INTRODUCTION

The Turn of the Screw, The Aspern Papers and Two Stories brings together for the first time in a single volume four of Henry James’s most popular, most anthologized, and most artistically successful stories: the two mentioned by name plus “The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Jolly Corner.” At first glance the collection suggests a miscellany, with two long stories and two short ones, two ghost stories and two secular ones, and each, except for the last two, written at very different stages of the author’s career. Yet these generic incompatibilities soon yield before the pleasure of discovering a subtle consistency among them. If any one story establishes a framework for this unity, it is The Turn of the Screw, around which the others are formally and thematically involved. But they are involved, perhaps, “in a direction unusual”—as James’s narrator-governess describes her own efforts to confront the supernatural by redirecting her sense of the natural. It is this question of imaginatively adjusting the natural, of redeploying and reworking familiar ways of seeing in order to face down the apparently “unnatural,” that jointly concerns these four fictions.

James wrote what was to become his most famous tale in the wake of the popular failure of his play Guy Domville in January 1895, when the author was personally subjected to catcalls and boos from the audience on opening night in London, an experience that terminated his cherished desire to be a celebrated dramatist (Edel, Henry James: A Life, p. 420; see “For Further Reading”). After retreating, a week later, to the home of his friend Edward White Benson, the archbishop of Canterbury, James recorded a curious anecdote told by his host about two children in a country house to whom the ghosts of former servants, “wicked and depraved” (Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius: A Biography, p. 412), had appeared. It is our first trace of a tale that the author would eventually make his own, most importantly through the creation of the unnamed governess who narrates it. The work is a tour de force of narrative ambiguity in that the reader can never decide whether the governess is protecting her young pupils from real ghosts or hysterically projecting the ghosts in response to deeply repressed libidinal yearnings. Though the latter reading was first proposed almost seventy years ago by the American critic Edmund Wilson and has been subjected to critical reappraisals ever since, it continues to influence much of the discussion of the work today (DeKoven, “Gender, History and Modernism in The Turn of the Screw,” p. 143).

Even in its initial serialization for Collier’s Weekly in 1898, The Turn of the Screw was interpreted by some as an illustration of a psychological disorder rather than as an artfully written tale of the supernatural. James himself urbanely dismissed such interpretations during his lifetime, explaining to various doctors and psychologists that the parallels they detected between his governess and their patients were simply the effects of an overriding artistry: “My conscious intention strikes you as having been larger than I deserve it should be thought. It is the intention so primarily, with me, always, of the artist, the painter, that that, is what I most myself feel in it....” To Frederic Myers, a colleague of his brother William at the Society for Psychical Research, James’s response was more casual: He described the work as “a very mechanical matter, I honestly think—an inferior, a merely pictorial, subject and rather a shameless potboiler” (Kaplan, p. 413). Yet in resisting a psychiatric reading, James enlarges the story’s interpretive appeal as an effect of his more encompassing vision—one that, for him, necessarily suspended judgment about the spiritual and the demonic as a way of deflecting the relentless, modern disenchantment of the world and reinvesting it with poetic interest.

James’s own youth was not entirely sanitized of the supernatural. His father, a religious freethinker strongly influenced by the writings of Swedenborg, had once had a vision of a “damned shape” radiating from his “fetid personality influences fatal to life” (Kaplan, p. 13). And while the youthful Henry insulated himself from many of his father’s ideas through an almost defensive shyness, Henry James Senior succeeded in imparting to his son a vivid sense of good and evil. The communication of this sensibility was supplemented by frequent and sustained travels to Europe in restless pursuit of a suitably progressive education for the James children, a quest aided by a comfortable inheritance from Henry Senior’s own enterprising father. Thus The Turn of the Screw— dictated in Lamb House in Rye, England, which the mature author had purchased because it reminded him of his youth (Knowles, “ ‘The Hideous Obscure’: The Turn of the Screw and Oscar Wilde,” p. 176)—represents a retreat from the glare of public attention and a reexamination of youthful inquiries about the relationship between knowledge and evil.

The two were closely intertwined for James, particularly in his sense of how best to convey the effects of evil to the consciousness of his reader. In the preface to the final version of the story in book form, he explains how this is done: “Only make the reader’s general vision of evil intense enough ... and his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy (with the children) and horror (of their false friends) will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself ...” (see this edition, p. 17). The evil’s viability largely consists in the capacity of the governess to make others—such as her illiterate companion, the serving woman Mrs. Grose—think or imagine it, since the actual circumstances never yield the smoking gun of proof, the concrete, public evidence that sinister visitants have corrupted the children. As to convincing the reader, the evil assumes competing, if undecidable, alternatives: either of malicious beings imparting forbidden knowledge to children, or of an overzealous governess imputing such knowledge to innocents in order to save them from it and win the coveted gratitude from her superiors—in particular, the dashing, though absent, master of Bly House.

Contemporary readers for whom a secular outlook is normative are not impressed by medieval threats of damnation. Consequently, the only plausible evils wrought by James’s ghosts may be the premature and assisted sexual enlightenment of children and other such forms of abuse—very tawdry sins indeed. It is almost only in this regard that the certifiably sinful nature of the ghosts can be established for today’s reader, and it is just this kind of communication that the governess seeks to ferret out, though she never makes her suspicions explicit. Her technique of always eliciting responses through deftly hinting at them inevitably strains her relations with the children. A “liability to impressions” brings her “knowledge” without the inconvenience of objects, referents, proofs (Schleifer, “The Trap of the Imagination: The Gothic Tradition, Fiction and The Turn of the Screw,” p. 28) until her true moral pedagogy erupts in this extravagant declaration: “Dear little Miles, dear little Miles, if you knew how I want to help you! It’s only that, it’s nothing but that, and ... I’d rather die than hurt a hair of you.... I just want you to help me to save you!” (p. 190). Understandably, the boy recoils from this inversely prophetic outburst and extinguishes the candle of her discourse for a time. One begins to consider the ghosts a lesser evil for the children than their would-be savior—ghosts whose illicit appeal seems to offer the children the only (nearly) human intercourse to be had during the governess’s “panoptic” tenure at Bly House (Newman, “Getting Fixed: Feminine Identity and Scopic Crisis in The Turn of the Screw,” p. 112). It is when the latter finally succeeds in exorcising Peter Quint’s and Miss Jessel’s spirits that Miles reluctantly “gives up the ghost”—both literally and figuratively.

Even granting the actual existence and cruel intentions of the spirits, the children’s greatest source of terror, then, may be the governess herself, whose tireless surveillance, tendentious inquisitions, avowed good intentions, and finally overt accusations combine to shatter the façade, as she sees it, of the children’s too-perfect innocence: “Their more than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness. It’s a game ... it’s a policy and a fraud!” (p. 171). Their relative freedom from parental authority, elevation of class, easy intimacy with the lower classes, and personal beauty all seem almost intolerable to this country parson’s daughter, who struggles to enforce the law of the father by smoking out and reevaluating the children’s unnatural precocity—intellectual, social, and possibly sexual. This precocity is felt in the relative poverty of lessons taught at Bly House. One queasily senses that the governess has nothing left to teach her pupils by the end of the story except about the dangers of being too free with certain adults (whether the ghosts or their former selves) and not free enough with others such as herself who want, and presumably deserve, to be recognized as worthy moral guardians.

Yet the governess’s almost maternal solicitude seems over-determined, the effect of a “displaced” attraction to (DeKoven, p. 145) and subsequent disappointment with the children’s uncle, in whose company she initially felt herself “carried away” (p. 124) and later spurned. Judging from the novels our narrator reads (she refers to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho), one wonders whether she is not writing her own paranoid romance in competition with the women writers she admires, writers whose prim governess-heroines successfully marry their gentlemen employers. In this way, the governess, whether as author or heroine of her manuscript, seems to test the metaphorical alternatives to such a prospect, the fallen Miss Jessel perhaps suggesting the risks of such a policy. And although she admits to having no pretensions to Bly House, it is as if, having failed to attract the master, she has subconsciously substituted his nephew as the object of her moral, social, and professional ambitions—not to mention certain gingerly amorous attentions. Thus she writes revealingly of her last encounter with Miles before he spends his innocent spirit: “We continued silent while the maid was with us—as silent, it whimsically occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding-journey, at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter” (p. 209).

Of course no such journey, psychological or otherwise, will ever take place, since Miles has always had his own ideas and, like his uncle, wants “to see more life,” to be with his “own sort” (pp. 179, 180). He has complained of not returning to school, from whence he was mysteriously expelled, and this fact alone provides the governess with virtually all the grounds she needs for suspecting him. Miles’s crime, not divulged in the headmaster’s letter, will provide all the evidence of his deeper guilt, its epistolary omission being the proof of its seriousness. Even before extracting an admission from Miles at the end of the story that his expulsion had to do with things he said to people he liked (p. 216), the governess concludes that what she has to deal with is “revoltingly, against nature” (p. 208). In turning the screw—or rather, applying the screws—of her “ordinary human virtue,” the governess hopes to expose “the hideous obscure” (p. 208) of his premature moral turpitude. One invariably concludes that James is discreetly linking the Gothic horror of the supernatural with the Victorian one of homosexuality as the final effect of all this ghostly intercourse between Miles and Peter Quint. As a consequence, the governess is revolted, though quite possibly also a little jealous about being outfoxed by a lowly valet. Unlike her prototype Jane Eyre, her modest charms are always spurned by entitled males who should “naturally” wish to enjoy them. Not a few critics have argued that James himself experienced a kind of “homosexual panic” that he disguised by transmuting repressed homosexual desires into fictive heterosexual ones (Sedgwick, “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic,” p. 197; Knowles, p. 167; Kaplan, p. 414). In this regard, it is important to note that the trial of Oscar Wilde briefly preceded James’s dictation of the story in 1897 and that his language for Miles’s transgression reflects the very terms James used (converging on the word “hideous”) to describe Wilde’s predicament (Knowles, pp. 164—165). It is in this further respect of obscuring and transmuting a plausible homosexual content that James’s tale may be compared to the other stories in this collection.

If the various male protagonists of The Turn of the Screw fail to live up to expectations of the kind instilled by Romantic prototypes, the lone extant male of The Aspern Papers offers an even graver instance of the desiccation of Romantic impulses in the Gilded Age. But this time the male is also the narrator, who, once again, is unnamed. An editor, publisher, and scholar of a sort, James’s narrator tells the story of his attempt to acquire the letters of a famous poet from the poet’s former lover, a woman who has survived him into an obscure old age, hidden away in a Venetian palazzo with her niece, a younger but aging spinster. The poet, Jeffrey Aspern—an imaginary American expatriate of the early part of the century—possesses an almost Byronic stature for the narrator, whose literary idolization of the man and professional self-interest compel him to use an alias and to rent rooms with the Misses Bordereau in hopes of gaining access to the papers. The papers assume all the passionate significance of a lost treasure representing “the truth, the past, the real thing” as Jeanne Campbell Reesman has written in “ ‘The Deepest Depths of the Artificial’: Attacking Women and Reality in ‘The Aspern Papers’ ” (p. 45). The editor proves perfectly willing to lie and even to steal by the end of the story in order to lay claim to the “divine” Juliana’s closely guarded secrets. But he is never quite willing enough for his beckoning spoils, since he rejects the surest means to success—marrying the niece—in an attitude of shock and near revulsion when marriage is directly proposed by Miss Tina herself.

The women, then, provide both access and obstacle to the narrator’s true passion: the life, letters, and spirit of Jeffrey Aspern himself. The living have become the dead for the narrator and the dead the inspiration for all his cunning energy. Yet the one viable solution to the narrator’s dilemma reveals the double bind of his predicament: To be united, as it were, with Aspern, he must commit himself to marriage with a woman. Although the woman may well be the unacknowledged daughter of Juliana and Aspern, the necessity of committing himself to such a relationship contradicts the nature of his admiration. Throughout the story the reader is made to feel the relative paucity of spirit on the part of the narrator in view of the poet’s romantic vitality as envisioned or remembered in life. The editor is subtly compared to the poet and shown to be wanting, not only as a romantic but as a man. Indeed, Miss Juliana not only considers him a “publishing scoundrel” (as she calls him at the climactic moment when she finds him testing the lid of her secretary), she also thinks him effeminate, and this may well be the primary reason he cannot acquire the letters he covets. His relation to poetry is a mediation of his homosexual desire. It may be repressed or sublimated, but it is strong enough to make him see that marrying Tina, while ensuring possession of the papers, will also irrevocably separate him from the source of his need for them. In the end, it is not that the narrator has allowed professional self-interest to take precedence over human relationships—it is just that the nature of his desire precludes such relationships with women, especially pathetic old ones.

James’s own decision not to marry was one that involved both gains and sacrifices for him (Kaplan, p. 319). But he may not have been the only one to suffer for it, and The Aspern Papers provides a glimpse into the complicated nature of his friendships with certain women-most importantly Constance Fenimore Woolson, with whom he had lived in close proximity on different occasions in Italy. A distant niece of the author James Fenimore Cooper, Woolson had invited James to sublease an apartment in the Villa Brichieri in Florence, which she was renting in the spring of 1887. James did not conceal the fact that they were living at the same residence to any of his acquaintances in Florence, but he avoided all reference to his living arrangements in his letters, particularly the fact that Woolson was living just upstairs from him and that they regularly dined together in the evening. James was finishing The Aspern Papers at this juncture, and certain aspects of his relationship seem to be captured in the narrator’s partly intentional, partly inadvertent seduction of Miss Tina. Though set in Venice and based on an anecdote about a Shelleyite who once tried to secure some letters from an aging mistress of Byron who lived in Florence with her niece (Kaplan, pp. 316-317), The Aspern Papers may well reflect what Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick has described as James’s “yieldings and repulsions” with regard to Woolson, a sort of “secreted-away companion” at whose expense the author’s marital and heterosexual prohibitions were maintained (Sedgwick, p. 196). A successful author herself, intelligent and intense, Woolson was partly deaf and suffered severe bouts of depression that culminated in her suicide in Venice seven years later when she threw herself from a third-story balcony. James sensed that he might have done more for this friend who had very possibly been in love with him. In a cunning paradox, he found himself three months later in Venice disposing of Woolson’s possessions and retrieving his own letters to her, not for the sake of posterity, but in order, one suspects, to burn them (Kaplan, p. 385).

Similar parallels may be detected in “The Beast in the Jungle,” a work of Jamesian virtuosity that both condenses and clarifies the impressionistic refulgence of his late style as it appears in such novels as The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. The beast of “The Beast in the Jungle” initially presents itself as an object of suspense, a kind of singular destiny to be meted out to the male protagonist of the story. But John Marcher’s conviction that he is “being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible” (p. 228), becomes the very obstacle to his self-knowledge. This failure of self-knowledge, in turn, results in his own misunderstanding, at the end of the story, of what his fate has actually been. The medium of his potential enlightenment is May Bartram, whose shared knowledge of his preoccupation provides the only access to his greater destiny, an access she maintains, paradoxically, by not divulging how little he understands the nature of his true destiny: to be the one “man of his time, the man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened” (p. 262). When she dies, she takes with her his last chance to recognize the love he later imagines she bore him, but also what little capacity or inclination he ever had for self-examination. He quickly replaces such capacities, so patiently cultivated by Miss Bartram, with grandiose, self-pitying gestures that mimic a tragic loss, deluding himself that he should have recognized the love he might have shared with this woman who supposedly put aside her own destiny in anticipation of his. In the end, the story seems to illustrate what it initially denies will be its significance: that Marcher’s fate had anything to do with the love of a woman, since such a fate would be too pedestrian for his misguided, but all-too-human belief that he was intended for something remarkable. When the question of marrying Miss Bartram first comes up in the story, it is quickly stifled as incompatible with Marcher’s self-allegorization:

The real form [their relationship] should have taken on the basis that stood out large was the form of their marrying. But the devil in this was that the very basis itself put marrying out of the question. His conviction, his apprehension, his obsession, in short, wasn’t a privilege he could invite a woman to share; and that consequence of it was precisely what was the matter with him. Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle. It signified little whether the crouching beast were destined to slay him or to be slain. The definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature; and the definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn’t cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt (pp. 232-233).

Marriage would only undermine the very foundation of his obsession because his obsession exists in order to stifle a desire he seems not to suspect himself of having. In other words, it would obviate the need for such an obsession since heterosexual union contradicts the true, cryptographically elided nature of his need. Marcher’s real beast is a form of repression, denial, and social conformity that he mythologizes as his personal Minotaur in order to avoid the condemned pleasures of a jungle he might otherwise inhabit—whether with May herself or with the forbidden loves for which she, too, acts as a screen, a diversion. As she says, “Our habit saves you at least, don’t you see? because it makes you, after all, for the vulgar, indistinguishable from other men.... I’m your dull woman, a part of the daily bread for which you pray at church. That covers your tracks more than anything” (p. 236). The absence of speech about what really distinguishes Marcher from other men, like the unwillingness of Miles’s headmaster to specify the reasons for the boy’s expulsion, implies once again a homosexual themat ics, or at least, as Sedgwick argues in her seminal essay “The Beast in the Closet,” another instance of homosexual panic on the part of a presumed heterosexual man.

Finally, “The Jolly Corner” reenacts in a more melodramatic way some of the preoccupations of “The Beast in the Jungle,” by, as it were, bringing John Marcher face to face with the fateful “beast” he has envisioned in order to avoid the worse one, for him, of self-knowledge. But the beast Spencer Brydon actively stalks in “The Jolly Corner” is the concrete emanation of an alternative, unchosen life path: that of staying home. James himself had frequently mused on the kind of writer he would have become had he not expatriated himself to Europe for so long, a process he finalized after almost thirty years by becoming a British citizen and retiring in England. It was a preoccupation that went at least as far back as The Aspern Papers, in which the narrator similarly speculates about the kind of poet America would have made Jeffrey Aspern had he fictively chosen not to leave it. After an eleven-month tour of the United States that the aging author undertook in order to reacquaint himself with his past and to discover what had become of his native country at the turn of the century, James returned to England in July 1905 to write “The Jolly Corner” as a commentary on what he found in America.

The alter ego James imagines for his formerly expatriated American male protagonist turns out to be shockingly antithetical to the Europeanized, almost dandified sensibility of the returning native. Whimsically searching out his American identity in the house of his youth—an empty mansion at the “jolly” corner of what appears to be Fourteenth Street and an unnamed (but “stately”) avenue in Manhattan—Brydon is shocked to discover the ferocious and deformed incarnation of what America might have made him. Stalker becomes stalked in the upper reaches of the darkened house and, in his unexpected and unqualified terror of finding himself pursued, Brydon quickly descends the grand staircase only to encounter his dark, violent, yet curiously pitiful double waiting in the alcove of the front door, like an Othello “perplexed in the extreme.” Touchingly, Brydon faints—as one can only deduce from the next scene, in which he awakens to the light of day, head gently nestled in the lap of his lady friend Alice Staverton. He credits her with bringing him back from the dead. But her arrival at the jolly corner is no coincidence, as Brydon’s obsession had become her own, the result of a premonitory dream about the man she could have had if Brydon had stayed in America. But she pretends, at least, to prefer the Brydon she gets, and in this way critic Earl Rovit is justified in describing the story as having a “glib closure” (Rovit, “The Language and Imagery of ‘The Jolly Corner,’ ” p. 167). Brydon, on the other hand, can only see his alter ego as a brutalized monster, a person who has lived roughly, who goes inconspicuously along mean, “downtown” streets where Brydon himself, with his dainty monocle, would only be mocked and abused—“guyed,” he calls it, as if to advertise the slanginess of its curious appeal. Indeed, his nightly perambulations through the darkened house have an almost masturbatory aura, aggravated by the simultaneous narcissism and exoticism of his singular quest. It is as if he were deeply tantalized by the “rough trade,” as it were, of American success, in which his finer sensibility—Europeanized and effeminate—would necessarily re-form itself in the tougher mold of America’s compulsory materialism, chauvinism and, invariably, heterosexuality.

Thus, in four great classics of American short fiction, James deftly and variously portrays the reversals—cultural, sexual, and gendered—of what constitutes a natural desire, outlook, or sensibility. Each exquisite tale represents an aesthetic engagement of consciousness that marks out the space of human understanding, its obstacles and dead ends. For James, a primary and potentially bottomless pit of consciousness is the one of human desire, representing both delight and terror for those groping along its periphery or clinging to its inner edges. The paltry social institution of marriage seems to offer one strategy for coping with human desire, and yet in the writings of Henry James it is the option almost never chosen, and in this the pathos of the author’s lonely integrity perhaps most distinctly emerges. In every instance the failure seems to mark a refusal, either calculated or unconscious, to disavow one’s own nature (to the extent that such a thing can be defined or recognized) and yield to the compulsory one society and its moralists would impose.

 

 

David LeHardy Sweet is a professor of literature at the American University in Cairo, where he teaches American and comparative literature. He has also taught at Princeton, the City University of New York, the American University of Paris, and Columbia University, where he received his doctorate in Comparative Literature. His book Savage Sight/Constructed Noise: Poetic Adaptations of Painterly Techniques in the French and American Avant-Gardes will be published in the fall of 2003 by the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill).