss this episode in Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 202–4. 22. In Michel Ferrari, “William James and the Denial of Death,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 9, no. 9–10 (2002): 117–139 (118), Ferrari argues that, from the death of Henry James Sr. in 1882 onward, William James “saw death as a transition to a higher level of existence.” 23. Henry James, “Is there a Life after Death?,” in Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene, ed. Pierre A. Walker (Lincoln:


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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

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University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 115–27 (127) (hereafter cited in text as LAD). Kant, Critique, 677. James identifies this majority as “dull people” (LAD, 117). Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 53–71 (56). Ibid., 56. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 56. See Kristin Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature, 202. Emerson, “Scholar,” 57. Ibid., 59. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Divinity School Address,” in Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 75–92 (78). The novel had originally appeared in 1902. Sharon Cameron formulates the relationship this way: “the essay is an allegory explicated by the novel.” As my discussion will indicate, I can’t agree with Cameron’s account of the allegory—“If you think enough, the essay would imply, you deny death.” For James as for Emerson, the inevitable tragedy of thought is that it, like bodies, is doomed to die. But Cameron is exactly right in seeing the novel as a demonstration, a fleshing-out, of James’s essay on death. Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 157. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vols. 19–20 (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), 19:219 (hereafter cited in text as WD). Emerson, “Scholar,” 56. William James, “Report on Mrs. Piper’s Hodgson-Control,” in William James: Collected Essays and Reviews (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1920), 484– 90 (488–9). Henry James to William James, 29 March 1870, in Letters of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, vol. 1, 1843–1875 (Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard University Press, 1974), 226. Henry James to Mrs. Henry James, Sr., 26 March 1870, ibid., 219. Henry James to William James, 29 March 1870, ibid., 228. Ibid., 229. Toward the end of the letter to his mother, concluded just before he began this one to William, Henry writes, “My letter doesn’t read over-wise, but I have written off my unreason.” Henry James to Mrs. Henry James Sr., 26 March 1870, ibid., 222. Sharon Cameron is correct in noting that “the meaning of Milly’s death lies in its power to awaken Densher’s feelings for her.” Cameron, Thinking, 149. But Cameron sees in the destruction of Milly’s letter a deliberateness on Densher’s part, as if he willingly agrees to its destruction in order to gain something in return: “he permits the letter’s destruction in order to think of, rather than to know, what she had written.” For Cameron, moreover, “nothing seems lost” in


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the sacrifice of Milly’s letter, since Densher’s feelings are thereby aroused when it is destroyed. Cameron, Thinking, 148, 149. But James’s language of lack indicates that the feeling and presence of loss are just what Densher is left with. 44. William James, “Mrs. Piper’s,” 490. 45. Ibid., 485, 488. 46. Emerson, “Scholar,” 59.


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CHAPTER 3

Haunting the Churches Henry James and the Sacred Space in “The Altar of the Dead”

Hazel Hutchison

In the opening section of Volume II of Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors (1903), Lambert Strether, a middle-aged American in Paris, pays a visit to Notre Dame Cathedral. He has not come to worship, but simply to observe and to escape the subtleties of his social situation: “The great church had no altar for his worship, no direct voice for his soul; but it was none the less soothing even to sanctity; for he could feel while there what he couldn’t elsewhere, that he was a plain tired man taking the holiday he had earned.”1 Strether’s situation proves even harder to evade than he imagines. Sitting in one of the pews is Madame de Vionnet, the very woman he suspects of having an affair with his young compatriot Chad Newsome. Her presence in the great cathedral suggests to Strether that this relationship must be innocent after all: “If it wasn’t innocent why did she haunt the churches?—into which, given the woman he could believe he made out, she would never have come to flaunt an insolence of guilt. She haunted them for continued help, for strength, for peace—sublime support which, if one were able to look at it so, she found from day to day” (AM 22:10). Strether’s reading of this scene is, of course, wrong. Madame de Vionnet’s presence in the church is no guarantee of her sexual purity; indeed it is just as likely to be the sign of a troubled conscience, as the novel’s later stages suggest. However, what this scene does clearly demonstrate is the tendency of James’s characters, throughout his oeuvre, to “haunt the churches” at points of heightened drama. This pattern is repeated from


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Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) to Nick Dormer in The Tragic Muse (1890), Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove (1902), and Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl (1904). Few of these figures attend religious services or ceremonies and even fewer appear to have any organized system of belief. So why do they “haunt the churches”? And what uneasy relationship between the material and the spiritual is suggested here by James’s choice of the verb “haunted”—a word that implies a restless search by the living, rather than the dead, for some kind of quietude? James’s short story “The Altar of the Dead” (1895) engages with just these questions of the relationship between the dead and the living and the role that architectural space can play in mediating between them. The story’s main figure, George Stransom, is a man both haunted and haunting. His life has been ruled by the “pale ghost” of his long-dead fiancée, Mary Antrim; and as he ages, more of his friends slip from the world of the living to that of the dead.2 Stransom finds solace by commissioning an altar in a Catholic church in a London suburb, where candles will burn for each of his Dead—even after his own death. Despite his lack of conventional faith (he recognizes only the “religion of the Dead”) and despite the complications of his interactions with the unnamed woman who also haunts his shrine, Stransom creates an intense relationship with the physical space of the church, which connects closely with his own consciousness (AD, 6). In James’s first note for the story, written on September 29, 1894, the protagonist of the tale is motivated by the lack of attention given to the dead: “He is struck with the rudeness, the coldness, that surrounds their memory—the want of place made for them in the life of the survivors.”3 James’s play on the double meaning of “place” quickly converts a question of prestige into one of locality. Initially James envisages his protagonist’s tribute to the dead within an internal space, but the demands of fiction force him to revise this idea: “Let me first say that I had first fancied the ‘altar’ as a merely spiritual one—an altar in his mind, in his soul, more splendid to the spiritual eye than any shrine in any actual church. But I probably can’t get an adequate action unless I enlarge this idea.”4 For James the writer, the external form of the church is necessary as a literary device to create the desired effect of “action,” much as for Stransom, within the published tale, the physical building is necessary to express his inner pattern of mourning at the altar, which “reared itself in his spiritual spaces” (AD, 5). James’s note reminds us that the external form of ritual merely dramatizes an interiority that is as much a state as it is a space. In this tale, therefore, as in so many other instances in James’s writing, the boundary between internal and external is blurred,


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and the difference between material and metaphorical becomes hard to trace. Indeed, Stransom plans that after his own death he too will become a candle on the altar, thereby using the physical place as a bridge into another kind of existence from which he will haunt both the church building and the memory of the woman who is sworn to keep up the altar on his behalf. The story is a strange one, and has at times been dismissed as flawed by James’s critics, largely on account of the coincidental subplot of the tale in which the fellow mourner turns out to have been using the altar to commemorate her lost lover, Acton Hague, Stransom’s former friend, who has been excluded from the altar on account of an old betrayal. Stransom’s collapse on the altar steps as he calls for “one more” candle can be read as an act of forgiveness, including Hague at last in the shrine, or as a defiant call for his own commemoration there, or as some fusion of their psychic selves. F. R. Leavis said that the tale was “extremely unpleasant”; S. Gorley Putt called it a “silly, tit-for-tat” plot full of “creepiness,” which nevertheless has some insight into “human grief.”5 More recent critics such as Hugh Stevens and Andrzej Warminski trace a homoerotic subtext in the sexually charged language of the story, placing Acton Hague and his unlit candle at the forefront of the tale. Warminski argues that the “plunges,” the “rapture,” and the “bliss” Stransom experiences imply that “something very shady, if not downright kinky, is going on in this church.”6 Others follow Leon Edel and Fred Kaplan in reading the story as a passionate elegy for James’s cousin Minny Temple or his fellow writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, or some combination of the two.7 It certainly seems pertinent that Minny’s real name was Mary, and that James wrote the first note for the story while staying at 15 Beaumont Street, Oxford, in rooms where Woolson once lodged. But what precisely should the reader make of such biographical traces in this, or any other, tale? As Lyall H. Powers warns the reader of James’s notebooks trawling there for explanations of his fiction, there is a “need to distinguish carefully between the raw materials—the ‘real’ ingredients dropped into the potau-feu—and the finished product, the true potage.”8 After working on the story, James wrote in his notebook on October 24, 1894 that it was turning out to be “a ‘conceit’ after all, a little fancy which doesn’t hold a great deal.” He adds, “Such things betray one.”9 James, however, does not make it explicit how the story betrays him, whether is it not worthy of his artistic ambition or whether it gives away too much of his own emotional experience of grief as Lyndall Gordon argues.10 Either way, James’s notebooks suggest that this tale contains something, personal or professional, that he would rather obscure.


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Like his characters, James also haunted the churches. His travel writing shows that James’s first port of call in an unfamiliar city was as likely to be a cathedral or chapel as an art gallery or theatre. He understood ecclesiastical architecture, although he confessed to preferring it in ruins, where one could better relish its “beauty of line and curve, balance and harmony of masses and dimensions,” as he writes of Glastonbury.11 Indeed, the sense of decay, of centuries passing, and the enduring presence of such buildings throughout the sweep of human history are, for him, a large part of their appeal. Visiting Chartres Cathedral in April 1876, James describes in its façade “a circular window of immense circumference, with a double row of sculptured spokes radiating from its centre and looking on its great lofty field of stone, as expansive and symbolic as if it were the wheel of Time itself.”12 This sensitivity to the passage of years witnessed by the stone structure often gives a deeply elegiac tone to James’s responses to church buildings: sometimes with a general air of nostalgia, sometimes with a sharply personal grief. Writing in 1890 of Browning’s funeral in Westminster Abbey, James equates the great hush of the architectural environment with the silence of death: “We possess a great man most when we begin to look at him through the glass plate of death; and it is a simple truth, though containing an apparent contradiction, that the Abbey never takes us so benignantly as when we have a valued voice to commit to silence there. For the silence is articulate after all, and in worthy instances the preservation great.”13 Westminster Abbey, like Stransom’s chapel, allows the mourners to possess that which is absent in death; it also has the ability to articulate something that is too rich for other forms of communication. It silences but also speaks on behalf of the “valued voice.” The religious building thus becomes an external focus for the internal grief and memory of the mourners, connecting them to a shared sense of something larger than the self. James’s pleasure in sacred spaces is also complicated by the cultural and parental legacy he inherits, which attaches moral and spiritual qualities to the properties of architecture. Although James never subscribed to the Swedenborgian beliefs of his father, Henry James Senior, many of the images and tropes of Emanuel Swedenborg’s writing were so deeply engrained in nineteenth-century transatlantic culture that James could hardly avoid them. Swedenborg’s recurrent image of the house as a symbol of the soul pervaded the literary and religious language of the nineteenth century, establishing an accepted synthesis between internal and external spaces. This chapter explores this topic and then considers the operation of this synthesis in James’s travel writing, analyzing his own experience of the religious space as a zone that is more than one thing at


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a time: material and imagined, present and absent, now and then, secular and sacred. Perhaps more than any other story in his oeuvre, “The Altar of the Dead” exemplifies the tendency of James’s fiction to explore the actual through the conceptual and to reach through the physical toward something spiritual—although what James understands by that term is quite specialized and has little to do with established religious belief. By reading this story as a romance of place, rather than of old lovers, it is possible to see how James’s treatment of space suggests possibilities of experience beyond the material. The Chamber of Consciousness In “The Art of Fiction” (1884) Henry James writes, “Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.”14 This much-quoted section of James’s much-quoted essay is usually cited for the accent it throws on the variability of experience. Experience, James argues here, is not only what happens to us or what we do but also what we feel or imagine. However, it is striking that James positions the web of thought within an enclosed architectural space. The juxtaposition of the transient, haphazard nature of experience and the supporting structure of the mind provides a powerful picture of consciousness as something both very fixed and very fluid. Almost a quarter of a century before he articulated the trope of the House of Fiction in the 1908 preface to The Portrait of a Lady, James was already thinking of the mind in terms of interior space. The image of the chamber of consciousness is an old one with a legacy back to biblical times. However, it enjoys a remarkable prominence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where architectural images for thought crop up everywhere from John Keats’s “Chamber of Maiden Thought” to Virginia Woolf ’s sentient holiday house in To the Lighthouse (1927).15 In British literature this trope is especially evident in poetry. Alfred Tennyson’s early dream work “The Palace of Art” (1832), Coventry Patmore’s extended marriage poem The Angel in the House (1854–62), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s cycle of sonnets, The House of Life (1870–81) all dramatize the nineteenth-century tendency to connect exterior spaces with internal psychological states, as do many of the works of Browning, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Blake. This habit of expression had a range, no doubt, of complex causes, including the rapid developments in building technology of the period and a growing preoccupation with the cult of domesticity. However, one demonstrable element of this trend was


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the familiarity of these authors, and many of their readers, with Swedenborg’s writings and his elaborate architectural images. As I have shown elsewhere, Swedenborg’s work was widely read in British artistic and intellectual circles throughout the nineteenth century and his visionary language was powerfully influential on the romantic and pre-Raphaelite movements.16 Swedenborg’s thought was also a shaping influence in the liberalization of American politics and culture in the mid-nineteenth century. Elements of his work are evident in the writings of the New England transcendentalists, such as Bronson Alcott, Charles Dana, and John Greenleaf Whittier, and in the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, which James read avidly in his youth. However, Swedenborg’s ideas were not simply confined to the bohemian and intellectual circles in which the James family moved, but enjoyed a wide readership across the settled territories. Charles Arthur Hawley notes that Swedenborgianism was as vital to the intellectual and cultural life of the Frontier as it was to that of New England. He argues that many of the democratic and moral characteristics of mainstream American life and culture originated in Swedenborg’s writing: “Later the disciples of Swedenborg on the frontier were to fight for freedom of the slave, for temperance, for the right to accept the findings of science and still hold fast to the Bible. They were also to fight for a new social order in which human values would increasingly be placed above money, greed and exploitation.”17 This is a big claim for the work of a man whose literary output was largely concerned with his mystical revelations of otherworldly experiences. A scientist, mining engineer, and politician, Swedenborg became prone in middle age to astonishing spiritual visions of angels and heavenly realms, which his philosophical works attempted to classify. The image of the house as a representation of the mind is one of his trademark concepts. The house within the mind, sometimes tagged as the “House of Life,” the “Palace of Love,” or the Temple of Wisdom,” is essential to Swedenborg’s depiction of life in the World of Spirits. The dwelling places of souls after death correspond directly to their lives on earth: “They who are sordidly avaricious, dwell in cellars, and love the filth of swine, and such nidorous exhalations as proceed from undigested substances in the stomach . . . They who love divine truths and the Word from interior affection, or from the affection of truth itself, dwell in the other life in light, in elevated places . . . Everything in their houses is refulgent as made of precious stones, and when they look through the windows, it is like looking through pure crystal.”18 Given the best-selling status of Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell in the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic, it is perhaps no surprise that for the Victorians the Crystal


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Palace of the 1851 Great Exhibition was perceived as the ultimate symbol of knowledge and understanding. In Swedenborg’s system the heavenly dwelling places of the spirit are mirrored in this life by a psychological house through which the individual moves as they grow in spiritual understanding, moving up from an animalistic basement through levels of art and knowledge toward the light and airy spaces of the pure mind. The profusion of Swedenborgian images in American literary and intellectual culture can also be attributed to their dissemination through the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Swedenborg’s fusion of the scientific and the spiritual allows Emerson to affirm the mystical element of human experience as something natural, while keeping it out of the hands of religious teachers and leaders. Emerson includes Swedenborg in his series of essays on Representative Men, alongside Plato, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe. He presents him as “The Mystic,” one of his archetypal figures on which the emerging American consciousness should model itself.19 However, Emerson is realistic in his assessment of Swedenborg. He criticizes his Lutheran parochialism, his grisly portrayals of damnation, his wooden prose style and his fixed concept of symbolism. He even shrewdly predicts that Swedenborg’s popularity will fall away in later generations. Nevertheless, Emerson points to something important in Swedenborg’s work, which is also central to his own system of thought. He praises his sense of the interconnectedness of spiritual and physical life and notes Swedenborg’s fascination with repeating patterns of form and structure. Emerson describes this as “the fine secret that little explains large, and large, little; the centrality of man in nature, and the connection that subsists throughout all things.”20 However, Swedenborg’s generalizing language and analytical drive prevent him from creating the kind of poetry that fully reveals or inspires. Emerson, like James, finds the system stultifying. He concludes that, after all, the mystic is “disagreeably wise.”21 Nevertheless, Swedenborg does leave a lasting impact on American intellectual life in the set of images and tropes that he bequeaths to later writers and thinkers, particularly spatial metaphors for psychological and spiritual experience. As Andrew Taylor notes, Swedenborg’s imagery resonates through many of the linguistic structures of American transcendentalism, particularly Emerson’s nostalgia for “the notion of a primal language of symbols that had once been able to convey full meaning.”22 Emerson’s own essay is peppered with such symbols, many of them spatial: regions, cities, kingdoms, firesides, labyrinths, gardens, towers, paths, planes, landscapes, shrines, and temples. Many such images can be found in Emerson’s essays and always carry a spiritualized element, fusing inner and outer apprehensions of architectural space with moral experience.23


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In his conclusion to “Nature,” he asserts that “every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven.”24 This correspondence of internal and external spaces is also repeated in other classics of American literature, including Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell is to be found on the bookshelves of Roderick Usher’s dying home, and Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, where Holgrave, the enlightened daguerreotypist, captures images made of light on glass plates in the attic. Henry James kept a respectful distance from Swedenborg’s theology. His letters and three volumes of autobiography testify to a distrust of the mystical visions and moral injunctions that offered his father an allconsuming blueprint for living. As he wrote to his brother William about their father’s system of belief: “I can’t enter into it (much) myself—I can’t be so theological nor grant his extraordinary premises, nor throw myself into conceptions of heavens and hells, nor be sure that the keynote of nature is humanity, etc.”25 Nevertheless, as Taylor demonstrates elsewhere, “Father’s Ideas” did have an impact on James’s work in subtle and complex ways, shaping his patterns of thought and expression, and focusing his attention on the ways that experience is converted into identity.26 James recalls that “simply everything that should happen to us, every contact, every impression and every experience we should know, were to form our soluble stuff.”27 Aptly enough, James figures his father’s system of belief with an architectural metaphor, which illustrates his own relief at being allowed to remain outside the “inhabited temple”: “It stood there in the centre of our family life, into which its doors of fine austere bronze opened straight: we passed and repassed them when we didn’t more consciously go round and behind; we took for granted vague grand things within, but we never paused to peer or penetrate.”28 This sort of image is also prevalent in James’s fiction. Compare the passage earlier with Maggie Verver’s conception of her marital situation in The Golden Bowl as an inaccessible ivory pagoda or her consciousness as “a roomful of confused objects, never as yet ‘sorted,’ which for some time now she had been passing and repassing, along the corridor of her life.”29 Alternatively, consider Strether’s sense of the Pococks’ position in The Ambassadors as “a brave blind alley, where to pass was impossible and where, unless they stuck fast, they would have—which was always awkward—publicly to back out” (AM, 22:160). There are too many more instances of such language to choose from across James’s oeuvre. Ultimately, of course, it is hard to tell how much his spatial metaphors and their lingering sense of spiritual significance derive from his father, from the Emersonian legacy in midcentury American literature, the


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proliferation of similar ideas in British and European culture, or other elements in James’s powerful imagination. However, it is clear that James and his readers operated within an intellectual tradition that expected, or at least recognized, a correspondence between internal and external states of being, and that placed a high spiritual premium on architectural metaphors. James among the Churches The correspondence between the exterior and the interior experience, the animate and the inanimate, is also characteristic of James’s portrayals of church buildings in his prose writing. James had little to say in his lifetime about religion. Although the possibility, or otherwise, of any form of supernatural experience was arguably the most pressing debate of his time, James made few direct statements about the problem of belief, even in private letters, preferring to use his fiction to explore associated epistemological and psychological questions.30 Only in his late essay “Is there a Life after Death?” (1910) does James offer an extended discussion of a religious question, and even here, his conclusion is characteristically hesitant. He would “‘like’ to think” that the consciousness survives in some form, but concedes after all that the question is “insoluble.”31 James’s accounts of churches in his travel writing, therefore, provide rare glimpses of his encounters with the trappings of established religion; they also suggest that a less formalized desire for spiritual experience appeals to him more strongly than any codified system of belief. The essays collected in English Hours (1905) offer a cross-section of James’s responses to churches and cathedrals across several decades. “Notebook VIII” of his working notebooks also contains a series of observations about London collected between August 1907 and October 1909, which he intended to expand into a “romantical-psychological-pictorial-social” book about the city, according to Edmund Gosse.32 Many of these notes are concerned with churches, suggesting that James found himself drawn toward them in his rambles around London in his later years. In both the essays and the notes there is a repeated tendency to find human qualities in buildings and to search in them for connections between the past and present, connections that can soften or even reverse the effects of time and death. While elements of a Swedenborgian appreciation of light and space resonate through James’s delight in the ecclesiastical space, he is equally drawn to the imaginative possibilities of shadow and decay, which often create for him a more profound sense of connection with the past and the sacred. James’s ideas about churches, therefore, connect closely with his


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attitude to death and the afterlife, which are often in his thoughts as he lingers there. Musing on Exeter Cathedral in 1872, James comments on the varying qualities of different building styles through the ages: “A Greek temple preserves a kind of fresh immortality in its concentrated refinement, and a Gothic cathedral in its adventurous exuberance; but a Norman tower stands up like some simple strong man in his might, bending a melancholy brow upon an age which demands that strength shall be cunning.”33 This passage illustrates James’s ability to find something human in architecture, to blur the boundary between the animate and the inanimate through his use of powerful metaphor. James returns to this technique when he describes the effect of Salisbury Cathedral as “equivalent to that of flaxen hair and blue eyes.”34 In his notebooks he finds St. Bride’s Church in Fleet Street, London, “so respectable, so bourgeois,” and figures St. Dunstan’s in the West as the “mate” of St Dunstan’s in the East.35 His attribution of personalities to architectural structures creates a kind of chiasmic reversal of Swedenborg’s system of using architectural structures to categorize personalities. However, in both techniques the difference between the built and the born is obfuscated in a way that opens up the possibility of imaginative identification with a walled space. These churches come alive for James in other ways too. The “little broken-visaged effigies of saints and kings” on the façade of Exeter Cathedral inspire a “contemplative tenderness” that allows the observer to imagine that they are broodingly conscious of their names, histories and misfortunes; that, sensitive victims of time, they feel the loss of their noses, their toes, and their crowns; and that, when the long June twilight turns at last to a deeper grey and the quiet of the close to a deeper stillness, they begin to peer sideways out of their narrow recesses and to converse in some strange form of early English, as rigid, yet as candid, as their features and postures, moaning like a company of ancient paupers around a hospital fire, over their aches and infirmities and losses and the sadness of being so terribly old.36

Here, as in Westminster Abbey, the building acquires the power of speech, and in so doing revivifies the past. These figures occupy some borderline state, animated and discriminating, yet contained within the materials and structures of their monuments. Similarly, James imagines the occupants of Poet’s Corner, where he himself would later be commemorated, comparing notes on new arrivals to the Abbey: “As they look out in the rich dusk, from the cold eyes of statues and the careful identity of tablets, they seem, with their converging faces, to scrutinize decorously the claims


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of each new recumbent glory, to ask each other how he is to be judged as an accession.”37 Again the medium of stone provides the possibility of community, “a sort of corporate company,” as James calls the interred poets, who interact through the fabric of the building, despite the barriers of time and mortality that should separate them. The living statue is present also in Canterbury Cathedral, where James corrects his initial impression that he has the place to himself: “But it would be more decent to affirm that I shared it, in particular, with another gentleman. This personage was stretched upon a couch of stone, beneath a quaint old canopy of wood; his hands were crossed upon his breast, and his pointed toes rested upon a little griffin or leopard. He was a very handsome fellow and the image of a gallant knight. His name was Edward Plantagenet, and his sobriquet was the Black Prince.”38 Centuries collapse into immediacy as James contemplates this figure. He writes that he “lost the sense of death in a momentary impression of nearness to him.” This telescoping of time is reinforced in the crypt below, “a magnificent maze of low, dark arches,” which makes James feel as if he had “descended into the very bowels of history.” This adventure ends, appropriately enough, with James returning to his inn to spend a rainy evening reading “Dean Stanley’s agreeable Memorials of Canterbury.”39 This fascination with memorials is also present in James’s 1909 note on the Crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, in which he describes “the spacious, the vast cheerful effect of this crypt—admirable Valhalla in its way—with the great temple above it and the London sounds of only the ghostliest faintness.”40 Here, ironically, the living world above is reduced to ghostliness in comparison with the imagined community below. James’s language often effects this kind of reversal and destabilizes the reader’s experience of the world within the text. Virginia Fowler notes that in reading James we are often “obliged to allow the repetition of images and metaphors in different contexts to create within our own minds the associative meanings that both clarify and complicate the text for us.”41 The boundary between the metaphorical and literal becomes at times impossible to police; so vivid are his metaphors and so abstract his sense of reality. Furthermore, James’s metaphors are at times explicitly religious in tone, introducing an element of spiritual experience at apparently incongruous points and doubling the reader’s confusion about where the “real” world begins and ends. As Kevin Kohan notes, there is little overt philosophizing in James’s fiction, but rather “a concentration—especially at moments of crisis and resolution—on the language of the sacred; on the theatre of sacrifice and


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violence, on the performance of ritual, and on the meaning of the term ‘sacred’ itself.”42 This is not to say that James’s language offers any kind of religious allegory. In fact he often appears to be working deliberately to disrupt the possibility of any such system emerging. He takes evident delight in upsetting the Swedenborgian rubric of architectural morality by preferring the dim and the shady to the tastefully illuminated, by mooching around in moldering crypts, rather than seeking out the uplifting vistas provided by galleries and towers. He remarks that if he “had to live within sight of a cathedral” then he would “grow less weary of the rugged black front of Exeter than of the sweet perfection of Salisbury.”43 Similarly, he finds the formal beauty of Wells Cathedral somewhat boring: “The interior is vast and massive, but it lacks incident—the incident of monuments, sepulchers and chapels—it is too brightly lighted for picturesque, as distinguished from strictly architectural interest.”44 Edwin Sill Fussell argues that James’s interest in ecclesiastical buildings begins and ends with the search for the “picturesque,” and that he finds it more predominantly in Catholic churches and practices than in Protestant ones.45 However, as Kendall Johnston’s recent study reminds us, the “picturesque” is a complex term for James, attached not simply to the experience of visual novelty and cultural elitism, but to issues of class, national identity, stylistic innovation and “more active roles of observation and artistic creation.”46 If James finds as much of interest in the depths and shadows of actual church buildings as in the refulgent “pure crystal” of Swedenborg’s idealized Temple of Wisdom, this suggests a playful but also sophisticated approach to the spiritual potential of built space, an approach that, like the House of Fiction, makes room for the entire range of human perspectives and personalities, without attempting to organize these into a program of moral improvement. After all, James’s “chamber of consciousness” is obviously a rather dusty place, laced with the cobwebs of human experience. Thickening the Conceptual Both James’s architectural metaphors and his responses to real-life buildings, therefore, present a challenge to the boundary between the material and the conceptual. While Swedenborg’s heavenly dwellings exist purely in conceptual form, and the cathedrals of English Hours are firmly grounded in the material world, the attraction of both sets of buildings for James lies in their ability to transcend their origins and offer multiplied forms of experience. Whether he is invoking a concrete image for a psychological state, or projecting abstract attributes and personalities


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onto solid forms, James demonstrates his recurring sense of built space as the location for some sort of transfer of energy between the internal and the external. In his study of the relationship of the body to objects, Thomas Otten identifies “a recursive movement between the material and the conceptual” as the central dynamic of James’s fiction.47 Drawing on the theoretical ideas of Elaine Scarry and Bill Brown among others, Otten identifies what he calls “a thickening of the conceptual” in contemporary criticism, a new kind of attention to the physical world and our consciousness of it. As Otten notes, James’s fiction is highly receptive to this kind of thinking “because his texts have the power to unsettle preferences for the conceptual (over the material), the essential (over the ornamental), the theoretical (over the practical).”48 Otten’s study focuses on the treatment of objects, and in particular on the surfaces at which they make contact with the human body. However, the desire to trace the interplay between the material and the conceptual could equally be applied to James’s presentation of buildings—especially churches, whose very purpose is to provide access to a spiritual concept through a material form. James’s engagement with the material world is profound (in both senses of the word) and resonates through his late style, which invokes the concrete qualities of the abstract and the abstract qualities of the concrete. The interface of the concrete and the abstract is particularly powerful in the case of Stransom’s church in “The Altar of the Dead.” Unlike Notre Dame Cathedral or Maggie Verver’s pagoda, this building exists both as an imagined and as a physical space. The conceptual altar that is “lighted with perpetual candles” and that “reared itself in his spiritual spaces” (AD, 5) is repeated in, but also challenged by, the external altar Stransom desires to build. His first encounter with the suburban church presents him with a spectacle that suggests to him that his internal altar, his “unapproachable shrine” is inadequate, and he begins to feel that he might “find his real comfort in some material act, some outward worship” (AD, 15). Idiosyncratically, he views church ritual as a corporeal activity rather than as spiritualizing process. Stransom’s mindset is already so abstracted that what he requires is external, sensible form: “That shrine had begun as a vague reflection of ecclesiastical pomps, but the echo had ended by growing more distinct than the sound. The sound now rang out, the type blazed at him with all its fires and with a mystery of radiance in which endless meanings could glow. The thing became as he sat there his appropriate altar and each starry candle an appropriate vow” (AD, 14–15). The boundaries between abstract and concrete are blurred in the very language of this passage as James invokes the senses of sight, sound, and physical presence to communicate an internalized experience.


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Such blurring also takes place in Stransom’s apparent desire to become the building that contains his altar. After learning of Acton Hague’s death he feels “how much he himself could resemble a stone” (AD, 12). His visits to the church are typified by his wish to “rest,” to “sink,” to “drop,” to “plunge” into the stillness of the building. Indeed, his own name, Stransom, suggests a transom, the stone cross-bar on a window, implying that he is part of the fabric of the church, as much as it is a part of him. Significantly, he is aligned with a window, the point where indoors meets outdoors and, in Swedenborgian imagery, where vision and understanding are made possible. There is also a distinctively Swedenborgian echo in James’s description of the street where Stransom’s friend lives as “closed at the end and as dreary as an empty pocket, where the pairs of shabby little houses, semi-detached but indissolubly united, were like married couples on bad terms” (AD, 31). As Stransom’s spiritual experience intensifies in the final pages, the reader is, ironically perhaps, made more aware, not less, of the physicality of the characters. Stransom’s body, which is rapidly deteriorating toward death, is highlighted here in a way it has not been previously: “He sank on his knees before his altar while his head fell over his hands. His weakness, his life’s weariness overtook him” (AD, 55). Until now both he and the woman have had at best a shadowy presence in “the place they haunted together” (AD, 32). But in the final section this vagueness becomes a vivid tangibility. Stransom’s knees, head, hands, arms, feet, face, eyes, and breath are all named in the last three pages of the text, as are the figure, head, eyes, hands, arms, knees, breath, and supporting shoulder of his female friend. These physical parts also call attention to the surfaces at which they meet the fabric of the building, its stone floor and its wooden benches, reiterating their bodily presence in “the dusky church” (AD, 58). The assertion of the body at this point suggests that what happens in this tale is not a simple renunciation of material experience in exchange for the spiritual. For Stransom, as for James’s readers, the conceptual is “thickened” by the encounter with the material; the purely abstract is given relevance and significance by its connection to the senses. It is not only the living whose physicality is intensified in this process. In the final scene the “vast radiance” of the altar, gathers itself “into form, and the form was human beauty and human charity—it was the far-off face of Mary Antrim” (AD, 55). Stransom’s epiphany takes a sensory, indeed a sensual, form. He experiences a deeply physical reaction as “another wave rolled over him,” as he feels “the quickening of joy to pain” and “felt his buried face grow hot” (AD, 55). The story ends with Stransom collapsing exhausted in the arms of Hague’s abandoned lover.


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James’s lexical choices in this section reinforce the overlap of the physical and the spiritual: “rapture,” “bliss,” and “passion immortal,” presenting the moment of consummation that Warminski finds so “kinky.” In some ways, Warminksi is right. The reading of this tale in material terms alone leads inevitably to nothing more than a linguistic game that “inscribes itself as the deluded Stransom in a story that tells the impossibility of recognizing one’s self in a text.”49 Seen in this light, the story is indeed, as Leavis suggests, “unpleasant,” the dramatization of a self-destroying fetish. But like so much of James’s fiction, “The Altar of the Dead” resists interpretation under a single reading. This perspective is counterpoised by the option that Karen Smythe offers, of reading Stransom’s creation of the altar as an act of writing, the composition of an elegiac text of the past, which affirms his life and personality and offers endless possibilities of meaning: “The relationship between the altar and the past is changed, upon reading it, from a meaningless system of signification— pure history—to a synecdochic, and inherently autobiographical, system of symbolization.”50 Like The Turn of the Screw, therefore, this text thrives on the tension between two mutually exclusive interpretations of what is going on: one purely materialist and one that affirms the potential of conceptual and spiritual experience. These two readings each rely on a very different perception of language: either as a futile pattern of self-reference or as a point of access to an infinite range of meanings. The inability to disentangle these two modes of experience within the text is what gives it its haunting effect. For haunting is, after all, the presence of what should be absent, the sensory experience of something that should be only a memory; it is the awareness of something visible, audible, or tangible that should be confined to thought or to the past. As Tzvetan Todorov notes in his classic study The Fantastic, James is expert at creating this effect of “uncertainty,” within which neither the story’s characters nor the reader can properly decide whether their experience belongs in the internal or the external world.51James’s manipulation of this effect in his fiction, therefore, maps closely onto his treatment of buildings as spaces that reanimate the inert, bring the past into the present or assert themselves within the mind. This is why so many of his architectural forms seem to be haunted, even when there is not so much as the shadow of a ghost around. For James, the superficial encounter with the built form is always an intense experience that enables, perhaps even demands, a transaction between the external and the internal, between the perspectives of the sensory world and the “chamber of consciousness” in which these are stored.


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This haunting effect is so prevalent in James’s writing because of his fundamental sense of consciousness as something more than material. In “Is there a Life after Death?,” James makes explicit what can be read as implicit in so much of his fiction: that he sees “personality” and “soul” as connected, or even interchangeable, terms. Life after death is only meaningful, James insists, if it constitutes some sort of extension of “the personal experience” rather than “unthinkable substitutes or metamorphoses.” James sees that this experience is grounded in the material world: “we are even at our highest flights of personality, our furthest reachings out of the mind, of the very stuff of the abject actual.” This personality is mutable, subject to suffering and “partial eclipses” even before death. He notes, “Our personality, by which I mean our ‘soul,’ declining in many a case, or in most, by inches, is aware of itself as it is, however contracted, and not as it was, however magnificent.”52 James’s equation of personality with soul is striking and makes a correspondence between material experience and spiritual experience at just the point in his essay where he appears to be arguing against the possibility of existence after physical death. However, in Part II, James reverses this position and argues for some form of extension of the self, not out of religious conviction, but out of his sense of his own consciousness as a space big enough to hold all of human experience: “it at least contained the world, and could handle and criticise it, could play with it and deride it; it had that superiority; which meant all the while that the abode itself grew more and more interesting to me.”53 Again, James chooses the metaphor of the house, the abode of the self, which is within the mind, yet large enough to contain the world around. On exploring this consciousness as an artist, James finds himself aware of things that seemed to come from elsewhere; he is “in communication with sources; sources to which I owe the apprehension of far more and far other combinations than observation and experience, in their ordinary sense, have given me the pattern of.”54 This sense of something beyond the mind offers for him another “adventure of personality” and he asks “how can we after it hold complete disconnection likely.” He concludes: “No, no, no—I reach beyond the laboratory-brain.”55 James’s sense of connection of personality and soul thus offers an explanation as to why his characters so often “haunt the churches,” and what they hope to find there. Built spaces, both material and metaphorical, play a key role in James’s sense of the possibilities of extending personal experience. His handling of these does bear elements of the imagery of both Swedenborg and Emerson, but his approach is less systematic and offers less certainty of a transcendent self or a heavenly afterlife. For James, the experience of architectural forms enriches the web of


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impressions suspended in the chamber of consciousness, thus creating another kind of space, open to other kinds of impressions from beyond the self, potentially beyond the mortal—the “soothing” and the “sublime support” that Strether invokes (AM, 22:5, 10). Engaging with built space, therefore, becomes in James’s fiction a means of negotiating between the external and the internal, allowing the consciousness to position itself in relation to both the material world of lived experience and the possibility of a spiritual reality that reaches beyond this. Notes 1. Henry James, The Ambassadors, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vols. 21–22 (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), 22:5 (hereafter cited in text as AM). 2. Henry James, “The Altar of the Dead,” in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 17 (New York: Scribner’s, 1909, hereafter cited in text as AD), 3–58 (4). 3. Henry James, The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), 164. 4. Ibid., 165. 5. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1942; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 181; S. Gorley Putt, The Fiction of Henry James: A Reader’s Guide (London: Penguin, 1968), 343–4. 6. Andrezj Warminski, “Reading Over Endless Histories: Henry James’s Altar of the Dead,” Yale French Studies 74 (1988): 261–84 (264); see also Hugh Stevens, “Queer Henry in the Cage,” in The Cambridge Companion to Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 120–38 (125). 7. Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper, 1985), 398–400, and Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (London: Hodder, 1992), 389–90. 8. Lyall H. Powers, “On the Use of James’s Notebooks,” in A Companion to Henry James Studies, ed. Daniel Mark Fogel (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1993), 337– 55 (354). 9. Henry James, Notebooks, 165. 10. Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and his Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998), 291–7. 11. Henry James, English Hours (1905); repr. ed. Leon Edel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 66. 12. Henry James, Parisian Sketches: Letters to the New York Tribune 1875–1876, ed. Leon Edel and Ilse Dusoir Lind (London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1958), 119. 13. Henry James, English Hours, 31. 14. Henry James, Literary Criticism: Essays American and English Writers, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 52. 15. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Brixton Forman, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 144.


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16. Hazel Hutchison, “Ideal Homes: James, Rossetti and Swedenborg’s House of Life,” Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 8 (2004): 49–62. 17. Charles Arthur Hawley, “Swedenborgianism and the Frontier,” Church History 6 (1937): 203–22 (210). 18. Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell (1758), trans. T. Hartley (London: Swedenborg Society, 1893), 266. 19. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men: Seven Lectures (1850; repr. Westminster, MD: Random House, 2004). 20. Ibid., 61. 21. Ibid., 82. 22. Andrew Taylor, “Beautiful Allusions, Aptly Applied: Transcendental Language Theory and its Discontents,” Irish Journal of American Studies 10 (2001): 33– 54 (45). 23. See also Anders Hallengren, “Swedenborgian Symbolism in Emersonian Edification,” in In Search of the Absolute, ed. Stephen McNeilly (London: The Swedenborg Society, 2004), 15–22. 24. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, (Boston: James Munroe, 1849), 73. 25. Percy Lubbock, ed. The Letters of Henry James, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1920), 1:111–112. 26. Henry James, Notes of A Son and Brother (1914); repr. in Autobiography, ed. Frederick W. Dupee (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 330; Andrew Taylor, Henry James and the Father Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 27. Henry James, Autobiography, 123. 28. Ibid., 332. 29. Henry James, The Golden Bowl, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vols. 23–24 (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), 24:14. 30. See also Hazel Hutchison, Seeing and Believing: Henry James and the Spiritual World (New York: Palgrave, 2006). 31. Henry James, “Is there a Life after Death?,” in William Dean Howells et al., In After Days: Thoughts on the Future Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910), 197–233 (232). 32. Henry James, Notebooks, 325. 33. Henry James, English Hours, 55. 34. Ibid., 67. 35. Henry James, Notebooks, 333 and 329. 36. Henry James, English Hours, 54. 37. Ibid., 31. 38. Ibid., 86. 39. Ibid. 40. Henry James, Notebooks, 334. 41. Virginia C. Fowler, “The Later Fiction,” in A Companion to Henry James Studies, ed. Daniel Mark Fogel (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1993), 179–207 (181).

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42. Kevin Kohan, “James and the Originary Scene,” Henry James Review 22 (2001): 229–38 (229). 43. Henry James, English Hours, 67. 44. Ibid., 63. 45. Edwin Sill Fussell, The Catholic Side of Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 46. Kendall Johnson, Henry James and the Visual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7. 47. Thomas Otten, A Superficial Reading of Henry James: Preoccupations with the Material World (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 157. 48. Ibid., 158, 165. 49. Warminski, “Reading,” 283. 50. Karen Smythe, “The Altar of the Dead: James’s Grammar of Grieving,” English Studies in Canada 16 (1990): 315–24 (318). 51. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (London: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973), 25. 52. Henry James, “Is there a Life after Death?,” 204, 206, 209. 53. Ibid., 220. 54. Ibid., 223, 224. 55. Ibid., 228, 233.


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CHAPTER 4

Mysterious Tenants Uncanny Women and the Private or Public Dilemma in the Supernatural Tales

Anna Despotopoulou

Several of Henry James’s stories and novels that employ the supernatural as an unexplained haunting device or metaphor center on the conflict between privacy and publicity, making use of gothic conventions like possession, the threat of invasion, and inexplicable presences in the home in order to explore the impact of publicity and the rise of spectacle on human relationships and ultimately on consciousness in late Victorian society. Many studies have tracked James’s concern with publicity on both biographical and literary levels, examining the way the Jamesian fictional self is transformed or compromised by the undermining of privacy in an increasingly public society.1 Often, James’s supernatural plots give prominence to setting—the old ancestral home in particular—in order to visually and physically represent the evolving social circumstances, where the house, despite its solidity, becomes a metaphor of the penetrability of the self by the forces of the market. Perhaps the most indicative example of this literal and figurative intrusion of public affairs into private consciousness can be traced in “The Jolly Corner,” in which the conflict between private and public is rendered in the form of a dichotomy, a splitting of personality. Here the suppressed side of the businessman arises in the form of a mysterious predator, first luring and ultimately preying on the more aesthetically oriented side of Spencer Brydon, who for a short term finds comfort in the spatial and temporal seclusion of the old vacant house amid the skyscrapers of New York. Less obviously, in The Turn of


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the Screw, the governess’s efforts to keep the ghosts outside of Bly and her obsession with closed doors and locked rooms inside the house may be interpreted as a battle between public knowledge and private secrets, the former threatening to displace the latter—public knowledge of sexuality destroying the illusion of immaculate innocence. In the wake of the Oscar Wilde trials, James’s plots suggest the dissolution of boundaries between private life and public knowledge and an increased anxiety—expressed through the gothic medium—about the impossibility of policing the threshold in a consumer-oriented society. In Alison Booth’s words, “The haunting arises from a transgression of boundaries,” as the private has forfeited its autonomy, its meaning having changed during the process of the socialization of the private sphere.2 Many urban studies, starting with Georg Simmel’s famous article, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), and more recently Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, report on the changing structure and definition of the home in the midst of what Simmel terms an “external” or “objective culture.”3 While James’s male characters openly deal with or are irreparably injured during the trials of publicity, through battles waged either in the real public sphere of socioeconomic activity4 or in the supernatural realm, female characters often suffer in representation, when absence, silence, and omission are employed by the author in cases where women’s engagement with undomestic challenges is at stake. Unresolved ambiguity encapsulates but also heightens the elusiveness associated with woman’s presence in the private and public spheres. James’s consideration of fictional and real women has recently been examined by scholars such as Tessa Hadley and Victoria Coulson, who both read in James “a potent ambivalence about the social authority of conservative gender patterns.”5 Coulson detects a Jamesian “uneasiness towards dominant patterns of gender identity,”6 a reading that goes against what Chris Foss and others have argued as “a stubbornly operative (however inherently flawed)” “pervasiveness of patriarchal appropriation” in his works.7 I would like to argue that James’s equivocal representation of women in the supernatural fiction proves him as trying to negotiate between stereotypical images of femininity, sometimes complying with and other times resisting cultural inscriptions. The women in the stories that follow are shown as holding a liminal position between the seen and the unseen, between the natural and the supernatural, a fictional position that seems to correspond to the precariousness that characterized women’s occupancy not only of public but also, paradoxically, of private space.


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Recent work on Victorian fiction has dealt with ambiguous representations of women’s subjectivity, studying the way the public reconstructs domesticity in terms of visibility. This cross semination of private and public and inner and outer is explored in (among other books) Karen Chase and Michael Levenson’s Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family, in which the authors argue that private life in the nineteenth century increasingly became public in the form of a spectacular story, an evolving drama often submitted to the most brutal exposure, an exposure that threatened the notion of domestic bliss that resulted from the ideology of gendered, separate spheres. “A house,” they maintain, “remains an object in social space, inevitably exposed to the winds of public life, and walls designed to keep inside and outside apart only sealed them in intimate antagonism.”8 In this sense in late Victorian times, private space was not a utopia or a safe haven. Rather than being, in John Ruskin’s words, “a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods,” the home is, as Chase and Levenson argue, “an uneasy cauldron of bliss,”9 and woman can hardly be viewed as the unexposed angel in the house. In Subjects on Display, Beth Newman captures this “paradox of ideal femininity,” the contradictory demands placed on women, according to which, in ideal circumstances, women were supposed to exhibit their invisibility.10 James’s novels often expose the fiction of separate spheres by overtly dealing with women’s appropriation of the mentality of the public sphere or showing them as particularly attuned to their sexuality through desire or abnegation: the binary of public and private—and the cultural logic each entails—does not apply to James’s women and men. Women’s sphere, therefore, is now and again represented as a limbo, an in-between space, which also reflects their equivocal position in society. In order to examine the conjunction between the private-public conflict, on the one hand, and James’s use of the supernatural, on the other, I will employ Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the etymological and psychoanalytic implications of the unheimlich vs. heimlich dichotomy in the essay “The Uncanny” (1919). Very briefly, Freud’s analysis of the uncanny traces the etymological development of the German word unheimlich, stressing its uncanny, we might say, identification with its opposite, the heimlich, in cases when uncanny effects are very often produced by very canny or familiar stimuli. In their original meanings the two words express a contrast between what is known, familiar, recognizable, and domestic— the heimlich—and what is unfamiliar, unusual, foreign, strange, hence sinister—the unheimlich. The root of the words, heim (home), inevitably connects familiarity and its opposite with the house, in the sense that heimlich means “belonging to the house.”11 Nevertheless, while the


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initial meanings of unheimlich signify the unfamiliarity and unnaturalness that strange and external effects may produce, Freud’s etymological analysis reveals an instance where the meanings of the two seemingly opposite words converge: in one of its uses, heimlich defines that which is “concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know of or about it, withheld from others.”12 Therefore, a house is, first, the site of the canny—containing that which is congenial to the inhabitant—and, second, a means of concealment creating mystery and uncanniness to those who do not have an insider’s information. Hence the meaning of heimlich “coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.”13 As John Fletcher argues in his article on “queer spectrality” in James, “with this second meaning [of heimlich] we get the specifically modern sense of privacy as an internal or withdrawn space or enclave that can be negatively inflected as shameful, sinister or taboo.”14 In this sense, gothic conventions like haunted enclosures may become a particularly handy tool for an author like James who, as Neill Matheson argues, often reconstructs the private as a monstrous secret.15 Moreover, the canny-uncanny paradox may help to illuminate the shifting meanings and functions of privacy and publicity at the fin de siècle. In other words, the etymological interchangeability between the two words may reflect the fineness of the line between private and public space, suggesting the invasion of the home by unfamiliar, or uncanny, forces. As Fletcher points out, “What we have here is not just a set of meanings in a dictionary, but a set of positions within a historically specific structure of experience which demarcates and regulates the shifting boundaries and interfaces between the private and the public spheres.”16 While Fletcher uses Freud’s theory of the uncanny to propound original queer readings of some of James’s ghostly tales, I would like to take the connection between privacy and publicity and the supernatural in a different direction, exploring the function of women in two tales from different periods in James’s career—“The Ghostly Rental” and “The Real Right Thing”—which employ gothic devices. The tales feature women in peripheral roles who have detrimental effects on the male protagonists of the stories. These women acquire literal or metaphorical supernatural features, and my point will be that they are the main cause of the uncanniness encountered in the fictional houses that act as settings in each plot. In his supernatural tales, rather than placing his women in the usual position of tremulous prey, James reverses the gothic tradition, making women the source and not the victims of terror. In this sense, James’s ambiguous representation of his female characters fictionalizes the equivocal position of women, who (in the late Victorian period) were caught


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within the contradictory discourses featured in conduct books and magazines, which required them to be inconspicuous on the one hand and to venture confidently into the public sphere on the other. In Freudian terms, not strictly belonging to either the domestic or the public sphere, these women represent the case of the knowable becoming unknowable, familiarity turned sinister, of the heimlich becoming unheimlich. Even though, because of social restrictions, they officially belong to the house, they are not familiar, domestic, or “tame,” to use one of Freud’s synonyms for heimlich; therefore, the heim, or home, has none of the comforting attributes supposedly provided by the angel in the house. On the contrary, the home, being a site of frustration and often repression, may harness demonic potentials.17 In Helena Michie’s words, “since [women] are themselves the unknowable, the unpenetrable mystery, they are not so much vehicles of epistemological consolation as they are sources of change, disruption, and complication.”18 As can be seen more clearly in The Turn of the Screw, in James’s supernatural tales the woman’s role and behaviour are unpredictable, indecipherable, and equally uncanny to the behaviour of the ghostly manifestations present in the stories. James’s early tale “The Ghostly Rental” (1876) is a good example of the blurring of boundaries between familiarity and strangeness, as from the first pages it sustains a spirit of contradiction, which aims at heightening the suspense and evading certainties. Even the time of day during which the first event takes place, the late afternoon, situates the story between day and night, vision and blindness, knowledge and ignorance, while the strange lighting effects of the sunset are further mystified as they are likened to “a sceptical smile on the lips of a beautiful woman”;19 the story, thus, early on vacillates in its view of woman as, on the one hand, an aesthetic spectacle and, on the other, an undecipherable other. The unnamed narrator is drawn toward a secluded, deserted house in New England, which perplexingly combines gothic elements with the heimlich: “There was no sign of life about it; it looked blank, bare and vacant, and yet, as I lingered near it, it seemed to have a familiar meaning—an audible eloquence” (GR, 159). In combining empirical with intuitive assessments of the house, the narrator is iterating scientific discourses of the early nineteenth century, which debated the subjective or objective nature of sensory perception.20 In claiming, “I have always thought of the impression made upon me at first sight, by that gray colonial dwelling, as a proof that induction may sometimes be near akin to divination” (GR, 159), the narrator is negotiating between two modes of perception—one empirical and one spiritual—participating in the debate between materialism and metaphysics by blurring the line between external and internal


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perception and preparing the reader for the indeterminacy of vision that follows when the ghost appears. In other words, the familiar and welcoming feeling that the house initially evokes is a product of objective sensory perception and subjective processing of cultural constructions of the home as a sanctuary, both of which when combined help rationalize the house’s appearance and assure the male intellect of its penetrability. However, when night falls, and vision is impaired, the narrator immediately negates the familiarity, turning over perception to the mind’s eye, which in turn transforms the house into an unfamiliar and ultimately supernatural enclosure: “At this moment, I said to myself with the accent of profound conviction—‘The house is simply haunted!’” (GR, 160). Darkness and blurred vision, thus, further estrange the hermetically closed house, making it penetrable only via the imagination. The inviolable privacy implied by the tightly sealed apertures make the house a case of the heimlich becoming unheimlich, generating in the narrator speculation, fear, and the conviction of haunting. Indeed when the narrator has the opportunity to peek inside he notices the lack of “small, familiar objects” (GR, 163), which would confirm its domesticity and hence its safety. On the other hand, the house down the road, where the narrator inquires after the former house’s owners, is “a comfortable, tidy dwelling, which might have offered itself as the model of the house which is in no sense haunted—which has no sinister secrets, and knows nothing but blooming prosperity” (GR, 160). What makes this type of enclosure heimlich, intimate, friendly, and domestic is the presence of a woman, “the mistress of the house” (GR, 160), who efficiently performs her wifely duties, catering for her friends’ comfort and showing them to the door, extending her farewells. The perfect hostess, in other words, with her explicable and predictable function, renders the house familiar and open to interpretation. However, when the woman is asked about the haunted house, she becomes mysterious: “She drew herself away, colored, raised her finger to her lips, and hurried into the house, where, in a moment, the curtains were dropped over the windows” (GR, 161). The woman’s silence and the suppression of information render the house unheimlich in the eyes of the narrator, with its curtains curtailing vision and containing the secret. A woman’s visibility, accessibility, and predictability, therefore, seem to determine the measure of canniness or uncanniness evoked by a dwelling. Homely comfort and definite knowledge in the story are also produced by a spinster, Miss Deborah, a friend of the narrator, who represents solitary female domestication. It is Miss Deborah, who, confined in a house with clear view windows, deals with secrets and gossip, and who


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uncovers the mystery of the haunted house to the prying narrator. This woman, who is represented as belonging to the house, a house penetrated by many nosy guests, is linked to the knowledge that renders her dwelling heimlich. From her the narrator learns that the cause of the uncanniness in the first house is a woman, the ghost of the supposedly dead daughter of a Captain Diamond, a military man, who believes he killed his daughter when he cursed her for defying his wishes and for having a relationship with an objectionable young man. Miss Deborah’s narration focuses on the father, whose story has become a legend (GR, 173), while the only thing revealed about the daughter is her repression, first by her father and next by her lover, who twice claimed her as his own wife despite her assertion that she was unmarried. James uses the masculine pronoun indiscriminately, obscuring and at the same time combining the harmful agency of the two men: “On the table was a note from the young man telling him that he had killed his daughter” (GR, 172). The ambiguity complicates the questions of who, if anyone, killed the daughter and what her sexual involvement with the young man was. Her undisclosed past helps to amplify the mystery; the more indeterminate the woman’s history is, the more uncanny the effect. Moreover, the elusiveness of the daughter produces in the narrator an obsessive voyeuristic impulse, which to a certain extent aestheticizes the woman’s death, once again displacing the questions of the violence done to her. I have been arguing that the uncanniness in the story is derived as much from the legend of Captain Diamond’s haunting as from the ambiguity related to his transgressive daughter’s past, namely, her sexuality and the conditions under which she died. However, in the end, the woman’s spectrality turns out to be a scam, and masculine control returns, taking over the uncanny effect. James surprises the reader twice: first, by making his story a case of the “explained supernatural,” in the Radcliffe style; and then by denying us a logical interpretation of events. Once again “divination” defies “induction.” The initial ghost turns out to be the real live masquerading daughter, who, outraged at the way Captain Diamond treated her, pretends to be a ghost in order to take revenge on her father, who, after his death, comes back to haunt and punish her in return for causing him so much mischief. The second, real haunting is more catastrophic than the first, as it results in the burning down of the house. In other words, with the female threat eliminated, male power returns with a vengeance reclaiming its material and spiritual right over the house. James prepares us for this conclusion by consistently blurring the boundary between familiar and uncanny female behavior. Despite her commanding presence and fearful look, the daughter’s ghostly presence


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never achieved the transgression that must have been the motive for her masquerade. She fails to carry out the possession, both spiritual and literal, of the house, which was her intention when she decided to play the trick on her father. As we learn from Miss Deborah, “[T]he ghost relented, and proposed a compromise. ‘Leave the house to me!’ it said; ‘I have marked it for my own. Go off and live elsewhere. But to enable you to live, I will be your tenant, since you can find no other. I will hire the house of you and pay you a certain rent’” (GR, 172). The obligation to pay rent, thus, denies the woman absolute possession of the house, while it sufficiently and efficiently replaces the domestic duties that a daughter would normally have to perform toward her father. Although the daughter yearns to keep the house in women’s hands (apparently it belonged to Captain Diamond’s wife, before her marriage), the house still belongs to the captain; she can neither live in it nor can she hold on to her fortune. She is merely the ghostly tenant who has to pay not so much for her infrequent occupancy but for acquiring a clear conscience. In spite of her absence from her father’s household, with her financial contribution she helps to fulfil all the domestic duties necessary for his material comfort, as it is this money that is his only “means of subsistence . . . His ghost supports him” (GR, 173). In other words, even in the form of a ghost, the daughter takes care of her father, sacrificing her own material comfort for his own. As a matter of fact, asked whether his daughter’s ghost has forgiven him for destroying her prospects of happiness, the captain replies: “She has forgiven me as the angels forgive!” (GR, 176). In death she represents the ideal (the angel in the house) for the father, who still needs to be comforted and supported by a stable domestic environment; and the dead muse for the narrator, whose spectatorial and aesthetic impulses are satisfied by her pictorial immateriality. As a fearful ghost she has not managed to escape the cultural framework, which subjects woman to aesthetic and moral inscriptions like the ones imposed by both father and narrator. A ghost and an angel, a demon and a saint, an independent woman who turns out to be dependent, the daughter gradually loses her fearfulness and her uncanniness is dissolved by the male intellect. She is betrayed by certain heimlich postures that undermine the unfamiliarity of her assumed, uncanny, role. The first time the narrator encounters her, he is struck by the incompatibility between her “dim, white, strange, in every way ghostly” appearance and her all too familiar and “trivial” gestures as she waves her hands (GR, 180). Puzzled by this incongruity he says, “Familiarity on the part of the haunting Presence had not entered into my calculations, and did not strike me pleasantly” (GR, 180), as the potential materiality (and vulgarity, according to the narrator) of her presence


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dispels the aesthetic fantasy that has sustained his interest. This familiarity is confirmed when the narrator violently pulls off her veil, solving the puzzle once and for all.21 The opacity of the veil, which underlined the uncertainty of vision, from both sides, has served to stimulate fantasy, which paradoxically both alienates and familiarizes woman, emphasizing the precariousness of her position as a ghostly other of herself. Initially her masquerade as a ghost and her performance of death, being, as Elisabeth Bronfen might argue, “woman’s one effective communicative act,”22 empower her in the eyes of the tremulous father and the curious narrator. “Staging disembodiment as a form of escaping personal and social constraints serves to criticize those cultural attitudes that reduce the feminine body to the position of dependency and passivity, to the vulnerable object of sexual incursions.”23 However, the daughter’s performance, being merely just that, a temporary performance, has been less an act of self-construction and more an iteration of cultural tropes of femininity, which in the end reveal her as an object of violence rather than a subject. From beginning to end, the narrator with his strong will has attempted to decipher the female mystery and neutralize its threat. Once her disguise has been violently taken off and knowledge that had been repressed surfaces, the uncanny effect of the woman is rationalized and forgotten. What is more, almost simultaneously, a real supernatural manifestation, the new male ghost of the father, takes possession of the contested house, leaving once again the daughter homeless—her homelessness exposing her liminal position in society. The only question remaining in the story has to do with whether the woman was actually married or not. At the end, the nameless daughter surprises the narrator by insisting that she never had a husband (GR, 188), on the one hand, alluding to a potential sexual freedom, which caused the initial conflict with her father, but, on the other, critiquing and defying the strict Victorian cultural and moral codes that define femininity according to prude expectations. Her own word against her lover’s or husband’s, this ambiguity about her transgressive or legitimate sexuality confirms the woman’s difficulty in defining the terms of her own existence in the private and the public sphere. Captain Diamond’s unnamed daughter, despite her competent role-playing, unsettles but cannot overturn dominant cultural constructions of femininity. Even the business transactions that she initiates with her father (in so much as they can only take place on a fake supernatural level) rather than making her a confident and independent player in the public sphere, in reality consign her to immateriality, invisibility, silence, and ultimately obscurity. After all, even after her trick is revealed, her real story remains undisclosed—a


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textual absence: Does she live alone elsewhere? Where does she find the money to pay the rent? By often blurring literal and figurative depictions of her embodied or disembodied presence, the narrative calls attention to woman’s liminality and her precarious position between the private and the public, with the woman not quite belonging to either. As a ghost she is homeless; but as a live person, she also seems homeless, as the end of the narrative makes clear when the narrator consigns her to ghostly invisibility once again and she vanishes into the darkness: “She left me with a rapid step, and as she receded into the darkness, resumed, with the dark flowing lines of her drapery, the phantasmal appearance with which she had at first appeared to me. I watched her till she became invisible” (GR, 189). James’s text appears to adopt a position of oscillation, hovering between cultural tropes of femininity, on the one hand affirming and on the other critiquing such stereotyping. Finally the in-betweenness of the ghostly woman reveals James’s unwillingness to see gender as fixed within societal roles and not his inability to envisage woman as anything other than the other. In his later work, the indeterminate position and unexplained motivation of women provide James with an opportunity to employ the style of absence, uncertainty, and secrecy more persistently. According to Ronald Schleifer in his analysis of The Turn of the Screw, James is the inaugurator of the “modern [gothic] tradition,” as he bases his novel on absence rather than presence.24 Schleifer observes that the older Gothic emphasized presence in the sense that on the way toward its closure, the narrative presented facts, which would be meticulously deciphered, and knowledge, which, once acquired, would help solve the mystery and dissolve the horror.25 On the contrary, “the evidence of apprehension in The Turn—of ‘waking,’ of consciousness, of horror—is absence, silence.”26 In James’s stories, in the case of women in particular, the narrative defies the characters’ wish to become conscious, to solve the puzzle, as the plots provide no definite knowledge and no assurances to either protagonists or readers. But the cause and result of the silence attributed to women is even more equivocal as it is linked to a spectrality, which places them on a level beyond the material: on the one hand, silence ensures their right to privacy and secrecy; on the other, it invites speculation, making woman the mute bearer of aesthetic and moral tropes. Like the pre-Raphaelites, but also like Walter Pater and A. C. Swinburne, in his representation of modern woman, James often captures the baffling and at the same time terrifying power of the Mona Lisa posture, which in its enigmatic complacence withholds unfathomable secrets from men.27 Functioning within the house, out of sight, yet very powerful,


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James’s uncanny women exert a disconcerting power over the male protagonists, and perhaps over the author himself, a power that is never resolved nor explained. In the late story, “The Real Right Thing” (1900), ambiguous female behavior is attributed to a woman who with obsessive persistence commissions the protagonist, Withermore, to write the biography of her late husband, a writer named Doyne. The story depicts a conflict between Mrs. Doyne, or Doyne’s wife as she is more frequently referred to, and her late husband, a conflict that perpetuates the unpleasant nature of their relationship while Doyne was still alive. Indeed, one of the things never clarified in the story, and perhaps the key to understanding the haunting that occurs, is the nature of their past relationship, which is described vaguely early on as a “very special chapter.”28 From the one and only clear comment that “she had not taken Doyne seriously enough in life” (RRT, 413) we are to conjecture that the special chapter of their life together could not have been very agreeable. As in “The Ghostly Rental,” the conflict between them is dramatized on a supernatural level, with the one not really a ghost but closely resembling one, and the other, toward the end, materializing as a supernatural manifestation. Doyne’s wife from the beginning is described by Withermore as a strange, manipulative, and indecipherable woman who keeps herself out of sight, occupying most of the time a room below her late husband’s study; she is mysterious in the sense that her motives are never disclosed. Her subjectivity is represented as inaccessible to men, as her mouth, main signifier of facial expression, remains protected by her “big black fan which she apparently never laid aside and with which she thus covered the lower half of her face, her rather hard eyes, above it, becoming the more ambiguous” (RRT, 418). Her seeming domesticity is undermined by her desires, which entangle her with the market and publicity: first, the biography that she authorizes is a means of publicizing the private life of her husband; second, she is interested in “quantity” (RRT, 413)—many volumes of exposed privacy; and third, the man she chooses to do it for her is primarily a journalist, whose reason for being is the disclosure of private facts. The wife, therefore, occupying (like the daughter of the previous story) a precarious position between privacy and publicity, represents a case of the unheimlich or the uncanny that arises from something that ceases to be known and easily recognizable. With “her big black eyes, her big black wig, her big black fan and gloves, her general gaunt, ugly, tragic, but striking and . . . ‘elegant’ presence” (RRT, 413), she acquires threatening gothic features, which make Withermore project fantasies of feminine evil onto her. While he is working on his research into the life of Doyne, Withermore feels her “through a supersubtle sixth sense . . . hover, in the


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still hours, at the top of landings and on the other side of doors, gathered from the soundless brush of her skirts the hint of her watchings and waitings. One evening when, at his friend’s table, he had lost himself in the depths of correspondence, he was made to start and turn by the suggestion that some one was behind him. Mrs. Doyne had come in without his hearing the door” (RRT, 418). The wife’s ghostly presence seems to cause more fear and mystification than the spirit of Doyne imagined by Withermore to be helping him in his research. Doyne’s supernatural presence, in other words, is familiar and welcomed by Withermore: he “encouraged it, quite cherished it, looking forward all day to feeling it renew itself in the evening” (RRT, 419). While the dead man is penetrable and knowable through his numerous letters and other writings, which solve the enigmas of his private life, the wife’s subjectivity is unheimlich and generates more unexplained mystery than the actual ghost. Just as her gesture of hiding the lower half of her face foreshadows, she speaks in short, often unfinished, phrases, using interrogative and negative sentence patterns to avoid exposure. On the other hand, the male ghost seems more predictable and benevolent than the female presence, which is uncomfortably intrusive and puzzling. Nevertheless, as in the previous story, the threat aroused by the woman’s ambiguous presence is gradually eliminated by the transformation of the familiar presence of the spirit of the writer into a fearful ghost. Doyne stops supporting the project of publicizing his life and looms large, this time as an uninvited ghost, causing terror to both his wife and Withermore, who abandon the biography. In the beginning of the story Withermore may be said to have evoked the spirit of the writer, who, as a result, functioned as an identical double, on to whom Withermore had projected his hopes; he imagined that his wishes in relation to the biography coincided with the dead author’s, and it is this fantasized approval that had procured the familiarity felt by the journalist in the presence of the dead writer. In other words, in accordance with Freud’s views on “doubles,” Withermore, by means of a defense mechanism, had projected his wish for endorsement outward on to something foreign to himself.29 It should be pointed out that his belief in Doyne’s ghost was intuitive rather than empirical, as he abstained from looking directly at the friendly ghost: their relationship was ruled “by deep delicacies and fine timidities, the dread of too sudden or too rude an advance” (RRT, 421). As long as his imaginative creation remained uncontested and empirically unconfirmed, he felt secured by the familiarity produced: “Doyne and he had, from the start, been together” (RRT, 423). But when he no longer senses Doyne’s presence, it is the absence that gives rise to uncanniness.


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As Freud says, “[A]n uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality.”30 Doyne’s sudden absence confirms his presence outside the realms of Withermore’s imagination. Writer and biographer have split up, the former materializing in a ghostly form independent of the definitions imposed on him by the latter and threatening to secure his private life from public probing. Even though it is with Withermore’s experience that the story is primarily concerned, I would like to propose that the haunting, as in the previous story, systematically works to eliminate the female threat of publicity rather than the comparatively mild threat posed by the naïve journalist. From the beginning, Doyne’s wife establishes the personal investment she has in the biography, which she hopes will “make up” (assumedly compensate for and unsettle accusations against herself ): “She had not taken Doyne seriously enough in life, but the biography should be a solid reply to every imputation on herself ” (RRT, 413). In this sense, the “real right thing” (RRT, 426) that she wants to do may benefit herself more than Doyne, as it is her real relationship with her husband that she hopes will be revealed in the biography, perhaps taking her out of the liminal and invisible position of being merely Doyne’s wife or widow. It is for this reason that she cannot or will not see what wrong they may be committing: “Then what, that’s so awful, are you doing?” she asks. And to Withermore’s fears, “We lay him bare. We serve him up. What is it called? We give him to the world,” she answers, “And why shouldn’t we?” (RRT, 427). Up until the last minute Doyne’s wife wants to carry on with the biography, desiring definite proof of her late husband’s ghostly objections: “I think, you know, we must have a clear sign,” she says (RRT, 429). To a certain extent the wife’s motivation could be attributed to a subtle but pervasive revenge impulse, but such speculative assertions are not allowed by James, who avoids disclosure through omission. Nevertheless, it becomes obvious that the ghost will not rest until his wife, and not Withermore, stops. The most catalytic haunting, of the wife by the husband, is never narrated, but reducing her to an “unutterable vision of Ashton Doyne’s wife” (RRT, 431), it accomplishes the displacement of the female will by the male. The story ends with her words, “I give up” (RRT, 431), which confirm once again her irrelevance to his life and to his death: “[My husband] won’t take from me . . . anything,” she says regretfully, leading the third-person narrator to call her “poor Mrs. Doyne” (RRT, 429). In these stories, therefore, women evoke the supernatural because their agency has been repressed. Repressed knowledge or anxieties, according


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to Freud, may have a haunting effect often conjuring uncanny sensations when they start resurfacing. Because of their indeterminate and marginal role in society or even in marriage, the women here return or try to return with a vengeance; and despite their minor roles, they threaten to disturb the patriarchal stability. The stories, in other words, present us with a case where the uncanniness is produced by the unfamiliar function of women in the home. James’s story “The Third Person” (1900) similarly creates mystery not so much out of the male ghost but out of the hovering presence of two women whose relationship supplies the story with suspense and uncertainty. The style of indirectness, allusion, and absence is used to represent the interaction between two spinsters, who, at a late stage in life, find themselves sharing a house and who consistently avoid disclosing secret knowledge to each other. While the male ghost produces no suspense or fear, the women are described pausing and lingering, “like soundless apparitions, in corners, doorways, passages, and sometimes [they] suddenly met, in these experiments with a suppressed start and a mute confession.”31 The muteness once again is the result of the ambiguity of their position, as they have found themselves enclosed in a remote house, yet with aspirations of the public sphere: the one with dreams of a flourishing social life in “foreign pensions” (TP, 257–58) and the other with anonymous literary publications and a “showy” appearance in her youth (TP, 255). Finally the mystery is resolved with both women extravagantly taking up traditionally male roles in the marketplace, the one attempting to pay off the Chancellor of the Exchequer in order to buy the dead man a conscience, and the other smuggling a forbidden book back from Paris. The latter’s daring role of smuggler, which apparently has been imposed by the ghost, suggests the permeability of the home by external forces and the dissolution of boundaries between private and public sphere, domestic and economic activity. Even stories not categorized as supernatural, such as “The Author of Beltraffio,” exude with Gothicism in their representation of women with indecipherable motives and unexplained behavior. In this story, Mark Ambient’s sister, who is described as the modern type in the sense that she has social facility, is depicted as a witch with her “mystical robes,” “necromantic glances and strange intuitions.”32 Like the fin-de-siècle artists, the excessively aesthetic narrator endows her with medieval mystery and powers of self-transformation suggestive of her ambiguous position between publicity and domesticity. Similarly, Ambient’s wife is allotted almost supernatural powers: first of possession, as she tries to possess her son, unnaturally and forcefully controlling his every move; and second of exorcism, as she tries to drive the spirit of decadence out of the ill-struck


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boy. Both women go against the domestic ideal assumed, in the beginning, to exist in the Ambient household, and exert an uncanny power over the male characters. As Viola Hopkins Winner observes, Ambient “has abdicated familial responsibility and authority,” succumbing to the forceful will of his wife, which is expressed not through explicit violence, but through silent gazes.33 The latter finally performs the most extreme undomestic act of sacrificing her son, rather than herself, on the altar of morality. Mrs. Ambient objects to her son being subjected to the decadence or immorality of her husband’s writings and manages to kill him by doing nothing that could have alleviated his illness. Transgressing from the usual domestic role of woman as care provider, these characters, even though they do not enter the public sphere, become threatening and uncanny. The supernatural, then, becomes a means of expressing the precarious function of the home in which women no longer regulate their desire nor cater for their husband’s or father’s needs. But while they dare to challenge the male protagonists’ will, they are often victimized or shown as elusive and “unutterable” (RRT, 431) at the same time, hovering perilously in an in-between space that defies divisions between the seen and the unseen, the real and the ghostly, and which hosts a subjectivity in transience. Notes 1. See Marcia Jacobson, Henry James and the Mass Market (University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1983); Michael Anesko, “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Ian F. Bell, Henry James and the Past: Readings into Time (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); Richard Salmon, Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Anna Despotopoulou, “Penetrating the Vitrine: Henry James and the Challenge of Publicity,” English Language Notes 39 (2002): 39–59. 2. Alison Booth, “The Real Right Place of Henry James: Homes and Haunts,” The Henry James Review 25 (2004): 216–27 (225). 3. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Cities and Society: The Revised Reader in Urban Sociology, ed. Paul K. Hatt and Albert J. Reiss Jr. (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1951), 635–46 (635). See also Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 4. Consider, for example, Merton Densher, who deplores the merging of public and private and often criticizes the “false gods” of the marketplace which have dominated even the private sphere. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902) 1: 88.


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5. Victoria Coulson, Henry James: Women and Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 8; see also Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 6. Coulson, Women, 8. 7. Chris Foss, “Female Innocence as Other in The Portrait of a Lady and What Maisie Knew: Reassessing the Feminist Recuperation of Henry James,” Essays in Literature 22 (1995): 253–68 (253). 8. Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 155. 9. John Ruskin, “Of Queens’ Gardens,” in Sesame and Lilies, ed. G. E. Hollingworth (London: Clive, 1932), 50–82 (62); Chase and Levenson, Spectacle, 14. 10. Beth Newman, Subjects on Display: Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian Femininity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 1–2. 11. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001), 929–52 (931). 12. Ibid., 933. 13. Ibid., 934. 14. John Fletcher, “The Haunted Closet: Henry James’s Queer Spectrality,” Textual Practice 14 (2000): 53–80 (59). 15. Neill Matheson, “Talking Horrors: James, Euphemism, and the Specter of Wilde,” American Literature 71 (1999): 709–50 (719). 16. Fletcher, “Haunted Closet,” 59. 17. Through an extensive analysis of texts and Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Nina Auerbach brilliantly shows how “demonic iconography became predominantly female” in late Victorian society (74). Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) 74. 18. Helena Michie, The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 7. 19. Henry James, “The Ghostly Rental,” in Complete Stories 1874–1884 (New York: Library of America, 1999), 157–190 (158) (emphasis added) (hereafter cited in text as GR). 20. See Srdjan Smajic, “The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story,” ELH 70 (2003): 1107–35, where, through an examination of various medical and philosophical texts, he discusses the Victorian friction between Enlightenment’s “imperative for absolute scientific objectivity” and many nineteenth-century studies’ “foregrounding [of ] the subjective nature of sensory perception, especially sight, and the ensuing uncertainties of all knowledge derived from empirical investigation” (1114). 21. See Sheri Weinstein, “Possessive Matters in ‘The Ghostly Rental,’” The Henry James Review 21 (2000): 270–78. Weinstein argues that the story “eliminates the tenuous relationship between ghosts and materiality by resorting to an age-old trope of unveiling those women who are mysterious and incalculable” (277).


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22. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 141. 23. Ibid., 142. 24. Ronald Schleifer, “The Trap of the Imagination: The Gothic Tradition, Fiction and The Turn of the Screw,” in The Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew: New Casebooks, ed. Neil Cornwell and Maggie Malone (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 19–41 (20). 25. Ibid., 19–20. 26. Ibid., 27. 27. Pre-Raphaelite paintings, as Nina Auerbach has shown in Woman and the Demon, suggest this ambiguous role of angel and demon, as woman is envisaged as a creature of metamorphic potentials, embodying mysterious powers. 28. Henry James, “The Real Right Thing,” in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 17 (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), 411–431 (411) (hereafter cited in text as RRT). 29. Freud, “Uncanny,” 941. 30. Ibid., 946. 31. Henry James, “The Third Person,” in Henry James: Complete Stories 1898–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1996), 255–286, (272) (hereafter cited in text as TP). 32. Henry James, “The Author of Beltraffio,” in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 16 (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), 1–74 (68). 33. Viola Hopkins Winner, “The Artist and the Man in ‘The Author of Beltraffio,’” PMLA 83 (1968): 102–8 (108).


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CHAPTER 5

John Marcher’s Uncanny Unmanning in “The Beast in the Jungle” Kathy Justice Gentile

The disquieting effects of Henry James’s literary supernaturalism in “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) can be suggestively teased out by considering the relation of the psychological and aesthetic concept of the uncanny to John Marcher’s quest to resolve his problematic masculinity. In the eyes of the world, Marcher wishes to pass as “a man like another,”1 yet in his imagination, he is “a man [un]like another,” unique in his terrific destiny. According to James’s preface to the New York edition, John Marcher is “another poor, sensitive gentleman,”2 a man whose “superstitious soul”3 apprehensively prefigures a fate of heroic and/or tragic dimensions, if he can only maintain the vigilant spirit that such an extraordinary encounter demands. Approaching Marcher’s quest for heroic masculinity through Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic investigation of the uncanny, along with Tzevtan Todorov’s concept of the literary uncanny, draws readers into a close encounter with James’s anxious, ambivalent relationship to supernaturalism. Along with James’s other “poor, sensitive gentlem[e]n,” John Marcher exhibits a disturbing ambivalence toward his own masculinity. According to Kelly Cannon, “James unsettles rather than appeases the reader’s longing for conventional manhood,”4 and Leland Person notes that James’s explorations of alternative masculinities “result . . . in a state of suspense in which male identity, configured in terms of gender and sexuality, remains fluid.”5 In “The Beast in the Jungle” Marcher’s quest for manhood is couched as “an elaborated fantasy,” another of James’s “be careful what


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you wish for” supernatural fairy tales.6 In effect, the tale supernaturalizes and critiques a mythology of masculinity. As anthropologists have shown, the acquisition of masculinity entails an arduous initiation process. Timothy Beneke notes that manhood is referred to as the “Big Impossible” by a Native American tribe, the Fox of Iowa, because it is conceived as a difficult and unrealistic achievement.7 Throughout the narrative of his continually deferred expectation, Marcher seeks the transfiguring experience that will elevate him above the common run of men to the realm of those chosen by the gods or fate, akin to the enlightenment or apotheosis that constitutes the culminating scenes of a Greek tragedy. He postpones living or, more accurately, he eschews emotional commitment and decisive action as he anxiously awaits the supernatural enhancement that will justify his unsettled, unproductive existence. As fitting compensation for his sacrifice, at the uncanny conclusion of “his great negative adventure,”8 he finally succeeds in proving to himself and the reader that indeed he is not “a man like another.” Although James terms “Beast” a “fantasy,” and the narrator indicates that John Marcher’s vision of the beast at the end of the tale is a “hallucination,” most critics are not inclined to include it with James’s other supernatural tales. Richard Hocks deems it “quasi-supernatural,” along with “The Jolly Corner.”9 Todorov has schematized the categories of “explained supernatural” and “unexplained supernatural,” used by Romantic critics in the early nineteenth century, to distinguish Anne Radcliffe’s gothic novels, where all the mysteries are finally dissipated by reason, and the gothic novels of male writers such as Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis, who present the supernatural horrors in The Castle of Otranto (1764) and The Monk (1796) as fictional realities.10 Using Todorov’s schema, one could argue that most Jamesian texts can be charted on a “reality”-supernatural continuum ranging from an occasional outbreak of the uncanny in an otherwise empirically grounded fictional world to explicitly supernatural fictions inhabited by the predatory spirits of physically departed characters. At the supernaturally uninflected end of this continuum, one might place a novel such as The Ambassadors, in which Lambert Strether finally confronts the reality of Chad Newsome’s relationship with Madame de Vionnet in his uncanny encounter on the river with their romantic intimacy.11 Although “The Beast in the Jungle” stands closer to The Ambassadors than to The Turn of the Screw, which I would argue belongs at the supernatural or marvelous end of the continuum, John Marcher’s “superstitious soul” distinguishes him from Strether’s “poor, sensitive gentleman.” A careful comparison of the texts


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also suggests that the language of haunting, fantasy, and make-believe is proportionally more pervasive in “Beast” than in The Ambassadors. The supernatural presence in “The Beast in the Jungle” emanates from John Marcher’s “superstitious soul,” which anticipates an encounter that Todorov would project as an initially fantastic experience that would likely dissipate into uncanniness if Marcher recognizes that the beast is not otherworldly but a psychological and/or corporeal entity. However, if we go beyond Todorov’s somewhat formulaic concept of the fantastic and uncanny, the long-awaited visitant that Marcher invests with supernatural power and metaphorically visualizes as a beast in the jungle can also be apprehended as James’s prefiguration of the concept of the uncanny that Freud analyzed in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny.” Freud defines the uncanny as “nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it through the process of repression.”12 Uncanniness arises from a perceiver’s acute, supernaturalized anxiety in response to an unexpected and threatening occurrence. In an uncanny experience, an individual’s sudden, disorienting perception is accompanied by an illuminating reminder of one’s buried past, abruptly summoned by a unique configuration of events and feelings that excavate the demonized and repressed memory into the light of the present moment. Since the uncanny marks the destabilizing eruption of repressed fears and desires into everyday life, the possibility of such an event occurring in Marcher’s sterile existence is remote because he is a man without felt memories, even while believing that he is “haunted.” Strangely, the reader learns nothing of Marcher’s past, except for his dim recall of his first meeting with May Bartram, which he misremembers as taking place in Rome rather than at an excavation in Pompeii. Ironically then—because Marcher’s mind is not haunted, not peopled by the spectral presence of others—he is unlikely to experience the event for which he sees himself as destined. Freud suggests that a regression to the animistic belief that external events correspond to one’s fears and wishes stems from the “overaccentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality,”13 a fair assessment of John Marcher’s ongoing state of mind. Freud’s theory of animism derives from his predecessor Ernst Jentsch and his concept of “ensoulment,” that is, projecting our own ensoulment to other entities in our environment to provide a sense of security in that environment.14 By working to preserve a sense of security and self-importance through a kind of pathetic fallacy of personalizing perceived external threats so as to render them less alien and more apprehensible, one can familiar-


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ize the unfamiliar and domesticate an otherwise inexplicably threatening universe.15 Unlike most of us, Marcher courts the onslaught of the unfamiliar or terrible, but in doing so, he ascribes the recognizable figure of a beast to the lurking uncanny. Marcher casts his existence as one of obsessive expectation and dread, as a prelude to a great uncanny experience, the everpending challenge that will prove or disprove his masculinity once and for all. He lives in a perpetual state of supernaturalized anxiety, realizing at one point that his life has become “the simplification of everything but the state of suspense” (BJ, 87). In his later work on anxiety, Freud suggests that adult anxiety stems from original anxieties, which were repressed and later recurred: anxiety may exhibit itself in physiological symptoms but “is also a reproduction of an earlier experience that contained the conditions for excitation.”16 As I argue in “Anxious Supernaturalism: An Analytic of the Uncanny,” as a sensation of being threatened by external or internal forces, anxiety invariably engages a supernaturalizing process of imagining and/or familiarizing what one dreads. Just as supernaturalism invariably cloaks an uncanny experience, the supernatural enhancement of an unsettling situation is provoked by the surfacing of repressed fears that coalesce into anxiety.17 In his analysis of compulsory masculinity, Beneke argues that overt expressions of masculinity may be defensive reactions against the anxiety generated by a man’s forbidden desire to regress to an infantile closeness and identification with the mother.18 In beating back this forbidden desire, which would expose him as vulnerable and feminine, through compulsory performances of masculinity, an individual male engages in a fantasy process that assuages his anxiety by projecting as a necessary but ultimately unattainable goal the man he feels compelled to become. Although Marcher declares to May that anxiety accompanies his everyday living, we do not learn anything about the original “conditions for excitation,” even though a necessary condition of being “haunted” is that unquiet ghosts from a troubled past stalk one’s present consciousness. However, the text of Marcher’s “haunted” consciousness is undisturbed by maternal, paternal, or any other ghosts; Marcher’s early life is a blank page that is never inscribed for the reader. All we learn of his life before the story’s opening meeting with May at Weatherend are his impaired recollections of his first meeting with May a decade earlier and her subsequent revision of his speculations: “He accepted her amendments, he enjoyed her corrections, though the moral of them was, she pointed out, that he really didn’t remember the least thing about her” (BJ, 65). He wishes he could recall himself as her rescuer, fancying that he could


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have saved May from drowning or recovered her “dressing bag” from a stiletto-wielding bandit, or alternatively, that she might have rescued him, perhaps by nursing him back to health from a dangerous fever, casting himself in stereotypically masculine roles of physical heroism or stoic suffering in the face of a life-threatening illness. As James points out in a notebook entry, May comes to function as Marcher’s “2d consciousness . . . who helps him to see.”19 That is, she comes to function as the unconscious that he so diligently represses during all his years with her. Yet only after her death does she help him to see beyond his willful blindness when she becomes part of his past and haunts him with the riddle of what has already happened to him. During her life, May’s interest and attention serve as proofs of Marcher’s manhood in that she doesn’t ridicule his extraordinary pretensions. As he quickly recognizes, “If she didn’t take the sarcastic view she clearly took the sympathetic, and that was what he had had, in all the long time, from no one whomsoever” (BJ, 70). Because May doesn’t express the judgmental societal views that might severely undermine Marcher’s confidence in his masculinist aspirations, her understanding and sympathy validate his quest and assuage his fears of being ridiculed as a sissy or a coward.20 When May prods him to recall the extraordinary confession he made to her all those years ago, he momentarily fears that he may have made “some imbecile ‘offer,’” suggesting that he had made such offers to other women. Along with his claim to May that he has been in love, the recollection of “imbecile” proposals indicates that he is, or was, capable of sexual and romantic feelings for women. Yet he also exempts May from the kind of women who might make him lose his head. Whether he exempts her out of respect for her as the better sort of woman or because he does not find her sexually attractive or both, he never bothers to clarify. Certainly, at least until after May’s death, the narrative voice reveals no sign of his physical desire for her or for any other human being. Thus all we learn of his past is his forgetting, or repression, of past experiences. As Millicent Bell has pointed out, Marcher’s “mysterious obsession is itself without an accessible beginning . . . The character of Marcher has no ‘unconscious,’ no hidden self-hood.”21 He has been haunted by this sensation for as long back as he can remember, suggesting that he has repressed the conditions that instigated his haunting. So focused is he on the future and his condition of perpetual watchfulness that he has effectively cut himself off from the life he has already lived. In order to alertly attend to his state of suspense, he must actively engage in a continual process of forgetfulness and repression, a repression so successful that neither Marcher nor the narrator ever excavates a memory


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that might account for his perpetual anxiety. If, as Freud has suggested, an uncanny experience marks the “return of the repressed,” then the great irony in Marcher’s quest is that his refusal to be haunted by the past continually undermines his ability to encounter the uncanny. While he delights in conceiving of himself as a “man of courage” and a “man of feeling” who “didn’t cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tigerhunt” (BJ, 79), his stubborn amnesia effectively sabotages any possibility that he will ever have to test himself or confront the tiger. To rework an idea from Simone de Beauvoir, a male child is not born a man, he becomes one.22 More so than femininity, masculinity must be proven. As Elisabeth Badinter has noted, a boy, unlike a girl, cannot irrevocably prove his gender through bodily development (i.e., through the onset of menstruation or the act of giving birth).23 Yet society, family, peers, and other institutions pressure him to provide recognizable signs to the world and himself that he is masculine and not feminine or “queer.” In both less-developed cultures and industrialized Western societies, boys become men through codified performances of physical and sexual prowess. As David Gilmore has observed, in cultures throughout the world, young males are compelled to undergo initiations that require endurance of physical distress.24 If a young male is unable to publicly demonstrate stoicism in the face of suffering, then he needs to show that he is stoical, capable, and brave by other means. Through his public work John Marcher may convey quiet competence but little else in the way of mastery or prowess, especially since he sees his public duties as “a long act of dissimulation . . . the forms he went through—those of his little office under Government, those of caring for his modest patrimony, for his library, for his garden in the country, for the people in London whose invitations he accepted and repaid” (BJ, 82). His compensation for his tepid, detached public and private performances is that May, knowing him as she does, also “understand[s] how much, with a lighter weight on his spirit, he might have done, and thereby establish how, clever as he was, he fell short” (BJ, 82). At the same time Marcher strives for public acceptance of the role he simulates for society, he longs to believe that he is another man entirely, a man with special, secret powers, powers recognized only by himself and his supportive shadow, May. Several years into their relationship, on May’s birthday, John Marcher presents her with a “fine” trinket, “one of his proofs to himself that he hadn’t sunk into real selfishness.” May clearly sees the gift not as a token of sincere affection but as mere “proof,” remarking, “What’s the most inveterate mark of men in general? Why the capacity to spend endless time with dull women” and then goes on to designate herself as “your dull


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woman . . . That covers your tracks more than anything” (BJ, 84). His “dull woman” and outwardly uneventful life shield his undercover quest from the eyes of the world. While Marcher is appreciative of her attention and companionship as evidence of his manliness in the eyes of society, he also sets himself above “the stupid world” (BJ, 82), which fails to perceive that he is a man unlike any other, a man marked out for a strange, unique distinction. He is proving himself invisibly, as it were, by hoodwinking conventional society into believing that he is one of them, all the while his true, inner self is moving in a radically different direction—or so he imagines. However, James, through May, mocks not only traditional conceptions of masculinity, but more specifically, Marcher’s pathetic desire for some kind of compensatory grandiose manliness. When May prods him to further analyze the mysterious object of his fear, he reflects on his long relationship to the beast and asks May to recognize that he is “not afraid now” (BJ, 87). Aware that it is an intimate relationship with her that he fears, May provides the ironic indulgence that he gratefully accepts at face value. She comments, “Considering what the danger is . . . I’m bound to say I don’t think your attitude could well be surpassed.” John Marcher faintly smiled. “It’s heroic?” “Certainly—call it that.” It was what he would have liked indeed to call it. “I am then a man of courage?” “That’s what you were to show me.” (BJ, 88)

Marcher seems to be asking for May’s affirmation that his long-term obsession with his strange fate proves that he is brave and worthy. He wants acknowledgment that by keeping himself “geared for battle” through his vigilant attention he is proving his masculinity. Instead, Marcher’s long vigil of waiting for the spring of the “Beast,” which he dissimulates to the world by keeping up appearances with May, suggests that the “suspense of masculinity,” the anxiety of proving oneself, is a process of perpetual deferment. A man has to prove his masculinity over and over again; he is never secured from the suspicion that he may not be a real man, after all. That masculinity is elusive and is never able to be proven once and for all again suggests that the concept of masculinity is a specter, an illusion of coherent identity and worth, a supernaturalized projection of an idealized, conquering manhood. As feminist scholars have observed, Freud projected his masculine model of the Oedipus complex onto girls and women after his rejection of the seduction theory.25 The Oedipal-castration complex, which


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undergirds the whole superstructure of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, may itself be something of a superstitious projection, the erection of a male bogeyman who corresponds to male insecurities stemming from the father’s power and the perception of the mother’s physical lack. Perhaps Freud fell prey to the human weakness that he so famously diagnosed: projection of one’s fears and desires onto others and onto an alien world that threatens one’s security. In attributing penis envy and other phallocentric complexes to females, he may have been reverting to animistic instincts in attempting to account for the female psychological development that was beyond his firsthand experience.26 When May’s health precipitously fails, Marcher’s façade of manhood that depended on his relationship with her also crumbles. He finds that he has no rights in the sickroom or in the funeral arrangements: “A woman might have been, as it were, everything to him, and it might yet present him in no connexion that any one seemed held to recognize” (BJ, 115). Significantly, he feels bereft of the social recognition that May’s attentions seemed to confer upon him and laments that he can neither claim the status of a relative or the sympathy conferred upon a public mourner nor definitively prove their intimacy to a world that seems to honor only formally proclaimed heterosexual unions: “[H]e seemed to feel himself unattended—and for a reason he couldn’t seize—by the distinction, the dignity, the propriety, if nothing else, of the man markedly bereaved. It was as if in the view of society he had not been markedly bereaved, as if there still failed some sign or proof of it, and as if none the less his character could never be affirmed nor the deficiency ever made up” (BJ, 115). Because of Marcher’s failure to act or commit, his relationship with May never acquires recognized status in the eyes of the world because Marcher never solemnized the central relationship in his life through an engagement, marriage, the sharing of a domicile, or even a declaration of love. The acute lack Marcher feels with May’s dying and death becomes the salient fact of his postmortem reflections, shunting to the background his obsession to seek out the strange fate that supposedly awaits him. With the extinction of the woman who shared his vigil comes “the extinction in his life of the element of suspense.” The terrain of his consciousness seems forever altered “now that the Jungle had been threshed to vacancy and . . . the Beast had stolen away” (BJ, 116). Ironically, in losing “the element of suspense” that has been the hallmark of his existence, his “superstitious soul” dwindles into prosaic rumination. He is certain that “what was to happen had so absolutely and finally happened that he was as little able to know a fear for his future as to know a hope . . . He was to live entirely with the other question, that


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of his unidentified past, that of his having to see his fortune impenetrably muffled and masked” (BJ, 117). On one level, Marcher seems to recognize that his life has been one of blindness to the very events and experiences that might have illuminated him about his strange fate. His past is “unidentified” because he has invested a lifetime of psychic energy in pushing aside, repressing, relegating to his unconscious what should have been an ongoing attentive awareness of others and his relationships with them, particularly with the principal person in his life, May. He refocuses his attention on trying to decipher the clues that she held out to him, particularly in their penultimate interview, when he stood stoically befuddled before her final loving invitation for a closer relationship. In their last interview, she tells him, “[Y]our not being aware of it is the strangeness in the strangeness” (BJ, 110). In posing this riddle, she becomes the “sibyl” whose death turns his obsession away from the future back to the past. In one of his final declarations to her, he proclaimed his stubborn incomprehension: “I can’t begin to pretend I understand. Nothing, for me, is past; nothing will pass till I pass myself ” (BJ, 113). Although his reference to passing himself was apparently intended as a reference to his death, it also suggests that he will never arrive on the side of illumination unless he can go beyond his egoistic preoccupations. Unfortunately, his reversal, his new mission to “excavate” the “lost stuff of consciousness” remains stuck in a narcissistic gear that keeps him circling round the woman who nurtured for so many years Marcher’s grandiose obsession. At the same time, she challenged him to confront the enigma of his narcissism. He hunts “the lost stuff . . . as a strayed or stolen child to an unappeasable father; he hunted it up and down very much as if he were knocking at doors and enquiring of the police” (BJ, 117–8). James’s language suggests that Marcher may be hard at work excavating his past, in particular the childhood and father that he never before gave any indication of owning. Again, however, whatever memories he might unearth are not manifested in any new consciousness that the narrator shares with the reader. Instead, after his desultory travels to the Far East, he returns to May’s grave as the literal and figurative touchstone and monument to his past and the greater glory that he and May had imagined for himself. One outof-body fantasy sparked by his regular visits to her tomb is symptomatic of his continuing befuddlement: “[H]e seemed to wander through the old years with his hand in the arm of a companion who was, in the most extraordinary manner, his other, his younger self; and to wander, which was more extraordinary yet, round and round a third presence—not wandering she, but stationary, still, whose eyes, turning with his revolution,


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never ceased to follow him, and whose seat was his point, so to speak, of orientation” (BJ, 121). In retrospect, Marcher conceives of May as the ceaselessly sympathetic center from which his quest radiates. His attention seems to have been wrenched away from speculative beasts lurking in the shadows of a labyrinthine future to consoling fantasies about the past of imagined glory that he seemed to live primarily or exclusively in relation to the flattering feminine attention that he so long took for granted. Yet he also recognizes that the open door leading away from his eccentrically cultivated solipsism has closed forever with the close of May’s life and the cold, alien stone that marks May’s grave symbolizes a door that appears to be forever shut: “[I]f the face of the tomb did become a face for him it was because her two names became a pair of eyes that didn’t know him” (BJ, 118). His penance for failing to take advantage of those possibilities she once held open to him is to ponder stupidly on his own imperceptiveness. Any opportunity of proving manhood appears to have slipped away with May’s life. Just as he failed to remember the site of his first meeting with May—at the mass grave of a civilization that once represented the glory of Pompeii—at the end of their physical association, he fails to find the necessary tools to excavate and resuscitate the spirit of the woman who lies moldering beneath the tomb. The stone that marks her grave is “all that was left to him for proof or pride” (BJ, 119) that he once was regarded as a man of distinction. In his reflections, however, he is moved to compare himself unfavorably to “certain little old men” he encountered during his wanderings in the East, amazedly hearing from others that these broken-down old men “had in their time fought twenty duels or been loved by ten princesses. They indeed had been wondrous for others while he was but wondrous for himself ” (BJ, 120). The lesson that his life has been one of inaction is finally brought home when on another visit to May’s grave he is unexpectedly brought face to face with a man whose expression and manner unmistakably convey to Marcher a feeling of lost love and deepest bereavement. This visible proof of a life fully lived and of passion fully felt kindles the awareness in the heretofore insensible Marcher that his life has proved nothing, except his own folly and futility. This kindled awareness flares into the bright, hollow illumination that his obliviousness to May’s love and his perverse inability to return that love is the final proof of his overweening impotence, that “he had been the man of his time, the man to whom nothing on earth was to have happened” (BJ, 125)—nothing except the encounter with the uncanny that for so many years he was unable to summon. In his notebook entry on “Beast,” James comments,


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“With his base safety and shrinkage he never knew,”27 a comment that provides a vivid image of a timid, impotent individual with delusional aspirations to heroic manhood. Having been so long engaged in burying the past as well as suppressing an engaged sensitivity to the emotional present in order to anticipate his strange fate, Marcher unwittingly sabotaged any possibility of unearthing the memories that spurred his flight away from his past. After May’s death, his objectless attention turns regretfully to his forgotten and neglected past; and in believing that the beast that has stalked him has stolen away, he ironically lays the groundwork and creates the conditions for the beast to spring out at last. His perverse inability to guess the answer to the riddle of his life that he himself posited through his compulsive deferring of self-recognition redounds on him with uncanny ferocity as the hallucinated beast rises from the tomb to settle on him the dark illumination of his willful blindness and wasted life. But instead of confronting the beast of recognition and proving his manhood by grappling heroically with his folly, in the final cowardly act that defines his character, he turns from the revivified tiger spirit of repression, excavated at last, to a desperate embrace of the cold, hard stone of May’s tomb and the silent corpse that lies beneath it. Rather than standing firm and fighting like a man, so to speak, Marcher quails in his supernaturalized confrontation with his long-repressed fears and desires and, in effect, embraces the death of his spirit. Despite and because of the horror of his end, Marcher ironically succeeds in his lifelong quest. His long wait culminates in a life-altering uncanny experience, but the secrets of his past that fueled his perpetual anxiety never come to light. We never learn whether he has been fleeing unsanctioned homosexual desires, as Eve Sedgwick has proposed,28 dread and desire for the female sexuality he spurned for long in the person of May, or whether the beast represents an overpowering vision of the castrating father and May (in her tomb) the castrated mother that he chooses to embrace at last. James’s multivalent text suggests all of these interpretations as well as a variety of other readings elucidated by generations of critics at the same time that it carefully conceals or represses the originary experiences or feelings that spurred John Marcher’s deluded quest for some kind of compensatory heroism. As readers, we never satisfactorily recover “the lost stuff of [un]consciousness” (BJ, 117). The text and its beast also serve as an astringent critique of masculinity, particularly the extreme stereotype of the man of action as big game hunter. The snarling, predatory, and destructive beast of masculinity also foreshadows the “successful” American male or “awful beast”29 that

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frightens Spencer Brydon into a faint in “The Jolly Corner,” the brutish, disfigured semblance of humanity who surprises him in his stalking of the past. As for John Marcher, in pursuing a vision of extreme masculinity, rather than accepting the man he is, with an occupation, an inheritance, a country garden, a library, and the love of a very understanding woman, he ultimately unmans himself through his emotional and physical cowardice. Although James skewers Marcher’s pretensions to a supernaturally enhanced manhood, as we see in “The Jolly Corner,” The Turn of the Screw, and other of his supernatural tales, empirically inexplicable events and phenomena can and do invade the world of the living in James’s vast and inclusive house of fiction. After the heyday of the spiritualist movement and the composition of “The Beast in the Jungle,” James addresses his attitudes toward the supernatural in “Is there a Life after Death?” (1910). As I earlier suggested, while Freud dedicated his life to uncovering rational explanations for psychological symptoms, he, nevertheless, may have engaged in a measure of supernatural projection by sanctifying the Oedipus complex as the foundation of neuroses for both men and women. Unlike Freud, James did not disavow all faith in the supernatural. While he expressed skepticism about many of the spirit manifestations investigated by the Society for Psychical Research, he appeared to support a conception of the infinite variability and extension of consciousness after death.30 In his essay, he seems to declare his refusal to accept that life should come to nothing in the end: Yes, I shall have them [the sense and the vision of existence] exactly for the space of time during which the question of my appetite for what they represent may clear itself up. The complete privation, as a more or less prompt sequel to that clearance, is worthy but of the wit of a sniggering little boy who makes his dog jump at a morsel only to whisk it away; a practical joke of the lowest description, with the execrable taste of which I decline to charge our prime originator.31

James seems to be unable to abide the idea that his “desire” for an infinite extension of consciousness is a foolish illusion of the living, a joke perpetuated on unwittingly pathetic humans by the universe or by “our prime originator.” He underscores his defiance of inevitable nullity with the oft-quoted conclusion of his essay: I like to think it open to me to establish speculative and imaginative connections, to take up conceived presumptions and pledges, that have for me all the air of not being decently able to escape redeeming themselves. And when once such a mental relation to the question as that begins to hover


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and settle, who shall say over what fields of experience, past and current, and what immensities of perception and yearning, it shall not spread the protection of its wings? No, no, no—I reach beyond the laboratory-brain. (LAD, 127)

James’s defiance of the possibility of cosmic cunning or a brutally terminal mortality can be seen as a more emphatic restatement of John Marcher’s urgent desire as his certainty about his fate begins to crumble “that he shouldn’t have been ‘sold’” (BJ, 97). As it turns out for James’s protagonist, he summons enough frustrated desire to hallucinate the beastly embodiment of ephemeral masculinity so that his supernatural premonitions are fulfilled at last. However, both he and the reader recognize that, ultimately, the joke is of his own witless making; or rather, the joke is made and finally ironically turned by his “prime originator.” Notes 1. Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle,” in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 17 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 61–127 (92), cited hereafter in text as BJ. 2. Henry James, Preface, The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 17, v–xxix (ix). 3. Ibid., x. 4. Kelly Cannon, Henry James and Masculinity: The Man at the Margins (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 1. 5. Leland Person, Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 34–35. 6. Henry James, Preface, “The Altar of the Dead,” ix. In his preface to “The Altar of the Dead,” “The Beast in the Jungle,” and other tales, James contends that “the ‘ghost-story,’ as we for convenience call it, has ever been for me the most possible form of the fairy-tale” (xvii). If fairy tales are wish-fulfillments, then James’s “ghost” tales—such as “Beast,” “The Jolly Corner,” and The Turn of the Screw—satisfy the obsessive wishes of the protagonists in ways they could not possibly have foreseen in James’s supernaturalized versions of fairy tales for adults. 7. Timothy Beneke, Proving Manhood: Reflections on Men and Sexism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 46–47. The Fox is a nonviolent tribe whose male members are driven to prove their manhood through attainment of material wealth and leadership positions in the tribe. However, among the Sembia of New Guinea, boys must undergo violent rites of passage by submitting to severe beatings by their elders. Socially prescribed rituals for attaining masculinity vary from culture to culture. They not only demonstrate masculinity’s arbitrary lineaments but also show that in most societies throughout the world, boys and men are subject to considerable institutional pressures to distinguish themselves as men. Many of Beneke’s examples are taken from David Gilmore,


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8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.


Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Henry James, Preface, x. Richard Hocks, Henry James: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990), 91. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973). See pages 41–57. See Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 32–33. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 217–56 (241). Freud, “The Uncanny,” 244. Ernst Jentsch, “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen,” Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift, 22–23 (1906): 195–98, 203–5, translated for me by Steven Rowan as “On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” See Kathy Justice Gentile, “Anxious Supernaturalism: An Analytic of the Uncanny,” Gothic Studies 2, no. 1 (2000): 23–38 (24–25). Gentile, “Anxious Supernaturalism,” 26. Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” in New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, Standard Edition, vol. 22 (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 1–182 (62). Gentile, “Anxious Supernaturalism,” 28–9. Beneke, Proving Manhood, 59. Henry James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 199. In Gender, Fantasy and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), Alfred Habegger argues that as a boy James failed to negotiate the developmental steps that would initiate him into manhood and his literary representations of masculinity reflect his “humiliating anguish at his failure ever to become a proper man” (267). Habegger finds James’s fictions woefully inadequate as examples of American realism because James fails to create characters that represent Habegger’s conception of proper American masculinity. According to Habegger, James’s fiction provides escapism for elitist sissy men and is, in effect, “highbrow fantasy masquerading as realism” (295). Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 269. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Random House, 1989), 267. Elisabeth Badinter, XY: On Masculine Identity, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 1–2. David Gilmore, Manhood in the Making, cited in Beneke, Proving Manhood, 44. Before Freud published his theories on the Oedipus complex, he had first proposed that many of his female patients suffered from the effects of childhood


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26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.


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sexual abuse, often by their fathers. Partly in response to the outcry by the male medical and psychiatric profession, he abandoned the seduction theory for a model that cast most childhood sexual memories as fantasy and wishfulfillment. For examples of feminist critiques of Freud, see Jane Marie Todd, “The Veiled Woman in Freud’s Das Unheimliche,” Signs 1 (1986): 518–30; Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); and Robin Lydenberg, “Freud’s Uncanny Narratives,” PMLA 112, no. 5 (1997): 1072–86. Gentile, “Anxious Supernaturalism,” 28. James, Notebooks, 199. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Beast in the Closet,” in The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 200–12. Henry James, “The Jolly Corner,” in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 17 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 435–85 (482). We know that James’s father and brother were involved with investigations of psychical phenomena, with William having served as a member from 1884 and later president for the English Society for Psychical Research during 1894– 96. We also know that Henry Jr., attended at least one meeting of the society in 1890 and was knowledgeable about psychical research and the spiritualist movement. See Peter G. Beidler, Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James: “The Turn of the Screw” at the Turn of the Century (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 38. James’s biographer, Sheldon M. Novick, suggests that James believed that the personality persisted after death, based on findings of the Society for Psychical Research that some reported telepathic communications could not be explained by empirical evidence. See Sheldon Novick, Henry James: The Mature Master (New York: Random House, 2007), 458. Henry James, “Is there a Life after Death?,” in Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene, ed. Pierre Walker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 115–27 (119–20), cited hereafter in text as LAD.

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CHAPTER 6

Homospectrality in Henry James’s Ghost Stories Diane Long Hoeveler

The gothic, the spectral, or the ghostly have recently emerged as central subjects in a number of critical studies of Henry James’s short tales. In fact, J. Hillis Miller has gone so far as to claim that “1) All James’s stories and novels are ghost stories, [and] 2) the ghost stories proper are really, obliquely, about the act of literature.”1 But the ghost stories are, in my opinion, much more about acts of concealment, obfuscation, and the contortions that occur during the process of making absent that which the psyche most desires. In fact, it would be more accurate to observe that most of James’s ghost tales take their cue from the central claim made in Terry Castle’s influential work The Apparitional Lesbian: The literary history of lesbianism . . . is first of all a history of derealization . . . in nearly all the art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, lesbianism or its possibility, can only be represented to the degree that it is simultaneously “derealized,” through a blanching authorial infusion of spectral metaphors . . . One woman or the other must be a ghost or on the way to becoming one. Passion is excited only to be obscured, disembodied, decarnalized. The vision is inevitably waved off. Panic seems to underwrite these obsessional spectralizing gestures: a panic over love, female pleasure, and the possibility of women breaking free—together—from their male sexual overseers.2

In a strategy that is strikingly similar to the one that Castle sees operating in lesbian textuality, James can be seen as depicting homosexual panic, homosocial bonding, and employing a variety of linguistic euphemisms, negations, and repressions in his works. His ghost stories are a veritable


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treasure trove of evasions, disavowals, and denials caused, I will argue, by the desire to reveal and at the same time to conceal his interest in the “real right thing”: the young and attractive male body in extremis. Another way of putting this is to ask why so many of the young, attractive male characters are absent—“disappeared”—in his ghostly tales. Like so many besieged gothic heroines, the male characters in James’s ghost stories are obsessively pursued only to be spectralized (“homospectralized” is John Fletcher’s term3) by the conclusion of his texts. The young and beautiful male hero or narrator of a James ghost story frequently suffers death or a fate worse than death—ostracism and a haunting sense of a life-in-death that separates him from all that he desires and not so secretly conceals. In ways that are somewhat similar to Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, the ghostly in James can be read as a manifestation “of what happens between two, and between all ‘twos’ one likes . . . [which] can only be talk[ed] with or about [by talking about] some ghost.”4 James’s version of Derridean hauntology can be seen as a similar complex of making absent—that is, employing denial, deferral, and circumlocution in order to elide desire. This oft-recognized phenomenon in James’s style has itself been the site of several recent critical skirmishes that aim for nothing less than the redefinition of James as a man and an artist. I am referring here to the competing claims made by Kaja Silverman and Eve K. Sedgwick, both of whom have sought to read the primal scene in James’s works as revealing either a heterosexual psychic economy (Silverman) or one of “queer tutelage” (Sedgwick).5 The critical field has clearly inclined more in the direction of Sedgwick,6 and, in fact, one of the ways that this “queer” James has come to the fore has been to focus on the ghost tales that he wrote throughout his literary career, sometimes with long periods of silence alternating with bouts of sustained interest in the genre, because something personal and deeply paradoxical—like an approach-avoidance mechanism—motivated his work in this particular area. In order to bracket the question of writerly motivation, I would like to turn now to a variety of queer theorists who have speculated on the nature of gay self-representation during the period in which James was writing. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have used the term “phobic enchantment” to describe the feelings of simultaneous fascination and repugnance, adoration, and abhorrence. For them, phobic enchantment occurs when the dominant culture uses its political power to abject and reject what it defines as a debased other, all the while refusing to recognize that such a movement “conflicts powerfully and predictably with a desire for this Other.”7 To be held in the gaze of what we both fear and desire is to be enchanted simultaneously as we are disgusted by our attraction to


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this other. Such a phenomenon is a fair description of the dead or absent male body that appears in a number of James’s ghost tales. But in addition to phobic enchantment, we can also discern what Jonathan Dollimore has characterized as a form of gay self-articulation, a “reverse discourse” that contests ideologies of sexual identity by using and revising dominant literary discourses,8 like “platonic” love, sentimentalism or, I would claim, the ghost story. By using such popular and readily recognized genres, gay male writers could, according to Kopelson, “desexualize the male homosexual” in order to make him seem less “transgressive, deviant, pathological, and criminal.”9 It is necessary to know at least three crucial historical facts in order to understand the climate in which James was writing: the notoriety of the three infamous 1895 trials and the two-year prison sentence of Oscar Wilde, who was convicted under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which made any sexual relations between men illegal and punishable by two years of imprisonment at hard labor.10 50 men were hung in Britain on charges of sodomy during the first 35 years of the nineteenth century and another 250 men were sentenced for sodomy between 1836 and 1859. Given these events, there was certainly a valid reason for any homosexual to fear for his life11 and for a gay writer in particular to attempt to “interrupt homophobic discourses with affirmative reverse discourses.”12 Although the British Parliament abolished the death penalty for sodomy in 1861, the threat of a prison sentence was very real during the period that James was writing. In particular, as Neill Matheson has noted, the specter of Oscar Wilde’s trial in 1895 hung over James like a pall, causing him to demonize Wilde as an “unclean beast” with whom he had nothing in common.13 In order to assuage the fears that must have been caused by living and writing in such a threatening culture, gay writers would have found themselves resorting to a variety of “camouflages” and what Kopelson calls “internalized homophobia.”14 But exactly how could the ghost story be employed as a “reverse discourse” to “desexualize the male homosexual”? As Kopelson and Sedgwick have noted, gay writers frequently resorted to the depiction of the homoerotic murder and/or suicide as a way of tapping into the feminocentric sentimental genre in which a seduced maiden either kills herself or is killed by the end of the narrative. Kopelson uses the term “homophilic eroticization” in describing a particular genre of nineteenth-century gay pornography that focused its gaze on the hanging sodomite.15 Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (1886; publ. 1924), for instance, could be seen as a muted example. But perhaps the most influential gay Victorian text was Teleny (1893), a work that appears to have been produced as a


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collaboration among members of the Wilde circle. The main character, Camile Des Grieux, twice attempts to take his own life, while his beloved, René Teleny, actually succeeds in doing so. According to GLBTQ Encyclopedia, Teleny “introduced the theme of suicide as a resolution to problems raised in gay-themed fiction. This served for many decades as a plot device to license the discussion of such problems. The tradition was continued and institutionalized in the pulp novels of the early modern period.”16 Sedgwick has also pointed out the prevalence of male suicide, the male love death (liebestod) in sentimental literature written during the latter part of the nineteenth century.17 For her, the trope of love death offered gay writers a “protective/expressive camouflage”18 so that they could present homosexuality as both sentimental and platonic (nonthreatening for the benefit of straight bourgeois readers), while at the same time depicting gay sexual experience for their gay male readers (offering a knowing wink to their intended readership). So when one reads the ghost stories of Henry James it is not long before one begins to notice and then try to explain the preponderance of dead or absent male bodies in those tales, and very quickly one finds oneself immersed in Jamesian psychological territory, a vast and extremely contested terrain. Suffice it to say at the outset that the psychological consensus on James’s sexual orientation focuses its attention on two different explanations: first, his possible narcissism, passivity, and infantilism caused by an ambivalent identification with his mother thereby resulting in the need to seek out younger versions of himself as his own love object; or second, his possible homosexuality caused by either a “breast complex,” ambivalent rivalry with William, or overidentification with a weak-willed father.19 Without privileging either of these psychoanalytical positions initially, let me cite Eric Savoy, who has asserted that “an explicitly queer critical agenda operates in relation to an essentially implicit Jamesian discourse[; therefore] queer work on James can proceed only by a species of close reading that I have described elsewhere as ‘queer formalism.’” As Savoy observes, in order to “track Queer James,” it is necessary “to attend closely to the residue of his figurative language, the imagistic suggestiveness of his lexicon; what endures as fundamentally queer in such discourse is its inexorable movement toward that twilight zone of signification called connotation.”20 Following Savoy and the very similar methods used by Fletcher and Matheson, I intend in this chapter to focus on that “twilight zone of signification” in a sampling of James’s ghost stories because a close reading of them will reveal, I think, the queer anxieties that could find expression only in its recourse to the conventions of the gothic genre and


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the “topos of spectralization.”21 The slippage that occurs between a queer agenda and its suppression will manifest if we note that there is in these tales a very pronounced narrative illogic, and it is the shape and dynamics of this illogic that I will explore here. Because these tales are not well known, certainly not as well known as his novels or The Turn of the Screw (1898), I will provide detailed and close readings of their character, plot, and what Matheson calls their use of “catachresis, the misuse or abuse of metaphor or, more generally, figurative language that calls attention to itself by means of its excessiveness or incongruity.”22 I also need to say at the outset that this chapter does not have the space to examine all of James’s ghostly tales. Instead, I will focus on what I would label the masculine supplement and phobic enchantment in a ghostly quartet that spans a large portion of James’s writing career: “De Grey: A Romance” (1868), “The Ghostly Rental” (1876), “Sir Edmund Orme” (1891), and “Owen Wingrave” (1892). All of these tales are structured over the bodies of dead men, and we can recall that Miles—the suspiciously tainted but attractive young boy in The Turn of the Screw—is sacrificed to a narrative libidinal economy that is blatantly self-censoring. In reading these stories one cannot help but be struck by the sense that James recognized the dangerous attraction that the masculine posed and therefore eliminated it before it could erupt into full textual presence. While critics have routinely dismissed the ghost stories, as James did himself at times, as money makers or “potboilers,”23 I would claim that these tales serve as miniature case studies for the evolving Jamesian narrative strategy and psychology. They make it clear that the beast in the jungle of the realistic fiction also inhabited the ghostly margins of James’s consciousness from the very beginning of and indeed throughout his literary career.24 Why Do George and Paul De Grey Have to Die? “De Grey: A Romance” employs the conventions of the demon-lover ballad and the xenophobic and misogynistic vampire tale. Very specifically set in America in 1820, it initially seems to focus on the concerns of a healthy, wealthy, elderly widow with one son, Paul, “a charming young man, handsome, witty, and wise; he was a model of filial devotion.”25 Mrs. De Grey’s husband, George, who had died after only one year of marriage, was rumored to have gone insane as a result of an “unhappy love-affair” (DG, 322) he had conducted while he was traveling in Europe as a young man. The widow herself is thought by her neighbors to be hiding a “secret” more sinister than the fact that she is a Catholic and harbors a priest named “Mr. Herbert,” her husband’s confidante and former


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traveling companion, in her house (DG, 321). With these conventional gothic devices in place, James then begins his real story, exploring the dynamics of the eroticized triangle, two men bound in homosocial loyalty to each other while supposedly engaged in winning the hand of the same beautiful woman. Triangular relationships are repeated twice in the story, once in the earlier generation with Herbert, George De Grey, and an Italian woman they both loved on that initial trip to Europe in 1786 (DG, 323) and again in the time of the current generation. Both are clear examples of the sort of configuration that mediates homosocial desire, and certainly unhappy triangular relationships ending in death, with ghostly trappings or not, appear regularly in many if not most of James’s early stories and have been the source of much of Sedgwick’s theorizing in Between Men.26 In “De Grey,” after almost forty years, the triangle is repeated with a difference: two women and a man, Paul, Margaret, and another nameless European woman (the ghostly supplement that clearly stands in for queer and therefore prohibited desire) whom Paul considers marrying but does not. While Paul is absent on his two-year grand tour of Europe, Mrs. De Grey finds herself miserably lonely and decides to take a “nice, fresh young girl” as a companion (DG, 325). Within a few weeks the beautiful and talented Margaret Aldis, a lovely orphan, presents herself to Mrs. De Grey in church as financially desperate and available for employment. Moving into the mansion, Margaret soon endears herself to both the widow and the priest, but fears that the return of the son will cause her removal from her comfortable refuge. In the character of the young Margaret we have, I think, something of a meditation on James’s ambivalent readings of Stendhal, or put another way, we have James’s send up of the dangers of extreme sensitivity brought on by self-induced idealizations that pass for what is labeled as “love.” For instance, it is by viewing three portraits of Paul (as a young boy, a young man, and a European traveler) that Margaret visually constructs Paul as her masculine ideal and then falls in love with that construction (an act that recalls Stendhal’s theory of love as “crystallization” in De L’Amour [1822]). Next she is allowed to read Paul’s letters to his mother, to wander in the garden he played in as a child, and to fondle the letters he carved into a tree. All of these mementoes create for her “the precincts of his personality, the mystery of his being, the magic circle of his feelings and opinions and fancies; wandering by his side, unseen, over Europe, and treading, unheard, the sounding pavements of famous churches and palaces, she felt that she tasted for the first time of the substance and sweetness of life” (DG, 330).


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Again, this description recalls what has been labeled the “Stendhal syndrome” (i.e., extreme sensitivity to the seductive beauties that one encounters during travel) described in Stendahl’s book Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio (1817). James himself unfavorably reviewed Andrew Paton’s 1874 biography of Stendhal and commented there on his uneasiness with a number of Stendhal’s writings, particularly De L’Amour.27 Margaret’s narcissistic idyll only intensifies when Paul himself appears in the flesh and the two very quickly fall in love. It is at this point that Herbert steps in to ascertain that Paul had never been in love before, that he had returned from Europe with “a virgin heart,” and therefore that his feelings for Margaret are “the first love, the first passion” (DG, 345). Herbert feels it his duty to warn Margaret that she will die if she marries Paul, as all of the other “first loves” of De Grey men have died very shortly after their marriages. The “curse” that plagues the De Grey family line goes back in fact to the time of the Crusades: One of the race, they say, came home from the East, from the crusades, infected with the germs of the plague. He had pledged his love-faith to a young girl before his departure, and it had been arranged that the wedding should immediately succeed his return. Feeling unwell, he consulted an elder brother of the bride, a man versed in fantastic medical lore, and supposed to be gifted with magical skill. By him he was assured that he was plague-stricken, and that he was in duty bound to defer the marriage. The young knight refused to comply, and the physician, infuriated, pronounced a curse upon his race. The marriage took place; within a week the bride expired, in horrible agony; the young man, after a slight illness, recovered; the curse took effect. (DG, 345-46)

We can see here the sort of xenophobia, fear of a diseased and contaminated foreignness, that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak recognized in Brontë’s Jane Eyre or that Teresa Derrickson sees operating in the sensational tales of Louisa May Alcott.28 Additionally, the demon-lover motif is mixed with the fairly eccentric and personal addition of an “elder brother” who possesses “fantastic medical lore” (William James frequently makes a number of ambiguous and slightly veiled appearances in these tales). The curse on this family manifests itself over the centuries in the death of every bride of a De Grey as long as that bride is indeed the first “true passion” of the male De Grey heir. James’s story twists the curse in Paul’s case by having Margaret learn of the curse and proclaim: “‘I revoke this curse. I undo it. I curse it!’” (DG, 346). But her verbal revocation has the ironic and unintended effect of causing Paul to die instead: “As she bloomed and


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prospered, he drooped and languished. While she was living for him, he was dying of her” (DG, 354).29 Only after Paul’s death does James hint that the earlier generation had seen the same sort of tragedy when George De Grey died. So the narrative and metaphoric illogic of this tale lies precisely in the fact that it is not the women who die of the curse, as had happened for generations in this family. Instead, it is the father and son who are sacrificed so that Mrs. De Grey can continue to live on in splendid wealth with her celibate priest-confessor Herbert and her beautiful and widowed daughter-in-law Margaret and presumably Margaret’s son. This strange final triangle presents something of a Jamesian ideal: three celibates living in thrall to their memories of beautiful but absent, dead male bodies. There is also a reification and celebration of the masculine mind, the male principle, and the creative spirits of both father and son that James suggests cannot survive sustained contact with the fleshly bodies of women (recall the very similar triangle operating in “The Aspern Papers” [1888] with two women and a celibate man in thrall to the creative spirit of the dead poet Jeffrey Aspern).30 George De Grey dies within a few months of his son’s birth, although he did not marry his “first love” and therefore should have been freed from the curse, as his wife was. No, it appears that George De Grey dies because he has come into contact with the world of generation; he lives long enough to father a child and then he is replaced and seen as redundant, unnecessary to the continuance of the species. Paul, his son, appears to have suffered the same fate, living just long enough to leave his widow pregnant with the next generation’s curse. It would appear that a terrific fear and loathing of female flesh is present throughout this tale, and that the deaths of the male members of the De Grey family represent all too clearly sexual anxiety about the precariousness of the masculine once it is engulfed and corrupted by contact with the maternal womb.31 Why Does Captain Diamond Become a Ghost? “The Ghostly Rental” has most frequently been read as an extended meditation on James’s anxious authorial confrontation with the American literary romance tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The ghostly figure behind the veil is often seen as a rewritten version of either Poe’s Madeline from “The Fall of the House of Usher” or Hawthorne’s Zenobia from The Blithedale Romance.32 But another reading of the story is possible if we focus on the father, Captain Diamond, rather than simply the daughter. The story is indebted, as Leon Edel points out, to both E. T. A. Hoffmann and to the fairy tale tradition, specifically


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“Blue Beard.”33 But Edel does not go on to point out that both of these references direct our attention to the besieged male as the major subject of the tale, as Hoffmann’s “The Entail” (1817; trans. English 1824) is certainly recalled in “Ghostly Rental,” while the “Blue Beard” reference, ostensibly directing our attention to the too-curious wife,34 actually works to force us to confront the reasons for the male’s eventual destruction. As related by a young nameless narrator, a student in a New England Divinity School, the story concerns a certain deserted house that the narrator decides is “haunted” because “it had been spiritually blighted” (GR, 160). Convinced that the house is inhabited by “mysterious tenants” (GR, 162), the narrator fetishizes the house, visiting it at all hours, staring at it and brooding on its “melancholy” and “horror” (GR, 161). Only after “several days” of such surveillance does the narrator see the house entered by a “figure out of one of Hoffmann’s tales” (GR, 163). This “little, old man” wears a “military cloak,” carries a “walking stick,” and vaguely resembles, we are told, Andrew Jackson: “He had an intense brilliancy, surmounted with thick brows, which had remained perfectly black” (GR, 162). Entering with a key and a short bow, the old man disappears into the interior of the house, only to be followed by the voyeuristic narrator who enters the house through one of the windows in order to attempt to discover what is happening within the strange house: At last I became conscious that a large shadow was projected upon the wall opposite the folding-door—the shadow, evidently, of a figure in the adjoining room. It was tall and grotesque, and seemed to represent a person sitting perfectly motionless, in profile. I thought I recognized the perpendicular bristles and far-arching nose of my little old man. There was a strange fixedness in his posture; he appeared to be seated, and looking intently at something. I watched the shadow a long time, but it never stirred. At last . . . it moved slowly, rose to the ceiling, and became indistinct. (GR, 164)

“My little old man”? For so is Captain Diamond, as the narrator soon learns. Diamonds, of course, are famous for their hardness as well as their value; the meaning of his name speaks for itself. After witnessing this strange scene the narrator feels he possesses a great “secret” that he vows never to discuss with anyone, while he toys with the idea of “following” the captain and then resolves instead to “coquet a little, as it were, with my discovery—to pull apart the petals of the flower one by one” (GR, 164). Such an expression is curious, suggesting something like, he loves me; he loves me not. The narrator’s obsessive interest in the old man causes him to seek out information about the man’s history from his landlady’s sister,


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who informs him that the captain metaphorically killed his daughter by pronouncing a “curse” on her (GR, 170). This curse recalls, of course, the curse that figured so prominently in “De Grey,” but by this time James presents the curse as a spoof, for the daughter is not dead, only playing dead in order to live in her mother’s familial home by paying quarterly rent to the old man and at the same time punishing him for his failure to let her marry the man of her choice, “a young man with whiskers from Boston” (GR, 171). The father’s guilt for cursing his daughter is so intense that he convinces himself that her ghost haunts the house so that he has in fact displaced and haunted himself with a parodic gothic tale about a crime that did not occur and a daughter who is not dead. When the captain becomes too ill to collect his rent, he begs the narrator to go to the house in his stead, stating, “I think she’d trust you, as I have trusted you; she’ll like your face; she’ll see there is no harm in you” (GR, 184). In other words, the narrator is forced to occupy the position of the damaged father in the eyes of the daughter. The captain by this time in the tale has for a variety of reasons, as the earlier passage makes clear, been psychically appropriated by the narrator as his projected, wounded masculinity, his own ghostly male split-off, cathected part-object. The narrator goes to the house as the substitute for the captain and learns from the daughter the true story, that there never was “a husband,” only a lover with “whiskers” (hypermasculine, animal-like) and that her father could never forgive what he considered to be her sexual promiscuity (GR, 188). Or rather, he could forgive her only if he thought she was dead, so she played dead to his satisfaction, denying the physicality of her body all the while producing the old coins—the solid materiality—that ensured her residence in the house. At the moment that the daughter is unveiled by the narrator, so does the father die and appear as a ghost in the house to haunt his daughter: “It’s the punishment of my long folly” says the daughter, while the narrator virtually echoes her: “It’s the punishment of my indiscretion—of my violence” (GR, 188). At this point we encounter yet another piece of metaphoric illogic or narrative duplicity in a Jamesian ghost story. How has the narrator committed “violence”? Weinstein claims that the outburst refers to his act of “removing the daughter’s veil” and thus exposing her materiality and causing the father’s death.35 At the end of the story we are given yet another possible explanation of the “violence” that has occurred when we learn that the narrator had not extinguished one of his candles and in fact was responsible for burning down the house, but at this point in the story he has not committed that violence or indeed any violence. Or has he?


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We can recall that he had earlier entered into the house and had imposed himself surreptitiously between father and daughter, spying on them as money was exchanged between their two very living bodies. By inserting himself as the third term, so to speak, in a dysfunctional domestic scene of exchange, the narrator has actually positioned himself as a child between two parent substitutes, the voyeur of their mysterious actions, conducted at night, in the dark, vague and “indistinct.” As he himself noted when he entered the house, “There was a risk, certainly, in the trick I was playing—a risk of being seen from within, or (worse) seeing, myself, something that I should repent of seeing” (GR, 163). In other words, the narrator fears not simply being seen by the father and daughter but seeing himself reflected in their shocked eyes, seeing himself as the uncanny interloper within the canny space of their home and bodies and, by extension, in contact with the materiality—the money—that has kept them both in operation. As Linda Zwinger has noted about an analogous exchange of money in “The Pupil” (1891), it functions as “the most visible effect of the interlocking chains of disavowal . . . by which a value projection then justifies behavior which can be described with the ‘I know, but all the same . . .’ formula.” For her, money “is the entity that in its movement in the real world most resembles what I am arguing is the characteristic structure of any sexuality narrative.”36 The “sexuality narrative” here is exploded when the narrator reveals his violent intentions by disrupting the quasi-incestuous father-daughter dyad and inserting himself into the scenario. From this point on, it is the narrator’s intention to destroy the domestic idyll that has continued between these two for many years. In some ways the narrator sees the relationship between the supposedly dead daughter and her mourning father as a parody of marriage, a celibate state in which only money passes between their hands. And so when the daughter is unmasked by the narrator, found to be a living woman, the only way the equilibrium can be maintained is for the father to die in earnest, so that the facade can be maintained—or better yet, made real. It is as if a child had placed his eye up to a keyhole37 in order to witness his parents in coitus and then says (in shock and jealousy) we will have no more of that. Why Is Edmund Orme Already Dead? The ghostly sightings of Sir Edmund Orme, who is visible only to Mrs. Marden, the mother and the narrator-suitor in the tale, recall the same sort of situation that occurs later in The Turn of the Screw with the governess the only person able to see the dead servants. Apart from the changes in the class status of the participants, the specificity of spectralization is


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significant because it suggests that in James’s narratives, the hauntings are not random; they are determined by the choices we make or, more accurately, do not make in our lives. Told in flashback style with the tale set within a frame narrative, we know at the outset that Charlotte Marden, the beautiful daughter of a charming mother and the intended love object of the narrator, is dead, having died in childbirth one year after her marriage.38 The tale is not concerned with the heterosexual romance of Charlotte and the narrator; it is focused much more clearly on the ghost of Edmund and his motivations for appearing, not just to the mother and daughter but to the young and handsome male narrator. Set in Brighton at the height of the social season, the narrator meets and falls in love with Charlotte when he realizes that “she was a beautiful liberal creature. I had seen her personality in glimpses and gleams, like a song sung in snatches, but now it was before me in a large rosy glow, as if it had been a full volume of sound” (EO, 373). Such a description recalls how Margaret Aldis fell in love with the idea of Paul De Grey through her own hypersensitive senses—in Margaret’s case, through the eye; in the case of the narrator of “Orme,” through the ear. Once in love with Charlotte, the narrator is prone to the same strange visions as the mother: he too begins to see Edmund Orme, the cast-off fiancé of Mrs. Marden, who has been “cursed” to see Orme although he committed suicide years earlier (EO, 380). Like some demon lover who has sought out his rejecting fiancé to torment her for her betrayal, Orme is described by the narrator as sitting in the front of a church “with his hands crossed on the knob of his cane . . . He was a pale young man in black and with the air of a gentleman” (EO, 378). What is most significant about this young man, however, is the fact that the narrator tries to share his prayer book with him—tries to make physical contact with him through a material object (like the coins exchanged in “Ghostly Rental”) and Orme rejects the offer, walking out of the pew. Later Orme appears to the narrator as a “reigning prince . . . with something of the grand air . . . Yet he looked fixedly and gravely at me . . . Did he consider that I should bend my knee or kiss his hand?” (EO, 385; emphases added). I would claim that the narrator here is projecting his proscribed desire onto Orme but closes it off immediately because of its impossibility, for Orme is dead as the narrator soon learns. Such knowledge does not prevent Orme from continuing to appear, mediated through the bodies of the beautiful mother and daughter: “He stood there without speaking—young pale handsome clean-shaven decorous, with extraordinary light blue eyes and something old-fashioned, like a portrait of years ago, in his head and in his manner of wearing his hair . . . He looked again strangely hard at me,


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harder than any one in the world had ever looked before” (EO, 385). Harder than a diamond? This strange scene of spectral seduction continues as Mrs. Marden enters the room and asks the narrator if he has seen a ghost. He blushes at being caught in the act of staring at Orme by the mother and then notes, “I was conscious I had turned very red. Sir Edmund Orme never blushed, and I was sure no embarrassment touched him. One had met people of that sort, but never any one with so high an indifference” (EO, 386). Being “caught in the act” of exposure and display is something that is explored at length by Joseph Litvak in his study of James’s ambivalent theatricality, and clearly in Orme we have another example of what he labels James’s “theater of embarrassment.”39 It would appear that Orme represents for the narrator that sort of social and sexual defiance of convention that he himself longs for but cannot manage for fear of the mother’s censuring gaze. As his interest in Charlotte fades, the narrator comforts himself with his quest for more sightings of the ghost: “I felt beneath my feet the threshold of the strange door, in my life, which had suddenly been thrown open and out of which came an air of keenness I had never breathed and of a taste stronger than wine” (EO, 389–90). This “threshold” beneath the feet reminds us all too clearly of the trapdoor above a gallows and the sodomite’s hanging, while the oral imagery (wine) that concludes the passage suggests the psychic regression and passivity that characterize so many of James’s protagonists. As his appearances become more frequent, the narrator muses not on their horror, but on Orme’s “perfect propriety”: “He struck me as strange, incontestably, but somehow always struck me as right. I very soon came to attach an idea of beauty to his unrecognised presence, the beauty of an old story, of love and pain and death. What I ended by feeling was that he was on my side, watching over my interest, looking to it that no trick should be played me and that my heart at least shouldn’t be broken” (EO, 401). The fact that Orme haunts Mrs. Marden and eventually causes her death signifies less to the narrator than the thought that he is bound to Orme in a homosocial fraternity of protection against the wiles of women. As he muses to himself, It was a case of retributive justice, of the visiting on the children of the sins of the mothers, since not of the fathers. This wretched mother was to pay, in suffering, for the suffering she had inflicted, and as the disposition to trifle with an honest man’s just expectations might crop up again, to my detriment, in the child, the latter young person was to be studied and watched, so that she might be made to suffer should she do an equal wrong.


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She might emulate her parent by some play of characteristic perversity not less than she resembled her in charm . . . (EO, 401)

The logic here is something like I (the narrator) have learned from the example of Orme and also will become a ghost like Orme and haunt Charlotte should she prove to be as faithless as her mother and reject me in order to marry another man. But this attitude is also predicated on a homosocial alliance with Orme that accepts as its basis the fact of misogyny and the young boy’s fear of the mother’s uncontrolled sexuality. Although Orme finally accomplishes his revenge and frightens Mrs. Marden to death, he also succeeds in planting the seeds of death in her daughter, for on the mother’s deathbed Charlotte also sees Orme for the first time and, as we learned at the beginning of the story, she is dead within a year of her marriage. So the illogic of this tale again reveals the power of narrative self-censorship, for James cannot create an attractive male figure without placing that male simultaneously in the arms of the faithless mother and the world of the almost absent dead. To meditate for very long on the handsome masculine supplement (too much man for the mother) is to feel that one’s feet are already standing on the gallows, and this was a place that the Jamesian narrator was loath to tarry. Sir Edmund Orme is already a ghost because he had to be absent, unavailable, untouchable, and finally only an idea of masculine beauty and pain, not a body that one could reach out and touch in return. Why Does Owen Wingrave Choose Death? In 1908 James adapted the tale of “Owen Wingrave” for the stage as The Saloon, and in 1971 it would be adapted by Benjamin Britten as an opera. The work’s very traditional gothic appeal can be found in its use of an actual ghost, although James himself was most anxiously ambivalent about this very issue. When he heard that the London production of The Saloon was going to use a “fleeting white figure at the climactic moment . . . he was horrified.” Writing to the producer, he sniffed: “There is absolutely no warrant or indication for this in my text and I view any such introduction with the liveliest disapproval.”40 But again, there is duplicity in this claim, as there is every reason to recognize that a ghost is part of the narrative logic of the tale, as Mrs. Coyle says to her husband, “Do you mean to say the house has a proved ghost?”41 The story in fact teases its readers with the ghosts of a father and son still inhabiting a haunted room (a closet) after more than two hundred years, the same room where Owen is found dead at the conclusion of the tale. So the question that the story poses is again centered on the reasons for the


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death of a promising and attractive young man, and the tale suggests that Owen committed suicide rather than serve in the military against the dictates of his conscience. By placing the legend of those floating male ghosts in the haunted room, James also hints that Owen was the victim of his own attraction to men, a homospectrality that can only be renounced by taking the ultimate way out, suicide.42 In short, Owen Wingrave is a bifurcated tale, torn between exploring in a realistic manner the psychology of depression and its manifestation in suicide and a late gothic tale of ghostly presences and haunted rooms or closets (Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto [1764] and Clara Reeve’s Old English Baron [1778] both contain extremely similar scenes). Owen, the handsome young hero in this tale of oppressive family expectations and unwanted burdens, chooses tragically to sacrifice himself rather than submit to further training in the military officers’ school at Sandhurst. James himself tells us that the tale formed in his mind as he observed a “tall quiet slim studious young man of admirable type” reading a book in Kensington Gardens.43 Owen is the second son of an illustrious military family with great expectations of him (just as James was the second son), and suffice it to say that Owen fits as poorly into his domestic inheritance as James did in his. Unlike the dashing and talented elder brothers who appear in James’s other tales, the elder brother Philip in “Owen Wingrave” is “literally imbecile and banished from view; deformed, unsocial, irretrievable, he had been relegated to a private asylum and had become among the friends of the family only a little hushed lugubrious legend” (OW, 277). Resisting all of the pressure that falls on him because of the elder brother’s inadequacies, Owen is as doomed as Philip to become a “hushed lugubrious legend” within the family, yet another failed son. When he makes the decision to refuse to pursue his destiny as determined by his paternal grandfather and aunt, Owen informs his supervisor and best friend that he is renouncing the army with no clear path in front of him. Returning home to inform Sir Philip Wingrave of his decision, Owen is disinherited and later mocked as a coward by his erstwhile fiancée Kate Julian. No matter how much pressure is brought by his family to persuade him to change his mind, he persists in what his supervisor calls his “stiff obsession” (OW, 295) and his belief that his entire family is “tainted” (OW, 297). Although Edel argues that the only war that is ever present in James’s imagination is the American Civil War,44 clearly we are being presented in this story with a historically undated British military context. There is the mention of receiving a “feather” for cowardice (OW, 315), and the context, with the British suicidal charge of the light brigade in the Crimea in 1854 in the


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background and their later involvement in the 1898 Sudan campaign, recalls very vividly the use that A. E. W. Mason (1865–1948) would make of this same situation in his novel The Four Feathers (1902), a work that was clearly indebted to James’s story. It is most revealing that the first words in the story, spoken by the military instructor Spencer Coyle to Owen are, “Upon my honour you must be off your head,” and losing one’s head, as in standing on a gallows, is a fear we have already noticed in “Sir Edmund Orme.” Later we are told that Owen is “too good” to be a soldier because he was “upright as a young hero, even though as pale as a Christian martyr” (OW, 293). The imagery here recalls both the hanged sodomite as well as St. Sebastian, arrows piercing his entire body (Kopelson calls Sebastian “the nineteenth century’s favorite gay saint”45). Finally, while sitting around the dining table Coyle looks at Owen and sees “a young lamb so visibly marked for sacrifice. ‘Hang him, what a pity,’” he muses (OW, 303). In this tale it is the married man, Spencer, who finds Owen perhaps too attractive for his comfort. Spencer, we are told, “liked ardent young men . . . and he had taken a particular fancy to Owen Wingrave” (270). Owen has worked his “charm” on Spencer, and Spencer cannot help but notice the “troubled gentleness in his [Owen’s] handsome face” (OW, 271). Later Coyle notices that Owen looks “queer” (OW, 285), and certainly Owen’s interests are not typical for a cadet. Owen prefers to read Johann von Goethe’s poetry in German than to study Julius Caesar’s military campaigns, and he has made it clear to his confidante Lechmere that he is a conscientious objector who will not participate in the cycle of male violence that is war: “He thinks all the great generals ought to have been shot, and that Napoleon Bonaparte in particular, the greatest, was a scoundrel, a criminal,” says Lechmere (OW, 286). One muses here on the odd fact that just before his death, James assumed the persona of Bonaparte and thought that he was charged with redecorating the Louvre.46 But if Coyle is smitten with Wingrave, so is his wife: Coyle “had accused the good lady more than once of being in love with Owen Wingrave. She admitted that she was, she even gloried in her passion; which shows that the subject, between them, was treated in a liberal spirit” (OW, 291). Jest or not, we have here yet another eroticized triangle, this time with a married couple competing to some extent for the loyalty and affections of the effete Owen. But Kate Julian is also very fond of Owen, although this heterosexual romance is muted and finally fails because of Owen’s defiance of his family’s orders that he remain in the military. The relationship of Kate and Owen is compared by the narrator to that of “Paul and Virginia, brother and sister” (OW, 305), a strange sentimental


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reference, although the (faulty) allusion here to Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s eponymous novel (1787) is yet another instance of what Sedgwick has identified as the use of a sentimental text that ends in death in order to displace and normalize homoerotic affection. There is something else besides sentimental friendship, unspoken but murky in the tale that clearly stands in the way of their successful union. Visiting the family estate of Paramore (haunted house as fetishized love object, mother as paramour?), the Coyles and Lechmere are witnesses to the fulfillment of the Wingrave family curse, the legend of the great-great-grandfather come to life to avenge all fathers disappointed in their weak sons: Oh a deed of violence took place here ages ago. I think it was in George the Second’s time that Colonel Wingrave, one of their ancestors, struck in a fit of passion one of his children, a lad just growing up, a blow on the head of which the unhappy child died. The matter was hushed up for the hour and some other explanation put about. The poor boy was laid out in one of those rooms on the other side of the house, and amid strange smothered rumours the funeral was hurried on. The next morning, when the household assembled, Colonel Wingrave was missing; he was looked for vainly, and at last it occurred to some one that he might perhaps be in the room from which his child had been carried to burial. The seeker knocked without an answer—then opened the door. The poor man lay dead on the floor, in his clothes, as if he had reeled and fallen back, without a wound, without a mark, without anything in his appearance to indicate that he had either struggled or suffered. He was a strong sound man—there was nothing to account for such a stroke. He’s supposed to have gone to the room during the night, just before going to bed, in some fit of compunction or some fascination of dread. (OW, 300–301)

The recital of this history is clearly the moment of desire in the tale, the embedded narrative that gives the story its “supernatural force . . . [its] haunting apparitional presence,” as James himself noted about it.47 But let us examine some of its suggestions for further clues about the anxieties haunting Owen. The first, most obvious, is the act of a passionate and violent father killing a son for some slight shortcoming (his effeminacy?). The boy himself appears to be an adolescent and the death blow is once again delivered to the vulnerable head. Next there is the matter of secrecy of the father having the power to kill his son and not face any consequences other than those imposed by his own conscience. So we have a mysterious death enacted in what is called “the White Room” of the estate, and Owen himself dies in a similar manner, with no apparent mark on his body, in the same room. Later Coyle provides more details about the room, stating, “The panels evidently, years and


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years ago, were painted white. But the paint has darkened with time and there are three or four quaint little ancient ‘samplers’” on the walls (OW, 301). The “white room” with its writings on the wall (the old samplers) is clearly intended to be read as a version of the closet, the secret chamber in which prohibited acts within the household are committed and concealed (whitewashed), but those acts remain partly legible to astute readers of the family’s history.48 Shortly before this family legend is related we are told that the portrait of Colonel Wingrave particularly haunts Owen for, as he tells Coyle, he has stirred up the family ghosts and “the very portraits glower at me on the walls” (OW, 297). Observing the largest of the ancestors, the colonel, Coyle notes that he is portrayed as a representation, with some force and style, for the place and period, of a gentleman with a hard handsome face, in a red coat and a peruke. Mrs. Coyle pronounced his descendent old Sir Philip wonderfully like him; and her husband could fancy, though he kept it to himself, that if one should have the courage to walk the old corridors of Paramore at night one might meet a figure that resembled him roaming, with the restlessness of a ghost, hand in hand with the figure of a tall boy. (OW, 302)

Two men roaming the house hand in hand is an image that is invoked only to be immediately erased in the act of violence and murder that must be the result of such male bonding. The colonel’s act of fratricide is repeated with a difference generations later by Owen’s death at the hands of his own internalized and introjected patriarch. In this latter-day death, however, Owen plays both roles, father and young son, as he turns on himself and becomes his own ghostly avenger. Strangely, though, Owen has informed Kate that he had slept in the haunted room the night before and that he saw nothing and that such an act, daring and heroic, absolves him of the suspicion of cowardice. Kate refuses to believe him and Owen dismisses her, while conveying to Lechmere that he actually did see something ghostly and unsettling in the room (OW, 315–16). Much like the mutilated version of Spencer Brydon that haunts “The Jolly Corner” (1908), Owen is compelled to repeat his visit to the room and this time he does not emerge alive to tell any version of the tale: “Owen Wingrave . . . lay dead on the spot which his ancestor had been found. He was all the young soldier on the gained field” (OW, 319). But if, as the narrator informs us, Owen had returned to the room at the instigation of Kate and she herself feels that his death was “the catastrophe that was her work” (OW, 319), then clearly Owen has chosen death over marriage.


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The ultimate battlefield in this story is not on some distant shore but the marriage bed, a frontier that Owen would prefer not to cross. How can we understand the repeated absences of young men in a number of James’s ghostly tales? As Gert Buelens has suggested, perhaps it is most helpful to understand the “complex psychosexual mechanism” at work in James’s stories by recognizing what he has called “oblique possession”: “an account of sexual identity in which the assertion of one’s own self-possession takes place in the very act of submitting to the erotic power of another force—whether that force be non-human . . . or human.” Buelens elaborates on this mechanism in James by noting that it involves two different types of mastery of one subject over another. In the first instance, pleasure is found in the act of submission and in the second: “The subject’s desire is fired by a commanding presence that is successfully resisted. But the sense of control that the subject derives from the event does not depend on any literal reduction of the former master to cowering submissiveness. Rather the erstwhile victim goes on to enjoy an indirect triumph. This oblique triumph rests on the participation of both master and slave . . . in an overbearing scene of desire that exacts the grateful surrender of all those it encompasses.”49 According to Buelens, the “oblique” moment is “queer” in James’s texts because it “thrives on a disruption of the very dichotomies of sexuality and identity that queer theory has been concerned to question.”50 As I have attempted to suggest, James frequently elides and makes very oblique the sources of desire and attraction in his gothic tales, but when he does acknowledge them he almost immediately buries his fascination beneath layers of subterfuge. And certainly it is fair to claim that James explored and then attempted to conceal in at least these four ghostly tales his narrators’ sexual anxieties and homophobic panic. The fact that men die in all these tales suggests that James feared what he sensed was beyond his control and yet which haunted him and his culture. Like a ghost that roams the halls of the psyche, the queer was a figure that James could confront only through a glass darkly, sometimes disguised as a nameless European woman, sometimes as a rejected young man. The oblique illogic of desire and metaphor that play out in all these tales reveals a writer who could only compose as if writing on a dark mirror. Notes 1. J. Hillis Miller, Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 299. 2. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 34.


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3. John Fletcher, “The Haunted Closet: Henry James’s Queer Spectrality,” Textual Practice 14 (2000): 53–80 (60). 4. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York : Routledge, 1994), xviii. Hauntology is a recent critical and psychoanalytical category that is not particularly germane to my argument here, but which will, I think, become increasingly important in James studies. For a succinct discussion of its history and two major schools of application, see Colin Davis, “État Présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms,” French Studies 59 (2005): 373–79. 5. Kaja Silverman, “Too Early/Too Late: Male Subjectivity and the Primal Scene,” in Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 157–81; Eve K. Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 78–80. 6. Silverman sees a heterosexual origin in the primal scenes that position so many of James’s child heroes as “infantile voyeurs”: “Miles, Flora, Nanda, and Maisie are all out of temporal alignment with the sexuality they somehow hear or see,” while the texts work to place them inappropriately at scenes of adult heterosexuality that they cannot understand (“Too Early,” 170). Sedgwick analyzes the late The Wings of the Dove (1902) in order to claim that “queer tutelage” is at the core of James’s aesthetic (Tendencies, 78–80). The recent critical and biographical works of Sheldon M. Novick, Eric L. Haralson, John Fletcher, Michael Moon, Hugh Stevens, and Linda Zwinger have convincingly excavated a “queer” James much more in line with Sedgwick’s pioneering work on the topic. 7. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986) 4. 8. Jonathan Dollimore, “The Dominant and the Deviant: A Violent Dialectic,” Critical Quarterly 28 (1986): 179–92 (180–81). 9. Kevin Kopelson, “Wilde’s Love Deaths,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 5 (1992): 31–60. Reprinted in Love’s Litany: The Writing of Modern Homoerotics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 33. 10. See Neill Matheson, “Talking Horrors: James, Euphemism, and the Specter of Wilde,” American Literature 71 (1999): 709–50 (710); and Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1993), 92–93. 11. Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius: A Biography (New York: Marrow, 1992), 300. 12. Kopelson, “Love Deaths,” 31, 46. 13. Matheson, “Talking Horrors,” 732. 14. Kopelson, “Love Deaths,” 44. 15. Ibid., 37. 16. GLBTQ Encyclopedia, s.v. “Erotica and Pornography,” accessed February 26, 2011, http://www.glbtq.com/literature/erotica_pornography,3.html 17. Kopelson has discussed the prevalence of the hanged sodomite in homoerotic literature of the period: “The spontaneous erections and ejaculations of hanged men may have made the executions of sodomites seem appallingly


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20.

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and scandalously pornographic to anyone who observed or imagined them (“Love Deaths,” 32). But this genre encoded for its coterie both “homophilic eroticization” and “anti-homophobic purification” (Kopelson, “Love Deaths,” 37), an ambivalent mixture of love and hatred for the homosexual impulse within. Allon White has asserted that James’s ghost tales are “displaced forms of representation” that elide a primal scene of sexuality or, for James, “vulgarity” (The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981], 154). Sedgwick discusses the trope of male love death and concludes that James’s typical homosocial panic evidences itself in numbness: “It is only by turning his desire for the male face into an envious identification with male loss that Marcher [“The Beast in the Jungle,” 1903] finally comes into any relation to a woman—and then it is a relation through one dead woman (the other man’s) to another dead woman of his own. That is to say, it is the relation of compulsory heterosexuality.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 150, 212. Sedgwick, Epistemology, 161. Guntrip notoriously labeled James “a relatively ‘normal’ schizoid personality” because of his “evasion of permanent ties,” while Horwitz focused on James’s relationship with his unreliable mother as the source of his sexual regression. Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object-Relations and the Self (New York: International University Press, 1969) 98; B. D. Horwitz, “The Sense of Desolation in Henry James,” Psychocultural Review 1 (1977): 466–91. More recent studies by Lewes and Graham emphasize James’s narcissism. Lewes notes, “The term narcissism in discussions of homosexuality came to mean the tendency to preserve the object tie to the mother by identifying with her and by seeking to regain her love by loving a partner who resembles the self,” while Graham states, “In taking himself as a love object (narcissistic endowment), James was unconsciously motivated to seek out young men who reminded him of the self his mother once loved.” Lewes describes the “breast complex” in detail, while Veeder asserts that James was “a son prevented—by paternal ineffectuality and maternal over-solicitude—from accomplishing the Oedipal transfer from mother to father.” His motivation in loving men is caused because he wants “a masculine figure to incorporate as the ego ideal which would solidify his conception of himself as masculine.” Kenneth Lewes, The Psychoanalytical Theory of Male Homosexuality (New York: NAL, 1988), 58, 104–5; Wendy Graham, “Henry James and the Mother-Complex,” Arizona Quarterly 54 (1998): 27–64 (35); William Veeder, “The Portrait of a Lack,” in New Essays on The Portrait of a Lady, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 95–121 (103). Eric Savoy, “Henry James, Queer Theory and the Biological Imperative,” in Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies, ed. Peter Rawlings (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 100–125 (103). Fletcher, “The Haunted Closet,” 53. Matheson, “Talking Horrors,” 713.

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23. T. J. Lustig, Henry James and the Ghostly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3. 24. Sallie Sears notes that “the human mind is, for James, by definition a haunted mind,” while Lustig’s study attempts to prove that almost all of James’s fiction “is ghostly in its enigmatic impalpability, its vague precision, its subtle allusiveness, its hovering uncertainty, its fascination with anxiety and awe, wonder and dread.” For Lustig, by the time James was writing his more “realistic” fictions, “the literal ghosts had vanished, [but] they almost immediately began to reappear as figures of speech, states and stages of subjective experience.” Lustig’s volume is the only book-length study of the ghost tales, but there are a fair number of articles on individual ghost stories or groupings of them. For instance, see Raymond Thorberg for a very general examination of the ghost stories as “concerned with the isolating effects of obsession,” and Brown for a discussion of the ghost as “a signifier of the unreadable in literary texts—the materialization of ‘literality’” in “Sir Edmund Orme.” Sallie Sears, The Negative Imagination: Form and Perspective in the Novels of Henry James (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 126; Lustig, Ghostly 2, 74; Raymond Thorberg, “Terror Made Relevant: James’s Ghost Stories,” Dalhousie Review 47 (1967): 185– 91, (186); Arthur A. Brown, “Ghosts and the Nature of Death in Literature: Henry James’s ‘Sir Edmund Orme,’” American Literary Realism 31 (1998): 60– 74 (71). 25. Henry James, “De Grey: A Romance,” in Henry James: Complete Stories 1864– 1874 (New York: Library of America, 1999), 320–56 (320) (hereafter cited in text as DG). 26. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 21–27. 27. Henry James, “Stendhal,” rev. of Henri Beyle: A Critical and Biographical Study, by Andrew Archibald Paton (London: Trübner, 1874), in Henry James, Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: Library of America, 1984), 3: 812–18 (817). 28. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 243–61; Teresa Derrickson, “Race and the Gothic Monster: The Xenophobic Impulse of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Taming a Tartar,’” ATQ (The American Transcendental Quarterly), accessed March 1, 2010, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7008/is_1_15/ai_n28124714/?tag =content;11 29. Edel, in commenting on this passage, notes, “Again there is guilt; and a fear, too, that self-assertion can bring a loss of love. Henry was caught between wanting to keep his brother’s love and at the same time asserting his own place in the family constellation. As his tale implies, what was bliss for one was bale for the other.” Hall has argued that William was Henry’s primary love object as well as fraternal antagonist, Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 82; Richard Hall, “An Obscure Hurt: The Sexuality of Henry James,” The New Republic, April 28 and May 5, 1979.


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30. I have discussed elsewhere and at greater length the triangular dynamics of “The Aspern Papers,” mediated as they were by their origin in the legend of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Claire Claremont. See Diane Long Hoeveler, “Romancing Venice: The Courtship of Percy Shelley in The Aspern Papers,” in Proceedings from the Tracing Henry James in Venice Conference, ed. Melanie Ross and Gregory Zacharias (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008), 155–67. 31. Hogle has made an analogous observation in the context of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that “the desirous man soon finds that a union with the mother—and later with any woman recalling her—could mean a loss of the phallic selfcompletion and conjunction with strictly male power that patriarchal logic urges men to seek. The mother, at least at the primal scene of conception, harbors the ‘unclean’ immersion of the phallic in the nonphallic, where the primacy of one over the other cannot be decided.” Jerrold E. Hogle, “The Struggle for Dichotomy: Abjection in Jekyll and His Interpreters,” in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after One Hundred Years, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 161–207 (166). 32. Cornelia Pulsifer Kelley, “The Early Development of Henry James,” University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 15 (1930): 1–309 (246 note 4); Lustig, Ghostly, 72. 33. The Ghostly Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1963), 70–71. 34. Henry James, “The Ghostly Rental,” in Henry James: Complete Stories 1874– 1884, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1999 ), 157–90 (hereafter cited in text as GR). 35. Sheri Weinstein, “Possessive Matters in ‘The Ghostly Rental,’” The Henry James Review 21 (2000): 270–78 (276). 36. Linda Zwinger, “Bodies that Don’t Matter: The Queering of ‘Henry James,’” Modern Fiction Studies 41 (1995): 657–80 (660). 37. Focusing on James’s voyeuristic fantasies, Geismar has observed that “in very few writers has the concept of adult love derived so obviously, so directly, so clearly from the earliest emotional sources (or fantasies) of the family, the parents,” while he also comments that “it is almost as though that prying, peeping child, who is at the psychological core of all these morbidly and sexually curious observers . . . had at long last gained entrance to what has been called ‘the primal scene’ of his parents’ sexual intercourse.” Maxwell Geismar, Henry James and the Jacobites (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 180, 207. 38. Henry James, “Sir Edmund Orme,” in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 17 (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), 367–406 (367) (hereafter cited in text as EO). 39. Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 195–278. 40. Quoted in Henry James, The Ghostly Tales, Leon Edel, ed., 143. 41. Henry James, “Owen Wingrave” in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 17, 269–319, (300) (hereafter cited in text as OW). 42. As Kopelson points out, gay suicide was very much “in the air” after the passage in 1885 of the Labouchère Amendment, also known as the “Blackmailer’s


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43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

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Charter” and added to the Criminal Law Amendment Act at the last minute as Section II of the Act. It reads: “Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures, or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency shall be guilty of misdemeanor, and being convicted shall be liable at the discretion of the Court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labor.” Because of the vagueness of the term “gross indecency,” the Act allowed the legal system to prosecute virtually any male homosexual behavior. As Kopelson notes, being exposed as a homosexual by an extortionist could result in social, financial, and professional ruin, and “many desperate gays saw suicide as their only escape” (Kopelson, “Love Deaths,” 46). The Ghostly Tales, Leon Edel, ed., 140. Ibid., 141–2. Kopelson, “Love Deaths,” 41. Leon Edel, “The Deathbed Notes of Henry James,” The Atlantic Monthly 221: 6 (1968): 103–5. The Ghostly Tales, Leon Edel, ed., 141. For the context of claiming that the “white room” is yet another version of the closet that appears so frequently in James’s works, see Sedgwick’s listing of the various Oxford English Dictionary definitions of the word “closet” appended to the title chapter of her study The Epistemology of the Closet, while Alan Stewart has traced the history of the closet as a sexualized and enclosed space within the household: “A secret non-public transactional space between two men behind a locked door.” Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 171. Gert Buelens, “Henry James’s Oblique Possession: Plottings of Desire and Mastery in The American Scene,” PMLA 116 (2001): 300–313 (301). Ibid.


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CHAPTER 7

Second Thoughts “Queer ‘Maud-Evelyn’”

Kevin Ohi

“Maud-Evelyn” has all the accoutrements of a ghost story except perhaps the dread that ought to accompany one: a beautiful, dead girl; disconsolate parents who go to mediums rather than give her up; a man who falls in love with the dead girl; a woman who, having fallen in love with him, must reconcile herself to losing him to the dead; and a rapt audience gathered to hear the story. First published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900, the tale takes as its unsettling premise the possibility of giving a dead child, in retrospect, the life she ought to have had. His proposal of marriage rejected by Lavinia, Marmaduke travels to Switzerland, where he encounters Mr. and Mrs. Dedrick; befriending this couple, Marmaduke’s life becomes more and more entwined with Maud-Evelyn, their daughter who died many years before, at age 14 or possibly 16 (no one seems sure). Determined to give Maud-Evelyn the life she missed, he becomes, by the story’s end, her fiancé, husband, and widower. Satisfied that their daughter has had “all her young happiness,” the couple dies, leaving to Marmaduke the gifts (for Maud-Evelyn) that have accumulated all the while.1 Similarly satisfied, Marmaduke likewise fades away and on his death leaves the treasures to Lavinia. Like his stories of writers and disciples, Henry James’s ghost stories often turn on—might even be said simply to be about—intensities of same-sex desire. For this story, one would not have to look far to discover thematics perhaps less of same-sex desire than of dissimulation or absence, thematics, one might therefore say, of the closet.2 Marmaduke’s manifestly perverse relation to Maud-Evelyn is sheltered by two observing, discrete, and thereby complicit women: Lavinia and Lady Emma (the internal


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narrator of the story). “It’s the oddest thing I ever heard of, but it is, in its way, a reality,” Lady Emma remarks of the conviction of retrospective compensation Marmaduke shares with the dead girl’s parents. “Only,” she continues, “we mustn’t speak of it to others” (ME, 194). “There had been little need of my enjoining reserve upon Lavinia: she obeyed, in respect to impenetrable silence save with myself, an instinct, an interest of her own. We never therefore gave poor Marmaduke, as you call it, ‘away’” (ME, 196). From the outset Marmaduke is for them a topic cathected, often, to the very extent that he is not explicitly discussed: “We avoided with much intensity the subject of Marmaduke” (ME, 186). “There was . . . a long middle stretch,” we later read, “during which, though we were all so much in London, he dropped out of my talks with Lavinia. We were conscious, she and I, of his absence from them; but we clearly felt in each quarter that there are things after all unspeakable” (ME, 196). The voluble silence, the vicarious shame (at least to the extent of forbearing to expose, to “give away,” a conviction Marmaduke himself may or may not have desired to conceal), and, above all, the fascination (“contagious”) (ME, 194) exerted by the “unspeakable”: the “quasi-nominative, quasi-obliterative” structure of preterition, marking, moreover, spectators’ investments in a friend’s (quasi-erotic, quasi-necromantic) relation to another suggests we are in the vicinity of the closet.3 There are other potentially queer aspects to the story. From one angle a narrative of unrequited love, the tale is, from another, a story of inheritance. One effect of the shared delusion (if it be a delusion) is to justify the transmission of property along lines not dictated by biological reproduction: the Dedricks leave the bulk of their estate to Marmaduke, who in turn leaves it to Lavinia—who is not married to Marmaduke and who has no matrimonial or familial relation, phantasmatic or otherwise, to MaudEvelyn. Marmaduke might look like the “young head of an hereditary business,” but he is not, technically, related to anyone in the firm, and his position is inherited by one less related than he is (ME, 196). Property, I will suggest, is transmitted according to other logics—bequests bypass familial routes to follow lines of narrative absorption. It is not simply patriarchal transmission that has gone awry; skewed, too, is the courtship plot that the story’s framing might have led us to expect. The dead Maud-Evelyn and the shared fascination with her take the place of what seems, at least initially, to promise to become the story’s central plot: Lavinia’s ostensibly unrequited love for Marmaduke and her effort to recover the marriage proposal she comes to think she too hastily rejected. Lady Emma’s conniving to bring the thwarted lovers together comes to naught; not merely ineffectual, it begins to seem irrelevant, and


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the promised courtship plot fizzles. Without too forced an emphasis, then, certain compensations for Marmaduke become visible: he gets the prestige, the sense of life-shaping meaning, and even—it seems—many of the pleasures of heterosexuality and marriage without having to undergo either. He gets, as it were, a fictional marriage that is as good—better, even—than the “real” thing. Singularly placid, moreover, is the simulacrum of heterosexuality in this ghost story without dread; one way to phrase what his fictional marriage gives him would be to say that, sheltering no tortured secret nor any private sense of lack, Marmaduke’s is a particularly happy experience of the closet. Lavinia, too—whatever spin Lady Emma may at times put on the matter—never seems to experience Marmaduke’s love for Maud-Evelyn as privative or even as something that necessarily excludes her. “Lavinia,” Lady Emma tells us, “was one of nine, and her brothers and sisters, who have never done anything for her, help, actually, in different countries, and on something, I believe, of the same scale, to people the globe” (ME, 179). Beyond securing one’s love for Lady Emma’s caustic wit, this statement intimates not only that heterosexual reproduction can be trusted to shift for itself—the demographics of that family alone leaving Lavinia and any puny marriage plot she might muster dwarfed in “scale” and happily irrelevant—but also that there are, after all, plots more interesting than those in the service of global population expansion. If the investments in this story might be called “heterosexual,” they are entirely nonreproductive; their “issue,” moreover, is a dead girl—and one who, her desires once fulfilled, allows those who love her to die. Ghosts (conventionally) want the living to join them; in this ghost story, that prospect is no source of terror—it is, it seems, a consummation devoutly to be wished. Inheritance thwarts reproductive paths, and desire leads to a dead girl. The death drive depicted by the story, in this sense, presents a realization of what Lee Edelman calls “no future”—though decidedly without the panic one might expect. The story might be called “queer” (and a ghost story) to the extent that “futurity” gives way to “sinthomosexuality,”4 which might begin to illuminate the stakes of the story’s “fictional” heterosexuality. A radically nonprocreative union, Marmaduke’s marriage to Maud-Evelyn might depict an experience of the closet, partly in the sense that its sheltering relation is a fictional one, which is not to say, however, that it is an illusion produced to obscure another, real, set of affairs. Such an understanding marks, perhaps, Lady Emma’s initial thought that Marmaduke must be either insane or an unscrupulous adventurer—options that the story (like Lady Emma, for that matter) does not long entertain (ME, 190, 198). The truth or falsity of Marmaduke’s wedding remains, finally,


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undecidable; neither does the question prove to be of much interest to the story. The relation is fictional. To understand what that might mean, however, requires further specification of both how the story phrases Maud-Evelyn’s recovered “happiness,” and its logic of legacy and bequest. Maud-Evelyn’s recovered happiness might be called fictional because it occurs through a particular temporal structure: Marmaduke and the Dedricks look back in order thereby to project the happiness she will have had—so that they can, in turn, look back on it: “They make her out older so as to imagine they had her longer; and they make out that certain things really happened to her, so that she shall have had more life” (ME, 195). “They wanted her so . . . to have had, don’t you know, just everything. . . . [T]hey couldn’t like me so much,” Marmaduke explains, “without wanting me to have been the man” (ME, 199). The temporal lag of these future anterior and perfect infinitive formulations gives way to a simple past tense: “There is one thing, above all, they want her to have had . . . And she did have it” (ME, 195). As Marmaduke says of their wedding, “Maud-Evelyn had all her young happiness” (ME, 201). There will be more to say about this temporal structure; for now, it might suffice to say that Marmaduke’s backward gaze shares something of the temporality of reading. The present depicted by a text never corresponds with the present time of reading; from the perspective of the written text, a reading moves backward to uncover what will have been, and closes the cover on what has, by then, already occurred. (“Once upon a time” points us to such a structure, through its gaze backwards that is at once a marker of a story yet to come and of a story already told and therefore finished.) In the case of Maud-Evelyn, this “fictional” gaze points to something like the power of thought Sharon Cameron traces in James’s late texts— thought’s power to comprise even its own vanishing, to assert power, at the limit, even over death.5 Here, that power is explicitly a power to narrate; Marmaduke and the Dedricks literalize the power of a narrator to make of events what he will. This performative power of thought initially seems restorative and, in that measure, redemptive: Maud-Evelyn is given what she lacked. “The more we live in the past, the more things we find in it,” Marmaduke says. “It’s the gradual effect of brooding over the past; the past, that way, grows and grows” (ME, 201, 194). The phrasing of thought’s power of redemption makes it seem literally restorative: the past “grows and grows” by being filled with more and more “things”—perhaps like those beautiful things that Marmaduke gives to Maud-Evelyn, inherits, and then leaves to Lavinia. The need for restoration in fact radiates outward. Lady Emma’s relation to Marmaduke, we recall, is in her not having been his stepmother: “Even after I had taken someone else I was


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conscious of a pleasant link with the boy whose stepmother it had been open to me to become and to whom it was perhaps a little matter of vanity with me to show that I should have been for him one of the finest” (ME, 179). More generally, the story is marked throughout by Lady Emma’s second thoughts, her sense that she did not, at the time, give Marmaduke sufficient credit. The story’s telling is, in this sense, her going back to give Marmaduke (after he is dead) what he ought to have had. If, however, it is possible to read the temporal movement of the story as redemptive or restorative, it is also possible to find in it something more disconcerting: “It appears she wasn’t so young,” says Lavinia. “It appears she had grown up” (ME, 193). Extending Maud-Evelyn’s life gives her “more” years; on the other hand, it in a sense erases her existence. No one seems to know how old she was; all that is certain is that, at the moment of the story’s telling, she is gone. To return to the temporal structure of the story, then, the movement from a future anterior (what she will have had) or a perfect infinitive (I want her to have had) to a past tense—“Maud-Evelyn had all her young happiness”—forecloses any possibility of a present (ME, 201). Happiness is not something MaudEvelyn ever has: she will have had it, and, afterward, she can be said to have had it. Striking, therefore, is Marmaduke’s announced wedding to Maud-Evelyn, which he celebrates by going into mourning. As Lavinia puts it, “He has lost his wife,” (ME, 201).6 Maud-Evelyn’s “happiness,” like Marmaduke’s wedding, never takes place.7 By becoming a widower, Marmaduke makes himself out to have been a groom; the loss and its compensation are simultaneous, and the future anterior passes into the past without ever passing through the present. To “have” a wife is, in this story, to have lost her. The story thus depicts a particular temporality of fiction: the “now” of its most crucial events never occurs. “In an ‘egocentric’ model of deixis,” writes Ann Banfield, “here and now are defined as the place and the time which I occupy, as my spatio-temporal perspective: ‘“here” is where my body is’ or ‘“here” is the place of whatever sensible object is occupying my attention.’ But the discussion of the here-now is not dependent on its being so occupied, despite the terminology, if one has abandoned the presupposition that sense-data, if they are given, are necessarily given to someone.”8 She continues: In the sentence containing a narrative past tense, the moment referred to by the verb is not deictically anchored, but calculated solely in terms of before-and-after, in a chronological order which is that of integers. In the sentence already cited from Flaubert [Ainsi, en 1825, deux vitriers


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badigeonnèrent le vestibule; en 1827, une portion du toit, tombant dans la cour, faillit tuer un homme],9badigeonnèrent refers to an event which precedes the event referred to by faillit tuer, which follows the first; there is no central present moment to which both are referred.10

Exploring the consequences for linguistics of what Virginia Woolf calls “the world without a self,”11 Banfield finds in narrative sentences (of a “now-in-the-past” representing “an empty spatial and temporal centre”) the potential for an “impersonal subjectivity.”12 In such sentences “describing the unobserved,” she finds a perspective inhabited by no one.13 The dispropriating potential that Banfield uncovers in a linguistic analysis of narrative language suggests one reason for the overlapping in James of effects of narrative erasure and queer effects of ghosting.14 For the queer, “different, odd, out-of-synch, and attracted to same-sex peers” child, the tendency “to treat all children as straight while we culturally consider them asexual” makes, as Kathryn Bond Stockton suggests, for an experience of “asynchronicity”: Certain linguistic marks for its queerness arrive only later and ride the back of this person’s recognition of a road not taken. “I am not straight”: “I was a gay child.” This is the only grammatical formulation allowed to gay childhood. That is to say, in one’s teens or twenties, when (parental) plans for one’s straight destination can be seen to have died, the designation “homosexual child,” or even “gay kid,” may finally, retrospectively, be applied.15

The gay child, she suggests, can never be. To recognize a gay child is to look back at a child now vanished and to see in what it will have become the ghostly outlines of what it was. Skirting, on the one side, the homophobic determinations of the invisibility of same-sex attractions and, on the other, the ego-consolidating imperialism of the later self (gay or otherwise), the child of “I was a gay child” emerges, ghostlike, in what Stockton calls an “interval”—in the time-lag built into the consolidation of meaning in metaphor (Stockton, 280), into identity’s recovery in retrospection, or, we might add, into cognition itself.16 The paradoxical temporality of “I was a gay child” is also that of “Maud-Evelyn,” and the time lag here marks the way in which we might understand its structure as fictional and how we might read its relation to the story’s paradoxical mode of desire. Whatever its compensations, recovery in the story—we suggested— does not lead to possession. This structure, which divides Maud-Evelyn from her happiness, traverses the entire story and links its “inner” and


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“outer” narratives. Lady Emma’s relation to Marmaduke consists in her not being his stepmother, Lavinia’s, in not being his wife. Linking MaudEvelyn’s story to its frame is an ostensibly privative relation: Maud-Evelyn and Lavinia “might have had him.” For Lavinia, this makes for a paradoxical mode of possession: “He’s mine from the moment no one else has him” (ME, 195). We might therefore make sense of Marmaduke’s recurrent promise to Lavinia: “I swore to her that I would never marry,” which then becomes, for Lavinia, a promise that he would never marry “anyone but me” (ME, 181, 182). Lavinia’s assertion here is compromised less by its egocentrism than by its taming of the potential exorbitance of Maramduke’s promise. If we noted earlier the potentially queer achievement of Marmaduke’s marriage to Maud-Evelyn—heterosexuality without any of its literal trappings—to the implicit register of social entitlement (one way of reading the closet in the story) should be added this paradoxical mode of erasure, exclusion, or dereification: marriage without possession, a desire that—without marking a renunciation—achieves its ends in letting go of its object.17 This particular mode of desire thus marks, on the level of character, the narrative structure we have been tracing in the story. These terms recall the story’s narrative of nonhereditary transmission, its bequests that follow paths not of heterosexual reproduction, but rather, finally, of absorption. It is striking in this regard that the story’s beautiful things never appear in it. “They’re really marvels,” the story concludes, “treasures extraordinary, and she [Lavinia] has them all. Next week I go with her—I shall see them at last. Tell you about them, you say? My dear man, everything” (205). Whatever their other effects (they make manifest that, at least to a certain extent, the story was, for Lady Emma, all along about the things), the story’s final lines explicitly elicit—and frustrate—the audience’s desire to see (or even simply hear about) those things. Implicit, perhaps, in the story’s ending with that promise is the intimation that, just as Maramduke fulfills his promise to Lavinia by never marrying, the story’s promise is fulfilled when it falls into silence. The transmitted (non) objects, like Maud-Evelyn, come into being with their vanishing.18 “Any theory has to suppose something,” remarks Lavinia in defense of Marmaduke’s seeming delusion, “and it depends at any rate on what it’s a theory of” (ME, 194). The theory, it seems, might be a theory of nothing. In this, it calls to mind Wilde’s “Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” whose elaborate theory of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, proposing to discover the boy who inspired them entirely through internal evidence, shows itself to be groundless. “You start by assuming the existence of the very person whose existence is the thing to be proven”: the effort to deduce historical reference


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exclusively from the language of the Sonnets results not in proof but in the perpetuation of the search.19 In that story, the groundlessness issues in absorption—and transmission from one absorbed reader to another. That the presented theory of the Sonnets cannot be proven insures its perpetuation—and its enduring fascination; the vanishing boy paradoxically bodies forth, in his very vanishing, the unlocatable present of literary absorption. “Maud-Evelyn” is likewise about absorption and about tellers and listeners who are caught up in a story: “His past, rolling up year after year, had become too interesting for him”; the queer bequests come with—or rather through—a similar interest (ME, 197). Marmaduke’s interest is shown here to be (in a term elsewhere used to describe MaudEvelyn’s fascination) “contagious” (ME, 194), and, for Lady Emma, it is explicitly compared to the fascination of reading: “I had drawn up to the fire with a book,” Lady Emma tells us, and Marmaduke’s knock (“suddenly, in my absorption, I heard a firm rat-tat-tat”) leads her to give “a groan of inhospitality.” But Marmaduke “proved . . . still more attaching than my novel,” and its “open face” perhaps allows him “to feel he could supersede Wilkie Collins” (ME, 196–97). Supersede here no doubt means “to take the place of (something set aside or abandoned); to succeed to the place occupied by; to serve, be adopted or accepted instead of ” (Oxford English Dictionary). Marmaduke takes the place of a text (as Wilkie Collins himself has, in this mode of referring to his text, been superseded by his writing). Yet I think that we might also hear the echoes of several archaic meanings of the word: to postpone, to defer, to put off, to suspend, to put aside, to delay, to hesitate, and to refrain from mentioning. To become a text is to embody the “interval” of “I was a gay child,” and of Maud-Evelyn—or “Maud-Evelyn.” The fascination of Shakespeare’s Sonnets is not the beautiful boy visible there but his vanishing; temporizing theories mark the paradoxical becoming-visible of that disappearance. The objects we never see in “Maud-Evelyn” intimate a similarly queer mode of literary transmission, as does the paradoxical mode of recompense and redemption in the story, and it is in the sense of a superseded story that we might understand Marmaduke’s happy experience of the closet. The story’s paradoxical mode of recompense seems to be partly what is at stake in the many layers of mediation that separate us from MaudEvelyn. Her parents tell her story to Marmaduke, who conveys it to Lavinia, who fills in the details for Lady Emma, who gives the entire story to an unnamed narrator, who, in turn, tells it to the reader. “What she had known,” concludes that narrator, “I must give as nearly as possible as she herself gave it. She talked to us from her corner of the sofa,


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and the flicker of the firelight in her face was like the glow of memory, the play of fancy, from within” (ME, 178). The moment, which evokes, perhaps, the fire around which “the story had held us, . . . sufficiently breathless,” in The Turn of the Screw, initially seems to intimate a logic of representative adequation: the simile, by bringing together the “glow of memory” and “the flicker of firelight,” seems to suggest an adequation of inside and out that in turn stands in for the story’s power to convey the past without loss.20 Such adequation, however, is exactly what is put in question by the temporality of Maud-Evelyn’s retrospective recovery, and the coming together of inside and out thereby seems to intimate a more unsettling dispossession. The end of the story and its frustrating of a reader’s desire to “see” the fabled “things” also suggests that the story’s structure leads not to narrative culmination or closure but toward (potentially endless) repetition—like the exfoliating layers of mediation in the story, the repetition, moving outward, of the contagious fascination of the dead girl at the story’s heart. Striking in this regard is Lady Emma’s opening remark: “I think that was the way that, one day when she [Lavinia] was about twenty—before some of you perhaps were born—the affair, for me, must have begun” (ME, 179). More striking than the equivocation is the parenthetical location of the time proper to the story: “Before some of you perhaps were born.” The coming together of inside and out in the image of the firelight also stands for the coming together of the story’s own inside and out: not only frame and narrative but also reader and text. In this story about characters out of sync with time, about a past made replete through an erasure of the present, about a desire that takes hold of its objects by letting them go, about a curious mode of transmission that culminates in dispossession, the true ghost may in fact be the reader, brought back to a time before his birth to read a story that will have fascinated him—and, in that fascination, will have spelled his erasure. Marmaduke shows us how happy an experience it can be to occupy, dispossessed, that interval of possession. I would, therefore, call “MaudEvelyn” queer to the precise extent that it is a ghost story. Notes 1. Henry James, “Maud-Evelyn,” in Henry James: Complete Stories 1898–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1996), 178–205 (201) (hereafter cited in text as ME). 2. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Beast in the Closet; James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic,” in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 182–212. 3. Sedgwick, “Beast,” 203.


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4. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 5. See Sharon Cameron’s reading of The Wings of the Dove and “Is there a Life after Death?”: “Thinking it Out in The Wings of the Dove,” in Thinking in Henry James (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), 122–68; see also Henry James, “Is there a Life after Death?,” in Henry James on Culture, ed. Pierre A. Walker (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 155–27. 6. We see the same structure in the anticipation of Marmaduke’s death: “He has had his life” (ME, 203). 7. In this, it obeys (perhaps figures) the fundamental ontology of James’s fiction. Given the essay’s subject, it is perhaps not entirely to be regretted that the five years that have passed since I first wrote it have given me ample time for second thoughts—and opportunity to reflect further on the consequences of the temporal structure outlined here. I do so in Henry James and the Queerness of Style (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). As I note there, the structure that this essay calls “fictional” might also be called “virtual”—in the sense that Leo Bersani uses that term in his reading of “The Beast in the Jungle,” which, he suggests, “thematizes the Jamesian tendency to extract all events, as well as all perspectives on them, from any specified time, and to transfer them to a before or after in which they are de-realized in the form of anticipations or retrospections.” Bersani, “The It and the I,” in Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 23. This is a “virtual” structure insofar as “represented happening in art, however meticulously detailed, is inherently unspecifiable happening” (26). On the virtual in James, see also Katherine Biers, The Promise of the Virtual: Writing and Media in the Progressive Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming). 8. Ann Banfield, “Describing the Unobserved: Events Grouped Around an Empty Centre,” in The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature, ed. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant, and Colin MacCabe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 265–85 (271). 9. (“Thus in 1825 a couple of glaziers whitewashed the hall; in 1827 a piece of the roof fell into the courtyard and nearly killed a man.”) Gustave Flaubert, “Un Coeur Simple,” in Trois Contes, Paris, 1965, 239, translated as “A Simple Heart” in Three Tales, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth [Penguin], 1961), 41. Both original and translation cited in Banfield, “Describing the Unobserved,” 270. 10. Banfield, “Unobserved,” 272. 11. Woolf, The Waves (London: The Hogarth Press, 1972), 204, cited in Banfield, “Unobserved,” 274. 12. Banfield, “Unobserved,” 275. 13. See also Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982); and Ann Banfield, “L’Écriture et le Non-Dit,” Diacritics 21, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 20– 31 (esp. 29). On some of the consequences for cinematic spectatorship of “the world without a self ” and of a perspective inhabited by no one, see Kevin Ohi,


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14.

15.

16.

17.

18.


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“Annunciation and Voyeurism in Almodóvar’s Talk To Her,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 51, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 521–57; and (in relation to animals and poetics) Kevin Ohi, “The Consummation of the Swallow’s Wings: A Zoo Story,” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 3 (“Digital Desire”) edited by Ellis Hanson (forthcoming). It is perhaps worth registering the ghost of another kind of story that the donnée of James’s tale could have lent itself to (a kind of story that is no doubt the object of James’s characteristically elusive irony): the sentimental conjuring up of a dead girl to give her “all her young happiness”—and its readers all the equivocal, vicarious pleasure of that recovery. James’s story makes us see the contradictions animating such mawkish tales—and the morbid pleasure, not least of all, of both the death that is the necessary condition of the redemption and the pathos therefore generated by the disavowed knowledge of the redemption’s ultimate failure. Kathryn Bond Stockton, “Growing Sideways, or Versions of the Queer Child: The Ghost, the Homosexual, the Freudian, the Innocent, and the Interval of the Animal,” in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 277–315 (283). Stockton has since elaborated on this concept in The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). On the genocidal fantasies of queer extermination underlying “treatment” of protogay kids, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys,” in Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 154–64. Against the expanding of the interval in Stockton, one might counterpose its compression in ideologies of childhood innocence; see Kevin Ohi, “‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’: The Exquisite Boy and Henry James’s Equivocal Aestheticism,” ELH 72, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 747–67. See also Kevin Ohi, “Forms of Initiation: ‘The Tree of Knowledge,’” The Henry James Review 29, no. 2 (Spring 2008), 118–131 and Kevin Ohi, “Children,” in Henry James in Context, ed. David McWhirter, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 115–25. On the temporal lag suggested by Stockton and by James’s story, see also Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 65–68. On belatedness and the queer potential of what it suggests about the understanding of consciousness in late James, see Ohi, Henry James and the Queerness of Style. One might note in this regard the story’s recurrent negatives. Maud-Evelyn is with her parents, Lavinia explains, “in the sense that they think of nothing else” (ME, 188). To think of “nothing else” is not exactly the same as thinking only of her; the thought of her potentially coincides with the absence of thought. Thus structure, too, ripples outward in the story, extending not only to Lavinia and Lady Emma’s relations to Marmaduke but also to Lady Emma’s grasp on Lavinia: “It was in the tone of this that she struck, to my ear, the first note of an acceptance so deep and a patience so strange that they gave me, at the end, even

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more food for wonderment than the rest of the business” (ME, 187); “there was something about her that began to escape me, and I must have looked at her hard” (ME, 189). As Lavinia says near the story’s end: “You’ve never understood” (ME, 203). 19. Oscar Wilde, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Perennial Library, 1989), 1161. 20. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 14 (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), 147–309 (147).


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CHAPTER 8

Uncanny Doublings in “Owen Wingrave” Gert Buelens

“Owen Wingrave” has not had the most distinguished of careers. In one of the most exhaustive accounts of James’s oeuvre, S. Gorley Putt is wholly dismissive of the value of this “morbid tale,”1 which dramatizes the moral battle fought by the scion of a long line of military officers who discovers that he has a strong pacifist inclination. Summarizing the story’s finale, set in a haunted room at young Owen’s family home in the country, Putt drily notes: “Owen spends the night there, haunted by cumulative accusations of cowardice. He is found dead. (All that is lacking is an ironic white feather on his heroic corpse).”2 Maqbool Aziz, writing in Daniel Fogel’s comprehensive Companion to Henry James Studies, groups “Owen Wingrave” with “The Bench of Desolation,” “The Altar of the Dead,” and “The Tone of Time,” commenting: “These are not tales so much as they are meditations strung on the frailest of narrative structures.”3 Most studies don’t even bother to mention the tale,4 in spite of the fact that James revised it for the New York Edition (traditionally a benchmark for the academic canonization of James’s work) as well as turning it into a play, The Saloon. That play, too, has managed to irritate critics, beginning with George Bernard Shaw, who, in Dupee’s summary, felt that the “young pacifist” must achieve an “unqualified victory over the ghost”: “Owen Wingrave must win and live; to have it otherwise was to ‘preach cowardice’ . . . ‘fatalism.’”5 But perhaps Virginia Woolf, otherwise a very sympathetic reader of James’s ghost stories, has been most damning in her assessment, singling out “Owen Wingrave” in 1921 as a case study in the failed ghostly tale. Woolf ’s key objection is that the protagonists are endowed with a great deal of “stir and importance,”6 without


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these qualities leading anywhere. “We seem to be settling in for a long absorbing narrative; and then, rudely, incongruously, a shriek rings out; poor Owen is found stretched on the threshold of the haunted room; the supernatural has cut the book in two. It is violent; it is sensational; but if Henry James himself were to ask us, ‘Now, have I frightened you?’ we should be forced to reply, ‘Not a bit.’ The catastrophe has not the right relations to what has gone before.”7 In what follows I want to take issue with the grounds on which Woolf quarrels with “Owen Wingrave.” I will be doing so not out of a conviction that she or other earlier critics would somehow be wrong in criticizing James. Rather, I think it is possible to see hitherto obscure “relations” between the “catastrophe” and “what has gone before” that are made visible by the different light shed by new sociocultural contexts, and particularly by new paradigms in literary studies. One example is composer Benjamin Britten and librettist Myfanwy Piper’s 1971 adaptation of the story for opera. As Halliwell reports, this version is not only clearly influenced by Britten’s strongly pacifist “concern with contemporary issues such as the Vietnam war”8 but also shows the marks, according to recent readings, of “Britten’s exploration of the possibility of coming out.”9 Britten’s transposition thus helps us become aware of homoerotic dimensions of the story that go some way towards explaining the abruptness of the catastrophe that strikes at the end. In a similar vein, Eric Haralson’s “Iron Henry, or James Goes to War” shows how “Owen Wingrave” is deeply informed not so much by an ideological pacifism as by “James’s lifelong effort to recuperate his wasted chance at war—to extract a ‘revelation’ for purposes of his ‘immortal form,’” a psychological gloss that, again, illuminates the violent denouement in richer ways, suggesting that the tale was an occasion for both “interrogating war ideology and vindicating James’s own commitment to an alternative heroism in art.”10 But I want to take my initial cue for a reading of “Owen Wingrave” as an effective ghostly story above all from T. J. Lustig’s remarks (both in his introduction to a World’s Classics collection and in his Henry James and the Ghostly) on how the tale shows “the patterns of the past being simultaneously repeated and altered”: “It is impossible for Owen to break with his family’s military past since in fighting it he inevitably perpetuates it. But his replication of the past is also a transformation of those patterns.”11 Lustig’s perspective on “Owen Wingrave” runs closely parallel to the theory of performativity that Judith Butler was developing around the same time, in the early 1990s. I aim to extend Lustig’s analysis (which, even in the scholarly version, is limited to some three pages), and to devote more sustained attention to the performative character of the


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story’s central irony: that Owen is the perfect soldier. Above all, I mean to provide a new answer to Woolf ’s question: “What use is made of the supernatural?” Woolf felt that James failed to show why “[p]oor Owen Wingrave is knocked on the head by the ghost of an ancestor” and that “a stable bucket in a dark passage would have done it better.”12 I intend to demonstrate that it is essential to the ghostly quality of this tale that Owen and his ancestors are involved in numerous uncanny doublings. “Performativity” has become the shorthand phrase to refer to Butler’s theory of the constructed nature of identities. Initially, Butler’s work was wholly concerned with gendered and sexual identities; of late, she has turned to the question of how a performative understanding of identity can be reconciled with the subject’s moral responsibility. Like Derrida before her, Butler elaborates on speech act theory, which distinguishes between constative and performative predicates. The former can be verified for their truth value (for instance, “The earth revolves around the sun.”); the latter cannot—instead, they enact in their very saying the activity they name (for instance, “I now pronounce you husband and wife.”). For Butler, there is no essential, original identity of the constative type; it is rather the concatenation of reiterated speech acts (copies) in which we assume a particular identity, in which we performatively become the thing we name. We are not at complete liberty in doing so. Just as the act of pronouncing two people husband and wife can only result in the fact of marriage when it is carried out by people who have the requisite authority behind them (“By the power vested in me by the State of . . .”) and cite a well-honed formula, so what we repeat in the process of assuming an identity is a series of social norms that preexist us. A final element that must be invoked to sketch Butler’s take is that she is interested in what happens when people miscite social norms: is there any potential in the process of repetition for undercutting the matrix of norms? Is it, in particular, possible to question the norm by exposing its artificial (construed) character through exaggerated performance? “Owen Wingrave,” it seems to me, performatively exposes the unnaturalness of “the military temperament,”13 and unsettles the relation between copy and original in the many doublings of this uncanny tale. Its performative effect is generated first and foremost by its citing of the basic military stance in another context, to another end. The crucial moment comes at the very end of the tale, when Owen, intent on proving (especially to his potential fiancée, Kate Julian, who dares him to the act) that his pacifism is not rooted in cowardice, returns to a haunted room, in full awareness of the risk he runs in doing so. The room is haunted not by just any old ghost, but particularly by that of Owen’s great-great-grandfather,


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Colonel Wingrave. It is this relative who is held out to Owen as the yardstick of family morality; it is his portrait on the grand staircase at Paramore, the Wingrave mansion, that dominates “the family circle”: “It’s what my aunt calls the family circle, and they sit, ever so grimly, in judgement. The circle’s all constituted here, it’s a kind of awful encompassing presence, it stretches away into the past, and when I came back with her the other day Miss Wingrave told me I wouldn’t have the impudence to stand in the midst of it and say such things” (OW, 297). The punitive force exerted by the social matrix is here thematized quite explicitly. Strikingly, this force is associated not only with the people commemorated in this particular location but also with the house overall. When Spencer Coyle asks his pupil what it is that worries him, if not the fact that his grandfather and aunt have cut him out of their wills, the answer is: “Oh the house—the very air and feeling of it. There are strange voices in it that seem to mutter at me—to say dreadful things as I pass. I mean the general consciousness and responsibility of what I’m doing. . . . I’ve started up all the old ghosts” (OW, 296–97). The inescapable role played by the house is underlined by the fact that Owen’s grandfather and aunt cannot stop him from inheriting Paramore, since Sir Philip “can’t break the entail” that passes “this place” down the Ladder of the Wingrave generations (OW, 295, 296). Just as the material possession of Paramore must be carried over from one generation to the next, so, it seems, must its ghostly possession be undergone by successive members of the Wingrave family. Let us rehearse what we know of the history that has been marked by such uncanny forces. Three deaths have taken place at Paramore. The first was “a lad just growing up” (OW, 300) in the reign of George the Second, who, for unspecified reasons, angered his father to the point of being struck dead by him. The murder was almost successfully hushed up by the family until the Colonel himself suffered death in the room (the White Room) where his son had been laid up the night before, prior to his burial: “The poor man lay dead on the floor, in his clothes, as if he had reeled and fallen back, without a wound, without a mark, without anything in his appearance to indicate that he had either struggled or suffered” (OW, 301). The third death is that of Owen himself, who goes up to the White Room to prove his valour, and is found dead, again without any visible signs of what caused his demise. These deaths form a chain of reiterated acts, with interesting divergences. I will return to the question of what caused the initial anger in a moment. What is important for now is that it is described as “a fit of passion” (OW, 300), which results in an act of violence strong enough to cause death (there is no suggestion that the


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death was above all an accident). The person who dealt this death blow returns, not to the scene of the crime, but to another, doubling room: “one of those rooms on the other side of the house, . . . the room from which his child had been carried to burial” (OW, 300–301). The idea of the copy makes an intriguing appearance here. Apparently, “some fit of compunction or some fascination of dread” makes the Colonel return to the room that is associated with the public scene of death, rather than the (unspecified) private place where the fatal blow was actually struck (OW, 301). What is more, there is, at this point, no mention of any ghost. It is rather as if the room itself has now acted against the person who killed. The house, we could speculate, does not tolerate this particular form of internecine violence within its walls. Rather, what the House of Wingrave is all about is how the “passion” that keeps troubling the members of the family must be directed outward into the socially acceptable vessel of the military temperament. The prime example of such success is Sir Philip Wingrave, current head of the family, “a small brown erect octogenarian, with smouldering eyes and a studied courtesy” (OW, 278–79). Sir Philip’s passion is betrayed by “the thick red ray, like the glow of stirred embers, that always made his eyes conflict oddly with his mild manners” (OW, 311). “The eye of the imagination,” the narrator observes, focalizing, as ever, through Spencer Coyle’s perception, “could glance back into his crowded Eastern past—back at episodes in which his scrupulous forms would only have made him more terrible. He had his legend—and oh there were stories about him!” (OW, 279). A great deal is made of the fact that many of the Wingraves have done what their surname in part suggests: they have won their graves, and they have done so particularly on the borders of the British Empire. The soldier is there to sacrifice his life in the process of defending Empire against the threatening other; he must maintain the external borders that exclude that other who is, in Derridean terms echoed by Butler, the constitutive outside of Empire: it is in marking boundaries between inside and outside that we become who we are—that we define what constitutes us. The crucial (economic) dependence of Empire on its other is also suggested by Haralson when he reminds us that it is the “East India Company’s trading ambitions” that underpin the presence of the British in these farflung territories.14 Owen and his brother Philip are said to be “the only children of the old man’s only son, who, like so many of his ancestors, had given up a gallant young life to the service of his country. Owen Wingrave the elder had received his death-cut, in close quarters, from an Afghan sabre; the blow had come crashing across his skull” (OW, 278). Kate Julian, too, descends from “a line of splendidly wasted soldiers”15: “I


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mean more particularly her father, who fell in battle. And her grandfather, and his father, and her uncles and great-uncles—they all fell in battle” (OW, 298). What is more, it is not just the men who are affected by this mentality. When Owen the elder dies, “[h]is wife, at that time in India, was about to give birth to her third child; and when the event took place, in darkness and anguish, the baby came lifeless into the world and the mother sank under the multiplication of her woes” (OW, 278). It is worth bearing in mind that, etymologically, “passion” is intimately related to suffering. The American Heritage Dictionary reports the word’s derivation “from Medieval Latin passio, passion-, sufferings of Jesus or a martyr, from Late Latin, physical suffering, martyrdom, sinful desire, from Latin, an undergoing, from passus, past participle of pati, to suffer.” This etymology bolsters a reading that underlines how all the agents undergo emotions, not just in the sense of enduring “woes” but also as being governed by something that they cannot properly control. Thus we learn that Owen’s aunt Jane is for one thing a staunch pillar of the military establishment: “She’s formidable . . . and it’s right she should be,” Spencer Coyle opines, “because somehow in her very person, good maiden Lady as she is, she represents the might, she represents the traditions and the exploits, of the British army” (OW, 274). But for another, aunt Jane is deeply marked by a romantic event that took place—or rather, misfired—in her younger days. A “passage of some delicacy, taking a tragic turn, was believed to have been enacted” between her and Captain Hume-Walker: “They had been engaged to be married, but she had given way to the jealousy of her nature—had broken with him and sent him off to his fate, which had been horrible. A passionate sense of having wronged him, a hard eternal remorse had thereupon taken possession of her . . .” (OW, 279). The military temperament—whether located with the Wingrave men or the Wingrave women—not only serves the needs of Empire at its physical borders; it is also activated to manage internal challenges to the Empire of orderly emotions. It sends Hume-Walker to his death for an alleged violation of erotic mores; it sends Owen to his for an imputed cowardice. There is manifestly an excess of passion within the Wingrave family that cannot always be dealt with optimally. Thus, Jane Wingrave’s remorse over her drastic action with regard to the suspected infidelity of her lover leads her to dedicate herself “grimly to a long expiation”: she appoints the Captain’s widowed sister Mrs. Julian as “an unremunerated though not uncriticised housekeeper” as well as taking in the latter’s daughter Kate (OW, 280). It is obvious to speculate in this hot-blooded context that the fate of Philip Wingrave the younger is equally tied to the question of what


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may happen to fervour when it finds no normative outlet. “Poor Philip Wingrave . . . was literally imbecile and banished from view; deformed, unsocial, irretrievable, he had been relegated to a private asylum and had become among the friends of the family only a little hushed lugubrious legend” (OW, 277). What the theory of performativity helps us see is that those who conform to the military spirit are no more “natural” than those who don’t. Rather, the social norms that govern soldiers amount to a means of conducting passion management that allows for the direction of surplus ardour outward so that, in the projected scenario, it only affects abjected foreigners, while ultimately leading to the soldiers’ own deaths. The continuity between those who stage a successful (“normal”) performance of the martial stand and those who in various ways fall short of the norm is underlined by the confusing echoing of names (which I have already unpicked for the reader of the present chapter). It took me a couple of rereadings to figure out exactly what were the links between the various Owens and Philips. The story’s protagonist has the same name as his father. Both, we are led to conclude, die a hero’s death, Owen the elder suffering his demise while engaged, “in close quarters,” with a sabrewielding Afghan other, Owen the younger, his second son, succumbing while secreted in the room at Paramore that is known to be haunted by a threatening type of ghostly other. The fact that Philip, the elder son of Owen Wingrave the elder, carries the same name as his grandfather also uncovers a possible metaphorical relationship between two people who are connected by what is arguably the merely metonymical association of a shared name. It makes it conceivable that the elder man’s “smouldering eyes” betray a latent lunacy that has found full expression in the “lugubrious legend” to which the younger man’s life has become reduced. What is more, the craze-linked chain of the generations stretches further back in time in the strong facial resemblance between Colonel Wingrave, the sonslayer, and Sir Philip, so that the extreme passion of the two men can also be likened. Indeed, the text is once more conveniently ambiguous in its reference to these two men: On the staircase as they went her husband showed her the portrait of Colonel Wingrave—a representation, with some force and style, for the place and period, of a gentleman with a hard handsome face, in a red coat and peruke. Mrs Coyle pronounced his descendant old Sir Philip wonderfully like him; and her husband could fancy, though he kept it to himself, that if one should have the courage to walk the old corridors of Paramore at night one might meet a figure that resembled him roaming, with the restlessness of a ghost, hand in hand with the figure of a tall boy. (OW, 302)


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The point of these confusions lies precisely in the inescapable doublings and repetitions that inform this family matrix. If x is wonderfully like y, and z might well “resemble him,” then there is little point wondering whether the “him” to whom there might well be such a likeness is x or y. The interdependent status of original and copy is here brought out with particular vividness. As one would expect in Henry James, various details subtly support this idea. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the founding catastrophe of the tale’s plot—the death of Colonel Wingrave’s son—took place during the reign of George the Second, that the Colonel’s portrait overlooks the second landing of the grand staircase at Paramore, and that the protagonist is removed twice two times from the Colonel, his great-great-grandfather, to whom Owen is now tangibly linked through his grandfather, Sir Philip, himself two steps down from the formative ancestor. These persistent echoings suggest that the initial deathblow of this family narrative, of whose causes we learn nothing, was struck in similar circumstances to the ones that rule the family conflicts we become acquainted with further down the line. The naming of the crucial room as “White,” too, might intimate that the first young man to die at Paramore was as motivated by a pacifist desire to escape the family’s militarist tradition.16 But these echoings do no more than suggest this. In fact, the hazy relation between copy and original makes it questionable whether I am entitled to call the killing of Colonel Wingrave’s son a “founding” act, a term that pushes the idea of origin rather more than the indistinct description of the event and the interchangeability of the Colonel and Sir Philip allow for. There is one more doubling that must be examined in closer detail. Owen Wingrave visits the haunted White Room twice during his stay at Paramore. The first time he escapes unscathed; the second he dies. How can we account for this fact? What makes the repeated act different— and lethal? The critical distinction, I think, is that the first visit carries a strongly private significance. None of the people at Paramore know of it at the time. Yet, Owen exposes himself to the full force of the Wingrave tradition: he takes on the house at what is perhaps simultaneously its weak point and its strongest one. In true military fashion, he attacks at a calculated point. And he wins, in that nothing happens, in spite of some (psychological) casualty on his side (he has suffered fear, that much is clear). The second visit takes place under intense social pressure and with the full knowledge of key protagonists. Owen has mentioned his stay in the haunted room to his friend Lechmere and to Kate Julian, who pointblank refuses to believe him, persuaded as she is that Owen’s pacifism is nothing but a veil for cowardice. “Take me there yourself then and lock


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me in!” is Owen’s exasperated response, and Kate apparently proceeds to take him at his word (OW, 316). But it is at this point that we must also carefully consider the role played by Spencer Coyle, who is, I think, quite as instrumental in the social scripting of the second visit. Coyle has started out as Owen Wingrave’s main antagonist, resenting strongly his pupil’s announcement (with which the tale opens) that he has determined not, after all, to pursue a military career. “I’m unspeakably disgusted. You’ve made me dreadfully ill,” he tells Owen (OW, 269). The “professional ‘coach’” refuses to accept Wingrave’s decision (OW, 270) and takes several steps to ensure that it be reversed. He turns to Owen’s fellow-pupil Lechmere, one of only two he seems to be currently preparing for the army (they stay at his house for the purpose), and urges the young man to “plead” with his friend: “struggle with him—for God’s sake” (OW, 275). Coyle also looks up Aunt Jane, telling her that “the most powerful arguments at your command—especially if you should be able to put your hand on some intensely practical one—will be none too effective” (OW, 283). Yet, right from the beginning, the narrator casts considerable doubt on the straightforwardness of Spencer Coyle’s actions and motives. There is the surname that so obviously suggests the going round in circles that will lead to no direct action on the part of this character, no matter how resolved he may manage to come across. But there is also the fraught nature of his relationship to Owen Wingrave, which is driven by more than just the responsibility of the coach for his trainee. Coyle’s response to Owen’s announcement is unusually emotional and affects the teacher to the point of bringing him down to the same level as his pupil. The text notes how both were “pale” during the initial scene; how Coyle was “quite as agitated as his young friend” (notice how this noun too suggests a levelling effect); and how “they were evidently in no condition to prolong an encounter in which each drew blood” (OW, 269–70). When he broaches the subject of Owen’s planned defection with Lechmere, the latter is struck by the swearing that has crept into the coach’s speech: Lechmere “had never before observed the head of the establishment to set a fellow such an example of bad language” (OW, 273); he is amazed at “the freshness, as of a forgotten vernacular, [the case] had imparted to the governor’s vocabulary” (OW, 274). Winding up his exhortation to Lechmere to do whatever he can to turn Owen around, Coyle exclaims, “Then save him!” (276).17 The narrator tells us his addressee was “puzzled” over this plea, “as if it were forced upon him by this intensity that there was more in such an appeal than could appear on the surface” (276).


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It is certainly possible to argue that what lies hidden beneath the surface is Spencer Coyle’s homoerotic attraction to Owen (which, as was already noted, may also have played a part in Britten’s interest in the tale). The narrator reports that Coyle “had taken a particular fancy to Owen Wingrave. This young man’s particular shade of ability, to say nothing of his whole personality, almost cast a spell and at any rate worked a charm” (OW, 270). Following a line of enquiry inspired by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s example in Epistemology of the Closet, it could be observed that, while Spencer Coyle’s erotic attraction to Owen cannot be openly admitted, his wife acts as a convenient substitute, so that it can be mentioned jocularly enough that Coyle “had accused the good lady more than once of being in love with Owen Wingrave” (OW, 291). “She admitted that she was, she even gloried in her passion; which shows,” the narrator informs us, “that the subject, between them, was treated in a liberal spirit,” though not as liberal, we might then add, as to permit it to be stated that the good gentleman was quite as smitten (OW, 291). I think, however, that to get close to what this uncanny tale is about we must also pay attention to the particular formulation the narrator uses to explain how Coyle is attracted to Owen: the young man “almost cast a spell and at any rate worked a charm” on his coach (OW, 270). Clearly, for Coyle, it is Owen himself who acts with the force of the uncanny. It then also becomes vital to register that Coyle originally agreed to take on Owen as a pupil after a visit to Paramore, which, through his consciousness, is qualified as that “remarkably ‘creepy’” house (OW, 278). His wife for her part, when she joins Coyle on his second visit, “characterised it as ‘uncanny’ and as looking wicked and weird, and she accused her husband of not having warned her properly” (OW, 291). Rather, he has enticed his wife along by telling her that “it was such an extraordinary, such a fascinating specimen of an old English home” (OW, 291). “This last allusion,” the narrator adds, “was softly sarcastic,” since no such reason was needed with Owen at hand as a boon for this lady who was so much in love with him (OW, 291). Owen is thus presented as metonymically interchangeable with the “‘creepy,’” “‘uncanny’” house from which he springs. If the two opening sections of the tale, set in London, had seen a Spencer Coyle who was fighting hard to “save” his pupil for the military profession, arguing with him violently and applying any pressure he could activate, the two closing ones, set at Paramore, present a more complex picture. Superficially, Coyle seems to be duly impressed with Owen’s tenacity and to become more and more persuaded that, even in his dedicated pacifism, Owen remains a soldier at heart, and that he should stand by the young man and help him defend his position from the onslaught


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that the House of Wingrave has in store. But his commitment to the interests of his charge is never undivided. Even as Owen, walking with Coyle on the terrace outside Paramore shortly after the coach’s arrival, passes his hand through Coyle’s arm in a movement “calculated to show he had guessed whom he could now most depend on to be kind to him” (OW, 293)—a guess the reader knows to be well-founded since the narrator has divulged that “at bottom [Coyle] was going [to Paramore] to defend his ex-pupil rather than to give him away” (OW, 290)—Coyle is conscious of the possibility that Jane Wingrave, who has invited him so as to strengthen her camp, could be observing this action, and, feeling caught out, hastens to assure Owen “that he hadn’t come down to Paramore to be corrupted” but to try to persuade Owen to give up his opposition (OW, 293). It seems to be particularly at Paramore that Spencer Coyle loses any of the decisiveness that is elsewhere referred to as the source of his professional success: the “irresistible stimulus” he applies to his aspirants for the army (OW, 270). What he can do at his own respectable London house is to target his passion at the principled goal of getting pupils ready for that great institution, the army. At Paramore, passion, as we saw, has manifested itself in less acceptable forms. Our “ardent little crammer” (OW, 285) is sensitive to what Lustig has called “the erotic conflict” at the place, associated as it is with “Jane Wingrave’s passion for the army, with its fusion of desire and suffering, aggression and remorse.”18 Spencer Coyle is more affected, though, at least on this, his second, visit to Paramore, by the mirroring erotic tension that exists between the members of the younger generation, and that is all the more potent for the weight of ancestral passion behind it. Kate Julian is the apex of a triangle at whose other ends Owen and Lechmere are located. She is using the latter, and his obvious crush on her, as a means to exert power over Owen—to fire his emotions in her direction (and the ultimate prize for her of becoming the wife of the successor to the Wingrave estate), rather than in that of his ideological fervour. Lechmere, if you like, is the copy to Owen’s original passion—but a copy that, in true Girardian fashion, is being relied upon to reactivate through its own hoped-for mimetic effect that original passion (which would then in effect be a copy to what has meanwhile become Lechmere’s original). Where does Spencer Coyle fit into this intricate constellation? Nowhere in particular, I would suggest, by which I do not mean that he does not fit in. Rather, Coyle responds to the disembodied, generalized sense of passion at Paramore, a force that floats around, attaching itself fairly haphazardly to the building itself (especially its “haunted” White Room), to


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the family (the House of Wingrave), and to whoever lives or stays there (e.g. Kate Julian or Spencer Coyle), and culminating just as happenstance in events and catastrophes that bear no clear relation to prior causes or verifiable reasons, to originals or copies. It cannot, I think, be decided who exactly it is that Coyle is erotically attracted to.19 As, for instance, some after-dinner banter between Owen and Lechmere takes a facetious turn, with bantering references to Kate being aired, we are told that “Mr Coyle . . . saw that his presence, now a certain note had been struck, made the young men uncomfortable” (OW, 312). Yet he has difficulty pulling himself away: “He was curious, but there were discretions and delicacies, with his pupils, that he had always pretended to practise . . .” (OW, 312). Observe the “pretended” that slips into the account, in spite of its apparent focalization through Coyle himself; we can also speculate that part of the pretence resides in the fact that he is not beyond invoking his power to intervene in the triangle, by instructing Lechmere to go upstairs after one cigarette: Coyle’s imagination is fired above all by the tension between Kate and Owen. What is more, by this point Coyle has stayed downstairs much longer than he had promised his wife he would do when she impressed upon him that “she positively declined to be left alone, for no matter how short an interval, in any part of the house” that she now knew to be haunted by a proved ghost (OW, 310). When he crosses Kate on his way up he is quick to offer to accompany her down again and help her look for the gem she says she has lost; he is “tempted to follow her” in spite of her declining his proposal, “but remembering his standard of tact he rejoined his wife in their apartment” (OW, 313). Coyle’s inclination is to associate himself with the erotic strain that surrounds the young threesome; he must exercise conscious self-control to stay within the normative limits of his society. Arguably, he does not fully manage to do so: “He delayed nevertheless to go to bed and . . . pretended for half a hour to read a novel . . .” (OW, 313). His agitation will not subside, and he looks up Lechmere, who has duly come upstairs, in his bedroom, where the young man is already “in his shirt and trousers” (OW, 314), and questions him on what has played itself out between the three of them. “He had, fundamentally, principles and high decencies, but what he had in particular just now was a curiosity” and a desire especially to find out how roughly Kate had been treating Owen (OW, 314). The question of the latter’s heroism thus becomes a focal point for the erotic interaction that Coyle shares in vicariously. As we saw earlier, Owen Wingrave actually seems to serve as the locus of the uncanny for Spencer Coyle, a hypothesis that can be underwritten through reference to Sigmund Freud’s definition of uncanny experiences, which are “all concerned with the phenomenon of


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the ‘double,’ which appears in every shape and in every degree of development [and can be] marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own.”20 A plausible interpretation of Coyle’s behaviour at Paramore is in this light that he is allowing Owen Wingrave to function as an uncanny extension of his own self—that part of himself, say, which responds with awe to the strength of character the young man displays and which luxuriates in the erotic play that same young man is so tantalizingly involved in at the house. Such an interpretation would also be in line with Martha Banta’s overall assessment of how the occult works in Henry James as the “great extension”21 that material bodies had been thought to possess ever since the seventeenth century. For Banta, James’s “art of the supernatural” offers him a first-rate way of meeting his “urge to expand life to its totality, not contract it to zero.”22 We must now examine how Coyle deals with the knowledge he obtains at the end of this late-night conversation in Lechmere’s bedroom. It is here that he finds out that Owen has instructed Kate to take him to the “White Room” and lock him in. He is immediately worried. Yet he does not actually do anything but think of excuses not to act upon his information. He realizes he might find the room again, which had been shown to him on his first visit, and had “its ancient name painted on it” (OW, 317). A major quest hardly seems to be involved, but Spencer nonetheless manages to coil his mind into non-action: “the corridors at Paramore were intricate; moreover some of the servants would still be up, and he didn’t wish to appear unduly to prowl” (OW, 317). He goes back to his room and talks over the situation with his wife, who “begged her husband to go and look into the matter at whatever cost to his own tranquility”: “But Spencer, perversely, had ended, as the perfect stillness of the night settled upon them, by charming himself into a pale acceptance of Owen’s readiness to face God knew what unholy strain . . .” (OW, 317–18). In spite of various opportunities and stimuli to take steps so that Owen would not expose himself to the haunted room, Spencer Coyle does nothing. It is clear that Coyle carries a real responsibility for Owen’s death through his abandonment of “his young friend” at the hour of his greatest need. Coyle’s negligence is shown up by the level of activity he does deploy after the fact, when he is awakened by Kate Julian’s “appalling” shriek upon discovering Owen’s body: “He rushed straight before him, the sound of opening doors and alarmed voices in his ears and the faintness of the early dawn in his eyes” (OW, 318). Now, when it is too late, he is capable of decisive action, the coiling being strikingly replaced by straightness. Now, too, he can pass judgment on Kate and consider Owen’s death “the


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catastrophe that was her work,” and can think of Owen as “all the young soldier on the gained field”—the phrase with which the story closes (OW, 319). Owen Wingrave’s second visit to the White Room thus proves fatal because it is no longer a privately heroic act that the young man can psychologically control independently, as was the first. Rather, the renewed visit is a socially performative event in which Owen must cite the norms of the military temperament that reign at Paramore. Both Kate Julian and, through his nonaction, Spencer Coyle force Owen to enact the heroism that the family tradition stipulates. It can be no surprise, given what we know about the outcome of such valour in the past, that Owen does not survive the experience. From the point of view of Spencer Coyle, who has been central to the story’s narrative perspective, this outcome is actually wholly satisfactory, as the final phrase makes clear. His pupil has placed those who questioned his mettle “all so hideously in the wrong” (OW, 318). He has proved his tutor right in believing that Owen always was “in a high sense of the term, a fighting man” (OW, 308). But above all, Owen’s death makes it unnecessary for Spencer Coyle to take up the true challenge that the young man’s ideological position constitutes especially for his coach, that mainstay of the military institution. Coyle does not, after all, see this pupil of his choose another path; Coyle does not need to make the choice that the earlier sections urged upon him: stick to his guns as one dedicated to preparing young men for the army, or give in to his “particular fancy” for this exceptional person and rethink his whole position in society (OW, 270), becoming more like that strong and erotically live person that Owen was and that he uncannily identified with, in the Freudian hypothesis. That the challenge was quite personal, in spite of Owen’s protestations to the contrary (“I’m awfully obliged to you for all you’ve done for me” [OW, 270]), is moreover suggested by the pupil’s special dislike of Napoleon—“a scoundrel, a criminal, a monster for whom language has no adequate name,” in Coyle’s summary of Owen’s feelings on the man (OW, 286)—combined with the coach’s own physical resemblance to this military precursor as noted early on—“He was a person of exactly the stature of the great Napoleon, with a certain flicker of genius in his light blue eye” (OW, 271).23 Once more we note an arresting echo in this tale of the uncanny that keeps returning to the idea of the double and of the troubling and ultimately undecided relation between copies and originals. I want to conclude by speculatively linking up the doublings that inform “Owen Wingrave” with Judith Butler’s recent exploration in Giving an Account of Oneself of what is in effect the uncanniness that makes


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people foreign to themselves. She calls such a foreignness “my own familiar alterity, my own private, or not so private, opacity”: “When I am able to appreciate this condition of internal division, then I speak as an ‘I,’ but do not make the mistake of thinking that I know precisely all that I am doing when I speak in that way. I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others.”24 “Owen Wingrave” anatomizes a military temperament that is founded on the repression of any such ethical possibility, and that instead asserts the need to situate outside of the self any notion of splitting. The tale zooms in on instances where this repression fails to function properly, and takes as its exempla two men, the eponymous character and his teacher-friend, who come close to achieving the ethical leap that is needed to allow ourselves to be linked by the indivisible cord that Butler describes. This process, as happens more often in James, is actually revealed most clearly by means of the character through whose senses the plot is perceived, even if that character does not appear to be the central point of interest in that plot. Spencer Coyle’s experience at Paramore can be aptly characterized as the uncanny discovery in himself of the otherness that Owen Wingrave embodies. Yet, Spencer’s realization that he is deeply connected to Owen and what the young man stands for is unable to free him; it actually paralyzes him. As a result of this paralysis, Owen dies—and so does Coyle’s foreignness to himself. This is the typical Jamesian denouement: the forces that are ranged against the ethical prove too strong, and characters are returned to the fixed slots the social matrix has marked out for them. Ultimately, the enabling power of the uncanny cannot win out over the destructive power of the real. Notes 1. S. Gorley Putt, Henry James: A Reader’s Guide (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 391. 2. Ibid. 3. Maqbool Aziz, “How Long is Long, How Short Short!,” in A Companion to Henry James Studies, ed. Daniel Mark Fogel (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993), 207–34 (229). 4. Even Martha Banta’s Henry James and the Occult: The Great Extension (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972) does no more than mention this supernatural tale in passing. 5. F. W. Dupee, Henry James (New York: Sloane, 1951), 225. 6. Virginia Woolf, “The Ghost Stories,” in Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Leon Edel (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 51. 7. Ibid., 52.


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8. Michael Halliwell, Opera and the Novel: The Case of Henry James, ed. Walter Bernhart (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), 229. 9. Stephen McClatchie, “Benjamin Britten, Owen Wingrave and the Politics of the Closet; or, ‘He Shall Be Straightened Out at Paramore,’” Cambridge Opera Journal 8, no. 1 (1996): 59–75 (61). Cited in Halliwell, Opera, 235. 10. Eric Haralson, “Iron Henry, or James Goes to War,” Arizona Quarterly 53, no. 4 (1997): 39–59 (40–41). 11. T. J. Lustig, Henry James and the Ghostly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xi. 12. Woolf, “Ghost Stories,” 52. 13. Henry James, “Owen Wingrave,” in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 17 (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), 269–310 (287) (hereafter cited in text as OW). 14. Haralson, “Iron Henry,” 49. 15. Ibid., 50. 16. Haralson concurs: “Colonel Wingrave . . . killed his son ‘in a fit of passion,’ inferably for pacifism.” Ibid., 51. 17. The expression “save” may well remind readers of that other central character in a Jamesian tale, who is just as intent on saving her charges as Coyle is on saving his. There is indeed more than a family resemblance between this “governor” and the governess who dominates The Turn of the Screw. 18. Lustig, Henry James and the Ghostly, x. 19. John Fletcher observes somewhat similarly of the link between homoeroticism and the late ghostly tales of Henry James that the latter “return again and again to what one might call the drama of spectralization, the drama of the production of spectres. However, it is important to insist that this drama in James’s texts is not so much about same-sex intensities in isolation, but attaches to the whole conflicted implication of same-sex and cross-sex relations and desires.” Fletcher’s concern is mainly with “The Real Right Thing” (1899) and “The Jolly Corner” (1908), as well as, more briefly, with The Turn of the Screw (1898). See Fletcher “The Haunted Closet: Henry James’s Queer Spectrality,” Textual Practice 14 (2000): 53–80 (63). 20. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 217–56 (234). 21. Banta, Henry James and the Occult, 68. 22. Ibid., 69. 23. The figure of Napoleon also resonates with James’s deathbed fantasy that he was the great man himself. 24. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 83, 84.


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CHAPTER 9

The Afterlife of Figures Sheila Teahan

This chapter argues that James’s 1900 story “The Great Good Place” is an allegory of figuration that narrativizes questions of space, place, and memory.1 Specifically, the story allegorizes the figure of aposiopesis (literally “a becoming silent”), the rhetorical device defined by Richard Lanham as “stopping suddenly in midcourse, leaving a statement unfinished; sometimes from genuine passion, sometimes for effect.”2 In The Art of English Poesie, George Puttenham defines aposiopesis as “the figure of silence, or of interruption,” and identifies it as an “auricular figure of defect, and is when we begin to speake a thing, and breake of in the middle way, as if either it needed no further to be spoken of, or that we were ashamed, or afraid to speake it out.”3 Puttenham associates it with a speaker’s propensity for whimsical non sequiturs and, especially, with problems of memory; he writes, “This figure is fit for phantasticall heads and such as be sodaine or lacke memorie.”4 For Quintilian in Institutio Oratoria, the use of aposiopesis suggests that the speaker is “too excited or distraught” to give full expression to his thought; for Demetrius in On Style, it indicates that the speaker’s feeling outstrips the power of language itself. As the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics notes, these two functions may not be readily distinguishable, as in King Lear’s inchoate threat of vengeance on Goneril and Regan: “I will have revenges on you both / That all the world shall—I will do such things”—lines whose broken syntax mimics the unspeakability they name.5 Like all such tropes, aposiopesis bleeds into the semantic territory of neighboring figures, and its plasticity is reflected by Lanham’s identification of the following nonidentical figures as synonymous with aposiopesis: reticentia (keeping silent); obticentia (a pause or sudden break); interpellatio (interruption); and praecisio (a cutting off ).6 The signature locution “hanging fire” is the consummate Jamesian instantiation of aposiopesis. Derived from the


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history of firearms, “hanging fire” refers to the moment between the ignition of the powder and the firing of the ball. To “hang fire” is “to hesitate,” to “remain concealed,” or to “withdraw, or step back, in the very act of seemingly stepping forward to say something.” As Ned Lukacher observes, hanging fire thus occupies “the interval between speech and silence” and dramatizes “the play of concealment and disclosure.”7 Although the locution occurs only once in “The Great Good Place,” the entire story may be read as an allegorization of the aposiopetic hanging fire of tropology itself.8 Aposiopesis, then, is a figure of simultaneous lack and excess that both points to its own syntactical and rhetorical incompletion and gestures toward an unspoken and unspeakable horizon of possibility. The relevance of aposiopesis for James’s fiction is not exactly opaque. Every reader of late James, in particular, is familiar with the rhetorical suspensions that clot (and, arguably, constitute) the dialogue of such texts as The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, rendering such dialogue an exquisitely nebulous stichomythic tissue of self-effacing implication and provocation. Writing of aposiopesis in The Turn of the Screw, Eric Savoy has argued that Peter Quint’s ghost is produced by “the holes in discourse that are the aposiopetic suspensions of nomination” such that the governess and Mrs. Grose finish each other’s sentences so as rhetorically to construct the ghosts.9 I suggest that aposiopesis wields a similar causal power in “The Great Good Place,” which is about the space of rhetoric itself. I am interested in trying to think about aposiopesis not only in the limited sense of a verbal or syntactic device, as defined by Puttenham, Lanham, and others, but also as a trope that operates at the level of narrative, rather in the manner of what Robyn Warhol has termed “narrative refusals.” Defining the “unnarrated” as comprising “those passages that explicitly do not tell what is supposed to have happened, foregrounding the narrator’s refusal to narrate,” Warhol identifies four major types within the category of the unnarratable: the subnarratable, that which need not be told because it is beneath narrative notice or otherwise taken for granted; the supranarratable, that which cannot be told because it is ineffable; the antinarratable, that which should not be told because of social convention; and the paranarratable, that which would not be told because of social convention.10 (Note the parallels between Warhol and Puttenham: “needed no further to be spoken of ” [the subnarratable]; “or that we were ashamed . . . or were afraid to speak it out” [the antinarratable and the paranarratable]). Taking into account Warhol’s conceptualization of the unnarrated, I wish to consider aposiopesis not merely as a verbal device, but as a mode


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of narrative refusal or elision. And following Savoy, I wish to consider aposiopesis as a rhetorical mechanism that, in addition to its function of pointing to narrative absences, in the manner of the related figure of occupatio, is productive of narrative per se. Although Lanham does not associate occupatio (also sometimes termed occultatio) with aposiopesis, his definition of it as “[e]mphasizing something by pointedly seeming to pass over it” highlights the continuity between the two figures.11 Occupatio is the figure that says, I am not going to talk about x—a gesture, of course, that invokes x in order to appear to dispense with it. Occupatio’s ambivalent gesture of dismissal and foregrounding—it means both “concealment” and “insinuation” or “suggestion”—makes clear its isomorphism with the double structure of aposiopesis. Finally, I am interested in thinking about the temporal status of aposiopesis, which, like a ghost, effects an uncanny disruption of temporality, as well as of the categories of presence and absence. Aposiopesis is a contradictory figure that appears to entail a temporal foreshortening and yet is productive of narrative figures. By its nature, aposiopesis lacks—or at least disavows— any telos; like “The Great Good Place,” it constitutes itself in the very gesture of claiming not to go anywhere. Since “The Great Good Place” is a story about which little has been written,12 I will begin with a brief plot summary—although the very suggestion that the story has a plot seems an unwarranted naturalization of a text that is enigmatic even by the standard of James’s so-called ghostly tales. The story’s protagonist is a writer named George Dane who awakens after a late night of labor on his “retarded, unfinished and interminable work” (GGP, 230). His servant Brown reminds him that he has a breakfast engagement with a young man, apparently a literary protégé, whose name and the purpose of whose visit, however, Dane cannot recall. When Brown reappears to announce the arrival of this guest, “a person whose name somehow failed to reach Dane’s ear” (GGP, 232), Dane extends his hand and feels it taken, and at this point the action is interrupted by a narrative ellipsis and displaced to an ambiguous, vaguely monastic, locale. Here Dane spends an indeterminate period and encounters an interlocutor who is identified as the Brother and who appears a specular double of Dane himself (“he was struck as by the reflexion of his very own image . . . a man of his own age, tired distinguished modest kind—really, as he could soon see, but the absence of what he didn’t want” [GGP, 234]). This double is in turn doubled by the young man, who functions as Dane’s “substitute in the world” and agrees to “live with my life and think with my brain and write with my hand and speak with my voice” during his absence (GGP, 241, 245). At the story’s conclusion the Brother’s physiognomy abruptly resolves


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itself into that of Dane’s servant (“it was verily Brown who possessed his hand,” the narrator says [GGP, 261]). This recognition of Brown is followed by a “relapse into darkness” and then by Dane’s recognition of the young man, whose face in turn becomes that of the Brother (GGP, 261). It is impossible to determine whether Dane has died, fainted, or merely slept and dreamed.13 The ambiguous middle section of “The Great Good Place” is a sustained achrony recounting the “arrest of life” signified by Dane’s sojourn at the cloistered and monastic retreat—what the narrator terms the “scene of his new consciousness” (GGP, 236, 234). The ontological status of event, setting, and characterization in the story is undecidable. It can be read as a dream sequence, as a posthumous narrative tracing George Dane’s “consciousness” after death, or (more convincingly, in my view) in the manner of Ambrose Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” as a threshold text that temporally and phenomenologically expands and narrativizes the moment before death. James’s remarks on “The Great Good Place” in his retrospective preface to volume 16 of the New York Edition are nearly as counterintuitive as his extraordinary (and surely disingenuous) claim in his ninth preface that The Turn of the Screw speaks so fully for itself that it preempts critical commentary altogether, in that it “rejoices, beyond any rival on a like ground, in a conscious provision of prompt retort to the sharpest question that may be addressed to it.”14 Here is James on the former story: “There remains ‘The Great Good Place’ (1900)—to the spirit of which, however, it strikes me, any gloss or comment would be a tactless challenge. It embodies a calculated effort, and to plunge into it, I find, even for a beguiled glance—a course I indeed recommend—is to have left all else outside. There then my indications must wait” (AN, 237). One might assume from James’s opening words that these comments conclude the preface, but in fact there remain substantial discussions of “Paste” and “Europe.” Much in the manner of aposiopesis itself, his gloss on “The Great Good Place” gestures toward an end, but goes on to reveal a remainder. As so often in the prefaces, James places his cards on the table—face down; and his retrospective assessment of the story is itself, as the Brother observes to Dane about their nebulous translation to the place where they meet, “a gap, a link missing, the great hiatus” (GGP, 240). This apparent dismissal of the story is itself aposiopetic in character, a seemingly preemptive foreclosure of narrative about the story that nevertheless “concludes” with a gesture of deferral and “waiting.” It partakes of Warhol’s categories of the subnarratable and the supranarratable: James implies at once that the story is self-explanatory and that both its “spirit” and its formal achievement (“calculated effort”) contain elements


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of the ineffable. One wonders even more about the character of the recommended “beguiled glance” into the story that renders commentary on James’s part unnecessary. To beguile is to deceive, delude, or cheat; to distract or divert; to pass time pleasantly; to amuse, charm, or delight. As its semantic range reflects, the definition of beguilement is mixed and contradictory; in the circuit from delude to delight, the definition arrives at a meaning antithetical to the one with which it begins, rather in the manner of the uncanny, whose etymological genealogy, as traced by Sigmund Freud, reveals an ultimate convergence between the heimlich and the unheimlich. Aposiopesis is itself a mode of beguilement, both a pleasant passing of time (a fair description, in fact, of what happens after Dane’s translation to the great good place) and, like its sister trope occupatio, a somewhat deceptive structure that does something other, or something more, than what it appears or claims to do. James’s beguiling narrative refusal in the preface to volume 16 becomes the occasion of a striking passage in Virginia Woolf ’s essay on James’s ghost stories. Directly after quoting the first two of James’s three sentences on “The Great Good Place,” Woolf complains to us that, in 1921, “The Great Good Place” is a failure: “It is another example of the fact that when a writer is completely and even ecstatically conscious of success he has, as likely as not, written his worst. We ought, we feel, to be inside, and we remain coldly outside. Something has failed to work, and we are inclined to accuse the supernatural. The challenge may be tactless, but challenge it we must.”15 Woolf picks up James’s inside-outside metaphor (to plunge into the story, James asserts, is to leave all else outside) and reverses it; Woolf ’s reader finds herself on the periphery of the narrative when she should be inside. (Two sentences later, however, she contradicts this figure, conceding that “The Great Good Place” “begins admirably, no one will deny. Without the waste of a word we find ourselves in the heart of a situation.”16) What is particularly odd about Woolf ’s complaint is her assumption that James’s cryptic gloss on the story reflects complacency about its success. Not only do his remarks reflect no consciousness of “ecstatic success” but the story also itself portrays a writer who is so fraught with authorial anxiety that he must be translated into another realm and who identifies “‘[s]uccess’—the vulgarest kind!” as the source of his woes (GGP, 241).17 Indeed, the entire story is a repudiation of conventional notions of authorial success.18 For Woolf, however, “The Great Good Place” is symptomatic of “the sentimental use of the supernatural,” and one wonders whether Woolf ’s deprecation of it has contributed to its relative neglect.19 The few readings of the story have tended to repeat Woolf ’s misprision of its affect by approaching it as a story about Dane’s


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psychic rebirth in a utopian space. Mary Ellen Herx, for example, argues that “James presents a fundamental monomyth, symbolic of the primordial experience of a hero’s departure from the physical world, his recovery of and initiation into his spiritual realm, and his return, with his boon, to his natural existence.”20 On the contrary, “The Great Good Place” profoundly ironizes this mythic pattern. In keeping with the structure of aposiopesis, the story elides any such redemptive return. The narrative of Dane’s possible death takes place under the sign of negation. The narrator observes: “Nothing had gone, had passed on while he slept—everything had stayed; nothing, that he could yet feel, had died—so naturally, one would have thought; many things on the contrary had been born” (GGP, 226). This disclaimer, which insinuates the very demise it disavows, is followed by an exchange between Dane and his servant, Brown, that rhetorically mirrors the narrator’s observation that when he had turned out his light the night before, Dane had laid down his pen and “left his phrase unfinished” (GGP, 227). The following morning, Brown urges: “And you told me to remind you, sir—”; “It’s only because, sir, you know, sir, you can’t remember—”; and again, “You say you can’t forget, sir, but you do forget—” (GGP, 228, 231). These unfinished phrases, which introduce the key theme of memory, exemplify the trope of aposiopesis, the figure of interruption or silence that at once prompts and disrupts anamnesis by repeatedly reminding Dane that he has forgotten something. The recurring trope of rain is the story’s principal figure of erasure and forgetting, and it resonates ironically with the images of hydropathy associated with the allegedly curative properties of the place to which Dane is translated after he loses consciousness and/or life. As we have seen, Puttenham explicitly links aposiopesis to the theme of memory, noting that “this figure is fit for phantasticall heads and such as be sodaine or lack memorie,” adducing the case of a speaker who would “interrupt his tale and never returne to it againe.”21 The latter formulation is an apt description of “The Great Good Place” itself, which never conclusively returns to its opening narrative frame after the aposiopetic break after the first section. The story narrativizes the “ragged phrase” of aposiopesis. Dane’s search for the “missing half [of his sentence from the night before] . . . that might have paired with it and begotten a figure” (GGP, 227) (a key word in the story) conjures the figure—in the double sense of person and trope—of the “Brother,” a specular double whose stichomythic and absurdist dialogue with Dane in the story’s second section uncannily anticipates Waiting for Godot, as in the following exchange between Dane and the Brother:22


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“We’re Brothers here for the time, as in a great monastery . . . Moreover we meet—don’t we?—with closed eyes.” “Ah don’t speak as if we were dead!” Dane laughed. “I shan’t mind death if it’s like this,” his friend replied. It was too obvious, as Dane gazed before him, that one wouldn’t; but after a moment he asked with the first articulation as yet of his most elementary wonder: “Where is it?” “I shouldn’t be surprised if it were much nearer than one ever suspected.” “Nearer ‘town,’ do you mean?” “Nearer everything—nearer every one.” George Dane thought. “Would it be somewhere for instance down in Surrey?” His Brother met him on this with a shade of reluctance. “Why should we call it names? It must have a climate, you see.” “Yes,” Dane happily mused; “without that——!”

After this aposiopetic break, Dane “breaks out”: “What is it?” “Oh, it’s positively a part of our ease and our rest and our change, I think, that we don’t at all know and that we may really call it, for that matter, anything in the world we like—the thing for instance we love it most for being.” “I know what I call it” said Dane after a moment. Then as his friend listened with interest: “Just simply ‘The Great Good Place.’” (GGP, 237–38)

Far from being redemptive, Dane’s translation to the ambiguous locale where he encounters himself in the form of the Brother is belated and clichéd. The ironic status of Dane’s delivery to the great good place is signaled by his quotation from the Scottish poet Andrew Young’s 1836 “Hymn”: “There is a happy land—far, far away” (GGP, 230). The line provides an obvious prolepsis of the transition between the first and second parts of the story. But in context, the implications of Young’s line become ironic: as his second stanza reveals, the poem’s addressee not only does not reach the happy land but also resists going there and indeed questions its value: “Come to that happy land, come, come away; / Why will you doubting stand, why still delay?” (5–6). The attainment of the happy land in Young’s “Hymn” is anticipatory and deferred, never realized in the text of the poem. Rather than being antithetical to the “arrears overwhelming” of literary labor from which Dane seeks respite at the story’s opening, labor figured as “the old rising tide . . . it was up to his chin now” (GGP, 226) that is reproduced by the later images of hydropathy, the “great good place”—the


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cloistered “green garden,” “paradise,” or “charming place” (GGP, 239, 252) where Dane finds himself after his ambiguous and amnesiac loss of consciousness—is the space of rhetoric itself. It is an ironized embodiment of the locus amoenus or “pleasant place” of classical and medieval tradition, the Edenic garden featuring the archetypal ingredients of trees, brook, and birdsong.23 “The Great Good Place” plays throughout on the spatial metaphorics of topos, the “place” or space of rhetoric, notably in its dramatization of the topos of the “memory-theater,” the mnemonic device of mentally touring the rooms of a building as a method of recall to facilitate the delivery of a speech. As Frances Yates explains in her authoritative study of the tradition of mnemonotechnics, which extends from Quintilian through the mid-seventeenth century, the architectural types employed in this tradition included churches, abbeys, and theaters—all of which appear in “The Great Good Place” as tropes for the place to which Dane is translated in the story’s second section.24 The idea of the memory theater is narrativized by Dane’s explorations of the buildings of the monastic compound, with the ironic qualification that he does not remember that he has forgotten anything. The great good place eclipses memory, supplanting it with “a gap, a link missing, the great hiatus” (GGP, 240).25 If Dane is in the memory theater, he has forgotten about it.26 What ultimately gets forgotten is Dane himself, as he registers in the free indirect discourse of the story’s opening: “the only remedy, the true soft effacing sponge, would be to be left, to be forgotten” (GGP, 226). If Dane is himself effaced by what is at least potentially his death at the end of the first section of the story, he enjoys a strange vicarious afterlife in the second section: the authorial labor that he evades by dying returns in displaced form in the narrative limbo of the great good place itself, which he intuits is dimly subtended by a nebulous yet immanent authorial consciousness: “The author might remain in the obscure, for that was part of the perfection: personal service so hushed and regulated that you scarce caught it in the act and only knew it by its results. Yet the wise mind was everywhere—the whole thing infallibly centred at the core in a consciousness” (GGP, 250). Dane himself is not so much a Jamesian reflective center as an ironized and decentered space of unconsciousness. The bland, even saccharine tonality of the sections set in the great good place—a tonality that helps to explain Woolf ’s complaint that the story is sentimental—covers over the negative affect surrounding Dane’s writerly anxiety at the story’s opening. Oddly, it is registered as an anxiety about reading rather than writing per se, a displacement that itself appears an anxious disavowal of its nature: Dane is consciously overwrought not by


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his own blocked textual production but by the backlog of texts written by others awaiting his attention, texts that seem to proliferate through a kind of perverse organic imperative—the “bristling hedge of letters planted by the early postman an hour before,” the “huddled mound [of journals and periodicals] that had been growing for several days and of which he had been wearily, helplessly aware” (GGP, 225). That Dane’s own writing is the true source of his malaise is implied by an image of entrapment whose linear imagery marks it as a figure of textuality: “It was a thing of meshes; he had simply gone to sleep under the net and had simply waked up there. The net was too fine; the cords crossed each other at spots too near together, making at each a little tight, hard knot that tired fingers were this morning too limp and too tender to touch” (GGP, 226–27). The net in which Dane finds himself tangled figures a narrative whose textual “knots” resist the resolution of dénouement, a “literal” untying; he is caught in a text of his own making. His anxiety is further displaced onto the row of newspapers on the desk awaiting his attention, an obvious metonym for his own writing: “There were newspapers . . . too many—what could any creature want of so much news?—and each with its hand on the neck of the other, so that the row of their bodiless heads was like a series of decapitations” (GGP, 225). This figure of disembodiment is countered in the second section by the Brother, who alone among the figures Dane initially encounters acquires a face and so becomes Dane’s interlocutor. We know from Paul de Man that the obverse side of prosopopoeia is defacement,27 and the negative affect that gets lodged in the figure of the decapitated papers is associated not only with Dane’s putative death but also with an anxiety surrounding the production of figuration—the begetting of figures: “But there still on the table were the bare bones of the sentence—and not all of those: the single thing borne away and that he could never recover was the missing half that might have paired with it and begotten a figure” (GGP, 227). Recall that one of James’s most privileged figures for tropological production, the famous trope of embroidery in the preface to Roderick Hudson, claims to “point[] the plain moral”—invariably a signal in James of imminent elaboration, qualification, and complication —that a young embroiderer of the canvas of life soon began to work in terror, fairly, of the vast expanse of that surface, of the boundless number of its distinct perforations for the needle, and of the tendency inherent in his many-coloured flowers and figures to cover and consume as many as possible of the little holes . . . That would have been, it seemed to him, a brave enough process, were it not the very nature of the holes so to invite,


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to solicit, to persuade, to practice positively a thousand lures and deceits. (AN, 5–6)

As Hillis Miller has demonstrated, the figure is incoherent: the covering of the holes in the canvas by means of embroidery requires a simultaneous puncturing with a needle.28 As in “The Great Good Place,” representation recreates the holes it would repair, and what Savoy characterizes as the “holes in discourse” turn out to be the holes of discourse. No wonder it is aligned with “terror,” with what the Brother terms “the vague movements of the monster—madness, surrender, collapse” that he and Dane escape through their translation to the great good place (GGP, 239). Dane’s entertainment of a “dozen halting similes” for the place (convent, country house, hotel, club, opera), each of which merely “light[s] up the difference” from the place itself, suggests that he also occupies the awkward nonspace of catachresis, which shares with aposiopesis a certain abyssal structure (GGP, 249). The narrator indeed characterizes the charm of the great good place as “an abyss of negatives” (GGP, 234). Dane’s train of figures may be abyssal, but their rhetorical amplification generates the space of figure itself, and his search for the “main term of comparison” for the great good place (GGP, 236) produces a catalogue of unverifiable catachreses. One example of this amplification is the story’s use of doubling at the multiple levels. It is introduced by a verbal doubling in Dane’s opening dialogue with Brown, in which Dane repeatedly utters things in pairs: “There’s too much. There’s too much”; “It came back, yes, came back”; “Yes, yes, wait, wait”; “Sure to—sure to” (GGP, 230, 232). At the level of characterization, Dane is doubled by the protégé and again by the Brother, who is in turn multiplied into a succession of identical others: “After that talk with the good Brother on the bench there were other good Brothers in other places—always in cloister or garden some figure that stopped if he himself stopped and with which a greeting became, in the easiest way in the world, a sign of the diffused amenity” (GGP, 254). Characterization becomes susceptible to a mode of recycling that undoes the distinction between selves: “the friend was always new and yet at the same time—it was amusing, not disturbing—suggested the possibility that he might be but an old one altered” (GGP, 254). As Richard Hocks notes, “There are really no other ‘characters’ than that of George Dane in the various guises of his psychic self.”29 Far from recounting Dane’s recovery of the besieged self of the story’s first section, “The Great Good Place” narrates the diffusion and dissolution of the self itself. As Dane muses, “Every one was a little some one else” (GGP, 263). After he regains “consciousness” and realizes that Brown has taken his hand, Dane


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perceives the young man from the morning, seated at his own writing desk: “The obscurity was completely gone by the time he had made out that the back of a person writing at his study-table was presented to him. He recognised a portion of a figure that he had somewhere described to somebody—the intent shoulders of the unsuccessful young man who had come that bad morning to breakfast” (GGP, 261–62). The motif of the turned back, which occurs also in The Sense of the Past and A Small Boy and Others, participates in the structure of the spectral by presenting to the viewer an unreadable page akin to the visor.30 A clear figure for Dane himself, the young man embodies Dane’s past—and passed—self.31 The collapse of temporality implied by this uncanny encounter should come as no surprise: as Jacques Derrida has observed, “A specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back.”32 The interchangeability of self and other is also suggested by the text’s recurring use of chiasmus, the figure of inversion or reversal: “Not all perhaps who wanted would really find; but none at least would find who didn’t really want” (GGP, 237); “It wasn’t they who made the conditions, it was the conditions that made them” (GGP, 249). “It was part of the whole impression that, by some extraordinary law, one’s vision seemed less from the facts than the facts from one’s vision” (GGP, 254). The story’s title itself exemplifies a mode of doubling: “The Great Good Place” is a seemingly tautologous title whose compensatory repetition fills in the holes in discourse that figuration both covers over and reveals. Moreover, the story is itself doubled by James’s story “The Real Right Thing,” with which it shares an alliterative doubling title. “The Real Right Thing” reads as an inversion of, or ironic sequel to, “The Great Good Place.” In each story, the author is displaced by a young protégé. In “The Real Right Thing,” the ironically named Withermore, the “young priest” of the “altar” of the late author Doyne, becomes a parasitical usurper whose work on Doyne’s papers threatens to turn the “master” into a mere “mystic assistant” to his own literary labors.33 The ghost of Doyne ultimately appears to Withermore, “guarding” the “threshold” in an ironic effort to “save his Life” from his protégé’s intrusive biographical activity (RRT, 430, 428). Withermore’s attitude toward his master’s demise, as reported in indirect discourse, resonates strikingly with the aposiopetic “broken sentence” of “The Great Place”: “He had broken short off—that was the way of it; and the end was ragged and needed trimming” (RRT, 412). As Withermore finally registers, however, Doyne resists the editorial completion of his life’s sentence by a ghost writer. (Strikingly, the notebook entry of May 12, 1892 that anticipates the plot of “The Great Good


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Place” describes a “man of letters, who, at the end, feels a kind of anguish of desire for a respite, a prolongation—another period of life to do the real thing that he has in him,” thus evoking the title of “The Real Right Thing” [CN, 68]). Particularly because it remains indeterminate whether the sections of the story following Dane’s loss of consciousness signify a dream sequence or a posthumous narrative, James’s 1910 essay “Is there a Life after Death?” is suggestive for “The Great Good Place,” not because it explicates or offers a philosophical redaction of the story but because it worries over some of the same questions. A full consideration of James’s searching and subtle exploration of the rhetorical question posed by his title is beyond the scope of this chapter, but what is striking for my purpose is his insistence that the continuation of consciousness beyond death is identified as a function of signification. He begins by suggesting that the very extent to which the question of the afterlife puts us “consciously in presence of it” may itself provide a ground for the afterlife, since it is also the measure of “our general concern with life.”34 Having established the necessarily personal character of immortality, James immediately questions the adequacy of the very language in which he has couched this preliminary proposal: “That it shall be personal and yet shall so entirely and relentlessly have yielded to dissociation, this makes us ask if such terms for it are acceptable to thought” (LAD, 120). How, he wonders, can the absolute “dissociation” of death be reconciled with what he understands to be the profoundly personal character of any possible continuation of consciousness beyond death? In light of this contradiction, James envisions a catastrophic collapse of signification that would imply an alienating dissociation from the self itself: I practically know what I am talking about when I say, “I,” hypothetically, for my full experience of another term of being, just as I know it when I say “I” for my experience of this one; but I shouldn’t in the least do so were I not able to say “I”—had I to reckon, that is, with a failure of the signs by which I know myself. In presence of the great question I cling to these signs more than ever, and to conceive of the actual achievement of immortality by others who may have had like knowledge I had to impute to others a clinging to similar signs. (LAD, 120)

The existence of the personal, to say nothing of its possible preservation beyond death, depends on the kind of diacritical articulation whose loss James fears: “The question is of the personal experience, of course, of another existence; of its being my very self, and you, definitely, and he and she, who resume and go on, and not of any unthinkable substitutes or metamorphoses” (LAD, 117). At stake in this play of pronouns is the


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preservation of otherness whose annihilation death appears to guarantee. We have no evidence that death does not annul the play of consciousness; the dead themselves send us no “retrospective personal sign,” and those “personal signs that ostensibly come to us through the trance medium” serve mainly to attract us to the medium itself; they are unreliable, and may or may not “savor of another state of being on the part of those from whom they profess to come” (LAD, 119–20). In the essay’s second part, James will reverse the negative trajectory of the first, adducing the very limitation of consciousness as the means by which one may ultimately “live in it more” and more fully, arriving finally at an understanding of consciousness as an evolving “practice” that produces a “boundlessly multiplied personal relation” (LAD, 123, 124). But here his emphasis is on the extent to which experience not only “encourages the so easy nonexistence of consciousness” but also seems to validate the positivist and scientific restriction of consciousness to the perishable “laboratory brain” (LAD, 118, 127), a restriction that James perceives as reductive and life denying. Before the recuperative movement of its second part, then, the essay reaches its affective nadir in James’s anguished apprehension that the apparent absoluteness of death “little by little acts upon us as so much triumphant negation of the past and the lost; the flicker of some vast sardonic, leering ‘Don’t you see?’ on the mask of Nature” (LAD, 120). (At the beginning of “The Great Good Place,” Dane is struck by the benevolent “face of nature . . . shining as with high spirits, good resolutions, lively intentions”; only a page later, the world’s “great staring egotism,” “not to be trusted for tact or delicacy,” appears markedly more equivocal [GGP, 225, 227].) For James, the worst eventuality of all would be if this malevolent face of nature were to prove “the last word on the matter,” an ultimate logos (or perhaps one should say antilogos) foreclosing discourse and hence consciousness itself (LAD, 120). Although he will come to understand the redemptive work on and by the faculty of consciousness articulated in Part II to be a linguistic operation (“I deal with being, I invoke and evoke, I figure and represent,” [LAD, 124]), here nature’s rhetorical question mocks us for our failure to see, yet shows us nothing, displaying only an unreadable surface, a blank mask or page.35 The asymmetry of this confrontation with nature’s expressionless countenance is reminiscent of what Derrida terms the “visor effect”: “This spectral someone other looks at us, we feel ourselves being looked at, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part, according to an absolute anteriority . . . To feel ourselves seen by a look which it will always be impossible to cross, that is the visor effect.”36 My claim


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is not that James’s personified abstraction of nature is a ghost but that it occupies the place of Derrida’s specter, which creates both a temporal anachrony and a disappropriation of identity: by its “nature,” a ghost is both/and and neither/nor ontologically present and absent, temporally present and past. The structure of the spectral brings with it an undecidable relation between presence and absence, body and spirit, materiality and ideality, the visible and the invisible. On this view, the ghostly is not merely a theme or a fictional subgenre but a structure that carries with it the “governing” binaries of Western metaphysics, to include the problem of the sign, which is one version of the problem of the relation between the material and the ideal. This understanding of what Derrida terms “the spectrality effect” raises the question, germane to the present collection, of what constitutes a “ghost story” in the first place.37 In their invaluable discussion of the uncanny, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle observe that, insofar as the uncanny creates an unsettling of definitions and of distinctions— such as the distinction between the living and the dead—literature “itself could be defined as the discourse of the uncanny.”38 I would add that literariness, more broadly understood as embracing those elements of any text that invite rhetorical analysis, lends itself to uncanny and unforeseen effects, not least in the operation of tropes such as aposiopesis. On this view, the otherness of the specter is merely a spectacular manifestation of the alienable otherness of tropology itself. James teaches us that all stories are haunted by the ghostly afterlife of figures. Notes 1. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Rabbi Sherwin Wine (1928–2007), who taught me about memory and place without ever knowing that he had done so. I also thank Bill Brown, Susan Griffin, Jonathan Gil Harris, Patrick O’Donnell, and Peter Rawlings for comments and questions that elicited some of my thinking. 2. Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 20. 3. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1970), 178. 4. Ibid. 5. For a full account of the genealogy of aposiopesis, see The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (New York: MJF Books, 1993), 81–82. The lines are from King Lear 2.4.282–83, William Shakespeare, King Lear, Folger Shakespeare Library Edition (New York: Washington Square Press, 1993. 6. Lanham, Handlist, 20.


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7. Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), 131. The dynamic of revelation and concealment links aposiopesis to hypotyposis; for a discussion of hypotyposis in The Turn of the Screw, see my “The Literal Turn of the Figurative Screw,” Arizona Quarterly 62, no. 3 (2006): 63–82. 8. Dane’s servant Brown “hung fire” when reminding Dane of his breakfast invitation with the protégé; Henry James, “The Great Good Place” in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 16 (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), 225–63 (232) (hereafter cited in text as GGP). 9. Eric Savoy, “Theory a Tergo in The Turn of the Screw” in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2004), 245–75 (265). 10. Robyn R. Warhol, “Neonarrative; or, How to Render the Unnarratable in Realist Fiction and Contemporary Film,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 220–31. 11. Lanham, Handlist, 104. Lanham contends that an “erroneous reading of Ad Herennium has led to the currency of Occupatio” as a synonym for occultatio (104). Since occupatio has remained the commonly used term in rhetorical tradition, however, I retained it here. 12. One is struck by the paucity of attention that the majority of James’s short stories have received. With the exception of a handful of widely read texts (such as “The Jolly Corner,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” and “The Altar of the Dead”) James’s short stories have been largely neglected. 13. James’s notebook entry of May 12, 1892, appears to posit the latter interpretation: “A young doctor, a young pilgrim who admires him. A deep sleep in which he dreams he has had his respite. Then his waking, to find that what he has dreamed of is only what he has done.” The final sentence offers more ambiguity than clarification: Does James mean to say that his protagonist dreams of what he has already done, or that what he has done is simply dream? The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 68 (hereafter cited in text as CN). 14. Henry James, The Art of the Novel (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984), 169 (hereafter cited in text as AN). 15. Virginia Woolf, “The Ghost Stories,” in Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Leon Edel (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1965), 47–56 (47–48). 16. Woolf, “Ghost Stories,” 48. 17. As reflected by two letters written to James Picker in October 1898, James harbored considerable anxiety about the placement of three stories, which he had sent the previous May and June, one of which was very likely “The Great Good Place.” On October 19, 1898, he writes: “Consternation has definitely settled upon me as the weeks & months have gone round without my hearing from you that you have been able to do anything with the three Tales of mine actually in your hands, & this is a word to confess to you that, as my nerves are really giving way under the tension of so much appearance that my work has, save in rare cases, for some reason I can’t fathom, ceased to be serially placeable, I shall


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18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

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be relieved—as I doubt not you yourself will be as well—you will kindly return me the unfortunate wanderers. It’s their wandering so far, in vain—I mean the consciousness of it—that upsets me.” All three stories were published in The Soft Side in 1900. See Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (London and New York: Penguin, 1999), 309–10. Leon Edel also believes “The Great Good Place” to have been one of the three stories in question; see Henry James: Letters, ed. Leon Edel, vol. 4 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1984), note 85. “It was part of the high style and grand manner that there was no personal publicity, much less any personal reference. Those things were in the world—in what he had left; there was no vulgarity here of credit or claim or fame” (GGP, 250). Woolf, “Ghost Stories,” 48. Mary Ellen Herx, “The Monomyth in ‘The Great Good Place,’” College English 24:6 (1963): 439–43 (439). See also Joseph Defalco, “‘The Great Good Place’: A Journey Into the Psyche,” Literature and Psychology 8 (1958): 18–20, which develops a Jungian reading of the story as a dream-sequence; and William Veeder, “James and the Limitations of Self-Therapy,” which reads the story in Kleinian terms as a failed therapeutic attempt to cure the fragmentation of the self. In Henry James: The Shorter Fiction, ed. N. H. Reeve (New York: Macmillan, 1997), 171–89. Puttenham, The Art, 179. Richard Hocks comments on the “‘postmodern’ tenor” of the story’s language; see Henry James: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990), 76. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1953), 192ff. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 22, 107. “And I may perfectly, you know,” the Brother pursued, “have seen you before. I may even have known you well.” They looked at each other again serenely enough, and at last Dane said, “No, we don’t know” (239–40). That the space in which Dane finds (and loses) himself is affectively charged is suggested by James’s notebook entry of December 11, 1904, which recounts “my own little personal harking back to the small old superseded Law-School” at Harvard—Dane Hall, where James was briefly enrolled during the academic year of 1862–63 (CN 236–37). Dane’s name may allude to the Cambridge of James’s youth, whose emotional pull his long entry makes clear: “The Cambridge fantastication seems to have only too much to ‘give’—God help me! It gives and gives; everything seems to give and give as I artfully press it” (CN 237). See Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 67–81. J. Hillis Miller, Reading Narrative (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 93–94.


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29. Hocks, Henry James, 77. Woolf clearly perceives the psychic status of James’s ghosts: “Henry James’s ghosts have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts—the blood-stained sea-captains, the white horses, the headless Ladies of dark lanes and windy commons. They have their origin within us. They are present whenever the significant overflows our powers of expressing it; whenever the ordinary appears ringed by the strange” (“Ghost Stories,” 52–53). 30. On this motif, see my “‘Specters of the Self ’ in A Small Boy and Others,” Igitur 4 (2003), 111–27 (121). 31. As Hocks notes, “James uses the back of a person as a kind of musical key signature denoting the alter ego,” Henry James, 77. Stuart Johnson similarly observes that the turned back operates as a figure for the writer in “Prelinguistic Consciousness in ‘Is there a Life after Death?,’” Criticism 26, no. 3 (1984), 245–57 (255). 32. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 11. 33. Henry James, “The Real Right Thing,” in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 17 (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), 411–431 (421, 416, 421) (hereafter cited in text as RRT). 34. Henry James, “Is there a Life after Death?,” Henry James on Culture, ed. Pierre A. Walker (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 115– 127 (116) (hereafter cited in text as LAD). On this essay, see especially Richard A. Hocks, Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974); Dana J. Ringuette, “Imagining the End: Henry James, Charles Sanders Pierce, and the ‘Reach Beyond the Laboratory-Brain,’” The Henry James Review 20, no. 2 (1999): 155–65; and Renée Tursi, “Henry James’s Self-Reiterating Habit in ‘Is there a Life after Death?,’” The Henry James Review 23, no. 2 (2002): 176–95. 35. Here I take issue with Johnson’s contention that James arrives at the conclusion that “consciousness, at its most important level, is prior to language” (“Prelinguistic Consciousness,” 247). Far from being extralinguistic, James’s conception of the afterlife rests on the metaphor of “immersion in the fountain of being” (LAD, 126). As George Dane also finds, there is no getting around the recourse to catachresis in naming the unknown. 36. Derrida, Specters, 113. 37. Ibid., 40. 38. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Prentice Hall, 1999), 37.


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EPILOGUE

Ghost Writing Nicola Bradbury

An epilogue to a volume of essays risks appearing no more than a supplement, superfluous to the real thing. Yet this subject entails revisiting. It is of the essence not merely to return but to haunt, to hang around, to hint at unfinished business. Henry James and the Supernatural prepares the ground for such ambivalence. It is the first substantial book-length collection on the novelist’s ghost stories and, therefore, must aspire to completeness in delineating its subject. Yet it also has to recognize the resistance of its material to finality. Both these aims, of comprehensive yet inconclusive criticisms, are pursued with rigorous energy and glee. Anna Despotopoulou and Kimberly Reed’s “Introduction” outlines the critical project to which individual essays contribute in distinct yet potentially connected ways. What I hope to add is no more than encouragement to extend the endeavor, because what emerges from this volume are ways of reading Henry James that go far beyond his nominal ghost stories, and propose a pattern of “ghost writing” running throughout his work, enhancing the actual with a perpetual sense of further possibility. This critical vision perceives a consonance between the structural and stylistic elements found in recurrent themes, rhetorical repetition, and revision. It allows for the sense of some correspondence (not equivalence but interconnection) between the work and the life, and between private life and public issues, and experience and history—or in textual terms, between letters, travel writing, impressions, criticism, and fiction. It may even extend to issues of influence, allusion (or possibly anxiety) between James and other authors. Questions of gender and queer culture are embraced by it. Without blurring distinctions, responding to these dimensions of his work alerts us to the implicit resonance between all aspects of the ghosts of Henry James. Echoes, which are not merely


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quotations or allusions or verbal recall nor even thematic issues, but perhaps even larger matters of approach to the matter of art, the business of letters, are seen at work in his work. The interplay of discipline and distraction in this procedure echoes a dialogue Henry James wryly imagines in his preface to The Princess Casamassima between author and audience. James conjures up a “wary reader” warning the novelist against making his characters “too interpretative” and demanding rather: “Give us plenty of bewilderment . . . for intelligence—well, endangers.”1 And all this a page or two after his own paean to consciousness among his characters: “The figures in any picture, the agents in any drama, are interesting only in proportion as they feel their respective situations; since the consciousness, on their part, of the complication exhibited forms for us their link of connexion with it. But there are degrees of feeling—the muffled, the faint, the just sufficient, the barely intelligent, as we may say; and the acute, the intense, the complete, in a word—the power to be finely aware and richly responsible” (vii–viii). James’s counterpoint between “bewilderment” and “the acute, the intense, the complete” gives another formulation to the project on Henry James’s ghost stories. His critical preface (itself a revisiting of the revised text for the New York edition) outlines a complex relationship between author, reader, and fictional character that looks like a problem of composition: how to create a drama, paint a picture, so that it works as fiction, takes on the dimensions of “a situation” and thereby captures the interest of the audience. But tackling this task retrospectively turns into something even more intriguing. To make it work, what has to be incorporated is everything that sticks and grinds and seems to threaten malfunction: the sense of bewilderment. A recalled compositional challenge turns into a current or perpetual drama of consciousness: an investigation removed from its moment, not merely of character and information but of perception, of what can be known. Behind the actual (or the historical) fictional scene or picture this preface invokes a ghostly counterpart, or rather a throng of potential shadow scenes, where more or less might be known or seen from what is said and done. The sense of reality grows precisely from the apprehension of what is not, or not quite, or not yet, real; the hypothetical, that might be, or might have been; the ghost story. The essays in Henry James and the Supernatural follow various stages of this journey: from the formal and rhetorical issues raised in James’s prefaces; through the aspects of history, memory, and of autobiography; and ranging into the philosophical realms of epistemology and ontology. Greg Zacharias opens by examining James’s late novels and his autobiographical works, to investigate the author’s artistic dynamic. He sees the ghostly


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as coming out of the past: essentially remembered experience. So memory, in James as in William Wordsworth, or later in Marcel Proust, does not merely evoke but effectively creates what could be termed a “ghostly reality” in art, one that wrestles with raw experience for primacy and for enduring power. For Kristin Boudreau, taking a philosophical view and calling on Immanuel Kant and Emanuel Swedenborg, ghosts become a trope for the truth of things, not only within the fiction but also in the work itself. For Henry James, the artist has an experience like the sighting of a ghost: access to a world beyond perceptible consciousness. Hazel Hutchinson again turns to Swedenborg, and particularly his influential development of the house as a symbol of the soul, which she shows as pivotal in the nineteenth-century understanding of the synthesis between internal and external spheres. So James negotiates architectural form to trace the consciousness positioning itself between the material world and a possible spiritual reality. Anna Despotopoulou moves from the rarefied air of pure reason and dedicated ecclesiastical space to the domain of the domestic in James’s world, only to discover deep anxiety there. For her, the transgressive trope of haunting acts as a metaphor in the struggle to establish identity between the private and the public in late Victorian society. Kathy Gentile addresses similar issues through a different critical route. She moves from formal to Freudian and then to contemporary anthropological versions of anxiety over initiation into masculinity. What emerges from this sequence of papers is both the range of James’s work that lends itself to investigation via the ghostly and the mobility of critical methodology, its capacity to address seemingly disparate yet persuasively linked target texts and issues (ghost stories, gender anxieties) with due awareness of their cultural context and historical location (American, English, or European literature and philosophy; new disciplines gaining definition in the late nineteenth century; the backwash of contemporary causes célèbres, such as the 1895 Oscar Wilde trial). Further investigations include Kevin Ohi’s queer reading of James’s ghost stories as “about” the intensities of same-sex desire; Diane Long Hoeveler on “homospectrality” and male liebestod in the ghost stories; Gert Buelens answering Virginia Woolf ’s question, “What use is made of the supernatural?” by turning to speech act theory and to Judith Butler’s notion of performativity; Sheila Teahan using rhetorical analysis to reveal in the ghostly a rendering of representation itself. Together, they demonstrate a productive interplay of critical approaches that are distinct but not exclusive. What I propose is not to rehearse their arguments, but use their guidance to explore the interplay of consciousness and bewilderment as the


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necessary condition for the sense of reality that grows from “the apprehension of what is not, or not quite, or not yet, real: the hypothetical” in James’s late novel, The Ambassadors. There are “ghostly” hints in this work, not the least being its unspoken but unmissable allusion to the famous Holbein painting of the French Ambassadors (held in London’s National Gallery), which offers centrally in the foreground, but visually encoded by a trick of perspective, the memento mori of a death’s head that comments silently on all the trappings of worldly wisdom and success displayed above. Yet, as James commented on his next novel, The Wings of the Dove, “[T]he poet essentially can’t be concerned with the act of dying.”2 The fascination of The Ambassadors is rather, as Henry James and the Supernatural discovers throughout James’s writings, the way the shadow of death, the type of loss and failure is held in tension and challenged by the demands of life: the haunting sense this gives of possibility. I would like to explore how this novel moves between a “real life” original “germ”—William Dean Howells’s words to Jonathan Sturges once in Paris, “Live! Live all you can—it’s a mistake not to,” reported in James’s preface to The Ambassadors3—and the way the novel circles around the concept of “Too late.”4 Between the wishful “Live!” and the regretful “Too late” lies an area of hypothetical development: the ghost of a chance; what might have been. Within that expanse, the construction of the novel replicates the circumstances of its inception. As James at one remove recognizes Howells’s reported utterance, so James’s protagonist Strether within the novel works as “ambassador” to his prospective second wife, dealing with her son’s romantic liaison, in the romantic foreign city where he himself once spent his honeymoon. His first wife and his own son long dead, Strether comes to Paris to retrieve the errant young man but finds himself embroiled in an oblique drama or shadow plot of seduction and disenchantment. In the famous Lambinet scene, Strether leaves Paris for a day in the country and finds himself apparently amid the very landscape of a painting he once saw, years ago, with his young wife, in a Boston art dealer’s, but could not afford to buy. Now, into this picture come two picturesque figures: exactly what was needed to complete the scene. But Strether to his horror recognizes that they are the very couple he came to France to separate but then stayed on to support—and that they are not idealized icons of romance but lovers indeed, human and errant. Their story erupts into his history. The memory of the past, the possibilities left incomplete, the misapprehensions of this moment, and the full force of understanding all come together. Hypothesis meets fiction; dream collides with sordid reality; the secondary and the primary experience intersect and are exchanged. The result is both a dramatic shock and a sense of


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paradoxical fulfillment: the revelation the whole novel has been waiting for in the congruence of “Live all you can” with “Too late.” The Lambinet episode builds on a sequence of encounters, which altogether attune our readerly antennae to the dramatic possibilities of the final scene between “our hero” and the lady he must now consign to oblivion. This is a parting worthy of grand opera, but given here in the mode characteristic of the novel, a style that reaches for what is missing behind the present scene: a “ghost story,” if you will. It echoes and laments Strether’s first meeting with Madame de Vionnet, whom he is now to relinquish forever. In this elegiac episode, through the approach to the moment, the setting, the words spoken and withheld between the “ambassador” and the lady, the novel can exploit all the apparent limitations of its diplomatic language, its coded expression, the rhetoric of implication and decorum, to give precise, though indirect, utterance to the eloquence of the missed opportunity. What we hear behind the forms of politeness is the trailing “if only” of the distant command, “Live all you can: it’s a mistake not to.” Between the Lambinet scene and this parting comes a period of waiting: only one day, but enough to shift the gravitational centre of the narrative from surface action back to the quiet space within Strether’s own consciousness where he himself is learning at last to “live all you can.” In this interior world he can cultivate more possibilities than outright narrative or plot action could allow. On receiving Madame de Vionnet’s telegram, asking him to call, for example, the rhythm of his thoughts circles around repetitions—a haunted rhetorical form: He mightn’t see her at all; that was one of the reflections he made after writing and before he dropped his closed card into the box; he mightn’t see any one at all any more; he might make an end as well now as ever, leaving things as they were, since he was doubtless not to leave them better, and taking his way home so far as should appear that a home remained to him.5

This hypothetical conclusion, couched in the conditional and subjunctive moods of nonfact, sketches out an “alternative” ending, giving the sense that Strether “might” (the auxiliary is repeated three times)—but also that he may not (two of these three are in the negative)—recoil from the full potential of the novel. Having engaged to meet Madame de Vionnet, Strether has the day to linger. But the hour of meeting, and parting, will come. Picture and scene, the formal and the historical, come together to inform this important passage. This is no longer a matter of plot, the old, foredoomed, story of the older woman and the younger man, which


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could not be redeemed by another lover. The “luxury” for Strether now is not actively to change things but rather to fully taste them. It is from Strether’s point of view—or rather, somewhere even deeper, within that part of his awareness that lies on the very edge of consciousness—that the narrative arrives on the threshold of this moment of parting. How does James convey this? Partly by long looping sentences, weaving to and fro through Strether’s mind, his memory, and his muted vision of the future, and establishing a rhythm of awareness and appreciation. Strether’s grammatical relation to these long sentences is largely oblique: the very syntax can act as a kind of expressive device, indicating his relation to a drama where he is neither a principal actor nor merely a part of the audience, but something intermediate: a witness, perhaps. Presented with this picture, all Strether need draw is breath—as the long phrasing of this sentence makes us actually feel: “Between nine and ten, at last, in the high clear picture—he was moving in these days, as in a gallery, from clever canvas to clever canvas—he drew a long breath: it was so presented to him from the first that the spell of his luxury wouldn’t be broken” (AM, 273). A hypnotic use of repetition recreates that “spell,” while the picture takes shape, and form itself is invested with values, which is not merely aesthetic but spiritual: “The light in her beautiful, formal room was dim, though it would do, as everything would always do; the hot night had kept out lamps, but there was a pair of clusters of candles that glimmered over the chimney-piece like the all tapers of an altar” (AM, 274). The “vague voice of Paris,” heard in the distance outside, creates further reverberations: not aesthetic and spiritual, but political. Strether’s “historic sense” brings in great parallels for what might have seemed merely a boudoir scene, magnifying the scale and the danger: “Thus and so, on the eve of the great recorded dates, the days and nights of revolution, the sounds had come in, the omens, the beginnings broken out. They were the smell of revolution, the smell of the public temper—or perhaps simply the smell of blood” (AM, 274). In this theatre of war, Madame de Vionnet’s dress “of simplest coolest white” (the reverse of the black she wore at their first meeting and distinct from the silvery grey of an earlier triumph)—this (ghostly?) white gown—prompts Strether to think of a distinguished victim of the revolution: “Madame Roland must on the scaffold have worn something like it” (AM, 275). The costume, the setting, even to the murmur of Paris heard beyond the courtyard, are the “things,” which convey the values Strether will preserve when the scene, and the actors too, are gone. The narrative asserts and retracts their actuality in the same phrase: “these things were at first as delicate as if they had been ghostly” (AM, 275).


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Even the incontrovertible “objects” are verbally ambivalent and Strether has to reach for certainty: “That conviction held him from the outset, and, seeming singularly to simplify, certified to him that the objects about would help him, would really help them both” (AM, 275). Before the conversation actually commences, the whole drama is anticipated, and appreciated, for more than a romantic episode: He knew in advance that he should look back on the perception actually sharpest with him as on the view of something old, old, old, the oldest thing he had ever personally touched; and he also knew, even while he took his companion in as the feature among features, that memory and fancy couldn’t help being enlisted for her. She might intend what she would, but this was beyond anything she could intend, with things from far back—tyrannies of history, facts of type, values, as the painters said, of expression—all working for her and giving her the supreme chance, the chance of the happy, the really luxurious few, the chance, on a great occasion, to be natural and simple. (AM, 276)

“Simple,” this is not; but masterful in the redistribution of a virtual power that goes beyond “intention.” As a witness, Strether is invested with a visionary capacity beyond his companion’s: “She might intend what she would, but this was beyond anything she could intend.” Located in the future perfect, but anchored to “something old, old, old,” what “he knew in advance he should look back on” is that “supreme chance” that not only The Ambassadors but also all James is reaching for: “The chance, on a great occasion, to be natural and simple”; the chance to find a balance between “bewilderment” and “the acute, the intense, the complete”: the ghost of a chance. Notes 1. Henry James, Preface, The Princess Casamassima, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 5 (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), ix. 2. Henry James, Preface, The Wings of the Dove, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 19 (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), vi. 3. Henry James, Preface, The Ambassadors, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 21 (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), vi. 4. Henry James, “February 5th, 1895,” in The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 112. 5. Henry James, The Ambassadors, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 22 (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), 270 (hereafter cited in text as AM).


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Index afterlife, 40–43, 50, 54, 74–75, 165–78, 181 See also immortality Agamben, Giorgio, 147 Aijmer, Celia, 6 Alcott, Bronson, 64 Alcott, Louisa May, 119 allegory, 56, 70, 165–66 architecture ecclesiastical, 62–63, 67–70 as metaphor, 66, 67–75 Aziz, Maqbool, 149 Badinter, Elisabeth, 102 Banfield, Ann, 141–42 Banta, Martha, 6, 161 Beauvoir, Simone de, 102 Beidler, Peter G., 7, 11, 111 Bell, Millicent, 101 Beneke, Timothy, 98, 100, 109–10 Bennett, Andrew, 178 Bersani, Leo, 146 Biers, Katherine, 146 body, 71–72, 87 male, 114–15, 120, 122, 126, 128, 129 Booth, Alison, 80 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 3 Britten, Benjamin, 126, 150, 158 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 87 Brontë, Charlotte, 119 Brown, Arthur A., 134 Brown, Bill, 71 Browning, Robert, 62 Buelens, Gert, 6, 30, 131

pal-reed-11in.indd 191

Butler, Judith, 150–51, 153, 162–63, 185 Cameron, Sharon, 56, 140 Cannon, Kelly, 97 Castle, Terry, 4, 113 cathedrals, 62, 67–70 Canterbury, 69 Chartres, 62 Exeter, 68, 70 Notre Dame, 59, 71 Saint Paul’s, 69 Salisbury, 68, 70 Wells, 70 Westminster Abbey, 62, 68 Cavell, Stanley, 36 “chamber of consciousness,” 6, 63, 70, 73, 75 Chase, Karen, 81 churches, 59–60, 61, 62, 67, 68, 70–72, 74, 172 See also cathedrals Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 37–38 Coulson, Victoria, 80 Cranfill, Thomas Mabry, 6 Dana, Charles, 64 death, 19, 29, 40–51, 54, 55, 56, 62, 64, 67–69, 74, 104, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119–20, 122, 125–26, 127, 128, 129, 130, 152–55, 156, 161–62, 163, 168, 170–71, 172, 173, 176–77 Defalco, Joseph, 180 de Man, Paul, 173 Demetrius, 165

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192

Index

Derrickson, Teresa, 119 Derrida, Jacques, 114, 132, 151, 175, 177–78 disembodiment, 44, 87, 88, 113, 159, 173 Dollimore, Jonathan, 115 domesticity, 4, 63, 80, 81, 83–84, 86, 89, 92–93, 123, 185 Edel, Leon, 61, 120–21, 127, 134, 180 Eliot, George, 19 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 37, 38, 43–44, 45, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 56, 65, 66–67, 74 erotic desire, 61, 114, 115, 118, 124, 128–29, 131, 132–33, 138, 150, 154, 157–58, 159–61, 162, 164 See also homosexuality: homoerotic estrangement, 4, 6, 81, 84 extrasensory perception, 23, 35–44, 83–84 Felman, Shoshana, 6–7 femininity, 80–81, 87–88, 89, 100, 102, 106 See also women Ferrari, Michel, 55 Fletcher, John, 82, 114, 116, 132, 164 Foss, Chris, 80 Fowler, Virginia, 69 Freud, Sigmund, 5, 81–83, 90–91, 92, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103–4, 108, 111, 160, 169 Fussell, Edwin Sill, 70 Galerie D’Apollon, 13–14 gaze, 93, 114, 115, 125, 140 Geismar, Maxwell, 135 ghostly as absence, 6, 41, 52–53, 80, 86, 88, 90–91, 92, 114, 137–38, 147, 167, 178 as concealment, 82, 107, 113–14, 131, 166–67, 179


and consciousness, 4–18, 21–25, 29, 40–44, 46–50, 52–54, 60, 67, 74– 75, 79, 88, 100, 104–5, 108, 168, 172, 174, 176–77, 184 as haunting, 3, 4, 5, 7, 14–17, 35, 39–40, 42–43, 46–48, 50, 52–54, 59–61, 72–75, 79–80, 82, 84, 85, 86, 89, 91–92, 99–102, 114, 121– 22, 124, 125–27, 129–31, 134, 149–51, 156, 159–61, 178, 183, 185, 186, 187 as hypothesis/possibility, 5, 184, 186–87 as memory, 14–18, 19, 20–23, 29, 46–54, 99, 101–2, 165, 170, 172 as narrative strategy, 1, 4–6, 14–29, 30, 31, 88, 117, 120, 122, 126, 129, 138, 141–45, 166–78, 188–89 and the past, 13–29, 30, 32, 42, 43–44, 46, 52, 67, 68, 73, 85, 89, 99, 100, 101–2, 105–7, 108, 109, 140–42, 144–45, 150, 152–54, 162, 175, 178, 185, 186, 189 and Romanticism, 36–40, 98 and the spiritual world, 2, 35–36, 38, 40–44, 47, 52–54, 60–75, 83, 85, 86, 108, 111, 121, 170, 185, 188 and truth, 15, 16–22, 37–40, 47, 185 See also ghost story; supernatural ghosts, 1, 3, 5, 7, 13–14, 16–18, 19, 20–29, 31, 32, 35, 38–43, 44, 46– 48, 52–53, 60, 73, 84, 85–93, 94, 100, 113–14, 120–22, 124–26, 126–27, 130, 131, 134, 139, 145, 147, 151–53, 155, 160, 166–68, 175, 178, 181, 185 family, 119–20, 129–31, 151–56 See also spectrality ghost story, 1–7, 13, 109, 113–31, 134, 137, 139, 145, 149–50, 169, 178, 183–89 Gilmore, David, 102 Gordon, Lyndall, 61

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Index

Gosse, Edmund, 67 gothic, 3–4, 98, 113–14, 126–27, 131 architecture, 68, 82, 83 conventions, 79, 80, 82, 88, 116, 118, 122 women, 82, 89, 92 Graham, Wendy, 133 Greenblatt, Stephen, 29 Guntrip, Harry, 133 Habegger, Alfred, 32, 110 Habermas, Jürgen, 80 Hadley, Tessa, 80 Hall, Richard, 134 Halliwell, Michael, 150 hallucinations, 47, 98, 107, 109 Haralson, Eric L., 132, 150, 153, 164 haunting. See ghostly: as haunting hauntology, 114, 132 See also Derrida, Jacques Hawley, Charles Arthur, 64 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1, 3, 64, 66, 120 Heller, Terry, 7 Herx, Mary Ellen, 170 heterosexuality, 104, 114, 124, 128, 132, 133, 139, 143 Hocks, Richard, 98, 174, 180, 181 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 120–21 Hogle, Jerrold E., 135 homosexuality, 133, 136, 139, 164 in childhood, 142, 144, 147 homoerotic, 61, 115, 129, 132–33, 150, 157–58, 159, 164 homosexual desire, 107, 113–31, 137, 142 homosexual panic, 113, 131, 133 (see also Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky) homosocial desire, 113, 118, 125– 26, 133 Hoople, Robin P., 7 Horwitz, B. D., 133 Howells, William Dean, 2, 186


193

immortality, 40–41, 40–43, 50, 54, 67–68, 176 James, Henry and America, relation to, 1, 18, 24– 28, 32–33, 120, 127 and culture, 1, 26, 62, 66–67, 102, 131 and gender, 7, 80, 81, 82–83, 88–89, 97–98, 110, 151, 183, 185 (see also femininity; masculinity) on ghost stories, 1–2, 4–5, 109 and James, Henry (Harry), III (nephew), 15, 23 and history, 2, 7, 16, 23, 30, 32, 62, 69, 127 and Minny Temple, 19–20, 22, 50– 51, 61 and rhetorical methods/narrative techniques, 7, 14–20, 24–29 absence, 6, 52–53, 80, 83–86, 88, 90–91, 92, 137–45, 167, 178 ambiguity, 4–7, 80, 82, 85, 87, 89–90, 92, 95, 119, 155–56, 168, 171–72, 179 aposiopesis, 165–78 concealment, 89–90, 113–14, 131 doubling, 90, 151–63, 167, 170, 174–75 evasion, 6, 113–14, 131, 133, 170, 172 figuration, 134, 165–78, 181 metonymy, 52, 155, 158, 173 occupation, 167, 169, 179 repetition, 69, 145, 151–54, 155–57, 159, 175, 183, 186–89 retrospective narrative, 14–29, 140–45, 168, 177, 184 temporal organization, 25–27, 140–45, 147, 167–68, 175, 178

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194

Index

James, Henry (continued ) and sexuality, 7, 97, 116, 133, 134 on the supernatural, 1–6, 13–29, 40– 41, 42–44, 129 reception of his work, 2–3, 4, 6–7, 61, 97–98, 149–51, 169 works by “Altar of the Dead, The,” 2, 5, 60–63, 71–73, 149 Ambassadors, The, 10, 24, 59, 66, 75, 98, 99, 186–89 American Scene, The, 14, 18, 20, 22, 24–29 “Art of Fiction, The,” 63 Aspern Papers, The, 23, 29, 120, 135 “Author of Beltraffio, The,” 92–93 “Beast in the Jungle, The,” 97– 109, 133, 146 “Bench of Desolation, The,” 149 Complete Notebooks of Henry James, The, 26, 28, 176, 179, 180 “Death of the Lion, The,” 23 “De Grey: A Romance,” 117– 20, 122, 124 “English Hours,” 67–70 “Ghostly Rental, The,” 2, 82– 88, 89, 94, 117, 120–23 Golden Bowl, The, 24, 60, 66, 166 “Great Good Place, The,” 165–78 Henry James: Letters, 15–16, 19–20 “Is there a Life after Death?,” 29, 40–44, 67–68, 74, 108– 9, 176–77 “Jolly Corner, The,” 20, 79, 98, 108, 130 “Lesson of the Master, The,” 23 “Maud-Evelyn,” 137–45 Notes of a Son and Brother, 16


“Owen Wingrave,” 126–31, 149–63 Portrait of a Lady, The, 4, 15, 21, 35, 38–40, 60, 63 Princess Casamassima, The, 21, 184 “Private Life, The,” 2 “Real Right Thing, The,” 82, 89–91, 175–76 Roderick Hudson, 20, 173 “Romance of Certain Old Clothes, The,” 2 Sense of the Past, The, 20, 175 “Sir Edmund Orme,” 123–26, 134 Small Boy and Others, A, 3, 13– 14, 15–17, 16, 19, 175 Spoils of Poynton, The, 22 “Third Person, The,” 92 “Tone of Time, The,” 149 Tragic Muse, The, 22, 60 Turn of the Screw, The, 1–2, 3, 4, 6–7, 20, 73, 79–80, 83, 88, 98, 108, 117, 123, 145, 166, 168, 179 What Maisie Knew, 18–19 Wings of the Dove, The, 4, 23, 24, 30, 44–54, 60, 166 James, Henry, Sr., 55, 62, 66 James, William, 15–16, 19, 23, 40–41, 46, 47, 51, 54, 55, 66, 111, 119, 134 Johnson, Stuart, 181 Johnston, Kendall, 70 Kant, Immanuel, 35–39, 40, 41–42, 43, 45 Kaplan, Fred, 61 Keats, John, 63 knowledge, empirical, 35–42, 80, 83, 84–85, 87, 88, 90, 91–92 Kohan, Kevin, 69–70 Kopelson, Kevin, 115, 128, 132–33, 135–36 Kuklick, Bruce, 37

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Index

Lanham, Richard, 165–67, 179 Leavis, F. R., 61 Levenson, Michael, 81 Lewes, Kenneth, 133 Lewis, Matthew, 98 Litvak, Joseph, 125 Louvre. See Galerie D’Apollon Lukacher, Ned, 166 Lustig, T. J., 6, 134, 150, 159 marginalization, 1–4, 27, 92, 117 masculinity, 97–98, 100–101, 102–4, 106–9, 117, 118, 120, 122, 126, 133 Mason, A. E. W., 128 Matheson, Neill, 82, 115, 116, 117 Maugham, Somerset, 55 McWhirter, David, 30 Melville, Herman, 115 metaphysics, 35–38, 40–44, 83–84, 178 Michie, Helena, 83 military temperament, 149, 150–58, 162–63 heroism, 149, 150, 155, 160, 162 Miller, J. Hillis, 113, 174 Moon, Michael, 132 morality, 37, 65, 70, 93, 152 mortality, 44–45, 69, 109 narcissism, 105, 116, 119, 133 Newman, Karen, 81 Novick, Sheldon, 111, 132 Oedipus complex, 103–4, 108, 111 Oliphant, Margaret, 3 Otten, Thomas, 71 pacifism, 149, 150, 151, 156, 158, 164 Pater, Walter, 88 Patmore, Coventry, 63 performativity, 140, 150–51, 155, 162, 185 See also Butler, Judith Person, Leland, 97 philosophy, 35–44, 46, 69, 176


195

Piper, Myfanwy, 150 Poe, Edgar Allan, 64, 66, 120 Posnock, Ross, 26 postmortem consciousness, 40–41, 42, 46, 104, 168, 170, 176–77, 181 Powers, Lyall H., 61 privacy, 4, 6, 13–14, 20–21, 26, 79–93, 102, 104, 153, 183, 185 psychological/psychoanalytic, 63, 65, 67, 70, 81, 97–100, 103–4, 116, 117, 127, 131, 132, 133, 135, 150, 156, 162, 180 public, 13–14, 20–21, 79–83, 87–93, 102, 104, 153, 180, 183, 185, 188 Punter, David, 4 Putt, S. Gorley, 61, 149 Puttenham, George, 165, 166, 170 queer theory, 82, 114, 116–18, 131, 132, 137–45, 146, 147, 157–58, 183 Quintilian, 165 Radcliffe, Anne, 85, 98 Rawlings, Peter, 19, 31 Reason. See Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Emerson, Ralph Waldo; Kant, Immanuel Reeve, Clara, 127 religious belief, 41–42, 60, 62–63, 65– 67, 74, 108 Righter, William, 14, 30, 32 ritual, 60, 69–70, 71, 109–10 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 63 Royle, Nicholas, 178 Ruskin, John, 81 Rye, Sussex (England), 24 Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, 129 Savoy, Eric, 116, 166–67, 174 Scarry, Elaine, 71 Schleifer, Ronald, 88 Sears, Sallie, 134

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196

Index

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 107, 114, 115, 116, 118, 129, 132, 133, 136, 147, 158 sense/sensory perception, 35–44, 71– 73, 83–84, 94 setting, 4, 79, 82, 165, 167–68, 171– 72, 186–89 sexuality, 7, 80–81, 85, 87, 107, 113– 16, 123, 126, 131, 132, 133, 139, 142–45, 150–51 See also femininity; heterosexuality; homosexuality; James, Henry: and gender; James, Henry: and sexuality; masculinity Shaw, George Bernard, 149 Silverman, Kaja, 114, 132 Simmel, Georg, 80 Smythe, Karen, 73 Society for Psychical Research, 2, 5, 11, 108, 111 sodomy, 115, 125, 128, 132–33 spectrality, 5–6, 31, 82, 85, 88, 99, 113–14, 117, 123–25, 127, 164, 175, 177–78, 185 spiritual, 54, 60, 62–67, 70–75 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 119 Stallybrass, Peter, 114 Stendhal, 118, 119 Stevens, Hugh, 61, 132 Stewart, Alan, 136 Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 142 supernatural experience of, 14, 38–44, 46–47, 52–54, 55, 67, 79–85, 87, 89–90, 91–93, 100, 103, 107, 108, 109, 121, 123, 129–30, 151–53, 155, 156–57, 158, 160–62 as genre, 1–6, 98–99, 150, 163, 169, 185 See also afterlife; ghostly; ghost story


Swedenborg, Emanuel, 37–38, 62, 64– 66, 70, 74 Swinburne, A. C., 88 Taylor, Andrew, 65 Tennyson, Alfred, 63 Thorberg, Raymond, 134 Todorov, Tzvetan, 73, 97, 98–99 Turgenev, Ivan, 31 uncanny, 4–7, 79–93, 97–109, 151, 152, 158, 160–63, 167, 169, 175, 178 See also Freud, Sigmund; Todorov, Tzvetan; unheimlich unheimlich, 81–84, 89, 169 Veeder, William, 133, 180 voyeurism, 85, 121, 123, 132, 135 Walpole, Horace, 98, 127 Warhol, Robyn, 166, 168 Warminski, Andrzej, 61, 73 White, Allon, 114, 133 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 64 Wilde, Oscar, 80, 115, 116, 143, 185 Winner, Viola Hopkins, 93 women, 80–93, 94, 95, 101–8, 111, 113, 118, 120, 123, 125–26, 131, 133, 135, 137–38, 154 as ghosts, 82–83, 88–89, 91–93, 137–45, 147 Woolf, Virginia, 5, 63, 142, 149–51, 169, 172, 181, 185 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 61 Yates, Frances, 172 Zwinger, Linda, 123, 132

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5/2/11 1:18 PM

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The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James

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Palgrave Advances in Henry James Studies

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