The Turn of the Screw
A History of Its Critical Interpretations 1898 - 1979
Edward J. Parkinson, PhD

Chapter VI - Culminations: 1970-1979

During the 1970's criticism of The Turn of the Screw continued to be dominated by the work's "ambiguity" and apparent susceptibility to a multitude of seemingly conflicting interpretations. Criticism during this period can be divided into two types: that which seeks to "solve" the ambiguity by ascertaining the "real meaning" of the work or the "correct answers" to the problems it poses--to achieve, in Hirsch's words, "the winning of firmly grounded agreement that one set of conclusions is more probable than others" (qtd. in Brenda Murphy 192); and that which "draws our attention away from the referential aspect of a work of art--its prolongations into reality--and toward its structural cohesion, which is taken as its principal source of inspiration" (Bersani qtd. in Goetz 335). Turn of the Screw criticism of the latter type tends to consider the ambiguity insoluble and to rejoice in the multiplicity of readings offered by the work.

1. Criticism Attempting to Ascertain the "Meaning" or "True Content" of the Work

A. Criticism Elucidating Psychological and/or Philosophical Themes in the Work

a. Holloway

Sr. Marcella M. Holloway, C.S.J. further developed Collins's, Rubin's, and Trachtenberg's exposures of the striking similarities between Douglas and Miles and consequent suggestions that Douglas and Miles are the same person. Holloway weaves these striking similarities into a new and highly original interpretation of the story.

While Trachtenberg had seen the story as a near-death confession from Douglas, Holloway read the narrative as a pre-mortem confession from the governess to Douglas. Although Holloway accepts as factual the meeting between the twenty-year-old Douglas and the thirty-year-old governess which is narrated in the prologue, she suggests that the events at Bly may never have taken place. Instead, she suggests that the governess's narrative may be "a kind of allegory sent from the borderland of death to a man she loved" (10).

Holloway reminds us of the love between Douglas and the governess which neither "spoke of" at the time and recalls that neither ever married. The story--which reveals her unrequited love for the employer and for Miles, both of whom resemble Douglas--is "the story of a man and woman who let love pass them by, repressed it" (12). The story is thus a confession of the governess's love for Douglas. It is also, however,--since Douglas reads the story to the interlocutors around the fire--Douglas's own story. It is "a dreadful allegory . . . the story of Douglas, of the Governess, of James himself, and ultimately of the readers who share in the terrors of suppressed love" (14).

The moral, however, is not that Douglas and the governess should have married. For the governess's love--because of her repressed and misunderstood sexuality--would have been neurotic, possessive, and destructive even in marriage. This is the governess's complementary purpose:

. . . to make manifest in her confession her sexual neurosis, to warn Douglas that she would have been no good for him after all. She would have smothered him with her neurotic love, killed him utterly, and he would have found her out and called her as Miles does in her story, `a devil' (14).

Holloway's reading is even more plausible because she relates her psychoanalysis of these fictional characters to telling insights regarding "James' own personal problems" (16-17) as reflected in his canon--Holloway suggests that "the governess is a heroine antithetically akin to James' May Bartram in `The Beast in the Jungle'" (14)--and to "the tone of James' own Notebooks written during the period which followed the fictional and dramatic crises of his middle career" (17). Holloway does not offer a detailed discussion of James's psychology or psychosexual history--she does, however, allude to the work of Cranfill and Clark, Shine, and others.

Her focus remains literary. She is careful to relate her psychological and philosophical insights to the story's effect on the reader:

The story . . . has had such wide appeal not because it reflects James's own personal problems but because he has touched upon a fundamental truth of human existence: `Virtue and vice coexist in each of us.' This is a truth of human nature which must be assimilated before the claim to maturity can be made. The Governess from her deathbed dared to be honest. If fiction is truer than life, her little fiction still haunts us all because of an unpleasant truth. Confessions are never of pleasant truths (17).

b. Nardin: Holloway With a Marxist Twist

Jane Nardin also reads the story as an indictment of repressed and unrequited love. However, while Holloway seems to see the root of the problem in individual pathology--the "neurosis" of the governess and/or Douglas--Nardin sees unrequited and repressed love as the natural consequence of

the cruel and destructive pressures of Victorian society, with its restrictive code of sexual morality and its strong sense of class consciousness. . . . Because the adult characters in The Turn of the Screw are trying to live by a set of social and moral norms that deny or frustrate some of the basic impulses of human nature, their good intentions turn sour and they begin to show marked signs of strain and mental deterioration. As Miles and Flora receive their education in this set of false values, their innocence is gradually corrupted (132).

Sexual repression is rampant in The Turn, suggests Nardin, because "Victorian standards defining socially proper marriages are so narrow that the necessity of following them frequently frustrates the desire for love, with unwholesome results" (132). Sexual repression, however, is part of a broader pattern. Miles and Flora's love for their surrogate parents, Quint and Jessel, must also be repressed because the latter are the children's social inferiors.

Unlike Holloway, Nardin assumes that the governess's narrative is largely factual. Like Holloway, however, she sees the Douglas of the prologue as a "wistful bachelor brooding over his lost love forty years after the event." She sees the repressed love between the governess and Douglas as a mirror image of the repressions which occurred at Bly.

If so, this vignette of frustrated love in the realistic frame narrative serves to reinforce the impact of the frustrated love theme within the gothic tale itself, to suggest that throughout ordinary Victorian society there are people who carry through life the scars of love which society forbids (133).

Nardin accepts Goddard's explanation of the subconscious motivation for the governess's hallucinations.

The governess is well aware that the master sees her only as a servant. If she brings herself or her problems with the children to his attention, he will be displeased with her. In devising her demonic solution of the Bly mysteries the governess is partly motivated by her desire to be involved in a situation which will bring her to the master's attention without costing her his approval. Such a situation could only be the existence of a serious problem in the upbringing of Miles and Flora which she solves without appealing to her employer. Later he will somehow hear about it and will be delighted with the concern for his peace of mind which she has demonstrated. When she is actually confronted by a peculiar situation at Bly, the governess therefore has an emotional interest in magnifying its significance (140).

The governess is driven to these extremities, of course, because the caste system of Victorian Britain would not permit the employer to think of her as a romantic partner and because the economic realities of Victorian Britain have forced her to accept employment in an isolated and unpromising location.

Moreover, the "peculiar situation at Bly" which furnishes the material for her psychodrama exists largely because of the aforementioned caste system and the repressions it engenders. The "peculiar situation" includes not only the hallucinations of the repressed governess, but also the unnatural silence of the children concerning Quint and Jessel and the bad report which Mrs. Grose provides concerning the two deceased servants. Nardin explains these facts by postulating romantic love between Quint and Jessel and a close relationship between the two servants and the children. Nardin reminds us that Mrs. Grose gives us little if any particulars about the wickedness of Quint and Jessel, that Miles was expelled from school for "saying things," and that the children--although they are silent about Quint and Jessel--seem, until the very end, free of objectionable behavior. Nardin suggests that the "socially unworkable" attraction between Quint and Jessel would have seemed "horrifying" to the conventional mind of Mrs. Grose.

A governess may not fully qualify as a lady when marriage to her employer's son is at issue, but she is certainly too much of a lady to marry a valet. . . . In the Victorian era it was considered infinitely more shocking for a lady to wish to marry beneath her than for a gentleman to do so. Why would a lady want to break so sacred a social taboo as that prohibiting intermarriage between classes if a strong sexual attraction were not at least part of her motive? Her motive for marrying a working class man could not be social advancement, nor was it likely to be a personal affection--for how could she feel true affection for a man whose manners and education were so inferior to her own? By merely wishing to marry beneath her a lady proved that she lacked the innocence and purity of mind which Victorian mores expected of her. For Miss Jessel to express an intention to marry Quint would have been seen as proof of depravity. She would have lost her place and Quint might have lost his. Such a marriage was socially unthinkable. If Quint and Miss Jessel were truly in love, their position was a pitiable one (133).

Similarly, Mrs. Grose, who "liked to see young gentlemen not forget their station" (Turn 213) would have been upset by a close relationship between Quint and Miles. She might also have been jealous of the love between Quint and Miss Jessel and of the pair's closeness to the children. Mrs. Grose's prejudices, moreover, would have been shared by others in Victorian Britain--particularly, the authorities at Miles's school. In order to be expelled, suggests Nardin, Miles

must have violated an important social norm--so important that the school authorities decided to make an example of him. Though it is impossible to be sure exactly what Miles said, there is evidence to suggest that it had something to do with Quint and Miss Jessel's relationships with each other and with him. . . . If the orphaned Miles was really as close to Quint and Miss Jessel as Mrs. Grose suggests, it is natural that he should miss them and should be thinking about them on his return to school. But he already senses that he must not be too open about his relationship with them, for Mrs. Grose has accused him of `forgetting his station . . .' and has expressed her shocked disapproval of Quint's relationship with Miss Jessel. So Miles cautiously decides to speak of these lost friends only in secret, to `those he likes' (136).

Such speech would have resulted in extreme punishment:

To treat . . . basic Victorian social and sexual taboos so cavalierly, to corrupt other boys by imparting these immoral attitudes in secret, would call for drastic exemplary punishment . . . in secretly voicing egalitarian sentiments about Quint and Miss Jessel, Miles would have been striking at his school's raison d'etre: the preparation of status conscious gentlemen to fill their places in a stratified society (138).

Such a drastic punishment, moreover, would explain the subsequent silence of Miles and Flora.

Like Spilka, Nardin contends that, although the ghosts are hallucinations, the governess is a normal product of her culture.

. . . the fact that she has hallucinations does not prove that she is hysterical, insane, neurotic, or irrational. . . . The ghosts are the logical offspring of the governess' attempts to understand a complex human situation in terms of a cultural tradition incapable of yielding real insight (139).

She is influenced not only by the economic realities of her situation but also by her religious background, which Nardin suggests is probably "the Evangelical group within the Church of England." Particularly important

is the view of human nature and morality which she has received from her religious training. The governess' view of moral issues tends to run to extremes; for her, people are either good or evil (139).

The normality of the governess is readily apparent, says Nardin, when she is seen in the context of English literary history.

In her love-at-first-sight response to her master, the governess spontaneously recreates a standard situation in the English novel, dating at least as far back as Pamela: a middle-class girl finds an upper-class man immensely attractive, primarily because the lifelong possession of rank and money have given him style and an air of freedom. That Douglas sees the governess' infatuation for the master within this literary tradition is apparent from his reference to the master as `a figure . . . in . . . an old novel. . . .' It is to novels like Pamela and Clarissa . . . that we must look. . . (141).

Nardin's highly original synthesis of Freudian and Marxist insights has indeed, "by suggesting society as the demon of the piece, [located] another source of the pervasive, uneasy sense of corruption in The Turn of the Screw" (132). Her sociological approach offers a convincing way

to interpret the highly ambiguous The Turn of the Screw as a tale which is neither about evil metaphysically conceived, nor about madness clinically conceived, but rather as a story of a particular social milieu and the way it affects people living in it (142).

c. Cole

Robert Carlton Cole, like Spilka, combines Marxist and Freudian insights by suggesting that the governess's hallucinations spring from

hysteria caused by her repression of her awareness that social inequities will frustrate her love for her employer. Emphasis on that awareness as the cause of her hysteria sets this study apart from those--the majority of the psychological interpretations--that assume that her hysteria derives primarily from the repression of sexual love. The governess is not suppressing erotic feeling, but despair at being too low in the social hierarchy to hope for the master's attention (1-2).

Cole suggests that her desire to marry the employer is primarily a desire to become mistress of Bly. Following Wilson, Cole contends that the illicit relationship between Quint and Jessel corresponds to the relationship she desires between the master and herself. Cole adds, however, an original insight concerning the respective social positions of Quint and Jessel and the resulting Freudian "antagonistic inversion" which they represent:

In her projections, the two ghosts become the opposite of her concept of the two people who concern her most, herself and the master--Freud's `antagonistic inversion.' The master, socially unattainable, becomes in her projections his servant, Peter Quint, who would be her social inferior in `the scale'...which is so important to the governess (7-8).

Cole's argument consists mainly of close attention to the text's portrayal of the governess's symptoms of "hysteria"--"the linear progress of the governess' emotional instability...is so distinct that it could be plotted on the 'vital signs sheet' of a hospital patient proceeding irregularly through a series of peaks and depressions" (4-5), as well as her many statements betraying a preoccupation and dissatisfaction with her place in the Victorian caste system. He suggests also that Mrs. Grose is exercised over Quint and Jessel not knowing their "place" in the social hierarchy rather than over specifically sexual infractions and provides evidence that the governess and the housekeeper frequently misunderstand one another because of their different preoccupations and the latter's limited vocabulary. For example, Mrs. Grose may mean Quint was too "free" in disregarding caste distinctions, but the governess may interpret "free" as sexually unrestrained. Similarly, Mrs. Grose may agree that Quint and Jessel were "infamous" and that Flora's bad language "justifies" the governess without knowing what the words "infamous" and "justifies" mean. Cole also contends quite plausibly that Mrs. Grose--because of her precarious economic situation and consequent need of employment at Bly--is afraid to cross the governess even when she is distressed at the latter's destructive effects on the children.

Cole's dissertation is a cogent argument which convincingly synthesizes Freudian and Marxist approaches.

d. Mogen: A Less Marxist Spilka

As Nardin is a more Marxist variant of Holloway, so David Mogen is a less Marxist variant of Spilka. Like Spilka, Mogen reads the story as a parable in which the reader is expected to accept the existence of the ghosts and considers the ghosts to be representatives of erotic realities which Victorian society has repressed. His analysis, however, differs from Spilka's in two important respects: first, Mogen does not provide a detailed explanation of how this repression is grounded in conflicts of interest between different economic classes, although he does compare this repression to "a luxurious cell where...awareness struggling for release is confined for the convenience of others" (235); secondly, Mogen seems explicitly to disavow the desirability of social protest--instead, "the challenge which confronts [the governess], which she is not equipped to meet successfully, is to accept the presence of the ghosts without forcing the children to confront them publicly" (235). Thus, just as Holloway sees the source of the problem in individual neurosis, so Mogen sees the solution in an individual and private acceptance of realities which society need never acknowledge.

Indeed, the governess's public acknowledgement is destructive, according to Mogen. It is this public flouting of conventions which causes the governess to fail where Maggie Verver had succeeded. Unlike Maggie Verver, who in her wisdom "neither denies the truth, nor breaks down the forms that protect her culture from confronting it directly" (233), the governess, with

no strategy for survival...breaks down all the forms of civility by which her culture avoids confronting its duplicity. She forces a confrontation between the children's pose of innocence and their furtive acquaintance with eroticism and nightmare, and the result is insanity and death....Her mistake is to assume that the forms can be dispensed with--and the result is psychic and social disintegration (233).

Here Mogen is reminiscent of critics such as Lydenberg who have argued that the governess aggravates otherwise quiescent evils.

She becomes the embodiment of the horrors she wrests from the children, but she threatens their security more traumatically than the ghosts did, since she leaves them nowhere to hide. By entering into open battle with the bad-faced strangers, the governess only shatters the precarious defenses of her kingdom and delivers it into their power (233).

Interestingly, and perhaps inconsistently, Mogen holds that these social forms are important precisely because of the unhealthy and all-pervasive repression which, in his view, ought not to be publicly challenged. "Where hysteria threatens constantly to disrupt the placid surface, maintaining the forms becomes more than a matter of style. It is a necessity of survival" (232-233).

Mogen's view of the governess's unconscious motivations for her hallucinations is similar to the view propounded in Wilson's 1938 essay. Mogen goes beyond Wilson, however, in imputing also to the children the eroticism which the specters represent.

If the apparitions embody the children's most hidden and guilty experience, they also represent a debased and frightening parody of the governess' own fantasies--their erotic relationship parodies her romantic attraction to the children's bachelor uncle, and Miss Jessel's pale disgrace confronts her with her own most intolerable desires and anxieties (233).

Although he does not discuss James's psychology extensively, Mogen seems to accept Edel's view of The Turn of the Screw as the product of a psychological crisis from which James subsequently recovered. He sees in The Golden Bowl a resolution of problems unresolved in The Turn of the Screw. Maggie Verver, unlike the governess,

finally...sees the `forms' in perspective: they are instruments to be employed for the purposes of a conscious and all-embracing love, which can be ignored without fear or regret when they have no utility (240).

Accordingly,

in The Golden Bowl the hysteria of James's Victorian girl is transformed from a helplessly destructive obsession to the source of a regenerative power of love. The cracked bowl, unlike the desolated garden at Bly, is finally an emblem of new life, the shattered husk of a growing thing (241).

Of course, the solution which Maggie Verver finds--and which Mogen appears to commend--is a private solution to an unacknowledged social problem, whose basis in economic conflicts between classes Mogen does not discuss. Might we classify Mogen's reading as "bourgeois Spilkaism"?

e. Grunes: Synthesis of Freudian and Mythic Criticism

Dennis Grunes combines psychoanalytic and mythic criticism in an interpretation which locates the origin of the governess's hallucinations and delusions in her unresolved oedipal problems and then demonstrates how--as she interprets the events in light of her Calvinist background--she weaves a "parody of Christian myth" (230) in which "Christ's redemption of us has been confused with the Fall from which we are redeemed" (231).

Grunes suggests that the governess has been driven from her country home to London and from there to Bly because of the threat of "incestuous love" between herself and her father--"whether this is the result of longings of her own, his advances, or both" (228). This explains the "disturbing letters" she receives from "home where things are not going well." She comes to Bly tormented by guilt and fear concerning her incestuous cravings and pity and remorse because of "what she has done (leaving home and father) and terribly lonely over where she is" (228). She cannot love a man--the employer or any other--in a healthy way or care for children in a wholesome way, "since now for her love and incest are dangerously confused" (229). Her fears are exacerbated by the overvaluing of parental authority which has been so much a part of her strict Evangelical upbringing: "...to have gone out on her own, as she has done, is to have gone the devil's way" (229).

Because of her incestuous cravings which taint any sexual attraction, her loneliness, guilt, and sexual frustration, and her infatuation for the employer--her repressed sexual fantasies take the form of a demonic and sexualized counterpart of the uncle, who is also her father. She later sees Jessel as a counterpart to herself in sexual union with the male specter.

Quint's ghost looms as an unshakable infernal image of the governess's own father, the Christian name giving him away (from the Latin pater meaning father, recalling Saint Peter, father of the Church) (228).

The governess then projects these fantasies onto the children and seeks to "save" them as a way of saving herself.

That she unconsciously interprets the carnally connected ghosts as herself and her father suggests--besides a traumatic reason for having left home--what the governess ultimately fears regarding her charges. In other words, she projects onto the children her own sexual obsession, imagining all the while that they are being encouraged by the ghosts of those who had been their demonstrative private tutors in forbidden love. The siblings' affection for one another becomes a horror for her (as when Miles puts his arm around his sister `to keep her quite in touch'), much as her father--as Quint--looks like the very devil (with hair and beard the flaming color of carnality) because he now, for her, embodies incestuous love... (228).

Her desire to "save" the children, according to Grunes, is a desire not only to escape from her own incestuous cravings and the threat of their fulfillment, but also to reconcile herself to the father whom she pities and regrets leaving.

Whatever else it may be, her ambition to `save' the children is an attempt to fulfill her father's ministerial role, thereby reconciling preacher and daughter as pure ministers of God. She will risk all--herself as well as her charges--to obliterate an evil past in the hope of salvaging a future of innocence regained (230).

As she attempts to save the children, however, her ministerial efforts become a "parody of Christian myth" (230). For the governess herself, the would be savior, is the one in need of salvation. "...the children are the ones--especially Miles...who must save her" (230) by becoming victims of her obsessions and delusions. His death, suggests Grunes,

may purge the girl of the obsession Miles had embodied, especially if she believes she has saved his soul. Freedom from the dread that had driven her from her father might explain how this hysterical woman became for Douglas, who reads us her manuscript, 'the most agreeable' governess he has ever known (230).

We have here, of course, a clear parody of the Christian myth. In contrast to Christ, who is "a victim, but an ultimate one...whose suffering, part of a required master plan, is rewarded by the paternal God" and who "achieves the power of true divinity through his suffering," this unfortunate little boy "exists without such power to make his victimization and suffering meaningful....his innocence certifies only his impotence and proves his downfall, not his triumph" (231). In other words,

Miles is simply a victimized little boy whose grotesque function is to save a fanatic from the evil in her own mind that makes him seem evil to her. In this parody of Christian myth, Miles, unconscious of his redemptive mission, must confirm his innocence by confessing to an esoteric sin (230-231).

Grunes reminds us of many other children in Victorian literature who function as ironic Christ figures--for example, "Oliver Twist, an innocent who has no ability to redeem Bill Sykes, the sinful surrogate for us all" and Little Nell of The Old Curiosity Shop, "a failed Christ whose forgiveness her grandfather begs in a Christian reversal of age and youth" (231).

Grunes suggests that readers respond to such stories because they see in children their own lost innocence. "The transformation of the traditionally innocent child into a demon" allows us to transfer our incestuous and other forbidden impulses to something outside of ourselves and our experience. There is more here than projection. Children such as Miles and Flora, and Regan in The Exorcist, are not considered real people subject to blame. Human conflicts--for example, between parents and children--are explained away. Our children would be in perfect harmony with us, and we would be at peace with ourselves, were malicious supernatural beings not attacking from without.

It is not the fault of parents, Blatty's book assures us, that children rebel so; it is simply that Satan has gotten hold of them. Happily, this exonerates the young as well. They are helpless victims, still entitled to parental love (222).

Grunes's interpretation is an insightful combination of psychoanalytic and mythic criticism--showing how the psychological history of a disturbed woman becomes a parody of Christian theology. In the process Grunes provides thought provoking speculations as to reader responses to The Turn of the Screw , as well other Victorian and modern works.

f. Briggs: Freudian and Theological Criticism Intertwined

Because Julia Briggs finds in the story insoluble ambiguity deliberately engendered to augment the reader's experience of terror and because she offers insights as to how this ambiguity is effected, her criticism will also be discussed in the section of this chapter dealing with structuralist criticism. Here we will comment on an interpretation which she considers plausible, although not necessarily exclusively correct. This interpretation synthesizes psychoanalytic and theological approaches in a manner strikingly reminiscent of Lydenberg.

Briggs assumes that the ghosts are real supernatural entities which threaten the children, basing this observation not on detailed argumentation, but on the observation that "James's starting-point," according to the Notebooks, the Prefaces, and much of his correspondence, "was a story of two dead servants tempting two living children" (154). However, while the danger to the children may be real, the governess's unrequited passion for the employer soon seduces her into "projecting her personal fantasies upon the situation" (156).

Briggs's interpretation of these "personal fantasies" seems to combine Wilson's and Goddard's insights. Briggs points out that, in the governess's descriptions,

the three main male characters and the three female characters seem to merge, or assume aspects of one another's personalities... [suggesting] psychic impositions rather than real relationships (156).

Thus, Briggs agrees with Wilson that the sexual relationship between Quint and Jessel mirrors the governess's longed for relationship with the master and agrees with Goddard that her desire to sacrifice herself heroically for the master is an unconscious substitution for a sexual relationship with this man. Briggs's insight into the "merging" of these characters, however, allows her to explain the erotic attraction to Miles more coherently than either Goddard or Wilson had done. The fervent desire to "save" Miles is a desire for sex with Miles, who, for her, is equivalent to Quint and the employer.

Briggs combines psychology and theology in her suggestion that the aforementioned "strong motives of self-interest" lead the governess into the sin of "hubris," which in turn causes her to conduct an incorrect and ineffective exorcism and thus become a failed Pelagian savior.

...there is something akin to hubris in her assumption that she can exorcise the demon in Miles unaided, without `bell, book, and candle', without holy water or holy church....As the daughter of a clergyman she should surely have known better. Miles's death has an accidental air, as if he were caught between conflicting powers beyond her control, the helpless victim of a well-meaning amateur (155).

Briggs has offered an original and coherent interpretation which effectively synthesizes psychological and theological approaches. Interestingly, her view of the governess as an unsuccessful Pelagian savior and of Miles as the victim of an incorrect exorcism is shared by Voegelin (to be discussed shortly). Briggs, although similar to Lydenberg in combining psychology and theology in an approach unsympathetic to the governess, differs from the former critic in reading the story primarily as an indictment of Pelagianism rather than Puritanism and in holding that the governess sins in improperly confronting manifest evils rather than in bringing to actuality otherwise dormant evils.

g. Fryer: Mythic Criticism with a Feminist Twist

Judith Fryer sees in the governess--and, to a lesser extent, in Mrs. Grose--examples of the Great Mother, one of several female archetypal figures or "faces of Eve" appearing recurrently in American literature during the latter two thirds of the nineteenth century. Other "faces" include the Temptress, the American Princess, and the New Woman. Examples of the Temptress are Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, Miriam, and Beatrice--as well as Melville's Isabel and Holmes's Elsie Venner. The American Princess is a variant of

the pale maiden....a descendant of the sentimental heroine, whose story nineteenth century ladies read over and over, but...something more....she has indigenous qualities that distinguish her from the sentimental heroine, regal qualities that will eventually take her to Europe in search of old worlds to conquer....a unique combination of innocence and self-reliance (85-86).

However, "her self-reliance is more theoretical than actual....she is never threatening to men. A descendant of the sentimental heroine, her project is to get her man" (25). Examples are "the ethereal Lucy in Melville's Pierre...Hawthorne's Priscilla and Hilda, James's Daisy Miler, Milly Theale, and Maggie Verver...Isabel Archer" (86). The New Woman seeks "the place for the woman who swerves from the path laid down for her by tradition" (208). The following are some examples: Hawthorne's Zenobia; James's Olive Chancellor, Miss Birdseye, Mrs. Farrinder, and Dr. Prance; Howells's Dr. Breen and Eveleth Strange; and Kate Chopin's Edna Pontellier. The Great Mother, in the words of Erich Neumann, "in her function of fixation and not releasing what aspires toward independence and freedom is dangerous" (qtd. in Fryer 143). One type of Great Mother is the mother surrogate typified by Olive Chancellor, of which type the governess and Mrs. Grose are specimens:

Her characteristics--a desperate determination to possess and control coupled with an equally desperate fear of a loss of control, a strength born of belief in the rightness of her cause which amounts to a religious zeal, martyrdom--are those of the mother surrogates who haunt, or dominate, James's novels. The Governess, Mrs. Grose, Mrs. Bread, Mrs. Wix are all 'mother surrogates' who possess such qualities in varying degrees (152).

Two other types can be identified:

the `neglecters'...those actual mothers who are devoid of any maternal feeings: Mrs. Farange, Mrs. Moreen, and Mrs. Touchett....and finally...the real witch-bitches: Rose Armiger, Madame de Bellegarde and Madame Merle, who deliberately set out to destroy their victims (152).

All of these "Eves" are negative portrayals--or at least seriously incomplete in some way. This is true even of the New Woman portrayals. Zenobia, for example, commits suicide, while Miss Birdseye is "a ridiculous and pathetic caricature" (226) of a social reformer and Dr. Prance is "prancing around in a circle, going nowhere....with an absence of sexuality" (232).

These negative Eves are, moreover, according to Fryer, offshoots of "the myth of America as New World Garden of Eden,...the dominant myth of American culture" (vii). Accordingly, Fryer sees in this pattern of negative representations the anima images of male authors "who projected their own images upon their heroines" (x). They were led to do this, Fryer maintains, because of the industrial revolution, which led to the increased migration of women to cities where employment opportunities existed outside the home. "With the potential of economic independence open to her, not only was the basis of her subordination diminished , but the stability of the family was challenged as well" (10). Accordingly, this negative reaction occurred:

If Eve was the cause of the original Adam's downfall, the role of the New World Eve must be minimized. This time she must be kept in her place so that in the American version of the myth there will be no Fall (6).

Fryer's location of the governess and Mrs. Grose within the gallery of Great Mothers is based on a careful reading of the text.

The governess, Fryer points out, sees her own psychic projections, not real people. Thus,

she sees things only in terms of black and white; thus the children are beautiful and innocent at the beginning of the tale and ugly and evil at its conclusion. They are never just children--a mixture of good and bad, mischievous and angelic, serious and frivolous--as children often are (157).

Fryer lists a number of telling examples of the governess's dubious perceptions--pointing out, for example, the unlikelihood that Miles "had never for a second suffered" and "had--morally at any rate--nothing to whack" in view of his orphaned status and his dismissal from school. Her capacity for self-deception, Fryer suggests, has led her unconsciously to construct a psychodrama in which "she has imagined a role for herself in which she will provide the direction for the lost passengers, thus earning for herself the admiration of the master in Harley Street" (155-156). This leads to the destruction of the children--"Flora is driven mad and Miles is literally frightened to death"; consequently,

whether or not the ghosts are `real' is not important....What is important is the governess....The story is about her....the evil done to the children...is done by the governess and far outweighs any potential evil effected through the machinations of any ghosts, real or imagined. The governess destroys the children by attempting to possess them (153).

Fryer lists many convincing examples of such possessiveness. She points out how the governess immediately moves Flora into her bedroom, keeps Miles out of school, and intercepts the children's letters to their guardian. Fryer notes also the revealing language the governess frequently applies to herself--for example, "I was like a gaolor with an eye to possible surprises and escapes" (159). In a telling discussion of the all-pervasive "threat of possession in a sexual sense" which is always "underlying the governess's overprotection of the boy" (159), Fryer points out how, in the last scene, the governess compares herself and Miles to a honeymooning married couple. Furthermore, Fryer points out "an...association of this kind of love with death, foreshadowing just what possession will mean for Miles" when their Sunday morning trip to church ends in the graveyard.

The governess, in fact, sinks down on a stone slab when Miles first inquires whether his uncle knows what is going on at Bly and then rebelliously marches into the church, leaving the governess alone on her tomb.

This same possessive love, moreover,

is associated with sickness...she even begins to listen outside his closed bedroom door. When he catches her there and refers to `this queer business of ours,' she sees him as `some wistful patient in a children's hospital,' like a convalescent slightly fatigued who needs mothering.

What follows is a series of kisses "that makes Miles look `as...sick children look,' makes him face the wall and beg her to let him alone" (159-160).

This possessiveness, Fryer suggests, is related to a quest for total knowledge of another person which, in nineteenth-century American literature, is frequently destructive.

One is reminded of Hawthorne, and beyond him of Poe: the governess loses the struggle for possession of the children (they are lost even if their souls are saved) because she attempts to know too much. In the Poe-Hawthorne-James tradition, knowledge is equated with evil, possession with destruction; to know, to possess is to destroy. One has only to think of `Rappaccini's Daughter,' `The Birthmark,' `Ethan Brand,' or `Young Goodman Brown' to understand that superhuman knowledge or the quest for perfection leads only to destruction. Possession by intellectual knowledge (or in this case, supernatural knowledge) is opposed to the more subtle and intuitive knowledge of the heart. To possess one's lover by complete knowledge inevitably leads to the destruction of the loved one--in this case the destruction of the children by the passionate devouring of the governess (161-162).

Mrs. Grose also, according to Fryer, should be seen as a "Jamesian mother-figure, potentially destructive in her capacity for possessiveness" (163). Fryer praises Dr. Aldrich for suggesting that Mrs. Grose is jealous of the governess's authority over the children and consequently may be encouraging her fantasies in order to drive her mad. Fryer also, like Aldrich, reminds us that most of our information about Quint and Jessel comes from Mrs. Grose, who may be a prejudiced observer jealous of Quint's interest in Miss Jessel. Fryer also reminds us of Mrs. Groses's strange statement that the employer "didn't really in the least know" Quint and Jessel, which seems to contradict her earlier assertion "that Quint was the master's personal valet and that the master put Quint in complete charge when Miss Jessel had to leave." Furthermore, suggests Fryer, her failure to report their misdeeds to the employer

is a puzzling admission on Mrs. Grose's part. It seems to reveal that she was content to ignore the 'infamy' of Quint and Miss Jessel (presumably their open and intimate sexual relationship) so that she could have complete control of the children (165).

Fryer has, in an original and interesting way, combined mythic and theological criticism with a psychoanalysis of the fictional characters and their author synthesized with sociological insights grounded in a feminist analysis of nineteenth century American culture. Her assertion that the negative Eves are male projections, however, is difficult to accept completely. Fryer's own analysis seems to suggest that the figures were, at least in part, accurate representations of reality. For example, terming "pure fantasy" James's extraordinary praise of his mother, Fryer says,

The younger brothers and sister were in fact crushed by the irrationalities and contradictions of the familial environment over which Mary James presided, and the novelist, while he surmounted them, was to re-create in his fiction these very contradictions (148).

She suggests also that governesses and tutors--Mrs. Wix and Pemberton, for example--were strongly inclined toward such possessiveness because of their precarious economic situation. Upper class women such as Madam Merle, on the other hand, derived some of their power precisely from that leisure--unemployment--which feminists so deplore.

James perceived `an abyss of inequality' in America, `the like of which has never before been seen under the sun.' This inequality lay in `the growing divorce between the American woman (with her comparative leisure, culture, grace, social instincts, artistic ambitions) and the male American immersed in the ferocity of business, with no time for any but the most sordid interests, purely commercial, professional democratic and political.' Women in James's America have all the power, and in his fiction they are often strong and terrifying women--especially in their ability to manipulate others (149).

h. Mythic Criticism Leading to a Devaluation of the Novella and an Indictment of Twentieth Century Consciousness: Voegelin

In November of 1947 philosopher Eric Voegelin wrote a letter to Robert B. Heilman responding to the as yet unpublished manuscript of Heilman's famous 1948 article, "The Turn of the Screw as Poem." In this letter Voegelin praised Heilman for his theological approach and offered his own interpretation of the novella, reading the story as an indictment of Pelagianism. In January of 1970 Voegelin wrote an essay in which he adhered to the basic interpretation he had hitherto expounded but claimed that the novella was only partially successful in expressing its theme because the mythic elements did not adhere in a completely coherent pattern. Voegelin asserted that this type of effect is endemic in twentieth-century literature and traceable to a "deformation of consciousness" existing in the West since the Renaissance. Because both essays were published for the first time in the winter of 1971--in an issue of Southern Review devoted exclusively to studies of Voegelin and his philosophy--and because Voegelin intended the two essays to be read as a unit, both are discussed in this chapter, which deals with criticism in the 1970's.

In his letter to Heilman Voegelin contends that

the employer, the governess, and the housekeeper....symbolize, in this order, God, the soul, and the earthy, commonsense existence. The soul is released by God to enter on its struggle with forces of good and evil (children and apparitions). This release has the form of an employment, and of its acceptance, on very interesting conditions (10).

These "interesting conditions," Voegelin reminds us, are

`that she should never trouble him--but never, never: neither appeal nor complain nor write about anything: only meet all questions herself, receive all moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing over, and let him alone.' The soul is on her own, burdened with the full responsibility for its problems, equipped with nothing but a living body (money from the solicitor) (11).

This foolish "assumption of full responsibility, without recourse to communication (prayers for help) and consequently without help (grace)"--an assumption which other applicants have wisely refused to accept--leads to "a horrible defeat." Thus, Voegelin interprets the novella as "a study of the demonically closed soul...possessed by the pride of handling the problem of good and evil by its own means" (11). In this preoccupation James was a man of his time, for "the problem of `self-salvation' through the demonically closed human will...plagued everybody in the nineteenth century, particularly Nietzsche" (24).

Voegelin, with this interpretation, illuminates many elements in the plot of the novella.

For example, commenting on the governess's interception of the children's letters to the employer, Voegelin quotes the governess's admission that, in so doing, she

`carried out the spirit of the pledge given not to appeal to him.' The legalistic formulation of the `spirit of the pledge' shows that the anima is up to tricks. The letter of the pledge had only said that she, the governess, should not appeal to the employer; the interpretation of the spirit, that the children should not write, is her own. The employer had only enjoined the governing conscience, the responsible ego, not to appeal to him; he had not enjoined that no appeal should rise to him from the depth of the soul, overriding freedom, conscience, and ego. The `spirit' of non-communication, and of the repression of the desire for communication, is not the spirit of the employer; it is the spirit of the governess (13).

Voegelin, like many other critics, sees the confrontation with Miles on the way to church as a climactic point. He--like Fryer and Briggs, among others--notes her sitting on a tombstone before returning to Bly and encountering Miss Jessel in the schoolroom. Voegelin suggests that the governess commits spiritual suicide by her definitive refusal to contact the employer, which she terms a refusal to "sacrifice" him. The employer must be sacrificed, and this sacrifice must be accepted if the soul is to live. Thus, she rises from the tombstone spiritually dead and from then on becomes more and more like Miss Jessel. The identification is complete when, at the final appearance of Miss Jessel, Flora, when commanded to look at the apparition, instead looks at her present governess with "reprobation."

Voegelin reminds us that Quint first appears when the governess is walking around Bly in "a mood of

possessiveness and justification" and wishing to be seen and approved of by the employer. This wish to be known by God not as she really is but as she wishes to see herself, Voegelin suggests, unconsciously invites the demonic presence. "The apparition has materialized out of her dream--and when a woman dreams of someone who will know her, she may be known by someone other than she dreamt" (16).

Voegelin provides an interesting analysis of the governess's remarks about "nature" in her narration of her final encounter with Miles.

At this juncture she felt `how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature.' The interruption with the `employer' is now driven a step further; the will has become rigid in its blindness to the supernatural. The supernatural is, `revoltingly, against nature.' And what is this `nature'? Here James himself puts the term into ironical inverted commas. `I could only get on at all by taking `nature' into my confidence and my account.' What is going on must still be happening within `nature.' The `monstrous ordeal' of the governess can be no more than `a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant.' It can demand no more by way of treatment than the means which she has employed hitherto, that is `another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue.' She has a little doubt whether it will work, for, after all, this is an `attempt to supply, one's self, all the nature.' No more will be thrown into this last battle than the nature and will of the ego. And, let us not forget, the nature and common sense of the housekeeper have departed with Flora. So the governess begins turning the screw still further (14).

Unfortunately, in the penultimate paragraph of this letter, Voegelin mars his otherwise coherent presentation by suggesting that "Quint and Miss Jessel, in the mythical pre-history of the story have been united by an unspeakable bond" of brother-sister incest and that "the ultimate, metaphysical conception of James goes back to a vision of the cosmic drama of good and evil as an incestuous affair in the divinity" (23-24). Voegelin never develops the idea of "the mythical pre-history of the story" and never explains what he means by "an incestuous affair in the divinity"--which, come to think of it, may be just as well.

In his subsequent commentary on the letter to Heilman, Voegelin declared,

I no longer believe that James's symbolism permits a direct translation into the language of philosophy at all. This decision was not reached in a day but reflects the change in our view of modern literary and ideological movements that has occurred since the last World War (25-26).

Voegelin began by noting

an incongruity between the meaning...in terms of God and man, the Puritan soul and common sense, the passion of self-salvation, grace, and damnation and the Jamesian symbols which carried these meanings...surrounded by a ghostly aura of indistinctness (25-26).

Furthermore, when Voegelin

tried to pursue the symbols through the labyrinth of the story, the distinct core tended to be shrouded by the fogginess of meaning that pervaded the work as a whole. How did, for instance, the drama of the Puritan soul come by the motif of incest? Or, how did the splendid young man in Harley Street, the symbolistic God, come by his rather peculiar divine nature? Or, what kind of a Garden of Eden--the symbol to which Heilman had given special attention--was this garden of the story that could be understood as the Heavenly Paradise in which the original fall had occurred, but also as the Terrestrial Paradise into which the `governess' had been released, and then would ironically change into the locale of the unparadisical mess a `governing' soul makes of the human condition? Or, what relation did the symbolistic garden bear to the school from which the little boy was dismissed? (26)

Voegelin, like Enck--discussed in the preceding chapter--considers this failure of the parts coherently to "hang together" yielding a definite meaning to be endemic to twentieth century art. "The fuzziness of the symbols," he says,

as well as the general fogginess of meaning pervading the work, is caused...by a certain deformation of personal and social reality that was experienced as such by artists at the turn of the century and expressed by means of symbolistic art. The indistinctness and ambiguity is inherent to the symbols which express deformed reality (27).

Throughout his article, with considerable erudition, Voegelin provides evidence of the pervasiveness of this "indistinctness and ambiguity," citing numerous examples not only from literature, but also from painting, sculpture, music, and architecture. Unlike Enck, however, who saw this development as evidence of an evolutionary leap in the history of consciousness--an ability to simultaneously see reality from many angles--Voegelin sees this development as a manifestation of an underlying spiritual pathology, an intellectual blindness resulting from a rejection of God and objective truth in favor of narcissistic self-idolization. The rejection of God and transcendence, says Voegelin, constitutes a

fateful shift in Western society from existence in openness toward the cosmos to existence in the mode of closure against, and denial of, its reality. As the process gains momentum, the symbols of open existence--God, man, the divine origin of the cosmos, and the divine logos permeating its order--lose the vitality of their truth and are eclipsed by the imagery of a self-creative, self-realizing, self-expressing, self-ordering, and self-saving ego that is thrown into, and confronted with, an immanently closed world (27).

In art this "deformation" makes impossible the creation of a work such as "an Aeschylean drama in which the full articulation of various tensions is the mode of consciousness that makes the drama a tragedy" (27) and leads instead to

dream worlds that are meant to replace the world of God's making--be they the imagery of artists and poets, or the systems of speculative thinkers, or the dreams of social metastasis through revolutionary violence (34).

The inclusion of the latter possibility reveals Voegelin's all-pervasive conservative bias. The "deformation" of consciousness which he so strongly discountenances is, he contends, responsible not only for unsatisfying art, but also for anarchy and tyranny. Thus, "immanentist" thinkers such as Hegel and Nietzsche are at least partly responsible for movements such fascism and Nazism. Thus Voegelin ridicules "our contemporary neo-Hegelian professors" who "are shocked when their students respond to `critical theory' with uncritical violence" (35) and "the closed Eden" of such thinkers becomes an arena for "the men of action `who make their strength their God' (Habakkuk 1:11)" (33).

Voegelin compares the garden symbolism in The Turn of the Screw to Milton's Eden. In both cases, he suggests, "paradise is somehow out of focus, measured by the standards of a paradise that is lost for good and will be regained only through grace in death." In the Jamesian novella,

the Paradise in which unspeakable things have happened among Quint, Miss Jessel, and the children....is lost. At the beginning of the story, it has become the paradise regained in which the governess is given her chance. At the end of the story, the paradise regained has become a paradise lost again (28-29).

Similarly, says Voegelin, Milton's Adam and Eve, upon their expulsion, are promised "A Paradise within thee happier far" which becomes the "tortured symbolism of an Eden dragging through history toward the end of its misery in metastatic conflagration" as "the Edens begin to multiply." Christ overcomes Satan and establishes a new Eden, but, again, "man succumbs to temptation and sinks into pagan idolatry" or "Catholic horror," which, in turn, must be supplanted by a new Eden, a Puritan theocracy. This Calvinist thinking, according to Voegelin, is the beginning of the self-idolizing "deformation":

Does Milton's paradise, so blandly lost, still symbolize man's knowledge of a perfection that is not his in time and space? Can one really lose a paradise that is not present in the daily loss of the perfection man strives for in his imperfection? No, Milton has not lost paradise, and, therefore, cannot regain it. He wants perfection in this world; he wants his Eden now...(31).

This "immanentist" concept of perfection leads to Pelagian self-reliance and a confusion between God and demonic forces within man--these patterns are reflected in both Milton and James.

The whole Trinity has been badly deformed by Milton. The Father has become a remote destiny that throws man into his condition and leaves him to shift for himself--as does James's young man in Harley Street. Man has become an `Energy' bounded by `Reason,' and `the Governor or Reason is called Messiah'--James's governess. And the Spirit is a vacuum--James's interception of the communications with Harley Street. The series of deformations leaves the Devil as the reality of man's life, of an energy bounded by reason (32).

Voegelin's provocative thoughts are certainly not above all question. His view of a rejection of transcendence beginning at the Renaissance is at least partly a psychological projection of his own. We could find considerable "closure" in the anti-empirical bias of medieval scholasticism, and there are no one to one correspondences between people's artistic tastes and the state of their souls. Voegelin's reactions to the artistic works of James and others are certainly not the only possible responses. For example,

in the Gustave Moreau Museum in Paris...the accumulation of the master's work overpowers the viewer with the pedantic richness of its ornamental sterility....in the recently restored Franz von Stuck Villa in Munich...the somnambulisme ideal of the implacably ornamented walls and ceilings oppresses the visitor so badly that with a sigh of relief he escapes from this prison the artist built for himself (38).

The reader of the Jamesian canon, says Voegelin,

will be struck by James's power of observation, by his perceptive irony, and his strength of intellect in developing the characters and their story....The figures, in search of a reality they somehow miss, are to James more than curious objects of realistic study; he is conscious of the deformity which compels them to create the carceri of their Edens; and he leaves no doubt about their being lost souls who mistake the divertissements offered by the world for its reality and get caught in their mistake. By this first impression, the reader's interest will be aroused. He wants to see more of the world through the eyes of an author who could produce this gem...he wants to watch the comedie humaine in which this case study of futile existence, he assumes, can occupy no more than a subordinate place; and above all, he wants to see the author's mind at work on the open existence which seems to form the background to his ironic study of closure. But when the reader, then, proceeds from what he may consider a minor exercise of the author's abilities to other works of his, he will be dismayed by discovering one such study of existential deformity following the other. The world that would put these no-worlds of bungled lives in critical perspective somehow does not open. He will wonder why the author should indulge in this relentless pursuit of deformity... (41-42).

However, Voegelin's suggestions, even if questionable, are undeniably thought provoking. If scholarship is an ongoing conversation, Voegelin's original evaluation of the work's elusiveness and his relating of this evaluation to so much intellectual and artistic history is certainly a valuable contribution to the conversation.

i. Samuels: Another Devaluation of the Novella Resulting From Its Failure to Yield a Coherent Meaning

Charles Thomas Samuels contributes less to the conversation because he does not make the sort of connections to intellectual and artistic history that Voegelin makes. Samuels 's purpose is narrower--he seeks only to evaluate James as a craftsman.

Samuels assumes that a work is to be judged by its success in fulfilling the author's intention. He evaluates the major Jamesian works beginning with the least successful, The Turn of the Screw. Deploring the fact that so few studies of James are primarily evaluative rather than interpretive, Samuels reminds us that such a discussion "has the merit of proving that James's greatness can't be simply taken for granted" (3).

Samuels begins by rejecting non-apparitionist interpretations of the story as inconsistent with occurrences in the plot and James's statements about the story in the Prefaces and in correspondence. He considers, for example, the governess's detailed description of Quint after the second apparition and the wind which extinguishes the candle in Miles's bedroom to be almost irrefragable arguments. Silver's suggestion that the governess has secured information about Quint's appearance from the neighboring villagers is "based on a fact not reported in the text," and Wilson's suggestion "that she is too far gone to know if the wind is blowing ....begs us not to consider facts but to reject them" (12).

Similar textual evidence--as well as James's comments--indicate that he intended the main focus of the story to be the objectively evil specters whom the good governess combats. "The governess represents Jamesian values of innocence, moral commitment, and faith in one's perception" (21). James, Samuels suggests, very much wanted to represent her as a heroine.

Thus, to highlight her natural aristocracy, he contrasts it with the actual aristocracy that is manifestly inferior. For this reason, the Harley Street master is described as a ladies' man unconcerned with duty, and Peter Quint, his valet, is shadowed by the imputation of mysterious rites in an unguarded house full of women. As a result, Bly was quite unsuitable for children, and the governess, to her honor, was attempting to reform things. Enraged by these efforts, the licentious servants, who had already suffered the wages of sin, sought to reverse this process by means literally diabolical. In order to prove that the governess was outstanding, and thus worthy of the stature to which she aspired, James also made her so prodigiously intelligent that no one else could see how matters stood (21).

Her intellectual superiority, however, undercuts James's purpose, for she is deprived of any credible witnesses to support her interpretation that the ghosts are threatening the children. Moreover, other elements in the plot indicate that the governess is motivated by a self-interested desire to impress the employer and, in pursuit of this ambition, uses the children as pawns. Thus we see

"a surprising equation between the heroine and her adversaries" (20). Furthermore, even though James's "intended focus was the specters....the specters are designedly left to the reader's imagination, while the governess is provided, by means of the prologue, with a complicated personal history" (20).

These confusions, according to Samuels, indicate that James was unsuccessful in presenting "the two obsessive questions in his work: how sound are morality and innocence?" In this work James "did not decide whether the governess validates or exposes them," and, thus,

he could not make a good case for the values she represents. Moreover, `The Turn of the Screw' suggests that James also had difficulty presenting what he deplored....James was as unable to castigate evil as he was to affirm virtue. For if the governess may be no better than the specters, the specters may be no worse than she....James was close to the truth when he derided the story as a potboiler (22).

Samuels's approach, of course, is authorial. He derives James's "major concerns" (22) from the totality of the canon and suggests that James was frequently more successful than he was in The Turn of the Screw. "I have tried to illuminate James's novels," he says,

just as I have tried to illuminate the essence of his total achievement.... I think James is America's greatest novelist, and I always intended that my book should help demonstrate why that is so by first acknowledging why it might not have been (9).

B. Criticism Attempting to Determine the Author's Intended Meaning Through Historical-Biographical Research, Including Source Studies

This period produced a number of critical studies which attempted to understand the novella by apprehending the author's meaning through methods such as biographical research to determine what the author did or did not read, what his preoccupations and opinions were as these can be ascertained not only from the totality of his canon but also from other literary and biographical evidence, what specific works meant to the author and his contemporaries, and what literary sources were used and how they were modified in the process of incorporation into the author's work. This type of criticism--like psychoanalytic and phenomenological criticism--sees the text as a message in need of decoding--something like an enigmatic missive or a cryptic diplomatic communication. It differs, however, from phenomenological criticism in its attempt to decipher the text's meaning through discursive reasoning rather than through intuitive empathetic identification with the author's persona and from psychoanalytic criticism in its focus on the conscious, rather than unconscious, elements of the creative process.

a. Sheppard

"I propose," Elizabeth A. Sheppard says,

to examine The Turn of the Screw in its context--the circumstances of its production, the literary tradition in which it was conceived, and the influences that helped to shape it. Within that context the author's expressed intentions and the objective testimony of the text of his story will be my sole guides to interpretation (1).

Sheppard's aim in this book length study is to decipher the author's intended message, with the word "message" broadly conceived to include not only the philosophical "theme," but also the correctly interpreted elements of the plot--i.e., whether the governess was hallucinating from mental illness or seeing "real" ghosts--and the emotional experiences which the author intended to produce in the reader. To divine these intentions Sheppard considers "certain indisputable facts of literary and personal history" and from these theorizes about questions such as what James did or did not read prior to the composition of The Turn of the Screw.

Sheppard asserts that the "scientific" sources of the story were the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, rather than such psychiatric material as Alice James's Journal and Freud and Breuer's Studies in Hysteria--as suggested by Cargill--or Parish's Hallucination and Illusion, as suggested by Cranfill and Clark. In considering whether or not to designate a work a source, Sheppard correctly notes that while "the only universally operative restriction is the mechanical one of priority in time, accessibility is variously conditioned" (262) and that "accessibility . . . is limited by more considerations than date or linguistic medium." For instance, Sheppard maintains,

as far as date or language is concerned, James could have read Breuer's and Freud's Studien uber Hysterie in 1895; but unless William James or Frederic Myers (by letter or in conversation) specifically directed his attention to it, he would never have been aware of the book's existence, nor, probably, of its authors (271).

Sheppard's argument here is not airtight; because of James's very active social life and his interest in his brother's researches and his sister's illness, his interest very easily could have been so directed in conversation.

Sheppard argues also that "after the painful termination of Alice James's illness," James would not likely

feel impelled to satisfy `a continuing interest in his sister's case' by reading scientific treatises on hysteria. Such an interest . . . would argue either a morbidly brooding grief or a coldly impersonal, `scientific' curiosity--tendencies equally foreign to his temperament and incompatible with the known facts of his busy and sociable life (271).

A similar argument occurs a few pages later:

Cranfill and Clark, like Cargill earlier, seem not to appreciate what Henry James's reading of such works as Parish's would imply--a preoccupation with highly specialized psychological problems in their laboratory aspects, and an interest in following explanatory clues through years, and tomes, of controversy; but of such an absorbing interest there is no trace in James's works, in his letters, or in his `legend,' and, to be plain, there was no intellectual basis (of native scientific ability or acquired knowledge) on which such an interest could be sustained (273).

Unwittingly, however, a few lines later in the same paragraph, Sheppard partially refutes her own argument. "An `intelligent interest' in `questions of the day,'" she admits, "as discussed among friends or as argued in newspapers and literary periodicals, might furnish for easy speculation on the phenomena of mediumship, say, or hypnotism" (273). These discussions "among friends" could have provided James with quite a bit of knowledge, albeit in simplified form, of authors such as Parish and Freud and Breuer. To engage in such conversations after his sister's death, moreover, would make James neither a "morbidly brooding" ghoul nor a "coldly impersonal" monster. Furthermore, the similarities between the governess's experiences and those of Miss Lucy as delineated by Cargill and the psychopathological patterns discussed by Parish do not, to me, seem so easy to dismiss.

James would be much more likely, Sheppard contends, to consult the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research--as well as the works such as Phantasms of the Living, published by the Society in 1886--

which are neither literature, philosophy, nor science, but an olio of all three. . . . Since, whatever his practical aim of the moment, Henry James remained the creative artist, it might happen that as well as the typical, authentic detail (the staircase haunting, the phantasm seen only in part, and so on) he gathered some overtone of suggestion, some `touch of picture' which would be applied in his own work (274-275).

Sheppard is convinced that James's

curiosity would be roused by that dauntingly massive work Phantasms of the Living, which his scientist-philosopher brother thought might be `the beginning of a new department of natural history' and which the merest sampling would reveal . . . as `the best book of ghost stories in the English language' (125).

Furthermore,

in October of 1890 James had obligingly lent his presence and made a sacrifice of his time for the benefit of the Society for Psychical Research; and in courteous acknowledgment of this service, no less than as a token of friendship, he would early in 1891 receive a copy of the Society's Proceedings for 1889-90, Volume VI in the series. Further, in 1893 he would most probably receive a copy of Volume VIII, for this contained a sequel to the reports with which, as William's deputy, he had been briefly concerned. And again (although in this case there was no motivation of personal or family involvement) in 1894 or later curiosity might very well lead him to explore Volume X, some four hundred pages of which were devoted to the Society's much-trumpeted, long-awaited report on its `census of hallucinations.' There are a number of indications, which . . . fall just short of proof, that James did in fact consult this volume; but concerning Volumes VI and VIII there can be no dispute. These two volumes he certainly read, in part at least, just as (before September 1897 if not earlier) he read portions of Phantasms of the Living: his own works supply that proof (126).

In support of the latter point,, Sheppard approvingly cites Roellinger's study (discussed in chapter four of this dissertation). Sheppard is careful to admit that James's use of these volumes

would be no more than desultory. As a mere artistic amateur of the supernatural, quite without scientific leanings, he would rarely feel the need to supplement the information to be gained as a matter of course in general conversation or from casual reading. No one, free from academic obligation, would willingly `keep up with' the reports of a society to whose `whole business' he felt alien--least, of all, surely, the author of `The Great Good Place' (1276).

However, Sheppard finds it quite reasonable to assume that, as a narrative artist, James would peruse the many narrative case histories "stuck like plums in a mass of experimental detail, statistical analyses, and wordy theorizing" (126). Sheppard details six incidents from Society material--four from Phantasms of the Living, one from Volume VI of the Proceedings, one from Volume VIII--which parallel events in the governess's narrative and "several near parallels to Griffin's ghost story" which are "recorded in Phantasms of the Living and in the SPR Proceedings" (164-171).

James's interest in such matters, moreover, would have been rekindled, Sheppard suggests, by the controversy over the Ballechin haunting, which in the summer of 1897 was "supplied by his morning newspaper . . . almost daily for the best part of a month" (202). Furthermore, Volume X of the Proceedings, published in 1894, "dealt concisely but comprehensively with the subject of hallucinations as a whole" and thus

constituted not merely a supplement, but also a synoptic guide to the much more copious but less systematically ordered material in Phantasms of the Living. And for Henry James this seems to have been an important consideration. Phantasms of the Living had been published five years before he resumed his composition of `ghostly tales' in 1891; but although he may have looked into it earlier, it is not a source for any of his fiction before The Turn of the Screw. And the same is true of PSPR Volume VIII. In The Turn of the Screw, however, we find detail after detail traceable to Phantasms of the Living and to PSPR Volume VIII; PSPR Volume VI is put to more varied and more significant use than in 1891-92; and there are indications that the apparitional scheme has been checked against the Census Report (184).

Furthermore, Sheppard points out, some of the material which Cranfill and Clark trace to the influence of Parish can plausibly be related to Society publications. For example, Cranfill and Clark correctly note, says Sheppard, the governess's sleeplessness after she sees Quint on the stairs in early morning, but they fail to appreciate the significance of the fact that she sees no visions during this period. This is to be expected in light of testimony such as that of the Ballechin case medium Miss X (Mlle. Marchand), who asserted that she could only see ghosts when well rested and calm. In other words, when the governess repeatedly stayed up all night,

her psychic powers diminished: she no longer saw what her anxiety assured her she ought to have seen. Psychical investigators would regard her conduct as impeding the flow of evidence, rather than as prejudicing the veridicality of her phantasms (153).

Similarly, Cranfill and Clark's assumption that "`the hypnogenic tendency of prolonged reading'" afflicted the governess must be complemented by a consideration of the possibility "that concentration on the printed page had resulted in a state of abstraction similar to the crystal-gazer's, and equally productive of hallucinations not necessarily `falsidical'" (153). Sheppard provides an original and novel explanation of James's disavowals of "the mere modern psychical case" in the Preface to Volume 12 of the New York Edition, terming such disclaimers as "editorial smoke screen" (161) and "precautionary devices similar to the formula prefixed to many novels: `All the characters and situations are imaginary, and no reference is intended to any living person'" (163). At the time these Prefaces were composed, Sheppard reminds us,

both Sidgwick and Myers were now dead; and perhaps more disturbingly, their associate Podmore, whose skepticism had been so reassuring, was now under a cloud, which his mysterious death in 1910 did nothing to dissipate. Moreover the bona fides of the psychical pioneers was now being seriously questioned: statements published in the Westminster Gazette from November 1907 to January 1908 had alleged fraud in the thought-transference experiments conducted under their supervision, and in the following December and January (1908-1909) the weekly John Bull substantiated these allegations by publishing the confession of one of the tricksters. This was no time to advertise one's reliance on phantasms so sponsored (164).

One of Sheppard's most valuable contributions to the debate between apparitionists and non-apparitionists is her convincing refutation of the suggestion--first made by Edel in The Ghostly Tales of Henry James and The Psychological Novel: 1900-1950 and later echoed by critics such as Cranfill and Clark and Kimbrough--that "the revisions . . . made for the New York edition" reflect "the determination to alter the nature of the governess' testimony from that of a report of things observed, perceived, recalled, to things felt" (qtd. in Sheppard 252).

Sheppard accuses such critics of constructing "a chain of error" by "comparison of selected passages only, and a `spot check' of selected words." By contrast, she asserts,

it is necessary to make a complete line by line collation of the two texts. Having done so, I state categorically that, with a single exception, James's revisions in The Turn of the Screw not only were stylistic, and merely stylistic, in intention but also, as regards character and incident, effect no change whatever in the impression conveyed to the reader. The single exception occurs in ch. xiii: `the eccentric nature of my father' becomes `the whimsical bent of my father', as if to guard against any possible suspicion of inherited madness in the governess. That any author should spend months over an improvement (as he considered it) in the mere wording of his novels and stories, is a procedure incomprehensible, it seems, to critics of the present day: in their eyes it requires the justification of an ulterior purpose. But to James (the French-trained, nineteenth-century artist) style was a matter of supreme importance, worth the utmost expense of time and ingenuity (254).

Sheppard supports her point with an impressive--in my opinion, unanswerable--array of examples:

. . . let us test by the facts the generalizations of Professor Edel and others regarding verbal alterations in The Turn of the Screw. `Perceived' is indeed altered to `felt' in chs. 1 and xxi, but to `noticed' in ch. x and to `recognized' in ch. xxii; and it is retained unaltered in ch. ix. `I now reflect' (long after the episode, not `recollect') is altered to `I now feel' in ch. xiii, but `I recollect' in ch. 1 remains unaltered. `It appeared to me' is altered to `it struck me' in ch. xiv; but `appeared' (i.e., `seemed') is retained in chs. iv, xiii, and xxii. In ch. 1 `the little girl who accompanied Mrs. Grose (not `Mrs. Grose') appeared to me' in 1898 and `affected me' in 1908' bit in ch. vii Mrs. Grose still `appeared to assent to this' and in ch. xxi `appeared . . . more reluctant', while Miles in ch. xxiv `appeared now to be thinking' in 1908 as in 1898. On one occasion `see' becomes `know' (ch. xx) and on another `saw' becomes `knew' (ch. ix); but there are no instances of `I saw' or `I believed' becoming `I felt', thought `I became sure' is altered to `I felt sure' in ch. xix. On one occasion `felt' becomes `conceived' (ch. x); on another `I found myself' becomes `I knew myself' (ch. ix). `It struck me' occurs fewer than a dozen times in the course of the story' but both `I saw' (30 odd examples) and `I felt' (40 odd examples) are very frequently used; and James's revision of the text makes virtually no change in these proportions (255).

Sheppard buttresses her argument that the ghosts are not mere hallucinations by pointing to James's childhood Swedenborgian background, the influence of Hawthorne reflected in his critical writings, notebooks, and correspondence, and the other ghostly tales in his canon. She also cites numerous statements James made about the story and interprets these as evidence against Freudian non-apparitionist readings. She denies, for example, that James's designation of the tale as "an amusette to catch those not easily caught" means "that James intends to hoax the reader," as Edna Kenton suggested. Instead, the word amusette indicates a sophisticated rather than conventional ghost story, one "which depends for its effect on the communication of unease, a horror which will remain mysterious and inexplicable to the reader, all the more so as it is conveyed in a precise and deliberately artistic narrative." Similarly, "catching" suggests not "deception," but

merely `attraction', `captivation': he wants to `catch' their interest and attention. The use of `catch' here recalls James's use of a favourable adjective, `attaching'. `A very attaching young man' he may say, where we should say `very attractive' (15).

Sheppard thus attempts to determine James's intention in employing a particular expression by considering the author's customary use of language. She takes a similar approach in analyzing James's statement that "we have as much of her (the governess's) own nature as we can swallow . . .":

That word `swallow' is the trouble here. James was fond of colloquialisms, which he sometimes slightly misapplied, in what began as a stroke of conscious wit and ended as an unconscious mannerism. It produces many anecdotes: for example, James gives sixpence to a yokel of whom he has asked the way, and says, `There, my man, put that in your pipe and smoke it.' But here, to say `as much as we can swallow' suggests that James himself finds something repellent,, even nauseating, in the nature of the governess as he has exhibited her. Yet the very next sentence makes it clear that there is no depreciatory intention whatever. James goes on: `It constitutes no little of a character indeed, in such conditions, for a young person, as she says, "privately bred," that she is able to make her particular credible statement of such strange matters. She has "authority," which is a good deal to have given her, and I couldn't have arrived at so much had I clumsily tried for more.' You will hardly believe that any critic could interpret `authority' in this context, not as `standing with' or `impressiveness for' the reader, but as `dominance over' Mrs. Grose and the children, yet it has been done (16).

Sheppard also considers the narrative "frame"--in particular, Douglas's good recommendation of the governess--as a clue to his intention. This is consistent, Sheppard says, with the Notebook entries which indicate an intention to write a story primarily about the haunted children, not about their troubled governess (16-17). These points, however, seem to me not entirely consistent with the Hawthornean "moral" which Sheppard herself has derived from the story.

Sheppard also, of course, reiterates the often cited evidence from the text: Miles' dismissal from school, Flora's bad language, the identification scene in chapter five, etc. Again and again, of course, the same incidents from the plot have been cited by different critics to support conflicting--often diametrically opposite--interpretations. I will not here rehash these by now tiresome controversies except to call attention to two arguments of Sheppard which seem particularly weak. In the first place, Sheppard contends that the governess cannot be a victim of repressed sexuality since she freely admits her love for the employer to Douglas and reiterates the point throughout her narrative. The obvious rejoinder is Spilka's observation that Victorians tended to equate love with non-sexual affection which could be freely admitted even while its libidinous component was repressed. Secondly, Sheppard suggests that the first vision of Quint cannot arise from repressed sexuality because, while daydreaming about the employer, the governess sees a different man, not the object of her reveries. The obvious refutation to this is Thomas's reminder that the unconscious often distorts love objects into bizarre, almost unrecognizable images.

Although Sheppard rejects the Wilsonian arguments that the ghosts are falsidical hallucinations, she does recognize an undercurrent of ambiguity pervading the story. This is traceable at least partly, she contends, to the influence of two rival schools of thought within the Society for Psychical Research. One group, led by Myers, interpreted ghostly apparitions as

`persistent personal energy'--indications `that some kind of force is being exercised . . .' after death; . . . `in some at least' of these cases `there has been a real agency of deceased persons.' The phenomena are produced telepathically through the medium of `a sub-conscious or submerged stratum in both agency and percipient', that is, in both the disembodied and the embodied personality (174).

According to this interpretation,

we must (with Myers's blessing) be prepared to accept both the theory of latency--since Quint and Miss Jessel had died months before--and the possibility that the governess...was `intercepting' visual communications, which did not reach Miles and Flora, the intended percipients. We may, of course, brutalize our version by assuming that the children were lying--in which case no 'interception' need be postulated (208).

This is very close to Lydenberg's interpretation.

On the other hand, however, another faction, led by Podmore, held that "thought-transference, or telepathy, between living persons remained the only plausible explanation for all phantasms not merely subjective in origin" (174). Thus, if a percipient could accurately describe a deceased person, whose characteristics the percipient had no normal way of knowing, as the governess accurately describes Quint, Podmore would assume that the percipient was telepathically receiving an image of the deceased person from the mind of a living person who had been acquainted with the deceased. According to this interpretation, the governess,

because of the growth of her love and concern for the children...suddenly...becomes aware of what is obsessing their minds: the memories of whatever illicit satisfactions Quint and Jessel have taught them to need, and the images of those fascinating purveyors of evil who have been lost to them. Her unconscious clairvoyant faculty shapes these impressions into visual images before her conscious mind has begun to take account of them (209).

This interpretation is very close to the readings of Aldrich and Rees, among others.

Some case histories reported by the Society appear equally explainable according to either hypothesis, but some seem more strongly to support either one hypothesis or the other. Thus,

each of these conflicting interpretations is based on the same narrative evidence. The evidence being imperfect, no decision on such phantasms is possible--judgment must remain in suspense....It is this double reading of narratives accepted as veridical which, as it were, authorizes James's ambiguous treatment of the supernatural in The Turn of the Screw (178).

Sheppard--unnecessarily, I think--makes a choice between these two interpretations. Although admitting that "in his development of the story {James} carefully holds the balance even," Sheppard argues that Podmore's interpretation

seems preferable, if only because it automatically saves everyone's credit: it rescues the author from the imputation either of naive superstition or fraudulent dealing with his reader, and it warrants the governess both sane and benevolent (208).

Here Sheppard seems to be confessing her own prejudices. I fail to see why an explanation involving discarnate spirits or surviving psychic energy is ipso facto any more "superstitious" or "fraudulent" than one involving "telepathic communication between living persons." I also fail to see why an interpretation which "automatically saves everyone's credit," including that of the governess, is necessarily preferable to one which does not. Are we to interpret Macbeth and Othello in such a way that no villains appear, only heroes and victims of misfortune? Furthermore, why would the governess be any less "sane and benevolent" if she saw apparitions of discarnate entities, assuming the appearances were "veridical" rather than "falsidical"?

Moreover, the governess--according to Sheppard's interpretation--is not all that "sane and benevolent":

Bred up as she has been, inexperienced as she is, she knows intuitively that the children are endangered by the apparitions, but her rationalizing intelligence misinterprets these as evil spirits returned to entice the children into danger, not as emanations from the children's own minds. Consequently she misinterprets her own role: `I was a screen--I was to stand before them. The more I saw, the less they would'....Her duty she thinks, with a desperate innocence, is to interpose herself physically between the children and--ghosts....the more vigilant she becomes, the more anxious, the more tense, the more excited--the more she allows the children to perceive that she is aware of their past evil associations (for these, it is to be remembered, have never been in doubt) and their present evil bent of mind and habits (whatever these may amount to), the less her love is free to help and release them. She is no longer the spontaneously affectionate, happy, normal young girl they have, with a return of affection, accepted. Her love now becomes an extra burden for these small, precociously excited, and in the case of the boy at least, outlawed creatures. And when in the final, climactic scenes (with Flora, by the lake and with Miles, at the window) she is impelled to declare the presence of a `ghost', when, that is, to the children's ears she jabbers of `seeing' things that aren't there, she reveals herself as their enemy--to the girl a hatefully, insupportably censorious accuser...,to the boy a torturing `devil'....In fact, she kills Miles on the spot, with mingled excitement, fright, rage, and despair, because she convinces him that Peter Quint is actually present--that she can see Peter Quint whom he needs, if not loves, and that he cannot (209-210).

Elsewhere in her study, Sheppard asserts--in agreement with Briggs--that Miles not only dies but is damned because of the governess's incorrectly performed exorcism.

This time the governess misjudges: instead of again imposing her will on the boy to confess and free himself, she proves to him that he has lost his familiar--that is, he is left with his burden of guilt (whatever it may be) but without his demonic support. She has spoilt the exorcism, performed the ritual in the wrong order (to use one traditional way of describing the procedure), or, in Swedenborgian terms, she has acted in ignorance of the fact that man's life is `the life of his love', and the victim dies of shock as a result. And, again, in Swedenborgian terms, the irony of that would be that the governess has not only killed the boy, but destroyed his soul as well, for 'no one's life can by any means be changed after death' (24-25).

This interpretation is, of course, consistent with a central reality of James's biography: the overwhelming influence of Swedenborgian theology throughout his childhood.

Furthermore, the philosophical themes which Sheppard derives from this interpretation of the plot--and which she correctly considers to be consistent with the dominant philosophy of the Jamesian canon and with the moral philosophy of Hawthorne, with which James was in express agreement (Sheppard notes in particular such works as "Rappaccini's Daughter," "The Birthmark," and "Young Goodman Brown")--is perfectly compatible with an inappropriate reaction to the manifestations of discarnate entities attempting, successfully or not, to communicate with the children. "The Turn of the Screw on this interpretation is, in effect, a `moral mystery,' "says Sheppard,

an undidactic fable of the conflict of appearances and the underlying reality, of the difficulty of understanding other people even when, as here, the contents of their minds are paraded visibly before one--a somewhat dubious privilege, luckily vouchsafed to few....`Acting'...is almost always dangerous when it is directed to interfere with another's mind and character. And the evangelizing attitude of mind which determines that souls must be saved, characters straightened, minds purified `at any cost', is already poised for destruction, not redemption: Whatever young Miles had done, it surely did not merit death (210).

Some sociologically oriented critics--for example, Cole, Rees, and Nardin--have seen Quint and Jessel, with their hopeless love, as innocent victims of an unjust Victorian caste system. The governess could be correct in opining that the specters are the souls of the two deceased servants, but wrong in her evaluation of their moral stature. This interpretation would be consistent with the following "moral" divined by Sheppard:

Virtue is relative, not absolute; the better is the enemy of the good; don't try forcibly to eradicate the darling vice which may be someone's root of life; don't strip anyone of the cloak of respect we all need to tolerate one another (210-211).

In addition to attempting to clarify the ambiguities of the plot and ascertain James's intended philosophical themes, Sheppard has sought to determine what emotional experiences the author intended to convey to the reader and the means whereby he intended to engender these effects. In so doing Sheppard delineates the influence of many sources--literary and historical--for The Turn of the Screw.

Sheppard contends that the "horror" of the story is conveyed by "incongruity, carried through particular after particular" from the "ordinariness" and "cheerfulness" of Bly to the apparent beauty and innocence of the children.

We are presented with a benevolent guardian--who disowns all but a monetary responsibility for his charges; trusted servants--who corrupt their little master and mistress; a perfectly beautiful and charming little girl--who can look like an old woman and rail like a fishwife; a perfectly beautiful and charming little boy--who has `covered and concealed' as the governess puts it, otherwise, in Victorian slang, `played gooseberry in', a sordid intrigue, and is an undesirable influence at his school; a devoted governess--whose care results in the death of one of her pupils. At Bly, nothing is, but all things seem (25-26).

In a manner reminiscent of Grabo (discussed in the second chapter of this book) and Costello (discussed in the fifth chapter of this study), Sheppard suggests that suspense is maintained through a wave-like pattern of thirteen stages in which

the governess first adumbrates, then presents, then interprets some disturbing incident (and Mrs. Grose's revelations, Miles's rebellion, the children's complicity are motivating `shocks' as powerful as the presumed `ghostly' visitations). And in every instance, except for the last catastrophic scene, she summons her resources to `cope' with the trouble, only to be overtaken by a new development before her plan can be put into effect. There is thus a continuing, wave-like, sequent toil towards the denouement. The only qualification I would add is that James's elaborate variation of rhythm and tempo ensures that this basic pattern never becomes monotonously obvious. Current action and dialogue alternate with retrospective narration and reflection (33).

Sheppard traces this "dramatic" narrative method not only to James's abortive dramatic career, but also to the

influence of Ibsen, the evidence of which is found throughout James's Notebooks and correspondence.

Sheppard also cites numerous sources to delineate the "accumulation of reference" (31) which enriches the story. Peter Quint's name, of course, is reminiscent of the name of the stage-manager of A Midsummer Night's Dream--and Quint's entertainments of Miles "rather horribly parallel" (277) his prototype's activities. The physical description of Quint, Sheppard demonstrates, parallels the physical description of George Bernard Shaw, whose reputation as "a dangerously subversive political agitator, who in private life was an equally dangerous seducer of women" (65) would not be lost on a Victorian readership. The case for this association is strengthened by the intense dislike James and Shaw harbored for one another, which Sheppard documents thoroughly. Quint's hatlessness and inappropriate dress--"somebody else's clothes"--are reminiscent of Shaw's carelessness about such matters, a carelessness which irritated James.

For to James conformity in dress, as in other usages of polite society, was necessary and important....His careful elegance on all appropriate, and some inappropriate, occasions, is part of the James legend. Far from rejoicing, as an author, in his emancipation, he wore the livery of the morning suit even at Rye, even in the privacy of his study (64).

Shaw, moreover, had a penchant for dark-haired women, the most famous of whom was Annie Besant, whom James also disliked and whose political radicalism and unconventional religious views had endowed her with a "notoriety...already so black as to be impervious to further stain." Sheppard reminds us that

James abominated female demagogues, platform advocates of `causes', from women's rights to eccentric cults; and Mrs. Besant, aided by great beauty, a magnificent contralto voice, and inexhaustible zeal for whatever cause had temporarily won her devotion, was the most renowned woman orator of her day (68).

These associations would make more credible Miles's expulsion from school for "saying things."

Once...Quint and Jessel are envisaged as fellow conspirators, godless revolutionaries who acknowledge neither divine nor human law, the threat to the children is at once extended and intellectualized: it becomes a matter of indoctrination rather than initiation into evil practices. The `things said' will not then be mere puerile obscenities, but mockery and denials of authority, of social obligations, of moral and religious sanctions, programmes for disruption and violence--a precocity in error much more alarming than any `normal' childish wickedness. Miles as boy atheist and anarchist, Flora as infantile `new woman' would be phenomena as shocking to Victorian teachers and guardians as their presumed commerce with the dead is to the governess (100).

Moreover, the name Jessel would be not without significance. "Jessel is a Jewish name, and as such it perhaps fits the dark, mysterious beauty of James's story. Perhaps, too, it recalls Shakespeare's Jessica..." (28). Jessel, furthermore, was the name of the judge who presided over the case involving custody of Annie Besant's two children.

And the very murmur of `Besant' and `Theosophy' would, for such readers, immediately thicken the occult suggestions of James's story: to their view, not merely unquiet dead of the Anglican persuasion, nor Swedenborgian spirits of Hell, but Elementaries from Kamaloka might confront the governess (29).

"The symbolism" of Mrs. Grose's name "is obvious enough" (27), says Sheppard. Miles and Flora represent the perfect male and female, as suggested by their names' Latin meanings. The namelessness of the governess

adds an authentic touch of Victorian propriety: it mimics the anonymity which strict etiquette required of any `lady' who ventured into print. The pseudonymous lady novelists of the period are tacitly rebuked by the hundreds of their sisters who instruct or entertain with no warrant save their gentility (29-30).

The governess, Sheppard convincingly argues, is largely modeled after Jane Eyre. To support this contention Sheppard cites numerous similarities between the plots of the two novels--in a manner reminiscent of Cole's collation in the Appendix of his dissertation. Such material, Sheppard maintains, provided a model of an English governess which James badly needed.

In spite of James's own childhood experience of a succession of French governesses, one can assume that he had very little first-hand knowledge of how English governesses might be expected to behave, or how an English nursery or schoolroom would be conducted in the nineties. But here, in Jane Eyre, were a governess and her setting ready-made for him; very little adaptation was required (50).

Harley Street--here Sheppard provides an interesting historical tidbit--was not "physicians' row" during Bronte's time, but an exclusive residential area suitable for a wealthy individual such as the children's uncle. Correspondences between the governess and Jane Eyre are intended, at least partly to establish the normality of the governess, according to Sheppard.

The correspondences between the plots, furthermore, are complemented by historical and biographical evidence suggesting that Bronte's novel was a source. In 1895 Frederic Harrison, whom James admired and whose publications James read (this latter fact is documented by numerous references in James's correspondence), published Studies in Victorian Literature in which

he devoted much of his space to demonstrating that she {Bronte} was precisely the kind of author Henry James was not--that she wrote exclusively out of her own narrow experience of life and the world (44).

Harrison maintained that Bronte had turned this "limitation" into material for a masterpiece by telling her story through the eyes of a governess of similarly limited perception and thus creating an unforgettable character. It seems reasonable to assume, Sheppard suggests, that James read this critical study and set a similar challenge for himself. Part of the story's ambiguity, however, is occasioned by a tension between the above source and "another source for the governess" (104)--namely, Mlle. Henriette Deluzy, with whom James was socially acquainted. She had been instituture in the home of the Duc de Praslin at the time of his wife's murder. Accused of complicity in the crime but acquitted, she "had emigrated to the United States" and

married a scion of one of New England's most respected families--Henry Martyn Field, almost ten years her junior...Mrs. Henry Martyn Field...became a leading figure in the intellectual and artistic circles of New York, so that her death in March 1875 was mourned as a distinct loss to the community (104).

This woman served as a source for Miriam in The Marble Faun, Sheppard suggests.

Mlle. Henriette Deluzy, like the governess, harbored an unrequited infatuation for her employer and an extreme affection for his children. Later, having emigrated to the United States and married, she wrote of her new environment in somewhat the same way the governess wrote of "the enlargement of prospect" (107) represented by Bly.

This woman, however, is not the main source, according to Sheppard. "To all fictional intents and purposes the governess is Jane Eyre (even if Mlle. Deluzy's green eyes may at times be peeping over her shoulder...)" (144).

Sheppard's book-length study is an outstanding example of criticism which seeks to ascertain the author's intentions and methods of construction through historical and biographical research. In her well documented study Sheppard draws on a vast accumulation of Jamesian scholarship to argue, for the most part convincingly, what materials are likely sources and the significance of their inclusion. In so doing she has constructed a plausible interpretation of the plot and suggested philosophical themes consistent with the internal evidence of the novella, the totality of the Jamesian canon, and other biographical evidence. Her study, however, is not without its weaknesses. She too easily dismisses Freudian arguments, and, given James's active and varied social life, her assumptions that