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The Turn of the Screw and Alice James

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Oscar Car Gill
Oscar Car Gill*
Affiliation:
New York Univ., New York 3, N.Y.
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Extract

The tenderest of men, Henry James could hardly have used the illness of his sister Alice as the basis of a story while she lived, or later, without elaborately disguising it—particularly since that illness, though not concealed, was only guardedly revealed as mental. But the heroism of Alice, fully as much as his experience and special knowledge of hysteria, must have strongly tempted him to exploit the extraordinary dramatic possibilities of her disease long before he composed The Turn of the Screw Delicacy, propriety, affection instantly inhibited the development of so rich a “germ,” but it remained planted in James's ingenious and subtle mind until he could bring the derivative narrative forth so altered that his closest intimates would not suspect its source or connections. The product is one of the greatest horror stories of all time.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 78 , Issue 3 , June 1963 , pp. 238 - 249
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963

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Footnotes

*

Invited in 1956 to contribute to that outstanding undergraduate quarterly, The Chicago Review, and having the previous winter noted the parallels between The Turn of the Screw and “The Case of Miss Lucy R.,” I wrote the sketch “Henry James as Freudian Pioneer,” C.R., x (Summer 1956), 13–29. When Gerald Willen asked my permission to reprint this sketch in his A Casebook on Henry James's “The Turn of the Screw” (New York, 1960), pp. 223–238, I wished greatly to revise the sketch but I yielded my wishes when he indicated this would hold up his publication. I had previously recognized that I must repudiate the sketch (which I now do) and provide a more adequate statement. These points are not made in C.R.: that (1) W. J. knew the Freud-Breuer book the year after its publication and was sufficiently impressed to talk about it; (2) the Prologue is essential to the story—the climax, in fact, and the governess has been altered from vil-lainess to heroine; (3) the special significance of the narrators Griffin and Douglas, with Douglas as lover; (4) analysis of the governess' “trauma,” an explanation of why Miles was actually dismissed from school, and new causes for the governess' state; (5) the important Saul-David allusion; (6) the reader's alternatives in interpretation suggested by the setting of Jane Eyre against The Mysteries of Udolpho; (7) Fielding's Amelia introduced as an illuminating source; (8) the suggestion that the story might have been written for Clement Shorter; and (9) there are more extensive parallels between the Journal of Alice James and The Turn of the Screw. Earlier forms of this essay were presented as the first Fales lecture, New York Univ., and at colloquia at Brown and Duke Universities.

References

1 F. O. Matthiessen, “Alice,” The James Family (New York, 1948), pp. 272–285.

2 I do not challenge the accepted view of the time of composition of The Turn of the Screw as after 12 Jan. 1895 (see note 10 below), but the idea for the story may have been in gestation a long time. The richness and variety of sources suggest this. James made his first major study of a neurotic in 1886 in The Bostonians.

3 “For sheer measureless evil and horror there are very few tales in world literature that can compare with The Turn of the Screw.” The Great Short Novels, ed. Philip Rahv (New York, 1944), p. 623.

4 “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” Hoîind & Horn, vn (Apr-June 1934), 385–406.

5 See Bibliography, “Henry James Number,” Modern Fiction Studies, m (Spring 1957), 94. Omit Cargill, Edel, Kenton, Wilson.

6 Leon Edel, who reprinted The Turn of the Screw in The Ghostly Tales of Henry James (New Brunswick, N. J., 1948), pp. 425–550, finds no anomaly in approaching the story as “a ghostly tale, pure and simple,” examining the governess “as a deeply fascinating psychological case,” and finding the tale “a projection of H. J.'s own haunted state.” In “Hugh Walpole and Henry James: The Fantasy of the ‘Killer and the Slain’,” Amerkan Imago, vm (Dec. 1951), 3–21, however, he supplies an extreme Freudian reading to the relation of the governess and Miles, but in his introduction to Harold C. Goddard's “A Pre-Freudian Reading of The Turn of the Screw,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, xn (June 1957), 1–36, he is more positive that “James wrote a ghost story … [but] ”offered sufficient data to permit the diagnosis that she [the governess] is mentally disturbed.“

7 The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James, ed. Richard P. Blackmur (New York, 1934), pp. 169–170.

8 xx (27 Jan.-2 Apr. 1898); xxi (9–16 Apr.). Leon Edel and Dan H. Laurence, A Bibliography of Henry James (London, 1957), p. 331, D494.

9 The Letters of Henry James (2 vols., New York, 1920), i, 278–280.

10 The Notebooks, pp. 179–180.

11 “My father took a certain interest in psychical matters, but we have never been able to recollect any story that he ever told which could have provided a hint for so grim a story.” A. C. Benson, Memories and Friends (New York, 1924), pp. 216–217. “But the odd thing is that to all of us the story was absolutely new, and neither my mother, nor my brother, nor I had the faintest recollection of any tale of my father's which resembled it.” E. F. Benson, As We Were: A Victorian Peep Show (London, 1930), p. 278. See also Robert Lee Wolff, “The Genesis of ‘The Turn of the Screw’,” American Literature, xrn (March 1941), 5.

12 “The Turn of the Screw,” The Two Magics (New York, 1898), pp. 3–4. All subsequent references in my essay are to this text.

13 The Living Shakespeare, ed. Oscar Campbell (New York, 1949), pp. 396, 404, 405, 406–407, 409, especially iv.i.1–5:

Hot: Well said, my noble Scot: if speaking truth

In this fine age were not thought flattery,

Such attribution should the Douglas have,

As not a soldier of this season's stamp

Should go so general current through the world.

The thought of using Douglas as a foil to Griffin probably occurred to James as he dictated the story to his unemotional amanuensis McAIpine: “… this iron Scot betrayed not the slightest shade of feeling. I dictated to him sentences that I thought would make him leap from his chair; he shorthanded them as though they had been geometry; and whenever I paused to see him collapse, he would inquire in a dry voice: ‘What next?‘ ” William Lyon Phelps, The Advance of the English Novel (New York, 1916), pp. 324–325. Edel, The Ghostly Tales, p. 426, says that McAIpine could not manage shorthand; curiously Phelps, in repeating the anecdote told him on 23 May 1911, when H. J. visited New Haven, corrects this detail in Autobiography With Letters (New York, 1939), p. 551.

14 xxxiii (Dec 1898), 525. The book was set up and electro-typed in September 1898. Edel and Laurence, p. 114, surmise the publication date to have been 13 Oct.

15 Four Americans (New Haven, 1919), p. 44.

16 The Art of the Novel, p. 172.

17 “Henry James to the Ruminant Reader: The Turn of the Screw,” The Arts, vi (Nov. 1924), 245–255. I have not included Professor Goddard's interpretation in my enumeration because of its late publication. Goddard deserves credit, however, for his dissent to the usual interpretation.

18 The Triple Thinkers (New York, 1948), pp. 88, 88–94, 90,90–91.1 cite the revised essay out of justice to Mr. Wilson, but compare pp. 38S, 385–389,387,387–388, in the original.

19 The Triple Thinkers, pp. 123–124. Addendum, dated “1948.” But see note 22 below.

20 If the governess is an unreliable witness, those who believe her in any degree are faced with the dilemma of picking what is true and false in her narrative.

21 “A Note on the Freudian Reading of ‘The Turn of the Screw’,” American Literature, xxix (May 1957), 207–211.

22 Italics supplied by Silver. Mr. Silver's proof has persuaded Edmund Wilson to make an addendum, dated “1959,” to his article in which he shifts back to “James knew exactly what he was doing … and intended the governess to be suffering from delusions.” A Casebook, p. 153.

23 Pp. 28–31,42, 58,62–67. Probably she picked up a good deal of misinformation in the village, too, where Mrs. Grose may have sown the seeds.

24 P. 158. The importance of this allusion was brought to my attention by Professor William M. Gibson. I do not believe James found it first in the Bible though he must have checked the text. It is more likely that he got it from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (Everyman ed., London, 1908), p. 442 : “If Saul could have had you for his David, the evil spirit would have been exorcised without the aid of the harp.” I have noted also that the unusual “sunk fence” of the Archbishop's anecdote appears in Jane Eyre, p. 94. Such fences are more common in Yorkshire than in Kent.

25 The Art of the Novel, pp. 170,173. Leon Edel notes parallels to Jane Eyre, mentioned by the governess, but not by title, at the beginning of her narrative (p. 42) : “the Jane Eyre who came to a lonely house, had a housekeeper for company and an orphan as her charge, and who fell in love with her employer.” The Ghostly Tales, p. 431. In this connection we should note, I think, the way in which the governess, “rooted, … shaken,” refers to Jane Eyre: “Was there a secret at Bly —a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in an unsuspected confinement?” James is posing, is he not, the dilemma which confronts the reader as well as the governess—he must choose between a supernatural explanation, such as confronts the reader of The Mysteries of Udolpho or a natural one such as is given him in Jane Eyre: a mad woman?

Edel, very importantly to my mind, suggests a source for the specter on the tower from a description by James in the Nation (25 July 1872) of Haddon Hall, which he had reached, past “rook-haunted elms” along “a meadow path by the Wye,” rhyming with Bly : “The twilight deepened, the ragged battlements and the low broad oriels glanced duskily from the foliage, the rooks wheeled and clamoured in the glowing sky; and if there had been a ghost on the premises I certainly ought to have seen it. In fact I did see it, as we see ghosts nowadays” (p. 433).

Robert Lee Wolff in “The Genesis of ‘The Turn of the Screw’,” American Literature, xin (Mar. 1914), 1–8, calls attention to the fact in the Christmas number of Black and White, which contained James's tale “Sir Edmund Orme,” “there is a drawing depicting two children, a boy and a girl, looking in terror across a lake at a house with a tower.” This is possibly the suggestion for “the sea of Azof” (p. 69).

26 “ … Freudian psychology was something Henry James could not have been consciously dealing with.” N. Bryllion Fagin, “Another Reading of The Turn of the Screw,” MLN, LXVI (Mar. 1941), p. 198. Fagin appears to have been the first to suggest that the tale is an “allegory of good and evil.”

27 Sigmund Freud, Selected Papers on Hysteria and Other Psycho-neuroses, tr. A. A. Brill, 3rd ed. (Washington, D. C, 1920), pp. 14–30. In another case, that of “Mrs. Emmy von N.,” a boy is frightened to death.

28 William James, The Principles of Psychology (2 vols., New York, 1890), ii, 30, writes of “sporadic cases of hallucination, visiting people only once in a lifetime (which seem to be far the most frequent type …).”

29 The faithfulness of her account makes simple and factual many of H. J.'s own comments on the story which otherwise are cryptic. Consider, for example, how the implication of the following is changed, if James is thinking of the heroine's later attitude toward herself in her writing of her tale: “… I had to rule out subjective complications of her own—play of tone etc.; and keep her impersonal save for the most obvious and indispensable little note of neatness, firmness and courage—without which she wouldn't have had her data.” Henry James and H. G. Wells, ed. Leon Edel and Gordon Ray (London, 1958) p. 56. Discussing “mirrors” in the Preface to The Princess Casamassima, James invites the reader to compare the governess with Isabel Archer, whose imagination is “positively the deepest depth of her imbroglio.” And he adds, “These persons all, so far as their other passions permit, intense perceivers all, of their respective predicaments.” The Art of the Novel, pp. 70–71. What does the governess not perceive vis-à-vis Douglas?

30 The objection of Alexander E. Jones, in “Point of View in The Tarn of the Screw,” PMLA, Lxxrv (Mar. 1959), 112122, that, if James were familiar with Lucy R.'s case, he would have adopted also Freud's theorizing about it, seems to demand that James turn scientist as well as remain artist. I hold that James used “The Case of Miss Lucy R.” as if it were a purely literary source without drawing on the theoretical material. Nevertheless, without being too minutely accurate scientifically, James does supply all that Freud demanded in a case of “conversion hysteria.” The unopened letter forwarded by her employer, when his kindly treatment of her earlier led her to look for a personal communication with what expectations her infatuated innocence might attach to it, constitutes the “painful idea” repressed into the subconscious to work itself out in the inventions and hallucinations of the governess.

31 Alice James: Her Brothers, Her Journal, ed. Anna Robeson Burr (New York, 1934). Also F. O. Matthiessen, The James Family, pp. 272–285.

32 A. J … Her Journal, pp. 181–182.

33 A. J … Her Journal, pp. 56, 75–82, 244–245.

34 Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Briefer Version, New York, 1935), p. 181, n. 3.

35 (Paris, 1883). “A l'éloquent et savant Professeur J.-M. Charcot, Médecin de la Salpêtrière, Je dédie cette Observation.”—A.D.

36 See my The Novels of Henry James (New York, 1961), pp. 127–129.

37 “Introduction,” The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. Dr. A. A. Brill (New York, 1938), pp. 5–10.

38 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, rx, 1215. A.J… . Her Journal, pp. 197, 249. Myers was also a long-time friend and associate of William James. Perry, pp. 157, 169, 175, 177, 204–205, 261, 364. Henry's delayed and evasive reply to a letter from Myers suggests that the latter came close to guessing the intent in The Turn of the Screw. The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (2 vols., New York, 1920), i, 300–301.

39 Matthiessen, p. 226, n. 1. William James's description of Freud's treatment of hysteria would have to be regarded as imprecise if challenged by the criteria of Alexander E. Jones. See n. 30 (above).

40 The Varieties of Religious Experience (Mod. Lib., New York, n.d.), p. 230. Not in the Index, pp. 519–526. William began planning these lectures as early as 1896, though they were not put into finished written form until 1900.“ Perry, p. 255. Jay B. Hubbell calls my attention to the fact that H. J. read ”everything“ that W. J. wrote. See letter, H. J. to W. J., 23 Nov. 1905. The hypochondria of William James is well known, also his tendency to discuss illnesses with everybody. See R. B. Perry, ”Morbid Traits,“ Thought and Character of William James: Briefer Version (New York, 1948), pp. 359–369. This increases the possibility of his having discussed Alice's case and Freud-Breuer with H. J.

41 “She [Madame de Mauves] was not striving to balance her sorrow with some strongly flavored joy; for the present, she was trying to live with it peaceably, reputably, and without scandal,—turning the key on it occasionally, as you would on a companion liable to attacks of insanity.” Madame de Mauves, The Great Short Novels of Henry James, ed. Philip Rahv (New York, 1944), p. 27. This story was published in the Galaxy, xva (Feb.-Mar. 1874), 216–233, 354–374.

42 P. 150. 25 Mar. 1890. She also records that Henry had “absolutely a physical repulsion from all personal disorder. 'Tis a sad fate, though, that he should have fastened to him a being like me.” p. 218. 12 Apr. 1891.

43 C. L. Tuckey, Psycho-therapeutics; or Treatment by Hypnotism and Suggestion (London, 1889). This book had gone into its third edition before Alice's death. In “Henry James as Freudian Pioneer,” p. 26, I mistakenly assumed that Dr. Hack Tuke, Alice's alienist from Bethlehem Hospital, was the practitioner who employed hypnosis.

44 “The Middle Years,” The Short Stories of Henry James, ed. Clifton Fadiman (New York, 1948), p. 302. This was called to my attention by Frederick L. Gwynn.

45 The Letters, ?, 214–216. H. J. to W. J., 28 May 1894.

46 AJ… Her Journal, pp. 246–248, 215, 181.

47 A.J. … Her Journal, p. 105. Note that Alice had just been reading Clarissa Harlowe by Richardson.

48 Amelia (3 vols., London, 1871), iii, 5–6. Not a prototype of Miles, but a suggestion for the latter's name.

49 136–137.

50 Kenton, p. 255.

51 The Letters, I, 297, 300–301.

52 The Art of the Novel, pp. 169–171.

53 In The Aspern Papers (1888) and elsewhere James had previously shown his awareness and distaste for the prying curiosity of scholars; may he not have deliberately “planted” Archbishop Benson's anecdote for them? Aside from the very positive assertion of Benson's sons that the anecdote was unfamiliar, the only suspicious thing in the notebook entry is the “sunk fence” and this solely because of its possible literary source (see nn. 24, 25 above). One sees, however, some connection between The Other Bouse and The Turn of the Screw—both are tales of the murder of a child by a trusted woman. The Other House was written for the Illustrated London News, whose editor, Clement Shorter, had just published his Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle (1896). Since his editor was new to him, what would have been more natural to James than to read the biography and review the novels of the Brontë sisters in order to post himself on Snorter's taste? That he read Jane Eyre is clear; Lionel Stevenson has suggested to me that the narrative method—the shift from Douglas to the governess—may owe something to the shift from Lockwood to Nelly Dean, who narrates and colors most of the story in Wuthering Heights. Lucy Snowe in Villelte scoffs at the legend of a ghost until she sees one, and although she is told by Dr. John that it is a product of her nerves, she persists in believing in her vision until the ghost, who has worn the habit of a nun, exposes himself by leaving his attire on her bed with a note addressed to her. In some way, surely, the Shorter relationship was generic to the story. In view of his acceptance of The Other House, may not James have hoped he would take this story? If the reference to the “sunk fence” came from Jane Eyre, the entry is misdated. The conjectures in this note, however, do not affect the main argument above in regard to the governess' hallucinations.

54 Those who have stressed The Turn of the Screw as an “allegory of good and evil” or “of the dual nature of man” do, at least, focus our attention on how consistently, by the use of popular theological clichés, which the governess got from her eccentric father, James maintains in the main narrative the provincial point of view of this poor girl. Notice especially her eagerness to extract a “confession” from little Miles. “If he confesses,” the governess declares, “he's saved” (p. 189). Note that she regards this as “like fighting with a demon for the human soul” (p. 205). The reality of this struggle the governess so vividly conveys to us that it is natural for us to catch meanings that are not there. Even Mrs. Grose is affected by the girl's language; palliating her, when she leaves with little Flora, Mrs. Grose declares she will return to “save” the governess (p. 189). James's well-known low opinion of allegory and his indifference to theology mitigate against an allegorical interpretation. In regard to the governess' “eccentric father,” consider the following on the death of Henry James, Sr.: “He announced that he had entered upon the ‘spiritual life’ and thereafter refused all food. The doctors spoke of ‘softening of the brain,’ but all evidence indicates that until his last hours, he was in possession of his faculties … In long letters to William … Henry said his father's passing had been ‘most strange … and as full of beauty as it was void of suffering. There was none of what we feared—no paralysis, no dementia, no violence'.” Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years (Philadelphia. 1962), pp. 57–58.