Voltaire, one of the main representatives of the Enlightenment, has Reason tell her daughter Truth in his Eloge historique de la raison (1775): “We must first walk through the darkness of ignorance and lies in front of us before we can enter your castle of light from which we were both cast out so many centuries ago.” With this statement he curiously anticipates the transition to the magical thinking that finds its acme in gothic literature around 1800. Reason herself declares that the human subject must first experience the abyss within the soul before he or she can discover the light of Truth. By taking the night not only as its theme, but expanding it to encompass an attitude toward the world, gothic culture draws attention to what happens when one tries to banish the nocturnal side of life from diurnal consciousness. This repressed aspect of psychic life will strike back, triggering a catastrophe and leaving behind indelible traces. Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) can be taken as a literary milestone in that it refigures the Christian struggle between good and evil in terms of a modern understanding of the psyche. Any allegedly peaceful pastoral can be revisited by those dark powers that lie hidden in the past because no one is immune from the risk of drawing guilt upon oneself.
At the outset of the book, Clara, who narrates the tragic events that will befall her family, lives in perfect harmony with her brother, Theodore Wieland, on the estate they have inherited from their late father. As a member of an evangelical sect, their father raised his children in strict accordance with his religious faith before dying in a mysterious explosion in the temple he had built in honor of his punitive God on a small hill in his garden. Wieland soon marries the neighbor’s daughter Catharine, whereas Clara, secretly in love with Henry Pleyel, the brother of her new sister-in-law, moves into a cottage of her own. Suddenly, a foreign threat encroaches upon their idyllic community that will transform their civilized garden into a bloody battlefield. One day, while walking outdoors, Wieland believes he hears his wife’s voice warning him not to enter the temple on the hill because danger is imminent. Upon returning home he discovers that Catharine had been in the house for the entire afternoon. Clara insists that the supernatural holds no power over her and initially seeks to find a rational explanation for this strange event, attributing the spectral voices to her brother’s excessive imagination. Then, alone in her cottage in the middle of the night, she too hears a male voice forbidding her to enter a particular room. At this point Clara begins to believe that she and her family are haunted by the dead; she will discover only much later that this is, in fact, the voice of a ventriloquist.
Decisive for the defense of critical reason that Brown’s gothic novel sustains is the question why even a person like Clara, whose name in itself signals clarity and rationality of thought, should not be immune to delusion. Only after the fatal events have run their course will she discover that the ventriloquist Carwin merely wanted to play a practical joke on them, not unlike the three weird sisters who initially interfere in Macbeth’s affairs without bad intent. As in Shakespeare’s tragedy, the demonic hoax falls on fertile ground because neither Wieland nor his sister has worked through the traumatic experience of their father’s death. Carwin’s uncanny ability to mimic voices calls forth spectral visions on the part of both orphans. These pertain not only to the fact that the circumstances of the father’s death could not be explained, but also force them to confront their father’s religious fanaticism, given that in some inexplicable way this untimely death is connected to the temple he built on the hill behind his home. The trust in rational thought
Wieland ultimately reinstalls is predicated on the fact that the two siblings respond differently to the obscuring of judgment induced by the ventriloquist’s game with voices. Wieland, having quickly fallen into religious delusion, interprets the mysterious voices as proof that his father’s death was the result of divine intervention. He is convinced that this punitive God will soon reveal himself to him as well.
Clara also believes that her father came to die because he had not observed some interdiction. In contrast to her brother, however, she sees herself as the victim of demonic passions that she senses are possibly of her own making. One night she has a vision of her brother Wieland seeking to bring about her death. Upon waking she finds the intruder Carwin standing in her antechamber. In contrast to her brother, who has given himself up completely to psychic nocturnality, Clara, even while enjoying this display of anxiety, maintains a rational attitude toward the uncanny incursions into her world. She refuses to attribute the allegedly demonic powers to the presence of some supernatural force and instead locates them in the human psyche: “There are no devils but those which are begotten upon selfishness, and reared by cunning” (123). Wieland wants to believe in divine punishment so that, in retrospect, this might give meaning to his father’s death. Clara’s fantasy that she is in mortal danger does not revolve around the loss of a paternal figure of authority who has come from the dead in search of retribution, but rather her lack of a husband. The voices she hears, along with the presence of a strange man in her home at midnight, are refigured as a personal psychodrama that allows her to act out what she cannot directly articulate. If Pleyel would only decide to marry her, she would no longer be exposed to the threat posed by strangers.
At the end of her walk through psychic darkness, Clara succeeds in regaining the light of reason forbidden to her brother. Her clear gaze is ultimately able to pass proper judgment on the dark irrationality that has intruded in this American pastoral. As the narrator of the text she will, in retrospect, shape all spectral haunting into the words on the pages she is writing. Yet she is also willing to give in to Carwin’s dubious machinations because she wants to cast herself as the heroine in a gothic fantasy in which her home has become the stage in which portentous warnings can be pronounced. There, her horrific dream vision will become reality. She will find Catharine’s corpse lying in her own bedroom, only to learn that her brother, now imprisoned, killed his wife along with his three children in a state of delirium. In his written confession, Wieland reveals the nocturnal side of the religious fanaticism inherited from his father. He insists that he merely acted as the faithful servant of a punitive God, whose divine voice had instructed him to destroy his family as proof of his stalwart faith. In horror, Clara must acknowledge that her own anxious mind had already crafted the image of a murderous brother long before he actually became the murderer of his family.
Clara would prefer to place blame elsewhere by seeing Carwin as a “grand deceiver; the author of this black conspiracy” (176). Yet upon returning to her home, which is cast in a twilight “whose darkness suited the color of my thoughts” (179), she obtains a confession from the ventriloquist that forbids exculpation. He admits openly what she already surmises: “I have deceived you: I have sported with your terrors” (182). Yet he also insists that he has not been acting as the agent of the devil, adding: “I have prompted none to slay; I have handled a tool of wonderful efficacy without malignant intentions, but without caution; ample will be the punishment of my temerity, if my conduct has contributed to this evil” (183). He is neither the author of murder fantasies nor their agent. He has simply brought to light those dark imaginations that were already dormant in the depth of his victims’ psyches. He merely put to the test the extent to which both Clara and her brother were willing to trust in chimeras and dreams.
Although it would take another century for Sigmund Freud to develop his cathartic therapy in the course of working with women suffering from hysteria, one might see Carwin as a psychoanalyst avant la lettre. His gift as a ventriloquist makes present the voices of people who are in fact absent, and in so doing forces those concerned with this spectral haunting to confront the clandestine desires that diurnal consciousness forbids. Even if this is not his intention, his trick with voices compels Clara to pass through the darkness of ignorance, which Freud and Breuer call the healing passage through the dark continent of the unconscious in their Writings on Hysteria. Like the two psychiatrists, Carwin makes use of information others provide. Because he has learned about Clara’s secrets from her diary, he can act as the director of a psychodrama that brings the hidden matters of her romantic desire into the light of starkly subjective illumination. Indeed, in the spirit of a benign therapist, he uses their final midnight meeting to arm Clara against any further attacks from internal demons: “I come now to remove your errors” he assures her, “to set you beyond the reach of similar fears” (183).
In keeping with the conventions of gothic fiction, the spectral haunting can find closure in
Wieland only after a final acting out of the collective nightmare that has befallen this family. Only after Wieland himself appears at this midnight meeting is Clara willing to acknowledge that Carwin is not the demonic seducer of her brother. Horrified, she discovers that he has come to sacrifice her as well to his strict God. Anticipating the praxis of psychoanalysis, Carwin uses his gift to impersonate the voice of Wieland’s punitive superego, thus preventing the madman from committing this final murder. At the darkest point in his wicked prank, he removes the veil of illusion and allows that truth to be revealed that, according to Voltaire, can be brought to light only at the end of a passage through ignorance. “Man of errors! Cease to cherish thy delusion. Not heaven or hell, but thy senses have misled thee to commit these acts,” he calls out to the desperate Wieland, and orders him to shake off “thy phrenzy, and ascend into rational and human. Be lunatic no longer!” (214).
Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic sensibility hinges on a final turn of the screw that the enlightened philosopher Voltaire would not have entertained.
Wieland ends with the proposition that delusions may actually constitute the psychic support that keeps those afflicted by traumatic experiences of death alive. Cured of his mad religious frenzy, Wieland is forced to acknowledge the consequences of his terrible deeds. He can no longer see the murders he has committed in the light of religious retribution. Instead, he recognizes his act as one of pure destruction, lacking all meaning and all higher purpose, even while acknowledging that what has been done cannot be undone. His entire family has been annihilated. Recognizing the abyss of his soul is more unbearable than death, he kills himself with the knife intended for his sister. Clara, by contrast, recuperates from this traumatic experience. With the distance of three years’ time, she looks back with humility and wonder on her own infatuation and judges the injustice of her conduct “in its true colours” (219). Now she can ascribe a meaning to her story that locates the origin of the destruction of her family’s happiness in the psychic fallibility of its members: “If Wieland had framed juster notions of moral duty, and of the divine attributes; or if I had been gifted with ordinary equanimity or foresight, the double-tongued deceiver would have been baffled and repelled” (227). Her gothic psychodrama has found a happy ending; it contains the traces of her traumatic heritage and secures her from it, even while it preserves this dangerous knowledge.
A decade after Brown’s Wieland was published, the romantic psychologist Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert explored ways in which the magical thinking so prevalent in gothic culture might be aligned with a scientific worldview. In his Views on the Dark Side of Science (1808), he offered a rejoinder to the Enlightenment that sought to bridge positive science and divination by attributing to the former what in the original German is called a nocturnal side (Nachtseite). To speak of a twofold light, he postulates an analogy between the nocturnal side of the planets and a nocturnal side of the psyche. Against the light of a rational, clear consciousness, comparable to the sun and the diurnal side of nature, he pits a nocturnal unconscious. This dark side of the psyche cannot be perceived with the help of the illumination of other stars, but only through specific phenomenon of phosphorescence: the ability to emit one’s own light after having been exposed to light waves. According to Schubert, the night side of the soul reveals itself to people in states of heightened awareness, primarily induced by autosuggestion or hypnosis. It pertains to knowledge gained through premonitions, hallucinations, and delusional obsessions, but also in states of somnambulism, ghost seeing, and madness.
Comparable to Hegel’s night of the world, certain experiences that are illuminated by such nocturnal light allow for the passage from one spiritual condition to a more advanced one. Such movement may occur, for instance, when the germ of a future life, deposited deep within the soul, announces itself in the guise of prophetic visions. Schubert privileges the night as a scene and state of mind in which the rule of the spiritual principle underlying all human existence can be more readily discerned than during waking consciousness, even when this nocturnal side of the soul corresponds to a state of madness. Decisive is merely the fact that something in the unconscious comes to be disclosed; more precisely the reality of the spiritual world that can come to light only when the subject turns away from the ordinary everyday to face its intimate, inner nocturnality. With the advent of romantic psychology, the night becomes a stage and state of mind not only for a struggle between God and the devil, but also between the unconscious and the rational thinking prescribed by the day. Yet this gothic night also preserves the inner reduplication that already characterized Böhme’s mystic nights. As the arsenal of a plethora of potential forces that intrude from it into daily life, the night side of the soul contains emotions of intense pleasure through which “our being is in closest harmony with the all of external nature” (7) and in deep sympathy with other human beings. This nocturnal side of psychic life thus serves as the bridge to a past that may suddenly make itself heard again. According to Schubert, even the “bad spirit” that stirs when the appearance of something strange triggers fear, “is also prophetic, with equal distinction to the good spirit” (62). Both are manifestations of that absolute consciousness that Romantic philosophy locates at the beginning and the end of the world.
ANOTHER CLEAR-SIGHTED BRIDE
In a letter E.T.A. Hoffmann writes to his friend Hippel on January 23, 1796, he explains: “During the week I am a jurist and at most somewhat of a musician. On Sundays I make drawings during the day, and in the evenings I am a very witty writer until late at night.” This sophisticated distinction between the rational man and the artist is seminal, not least of all because the wit that was to bring forth the collection of novellas he came to publish in 1816 under the title
Nachtstücke (or
Night Pieces) is thus clearly conceived as a nocturnal praxis. In these gothic tales, which all revolve around the nocturnal side of the human psyche, Hoffmann focuses less on the harmonious accord between the subject and his world discussed by Schubert; instead, he foregrounds the horror that prophetic visions can induce, particularly when imaginary messengers returning from the past bring with them portentous visions of future catastrophes. His gothic tale “The Sandman” reads both like a case history of Romantic psychology and a rewriting of Charles Brockden Brown’s
Wieland, given that it too revolves around the mysterious death of a father that only belatedly unfolds its harmful power. In the letter with which the novella begins, Nathanael describes the terrible anxiety that the sudden appearance of a strange merchant selling barometers has triggered in him. He has convinced himself that this incident is intricately related to dark events from his early youth. Like Brown’s deluded hero, he too is readily haunted by inner demons. In contrast to Wieland, however, his psychic nocturnality thrives on a complex reduplication of the key players in his psychic life. In his opening letter, he confesses to his friend Lothar that as a child he usually saw his father only in the evenings and that this figure of paternal authority wore two distinct faces. Sometimes he was kind and told Nathanael tales of wonder. At other times, he would sit “silent and motionless in his armchair, blowing such clouds of smoke that we all seemed to be swathed in mist” (86).
These were also the evenings his father’s friend, the lawyer Coppelius, would appear around nine o’clock and go with him into the study. To get the children to go to bed peaceably, his mother would cast this visitor, whom they took to be a disturber of their family happiness, as a fairy tale figure. She called him the Sandman. The magic Sandman also came to have two sides. The children’s nanny transforms this amicable bringer of sleep into a bogeyman who sprinkles sand in the eyes of children. Once the eyes have begun to bleed and pop out of their heads, she assured her listeners that the Sandman carries them to the crescent moon, where he feeds them to his children. Although Nathanael is tormented night after night by the thought of this dreadful spectacle, the anxiety also awakens his poetic imagination. In his letter he admits that “the Sandman had aroused my interest in the marvelous and extraordinary” (87). He begins to read horror stories and make sketches of the strange figure in chalk and charcoal. He also wishes to confront in person the embodiment of his idée fixe. One evening he decides to hide in his father’s study in order to clandestinely observe what the two men do when they are in there alone. The artificial light of the fire used by his father and Coppelius to conduct their alchemical experiments makes both of them look like repulsive demonic figures. Amid the thick smoke, the childlike voyeur believes he is seeing “human faces . . . on all sides, but without eyes” (90).
Nathanael will only seemingly recover from the shock of that night. After his father is killed while conducting one of his nocturnal experiments, an idée fixe takes hold of his mind. To the traumatized boy, the recollection of the dead father lying on the floor “with a black, horribly burnt countenance” only retrieves his true mild and gentle features once he has been placed in his coffin. The boy Nathanael, in turn, projects the father’s uncanny other face onto the lawyer Coppelius, whom in his mind he has transformed into the demonic Sandman. He is able to successfully repress this dangerous knowledge; yet, because it has come to attach itself to a dark fantasy, it remains dormant in his unconscious, waiting for an auspicious moment to return to his waking mind in the shape of a figure of calamity. As in
Wieland, a coincidence brings traumatic knowledge pertaining to the death of the father back to light. Because Coppola, the merchant selling barometers, seems to resemble the unwelcome guest of his childhood, Nathanael is convinced he is possessed by dead spirits. After his fiancée Clara scolds him, he is willing to admit that any sinister connection between Coppola and the lawyer exists only on the stage of his internal psychic theater. Yet the dark foreboding triggered by the face of the stranger can no longer be effaced. It colors everything he looks at, especially when he gazes through the pocket telescope he has bought from the ominous merchant.
After his apartment has burned down while he was in the country visiting his fiancée, Nathanael rents a room in the house next door to Professor Spalanzani. There he soon becomes captivated by the vision of the professor’s daughter Olimpia, who seems to sit perfectly upright and silent in her chair all day long. Although in his first letter he had called Clara a “dear sweet angel” (97) whose clear eyes have imprinted themselves on his heart and senses, the more he looks through his pocket spyglass, it is “as if he saw moist moonbeams shining from Olimpia’s eyes” (106). As a result, the image of Olimpia begins to occlude that of the fiancée, who, with her bright intelligence and ironic smile, stands firmly grounded in everyday life. Although cast in a darker light, because it is visually refracted, Olimpia nevertheless serves as a protective shield against the outbreak of madness. He begins to call her the “light of my life, you glorious, lofty star” and wonders if she has arisen “only to vanish again, leaving me in dark and hopeless night?” (107).
What Nathanael perceives as a struggle between Olimpia’s two creators transforms into a battle for his own soul. As when he hid himself in his father’s study one night only to find himself observing him and Coppelius experimenting with the production of new life, he now visits Professor Spalanzani’s room. Even if this time the intruder finds himself witnessing an act not of creation but of destruction, his response is once more to project himself onto the clandestine scene. While the professor and Coppola (whom Nathanael’s nocturnal vision has again transformed into the lawyer Coppelius of his boyhood) tear at the automaton they created together, ultimately ripping apart Olimpia’s lifeless body, the intruder imagines that he is the object of their dispute. Completely inundated by psychic nocturnality, Nathanael believes that the eyes, which are the only things Spalanzani is able to salvage from his best automaton in his struggle with Coppola, are actually his own. In this onslaught of madness we find the tragic consequences of narcissistic love. If the consistency of Nathanael’s world depends on the vision of a beloved woman, in this case the artificial creature Olimpia, her loss is coterminous with the collapse of any ordered world. When Nathanael wakes up from his terrible hallucination, he finds Clara at his side, whose cheerful nature guides him back into sanity. All traces of his madness seem to have disappeared. Yet in the case of Hoffmann’s young man, who not only silently endures the prohibitions of a strict paternal law, but actually believes he has endured its punishment at his own body, Tamino has transmuted into a gothic figure.
Like Schikaneder’s hero, Nathanael cannot endure a love that defies the notion of an unalterable fate dictated by a paternal figure of authority. He prefers to follow the command of a punitive father, even if this costs him his life. In the shift from Enlightenment to magical thinking that this gothic novella performs, the parameters of a struggle between father and bride have changed. The paternal figure of authority, whether familiar or uncanny, belongs to the domain of the night, whereas the beloved is clearly positioned in an ordinary everyday not ruled by stark contrasts. Rather than being marked by bright light or deep shadow, Clara’s rational world consists of a balanced palette of colors. Clara herself answers the letter with which the novella begins, because although Nathanael had written it to her brother Lothar, he inadvertently sent it to her. In her response, she begs her bridegroom to put an end to his psychic fury and see things not in the light of his fateful premonition, but instead in the manner in which other people actually partake of them. Although she acknowledges the existence of a nocturnal side of the psyche, she adds that “it must take the same form as we do, it must become our very self; for only in this way can we believe in it and give it the scope it requires to accomplish its secret task” (95). Hoffmann’s clear-sighted bride shares an insight with Brown’s heroine of the same name: This unconscious power is hostile and treacherous only if one is ready to embark on the fatal path these inner demons indicate. One could, however, resolutely resist, trusting instead in one’s critical reason. By openly acknowledging the potential impact of this dark psychic power, one can decide in favor of the path of a rational everyday. Clara is confident when she asserts that “the uncanny power must surely perish in a vain struggle to assume the form which is our own reflection” (95).
Avant la lettre, Clara articulates the premise of psychoanalytic therapy, which ascribes a psychic reality to the internal specters that haunt our fantasy life, so that in the process of transformation they might be disarmed and their harmful power overcome. Under the auspices of her blithe diurnal gaze, she connects a correction of the nocturnal side of the soul with Böhme’s mystic cosmogony. After all, the psychic material stored in the unconscious must first take on a strange and hostile shape before one can consciously decide not to embark on this destructive path. Like Shakespeare’s Malcolm, Clara is willing to admit that “we ourselves give life to the spirit which our strange delusion persuades us is speaking from such figures” (95). She acknowledges the existence of such phantoms of the ego and as such the possibility that they may be invoked at any time. For Clara, any convalescence from psychic delusions does not mean disavowing the potential power these internal phantoms have over psychic life. Instead, she argues for a deliberate refusal to give in to this dark psychic force. In calling upon Nathanael to be “assured that these alien figures have no power over you; only your belief in their malevolent power can make them truly malevolent to you” (95), she is not denying that there is a nocturnal side of the soul. At issue instead is the attitude with which one approaches such hindrances. Decisive is whether one chooses to paint the world in the colors of a gothic ghost story or whether one privileges a blithe, ironic gaze, which allows one to take phantasmagoria for what it actually is, despite all dazzling appearances.
After the automaton Olimpia has been destroyed, Nathanael returns to Clara. As if having awakened from a “terrible nightmare” (116), he once more believes that all traces of madness have disappeared. Because Clara (like Wieland’s sister) underestimates the psychic instability of her bridegroom, she allows herself to be deceived by his alleged recovery. With her energetic imagination and her bright, discerning intellect, she is the one who suggests to her fiancé at midday that they go up the tower of the town hall, which is casting its ominous shadow on the marketplace. And she is also the one to direct her groom’s gaze toward the strange little gray fellow, of whom she claims that he “really seems to be walking towards us” (117). As though with this gesture she were giving voice to her own psychic ambivalence, she provokes the opposite of what she consciously intends, even while bringing to light the terrible truth that will save her from a catastrophic marriage. She compels Nathanael to act in a manner offering unequivocal proof that he does not want to be free of the inner phantoms that have haunted him since the death of his father. Significantly, he does not look at the strange man who has just arrived in their town, but instead directs Coppola’s pocket spyglass at Clara herself.
The narrative leaves open why the vision of his bride provokes the bodily twitching, which symptomatically indicates the return of his madness. Is he unsettled by the difference between his prosaic bride and the beautiful rigid doll he used to gaze at through this spyglass? Or does the visual enhancement render Clara’s ordinary appearance uncanny? And if so, does this representative of reason, who insists on an understanding of life in its clear depth, trouble him because she threatens to deprive him of the dark imaginations that emerged from the vapor cloud of his father’s pipe and the evil lawyer this seemed to call forth? One point is clear. Clara’s enlightenment effort succeeds precisely where it fails. Because Lothar is able to wrest his sister away from Nathanael just in time to prevent her from being thrown from the tower, her fiancé jumps to his death instead. In contrast to Olimpia, Clara is not torn apart in a struggle between two rival men; rather, she is saved as she faints into her brother’s arms. At the end of the novella, she represents a viable alternative to the dualism of mystical cosmogony. Nathanael’s nocturnal vision permits only a conception of the world as ruled by and related to subjective anxieties. Either he finds himself standing in the harsh light of phantoms he has himself produced, or he disappears in the darkness of death.
Clara, in turn, dissolves into the uncertainty that the night also has to offer as its form of illumination. She is said to have been seen in a distant part of the country “sitting hand in hand with an affectionate husband outside the door of a handsome country dwelling, with two merry boys playing in front of her. This would seem to suggest,” the narrator of “The Sandman” concludes, “that Clara succeeded in finding the quiet domestic happiness which suited her cheerful, sunny disposition, and which she could never have enjoyed with the tormented, self-divided Nathanael” (118). The tableau remains heresy. It could all have turned out differently. The text won’t tell. Yet what this narrative closure
does draw attention to is that Clara’s ironic disposition, capable of banishing self-induced phantoms with her cheerful laughter, has no place in this gothic novella. Even though her psychically troubled fiancé had repeatedly listened to her voice and at times even followed the advice she gave, ultimately he could not sustain a balance between a diurnal worldview and its nocturnal counterpart. In contrast to the narrator of
Wieland, Clara does not have the last word, but rather the final image. Consequently, what remains is the danger that no one will wake up from this gothic tale. Even what is seen in the day remains uncertain. What someone claims to have seen, we are told, seems merely to suggest marital happiness. It could be another delusion.
BREUER’S GOTHIC CASE HISTORY OF HYSTERIA
According to Schubert, the nocturnal side of the psyche allows the subject an insight into the organic harmonious coherence of all things. According to E.T.A. Hoffmann, this other vision can also summon dark forebodings that transform into a catastrophic reality when the afflicted person no longer trusts anything but these dark perceptions. Freud uses his reading of Hoffman’s gothic novella in his essay “The Uncanny” to discuss the disorienting effect that the return of repressed psychic material, stored away in the dark arsenal of the unconscious, can have on the familiar world. According to him, the uncanny, as revealed by the nocturnal side of the psyche, contains everything that was meant to remain secret but has emerged from the darkness of the unconscious where it was concealed. This knowledge, suddenly reemerged in the light of consciousness, is nothing “new or alien,” he explains, “but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (241). An experience of the uncanny occurs when the line between fantasy and reality becomes blurred or when an omnipotence of thought takes hold of the subject’s psychic life, creating the impression that a traumatic event from the past has found a vicious repetition in the present.
For Freud, the uncanny always represents the return of something that was initially familiar and safe (
heimlich), with the prefix un- (
unheimlich) simply functioning as “the token of repression” (245). The topography of the psychic apparatus he develops can fruitfully be cross-mapped onto Milton’s
Paradise Lost. Lucifer, who was initially a brilliant light bearer, returns to paradise as an uncanny visitor. Even in his altered appearance, he is utterly familiar to God and the archangels that await him there. Only his expulsion into hell has transformed him into a strange figure. Having explicit recourse to the imagining of demonic lore, Freud, in his essay “On a Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis,” compares the unconscious to a place of “evil, alien spirits,” from which these intrude upon a quasi paradisiacal state of sovereign identity once they are able to return from their banishment. The ego feels troubled, Freud writes, because “thoughts emerge suddenly without one’s knowing where they come from” (141). They cannot be driven away because these strange guests successfully resist all well-tested powers of the will and remain unaffected by all logical refutation as well as any counter-assertion by the reality principle. Although the ego can hone its vigilance against this “foreign invasion” (142), nevertheless it feels paralyzed. With this scenic description, Freud himself draws on mystic cosmogony with its positing of an original enmeshment between good and evil. The weakness of the psyche’s defenses, he explains, is a result of the fact that the ego is not struggling with something alien, but rather with the part of its psychic life that has withdrawn from its conscious knowledge and the rule of its will.
Explains Freud, “You are using one part of your force to fight the other part and you cannot concentrate the whole of your force as you would against an external enemy” (142). The fault for directing a part of its psychical forces against itself, furthermore, lies with the ego itself. Not unlike Milton’s punitive God, the superego has overestimated its own power, believing that it can do with its drives as it chooses. “They have rebelled and have taken their own obscure paths to escape this suppression,” Freud explains, “they have established their rights in a manner you cannot approve” (142). Like Lucifer, the expelled drives bring something to light. Having transformed into symptoms of psychic pain, they are set on conveying a message: that the vicissitudes of drives can never fully be contained, much as “mental processes are in themselves unconscious and only reach the ego and come under its control through incomplete and untrustworthy perceptions” (143). Congruous with mystical dualism, psychic life is not subsumed by rational consciousness. Instead, it pits imagination and desire against reason. With the help of psychoanalysis, Freud hopes to illuminate the reasons for psychic discontent. Yet like Schubert, he can only do so by resorting to the imaginings of magical thinking. The issue of Christian salvation is recoded as a story of convalescence from the onslaught of self-engendered phantoms. Conceived as a modern form of exorcism, Freud counters the temptation of madness with an analysis of the genesis and development of these uncanny drives.
His reading of “The Sandman” serves to explain how the imagination, with recourse to an omnipotence of thoughts and by uncovering fateful premonitions in accidental repetitions of events, can be seen as a particularly vibrant expression of the nocturnal side of the psyche, which finds expression in manifestations of the uncanny. By contrast, his early Studies on Hysteria, co-written with Josef Breuer, follow the narrative dramaturgy of a gothic novella. The case history of Anna O., to which my discussion will be limited, also takes the death of a father as its point of departure. Like Wieland, it also revolves around a young woman who is haunted by hallucinations while staying in a country house. And, like Brown’s heroine, the subject of this case history also regularly meets with a man in the evening hours. With the help of parapsychological powers he brings to light all the evil spirits she is harboring within her psyche. Breuer’s narration of this case history begins with a prelude, followed by various stages in a struggle with his patient’s inner demons. Before her illness, the twenty-one year old Anna O. had displayed a vivid intelligence, a talent for poetry and imagination, as well as an acute critical intellect. Her monotonous life allowed this daughter of a Viennese bourgeois family to cultivate daydreams, which in the course of her analysis she referred to as her “private theater” (22). In July 1880, her father fell ill during a stay in the country. Anna, who loved him deeply, dedicated herself to his care until her psychosomatic symptoms became so intense that she herself required medical attention. What had started with a severe cough and a curious desire to take a nap in the afternoon, followed by a somnambulant condition in the evening and then increased excitation throughout the night, soon developed into a paralysis of her arms and legs as well as a disturbance of her vision that proved difficult to diagnose.
Not until the end of the journey she undertakes with Breuer through the nocturnal side of her soul will she offer up to her analyst the primal scene that gave birth to her symptoms. She casts her nocturnal vigil at her father’s bedside in the language of a gothic novella. At the beginning of his illness, she remembers having had one of her waking dreams, in which she thought she saw a black snake approaching the invalid so as to bite him: “She tried to keep the snake off, but it was as though she was paralyzed. Her right arm, over the back of the chair, had gone to sleep, and had become anesthetic and paretic; and when she looked at it the fingers turned into little snakes with death’s heads” (38). In her anxiety she “tried to pray. But language failed her: she could find no tongue in which to speak, till at last she thought of some children’s verses in English” (39). This phantomatic scene is finally interrupted by the “whistle of the train that was bringing the doctor whom she expected” (39).
Decisive for the genesis of her hysteria is the splitting of her person into two distinct states of consciousness, one vigilantly awake and the other daydreaming. In the course of her illness, Anna (not unlike Hoffman’s Nathanael) acts out with her body all the fairy stories she had previously cultivated on the stage of her own internal theater. If previously no one had taken much note of her absent-mindedness, once her hysteria breaks into the open, everyone is drawn into an embodied display of discontent that has her alternating between two psychic states. In one, she recognizes the world around her even though she is sad and anxious. In the other, she exists only in the realm of her hallucinations. While in her state of mental lucidity, furthermore, she is able to address this experience of a doubling of the self, speaking “of the profound darkness in her head, of not being able to think, of becoming blind and deaf, of having two selves, a real one and an evil one that forced her to behave badly, and so on” (24).
Her hysteria not only entails the flooding of diurnal consciousness by its psychic nocturnal side. Like the young brides in Bram Stoker’s
Dracula whom the vampire visits at night, Anna falls into a state of somnambulance in the afternoons, often lasting until an hour after sunset. Only after the onset of darkness can she speak about the inner demons tormenting her. Decisive about the psychoanalytic cure is that Breuer exploits precisely this somnambulant split into two persons so as to discover the origin of her hysteria and bring about her convalescence. After the death of her father, Breuer takes his place, and although, in her state of mourning, all other people seem to Anna to resemble “wax figures,” she continues to recognize her analyst. What she acts through in the course of this therapy entails a different kind of night watch, a vampire exchange of sorts. Anna not only allows him to feed her but, around sunset, also lets him induce a state of deep hypnosis, calling this psychic condition “clouds.” In this psychic night produced by her trusted analyst, she is able to relate to him the hallucinations of the day, and, having named them, “she would wake up clear in mind, calm and cheerful. She would sit down to work, and write or draw far into the night, quite rationally. At about four she would go to bed. Next day the whole series of events would be repeated” (27). This first phase is thus marked by a curious displacement. During the day, Anna is an invalid, tormented by inner demons, whose psychosomatic incapacitations serve to perform the content of these hallucinations. At night, in turn, she turns into a completely lucid young woman.
Despite this nightly euphoria, however, her hysteria gets worse, as do the hallucinations, filled with bogeymen, skulls, and skeletons. In contrast to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Clara, who urges for a rejection of the psychic phantoms of one’s own making, Breuer vigorously promotes their production. Together with his patient, he explicitly conjures up the world of ghosts stored in the arsenal of her unconscious, seeking to pit the benign aspect of her nocturnal vision against its malign counterpart. He is able to get Anna to transform her psychic discontent into imaging narratives. Initially she refigures her distress into tragic fairy tales in the style of Hans Christian Andersen. Once her psychic condition deteriorates, her mode of narration turns to more horrific representations of the gothic tradition. In both cases, the poetic shaping serves a restorative interpretation. By transferring the anxiety and guilt she has in regard to her father’s death into narrative scenes, Anna is able to cast off, one by one, all the inner ghosts tormenting her. After the end of each evening’s report, she wakes up from her hypnosis relieved. So as to fulfill his exorcism, Breuer compels his patient to penetrate ever more deeply into the darkness of her mind. In a second phase, he removes her to a country house near Vienna, where she is cut off entirely from her family. Banished to this isolated home, everything becomes the stage for her psychic nocturnality and she can no longer recognize any part of her actual surroundings.
In this self-induced fantasy of being blind, she will only speak with Breuer after she has convinced herself of his identity by attentively feeling his hands. At this point in her therapy she sees him only with her night vision. On the evenings when he can come to visit her, he removes her entire reservoir of phantoms with the help of hypnosis. Although Anna calls this process talking-cure or chimney-sweeping, one might also see it as the de-creation of the nocturnal world of her phantasms. Each evening account depletes her of precisely the psychic energy that sustains her rebellious obstinacy to remain an invalid so as to perform her daughter’s discontent. Moreover, on those evenings when Breuer is not able to visit her, and she is thus not able to find any relief through talking, her nurse administers a sleeping drug. The country house emerges as the stage for a shared nocturnal game, in which the doctor inflicts ever more darkness on his patient because his therapy requires a passage through the nocturnal side of her psyche. Anna’s
condition seconde is only effective until the point at which she has told Breuer all her hallucinations; this underscores her dependency on the nocturnality his hypnosis produces. Only in this artificially created night can she rid herself of the self-engendered phantoms she first experiences as hallucinations and then shapes into a gothic narrative so as to share this troubling knowledge with him.
Breuer responds by adapting his therapy to the gothic mode she proposes. Her return to Vienna around Christmas does not result in the convalescence both expected. Yet although her condition worsens, this deterioration also serves to clarify matters. It is now exactly a year since she became an invalid and, owing to the intensity of her hysteric symptoms, she lives almost entirely in her own psychic night, completely oblivious to the urban world around her. Breuer is forced to recognize that “from morning onwards, her absences (that is to say, the emergence of her
condition seconde) always became more frequent as the day advanced and took entire possession by the evening” (32). In contrast to the first stage, moreover, the two states can no longer be neatly distinguished into a normal and an alienated state. Instead, the split is now a temporal one. In the first, Breuer explains, “she lived, like the rest of us, in the winter of 1881–82, whereas in the second she lived in the winter of 1880–81, and had completely forgotten all the subsequent events” (33). The only thing she knows for certain is that her father is dead. The hysteric, in other words, responds to her doctor’s attempt to eradicate her self-engendered phantasms with a new type of resistance. This forces both of them to reestablish on a daily basis that psychic reality that caused the outbreak of her illness in the first place. In the course of this passage through darkness, a further layer of repressed material comes to light. Only now does Anna become cognizant of all those emotions that fall into the time of incubation when neither she nor her family was aware of her emotional distress. Together with her analyst, Anna produces a reverse cosmogony. From the darkness of her unconscious they retrieve for each one of her symptoms the event in which it first manifested itself. Beginning with the day before she became an invalid, they reconstruct the trajectory of her psychic trauma in reverse order.
“When they were brought to verbal utterance,” Breuer assures us, “the symptoms disappeared” (34). Yet because Anna must now narrate away twice as much material, Breuer doubles the hypnosis. In Vienna, he visits her both mornings and evenings, so that she lives almost entirely in the state she calls “clouds,” in which the past and the imagined have become almost congruent. Because her diurnal world view is now almost completely eclipsed by her nocturnal vision, Breuer, as the watchman of this night, must do everything to protect it. To prevent her from waking up in the middle of her sleep and finding herself unable to orient herself in a real world that has become utterly unfamiliar, he closes her eyes each evening. Allegedly in response to her own request, he suggests to her during the hypnosis that she cannot open her eyes of her own accord but must wait until he does it for her the next morning. Although he is the one to decide when she will see daylight each morning, she proves to be the one who finally determines when their shared therapy of haunting has come to an end. As though she had taken the advice of E.T.A. Hoffman’s protagonist Clara to heart after all, Anna had “formed a strong determination that the whole treatment should be finished by the anniversary of the day on which she was moved into the country” (40). The self-produced phantom she equates with the dead father retains its dark power over her only as long as she is willing to believe in its effect. The decision no longer to indulge in the temptation posed by this internal demon lies with her. The culmination of her cure is presented by Breuer, in turn, as an act of magical thinking in its own right. “On the last day,” he asserts, “by the help of rearranging the room so as to resemble her father’s sickroom—she reproduces those terrifying hallucinations which constituted the root of her whole illness” and was now “free from the innumerable disturbances which she had previously exhibited” (40).
Whether or not Anna O.’s convalescence was indeed concluded is less significant than the heuristic value that Breuer’s narration of her case history attributes to the nocturnal side of his patient’s psyche. Like the young woman narrating Wieland, he also asks what it takes for a surplus of psychic agility and intellectual energy to make a proclivity to daydreaming pathological. In contrast to the authors of gothic texts, however, Breuer is far more willing to underscore the therapeutic aspects of the nocturnal side of the psyche. If psychoanalysis is predicated on the notion of the ego, split between a conscious and an unconscious side, the magic power of therapy does not reside in treating symptoms of psychic distress as the invasion of an alien force, but instead as inner demons whose articulations must be given a hearing. In the case of Anna O., Breuer is struck by the fact that, even before she fell ill, his patient had already developed a broad range of hysterical symptoms without anyone taking notice of them, including herself. The nocturnal vision that drew attention to itself only once she had fallen ill not only caused her psychic discontent to make itself heard; it also proved to be the only mode of self-articulation in which she could find a language for her distress, because “while she was in her waking state, she knew nothing of all this” (44).
If the nocturnal side of the psyche thus emerges as both the catalyst and the source of illumination for the uncanny, Breuer’s case history thrives on a final dialectic turn sustaining the mutual implication of rational insight and phantomatic delusion. The formation of two personalities did not only mean that her “bad self” (46) came to intrude into her normal state. As she herself puts it, “even when she was in a very bad condition—a clear-sighted and calm observer sat (. . .) in a corner of her brain and looked on at all the mad business,” suggesting a “persistence of clear thinking” in the middle of her psychic night (46). Just as diurnal consciousness can never protect itself from the return of internal ghosts slumbering in the unconscious, this other scene can never fully seal itself off from the blithe gaze of reason, which recognizes all phantoms for what they are—the stuff of phantasmagoria created out of nothing.
TURNING THE SCREW ON THE NOCTURNAL SIDE OF THE PSYCHE
At the same time that Breuer and Freud compile their Studies on Hysteria, Henry James writes a ghost story “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), which explores the murky interface between ghost seeing and a will to truth by moving into the terrain of radical indeterminacy. My cross-mapping is prompted by the fact that this gothic text reads like a case history of hysteria in its own right. Indeed, like Anna O., the narrator of this novella relates her struggle with internal demons that appear to her in the guise of hallucinations in the real. Like Breuer’s patient, this governess has been left virtually on her own in a country house. As governess to two orphans, Flora and Miles, she too casts a deeply subjective vision on the world she has been charged to protect, compelling her to treat the welfare of her charges as a battle between innocence and corruption. The attractive and prosperous London businessman who hired her had made only one stipulation. She was never to contact him. In James’s novella, the figure of the dead father has changed into an absent one. Yet owing to his interdiction, this master also calls forth a psychic lacuna in the mind of a governess clearly attracted to him, which can be filled by evil spirits. At first this young, inexperienced, and nervous pastor’s daughter has the impression that she has stepped into one of the old pastoral novels on which her imagination has so far thrived. On the second day, however, a dark foreboding begins to take shape, keeping her awake that night. Her master had forwarded an unopened letter to her, adding the ominous request “but mind don’t report. Not a word.” (646). Thus, just before she had wanted to go to sleep, she is left completely alone with the fact that Miles has just been expelled from his school.
A few weeks later, the young governess is taking a walk on the grounds of the manor Bly at dusk, a time of day she refers to as “my very hour” (652) because at this point in the day, her charges have usually already gone to bed. In the fading light she entertains the fantasy that her master might suddenly appear at the turn of the path and would stand in front of her and smile and approve: “I only asked that he should
know; and the only way to be sure he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome face” (652). This face is already present in her mind when she has the feeling that her “imagination had, in a flash, turned real” (653). In front of her, standing high up on the top of the tower, she believes she can make out a man in the twilight. However, he is not the one she is yearning for, but a stranger. The appearance of this uncanny figure ignites her idée fixe that the house is inhabited by the ghosts of her predecessors—the former governess Miss Jessel and the manservant Peter Quint. From her midnight conversations with the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, she learns that both passed away under mysterious circumstances. The governess soon convinces herself that these apparitions are not there for her sake but for the children’s, with whom they have long since struck up a conversation, corrupting them with their forbidden sexual knowledge. As her obsession grows, the young, nervous woman not only imagines that her two predecessors had a clandestine love affair, she also starts to believe that she has been chosen to save Flora and Miles from perdition. Comparable to the witch hunters of seventeenth century Salem (whom Henry James, a native of Boston, implicitly evokes), she can only do so if she gets the children to confess their knowledge of these ghosts and the moral evil they allegedly embody.
In fact the young governess is struggling with her own inner demons, triggered by her master’s insistence that she never turn to him for help. Concomitant with this interdiction is the sexual knowledge she must forbid herself. Much like the Sandman in Nathanael’s psychic confusion, Peter Quint’s spectral appearance functions as the psychic distortion of the gallant gentleman in London whom this highly excitable young woman secretly desires. She can project her uncurtailed passion onto this evil surrogate figure with impunity, imagining that she can see him everywhere at night, not least of all because, while still alive, the deceased servant had been bold enough to don his master’s clothes. She also needs the self-engendered phantom of the servant to break her contract with her master never to contact him. She imagines herself to be a heroine in an admirable, albeit difficult service. If she were to succeed in protecting the children against the very moral corruption she has invented for them, she tells herself there “would be greatness in letting it be seen that she could succeed where many another girl might have failed” (667). However, she can only obtain the much desired attention of her master if she can produce a real situation of danger in which her charges become the collateral damage. If something happens to them that can neither be kept secret nor denied, she can be certain to attract their uncle’s attention and claim that she has resisted the temptation of evil.
The idiosyncratic turn that Henry James introduces into the fluid boundary between a moral and a psychic battle against evil spirits is the way his governess exchanges places with the children she is meant to protect. If she can get Flora and Miles to confess to a relationship with the returned dead, she could, dispossess them by proxy of the evil sexual knowledge that has encroached upon her own psychic world. Repeatedly she urges Flora to admit that she, too, has seen the pale woman dressed in black. The girl, in turn, resolutely denies having seen anything, let alone that she is in possession of secret knowledge. Given this psychic pressure, Flora instead comes down with a grievous fever and develops such a fervent dislike of the governess that the latter is compelled to ask Mrs. Grose to leave with the young girl. By contrast, Miles allows himself from the start to be drawn into the governess’s obsessive search for proof that her imaginations are indeed real. He soon notices that she stays awake at night, and believing that the children are fast asleep, wanders along the dark corridors of the manor house. To test her, he comes up with a devious experiment. Many nights before Flora falls ill, he persuades his sister to act out a nocturnal scene with him, aimed at rendering visible the fact that the phantoms their governess is out to catch are spirits of her own making. He has Flora stand at her window at midnight and stare into the darkness of the night, so as to direct the attention of their excitable warden to the lawn below. There the governess’s gaze is met by that of Miles, looking up at her from the moonlit garden. Back in his room, he confesses that he went outside so that for once she would be able to imagine him capable of doing something wicked.
He repeatedly performs for her what she secretly ascribes to him. A few nights later he again lures the governess into his bedroom and in the course of the interrogation that follows, in which she persists in finding out why he was dismissed from school, he transforms the nocturnal scene into a reflection of her desire. After having admitted that she is totally in the dark, she assures him, “I just want you to help me to save you” (712). At this point in their exchange he blows out the candle with a loud, high shriek, signaling both jubilation and terror. For a brief moment they remain enclosed in a darkness that leaves everything open because the rest of the night’s events are not described by the narrator. Convinced that Miles is finally willing to make his secret knowledge known and having sent Flora away with the housekeeper, the governess remains alone with him in the abandoned house. In retrospect, while writing down the fateful event that is about to happen, she recognizes that her insistence on discovering the truth had entailed an act of violence, “for what did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation for the possibilities of beautiful intercourse?” (735). In the gray light of that afternoon she finds herself unable to stop her exorcistic furor until she can extort the confession she so fervently desires. She is convinced that she sees the white face of Peter Quint standing close to the window, glaring through the glass at them from outside the house. One last time she works herself into a state of deluded excitation, believing that it is her duty to wrestle with the devil for the salvation of this one human soul. She draws Miles close to her breast, taking note of the fact that “the face that was close to mine was as white as the face against the glass” (736).
Although the boy admits to having said forbidden things at school, it remains unclear whether the appearance behind the glass is merely a reflection of the face that, in her wild imagination, the governess has produced of her allegedly corrupted charge. At the high point of her furor, she leaps upon him, so as to screen out his view of what she calls the “hideous author of our woe—the white face of damnation” (739). Miles is willing to share her hallucination, giving the name she yearns to hear to the ghost she claims is intercepting their intimacy: “Peter Quint—you devil.” She interprets the surrender of this name as a sign of tribute to her devotion, as well as proof that she has won Miles while the intruder has lost him forever. Yet she cannot prevent the boy from jerking his body away from her and turning toward the window where he sees “but the quiet day.” The phantom appearance that had united them in mad furor has dissolved into nothingness. As though he were hurled over an abyss, Miles utters one last cry. She catches him in her arms, and only in a moment of terrible awakening does she recognize what it is that she is holding: “We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped” (740).
The undecidability Henry James writes into his case history of hysteria not only attests to the fact that the governess, in seeking salvation for her charges (and perhaps herself), finds herself inflicting fatal harm. The novella also proposes that although the children may not be privy to the spectral apparitions (leaving open whether these are actual ghosts or merely the reflection of the governess’s anxious desires), these two young children are not innocent. Even if we never discover what misdeed Miles committed at boarding school, we know he must have done something to warrant his dismissal. Furthermore, although Mrs. Grose also fails to see the apparitions, the terrible language Flora uses to express the anger she feels toward her governess does convince her that the girl has some guilty knowledge. It is no longer possible to draw an unequivocal line of demarcation between lying and telling the truth. At issue, therefore, is less whether the children’s imagination has already been corrupted by sexual knowledge and they are only pretending to be innocent; rather, it is decisive that both support their governess’s will to knowledge—Flora by her refusal to comply and Miles by his nebulous intimations. Both encourage a quest for evidence in which damage and cure can no longer be separated. The will to save a home and its inhabitants from evil spirits contains at its kernel a furor that results in both a girl’s illness and a boy’s fatal dispossession.
Yet the obscurity that the governess retrospectively attributes to the fatal outcome of her exorcism allows us to read “The Turn of the Screw” not only as an account of how the nocturnal side of the psyche overwhelmed the imagination of the narrator’s inexperienced younger self; rather, this nocturnality has also impinged on the poetic language with which she composes her own belated confession. In her ceaseless pursuit of tangible evidence for the existence of ghosts, the governess repeatedly asks the other inhabitants of the house whether they too are privy to what is unfolding before her nocturnal eye. When, as a mature woman, she looks back on these past events, the style of writing she has recourse to celebrates a lack of clear distinction, such that whenever a piece of knowledge is gained it almost immediately turns vague again, much as most conversations in the novella end with the speakers hanging fire. As she revisits the psychic state she was in, and narrates the past from the distance of many subsequent years working as a governess, she openly admits to the hysteric madness of her younger self. Yet her belated narration also envelops everything with a fog of inexplicable desire. The reader ultimately discovers that a network of secrets holds together all the players in this ghost story. Those involved mutually infect each other with their dark imagination precisely because all players in this gothic story merely hint at things and refuse to speak openly; yet in so doing, they make unequivocally clear that everyone is withholding knowledge. In contrast to Voltaire’s enlightened optimism, there can be no passage from ignorance to reason in the world of Henry James. Lying and telling the truth are mutually dependent. The clear distinction remains undecidable because within the Christian cosmogony refigured in this story about a will to purify allegedly corrupt souls, lying and truth telling have a common point of origin; namely, that nothingness from which all phantasmagoria emanate, whether benign or evil.
In hindsight the narrator, like Anna O., is able to discern two states of consciousness that have left their mark on the production of her text. Belatedly she asks herself, “How can I retrace to-day the strange steps of my obsession?” (697), thereby admitting that at the time she had been driven by a mad fury. Yet she also allows two distinct voices to be heard in her text. On the one hand there is the voice of the young woman, blinded by her own ignorance, who is groping for illumination in the dark, and, on the other hand, that of the older woman using her critical reason to pass judgment on her former deluded self. Although the latter voice offers a sober assessment of the mad fury even as she is reimagining it in the act of writing down her story, the former draws us into a maelstrom of imaginations that take shape in the real only to end in the terrifying vision of nothing. Like Miles, we too see only the quiet day when we look directly at the ghosts whom the narrator alone can see—or rather see again as she revisits her past. Like her charges, we have to give in to her imagination for these apparitions to become plausible. In one point, then, James’s novella differs fundamentally from Breuer’s gothic case history. At issue is less how one interprets the final pietà image: whether we take Miles to be a Christ figure who brings quiet daylight into the nocturnal ravings of his governess, or, recalling the Puritan witch trials in Salem, the dispossessed boy is to be seen as a sacrificial victim in a case of spiritual salvation whose obsessive tone has itself turned demonic. More crucial is the story’s insistence that the haunting from which the governess wants to dispossess both her charge and herself cannot be averted. It has irrevocably intruded into the writing of her belated confession.
Describing the scene in which she first saw Peter Quint in a twilight that corresponded to her own nebulous daydreaming, she ascertains: “So I saw him as I see the letters I form on this page” (654). Letters, we gather, are themselves apparitions. They call the dead back to life and endow them with a spectral shape that takes possession of the reader. This resilient haunting is foregrounded by the frame narrative of James’s ghost story. On Christmas Day, in a different country house, friends have gathered around the fire, competing to tell the best ghost story. Suddenly Douglas announces that he has stored away in his house in town in a locked drawer a ghost story that is terrible beyond all accounts. Decisive about the text that he will soon commence reading to his enthralled audience, and that will hold their attention for several evenings, is the fact that it is not his story. This story about a young excitable woman possessed by inner demons belongs to the governess of his sister, who sent it to him shortly before her death. Even if the listeners immediately suspect a romance between Douglas and the author, what is brought to light retains its nocturnal coloring. “The story won’t tell,” Douglas insists, “not in any literal vulgar way” (637). What it does tell is how the screw of haunting can be given another turn. The novella Henry James publishes under the title “The Turn of the Screw,” claims to be an exact copy of the governess’s manuscript, transcribed by the first-person narrator (in the frame story), to whom Douglas entrusted this text shortly before his own death.
All the characters involved, who, with the help of letters inscribed on a page, have returned as ghosts from the oblivion of the past, are dead by the time the story is transformed into a gothic novella, rendered public by virtue of its publication. The capacity to see ghosts is both the precondition and result of storytelling. There is no clarity at the end of this passage through the darkness of ignorance, only the recognition that no clarity is in sight. In “The Middle Years,” another novella James published in 1895, his protagonist Dencombe explains, “We are working in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art” (105). Aesthetic writing and the flights of fancy this produces in the reader have one thing in common. They arise out of a prior night that, as the source and precondition of their emergence, they persistently address.
Speaking about the discourse of madness that sets in around 1800, and in so doing, heralding modern psychoanalysis, Michel Foucault makes the following point: To claim that madness is a form of blindness implies that the insane person sees the same day as does the one in possession of his or her rational faculties. Yet by seeing the day itself and, thus, nothing but the day but also nothing in the day, the insane person sees the day as empty. He or she sees the day as a night, as a void. For the mentally afflicted, shadows are the manner in which the day can be perceived. Seeing the night and the nothingness of night—the ability Shakespeare’s Theseus ascribes to lovers and poets along with madmen—does not entail seeing
nothing. It means instead that the conviction that one is seeing
something (even if this is invisible to the rational eye) allows for an encounter with the phantasmagoria of one’s imaginary, treating this as though it was real. Foucault concludes that delirium and delusion relate to each other as the essence of madness in the same way that truth and clarity do for the rationality of the Enlightenment project. With this claim, he offers a poignant description of gothic poetics, which, by inundating diurnal vision with its nocturnal side, raises the double-sided effect of a
pharmakon to its aesthetic principle. The only cure literature has to offer consists of seducing us to a knowledge that drives us to fantasize. The haunting that makes up the imaginary in the real continues.
