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Heilman-FreudianReadingTurn-1947 Lavoratoiubuib

Robert B. Heilman's analysis critiques the Freudian interpretation of Henry James' 'The Turn of the Screw,' arguing that it misrepresents both the story and its preface. Heilman contends that earlier critics, like Edna Kenton and Edmund Wilson, fail to recognize James's intentions and the objective nature of the ghosts, instead projecting their own psychological theories onto the text. Ultimately, Heilman asserts that the narrative's complexities and James's aesthetic choices are overlooked by those who prioritize Freudian readings over textual evidence.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
23 views14 pages

Heilman-FreudianReadingTurn-1947 Lavoratoiubuib

Robert B. Heilman's analysis critiques the Freudian interpretation of Henry James' 'The Turn of the Screw,' arguing that it misrepresents both the story and its preface. Heilman contends that earlier critics, like Edna Kenton and Edmund Wilson, fail to recognize James's intentions and the objective nature of the ghosts, instead projecting their own psychological theories onto the text. Ultimately, Heilman asserts that the narrative's complexities and James's aesthetic choices are overlooked by those who prioritize Freudian readings over textual evidence.

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The Freudian Reading of the Turn of the Screw

Author(s): Robert B. Heilman


Source: Modern Language Notes, Vol. 62, No. 7 (Nov., 1947), pp. 433-445
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Modern Language Notes
Voltume LXII NOVEMBER, 1947 Number 7

THE FREUDIAN READING OF THE TURN


OF THE SCREW
The Freudian reading of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw,
which has had some currency in recent decades, does violence not
only to the story but also to the Preface, which, like the story, de-
mands scrupulous attention. The Freudian reading was first
given public expression by Edna Kenton in 1924; her view is that
the ghosts and the attendant horrors are imagined by the neurotic
governess, " trying to harmonize her own disharmonies by creating
discords outside herself." 1 Miss Kenton, however, adduces almost
no evidence to sustain her interpretation, but simply enjoys a
gracefully gleeful revel in the conviction that James, by permitting
the ghosts to seem real, has utterly fooled all the other readers of
the story. She is sure that this is so because of James's prefatory
remark upon his intention "to catch those not easily caught"; 2
but all James is doing in the passage quoted from is relishing-
and deservedly, we may say-the success, with adult audiences, of
what he modestly calls a "fairy-tale pure and simple";, he is
talking about nothing more-as if this is not enough-than his
having evoked the willing suspension of disbelief in those who by
situation and experience might be supposed to be more than
ordinarily skeptical. His tone is simply not that of one who has
proudly hoaxed the credulous; it is that of one meditating upon an
aesthetic problem. He points out, shrewdly, that the way to create

" Henry James to the Ruminant Reader, The Arts, vi (1924), 254.
2 Loc. cit., pp. 248, 251. The passage Miss Kenton quotes appears in
The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York Edition (1922), xii,
xviii. Subsequent references to preface and story are to this volume.
a P. xi.
433

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434 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES, NOVEMBER, 194"7

belief in "portentous evil" is to present an undefined evil to the


reader's imagination.4 Miss Kenton, most oddly, considers this
choice of method a validation of her own definition of the evil.5
The dispassionate judge must conclude: non sequitur.
A decade or so later Edmund Wilson sets out to provide what we
might call the scholarly foundation for the airy castle of Miss
Kenton's intuitions: in an essay entitled " The Ambiguity of Henry
James " he sets forth an astonishingly unambiguows exegesis of
The Tutrn of the Screw.6 Wilson also misreads the preface-most
conspicuously in the explanation, essential to his own case, that
James, when he says he has given the governess " authority," means
" the relentless English 'authority' which enables her to put over
on inferiors even purposes which are totally deluded. . . . " It
must be said unequivocally: James means nothing of the kind. In
the context 8 he is talking merely about technical problems of com-
position, and what he is saying is, to use the trite terms of the
rhetoric book, that he is telling the story entirely from the govern-
ess's point of view. What is involved, too, is his general theory that
the raw materials of the ghost story, to be effective, must be pre-
sented through a recording and interpreting consciousness; prodi-
gies "keep all their character, . . . by looming through some
other history-the indispensable history of somebody's normal
[the italics are James's] relation to something."" Once again,
then, the word authority has brought about, in an unwary liberal,
an emotional spasm which has resulted in a kind of hysterical
blindness. James explains his inability to characterize the govern-
ess fully: it was enough of an aesthetic tassk to present the "young
woman's keeping crystalline her record of so many intense anomalies
and obscurities-by which I don't of course mean her explanation
of them, a different matter; . . ." 10 In the last clause James is
merely, as a part of the statement of the technical problem, dis-
tinguishing two phases of the material presented through the
governess-the phenomena she had observed, and her commentary

' Pp. xx-xxii. 6 Pp. 254-55.


,'The Triple Thinkers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938), pp. 122 ff.
7 P. 131. 8 Pp. xviii-xix.
9 The issue is discussed at length in the preface to The Altar of the
Dead, Novels and Tales, ed. cit., XVII, xvii ff. The sentence quoted is on
p. xix.
10 P. xix.

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THE TURN OF THE SCREW 435
upon them. Yet Wilson supposes that James is here giving it
away that the governess has hallucinationsI 11 Wilson then con-
tinues with a general conclusion about the story that runs counter
to a major statement of the preface-a statement which Wilson
simply ignores. He insists that the story is " primarily intended
as a characterization of the governess: .. 12 James says flatly,
I saw no way, . . . to exhibit her in relations other than
those; one of which, precisely, would have been her relation to her
own nature." 13 Besides, James makes this statement even more
unequivocally in a letter to H. G. Wells in 1898:

Of course I had, about my young woman, to take a very sharp line. The
grotesque business I had to make her picture and the childish psychology
I had to make her trace and present, were for me at least, a very difficult
job, in which absolute lucidity and logic, a singleness of effect, were
imperative. Therefore I had to rule out subjective complications of her
own-play of tone etc.; and keep her impersonal save for the most obvious
and indispensable little note of neatness, firmness and courage-without
which she wouldn't have had her data."'

Here James not only explicitly states that the governess is not
his subject but also gives his word for it that the phenomena to
which she plays the part of recording consciousness are objective.
Wilson says he knew an actual case of a governess who frightened
parents and children because of her psychological difficulties."5
But James writes, in both Preface and letter, of a story he heard
about the ghosts of " bad " servants which appeared in an effort to
" get hold of " young children."' We must decide whether James is
writing about what he heard about or what Wilson heard about.
Indeed, the sly Freudian readers of the Preface-who ignore the
letters entirely-seem to miss its whole tone and import: James
speaks continually of the ghosts as if they are objective manifesta-
tions, and there is no sign whatever of a knowing wink to the
rationalists.17 He is concerned almost entirely with defining his

i p. 130. 12 P. 131. 13 P. XiX.


14 Percy Lubbock, ed., The Letters of Henry James (New York: Scribner,
1920), I, 299.
1 5P. 13 1.
l6 P. xv. In 1898 he wrote Arthur C. Benson an account of the original
telling of the story to him by Arthur's father, Archbishop Benson (Letters,
I, 278-280).
17 What happens in the story is exactly described by Graham Greene's

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436 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES, NOVEMBER, 1947

techlnical problems and with observing, almost gaily, how satis-


factorily they have been met.
The Freudians misread the internal evidence almost as valiantly
as they do the external. In the story, of course, there are passages
that it is possible to read ambivalently; but the determining un-
ambiguous passages from which the critic might work are so
plentiful that it seems hardly good critical strategy to use the
ambiguous ones as points of departure, to treat them as if they were
unambiguous, and to roughride over the immitigable difficulties
that then arise. We cannot examine all the passages to which
Wilson does violence, but a consideration of several of them will
show how wobbly his case is.
Wilson supposes the governess to be seeing ghosts because she
is in a psychopathic state originating in a repressed passion for the
master.'8 In view of the terrible outcome of the story, we should
at best have to suspect the fallacy of insufficient cause. But the
cause does not exist at all: the governess's feelings for the master
are never repressed: they are wholly in the open and are joyously
talked about: even in the opening section 19 which precedes Chapter
1, we are told that she is in love with him. There is no faint trace
of the initial situation necessary to produce the distortion of per-
sonality upon which Wilson's analysis depends. But Wilson does
compel us to consider one point: why does James emphasize the
governess's fascinated devotion to the master? For an important
technical reason: it is the only way of motivating-although it is
probably not quite successful-the governess's stubborn refusal to
take the logical step of over-riding the master's irresponsible wish
not to be bothered and of calling him in.20 The master's presence

shrewd general remark on James: "James believed in the supernatural,


but he saw evil as an equal force with good," in The English Novelists:
A Survey of the Aovel by Twenty Contemporary Novelists, ed. Derek
Verschoyle (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), p. 245.
18 P. 122.
19 Pp. 150 ff. Cf. also the outright admission of Chapter 1 (p. 162); and
the clear implications of the phrase " in the right quarter " (p. 199) and
of the governess's self-analysis at the end of Chapter 12 (pp. 239-240). She
can even be laughingly, not tensely, ironic about the uncle's inattentiveness
to her (p. 287).
20 See Chapters 12 and 13. James's honesty with his reader appears in
his presenting so fully the governess's unwillingness to call the uncle. In
order to strengthen our impression of the uncle's power to fascinate, James

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THIE TURN OF THE SCREW 437
would change the situation and the focus and thus the whole
story which James had planned. His absence is a datum: James
wrote to Dr. Louis Waldstein in 1898, " But ah, the exposure
indeed, the helpless plasticity of childhood that isn't dear or sacred
to somebody. That was my little tragedy- . . 21 It is
possible to argue that James's strategy is faulty; indeed, that he
himself sensed the weakness of the governess's not calling the
master is suggested by the retrospective irony with which he makes
her comment upon her rash assumption of adequacy to the situ-
ation.22 But a technical procedure should not be mistaken for a
psychopathological clue.
When the governess describes the ghost to Mrs. Grose, Mrs.
Grose identifies it with Quint, the dead valet, whom the governess
had never so much as heard of; and Mrs. Grose gives him-and later
Miss Jessel-a character which is entirely consistent with what the
governess has already inferred about the moral quality and in-
tentions of the ghost.23 There can be no firmer dramatic evidence
of the objectivity of the apparition, and Wilson acknowledges the
difficulty: but in order to sustain his contention that the hallucina-
tion grows out of the repressed passion for the uncle, he advances
the incredible hypothesis that the governess has got master and man

even suggests that Mrs. Grose has felt that power: she too had not in-
formed him of former goings-on at Bly (p. 261). Compare a further com-
ment of hers (p. 162).
21 Letters, I, 297.
22 There is a consistent ironic undertone. It is unmistakable in such
phrases as "I was wonderful" (p. 172), "I brought the thing out hand-
somely " (p. 277), " -oh I was grand!- " (p. 297), and " But I was
infatuated-I was blind with victory, . . ." (p. 306). Compare also the
open acknowledgments in Chapter 16 (pp. 260-261). The story might have
been developed as the tragedy of the teacher-protector, whose flaw is ex-
cessive confidence in his own abilities. The tragic quality of the governess,
as well as several other points which I have made, is also suggested in The
New Invitation to Leazrning, ed. Mark Van Doren (New York: New Home
Library, 1944), pp. 223-35. Although the participants in the discussion-
Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, and Mark Van Doren-condemn the
Freudian interpretation, they still believe that the evil is working through
the governess. This seems to me to come uncomfortably close to the
Freudian version.
23 Chapters 5, 6, and 7. The breakdown of the Wilson theory at this
point has already been discussed by A. J. A. Waldock, " Mr. Edmund Wilson
and 'The Turn of the Screw,'" MLLN, 331-334 (May, 1947).

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438 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES, NOVEMBER, 1947

confused-which is inconsistent with her obviously having a sharp


eye for distinctions-and that Quint and the uncle may look alike.24
Even at his most unsubtle, James would hardly be found thus
trafficking in coincidence. But if lie were, it can hardly be sup-
posed that Mrs. Grose, who in such matters is very observant, would
not at some time comment upon the strange resemblance of master
and man.
Like Miss Kenton, Wilson infers the unreality of the ghosts from
the fact that only the governess acknowledges seeing them; he does
not stop to consider that this fact may be wholly explicable in
aesthetic terms. Of course Mrs. Grose does not see the ghosts: she
is the good but slow-witted woman who sees only the obvious in
life-for instance, the sexual irregularity of Quint and Miss
Jessel-but does not unassisted detect the subtler manifestations of
evil. She is the plain domestic type who is the foil for the sensitive,
acute governess-Cassandra-like in the insight which outspeeds
the perceptions of those about her-whose ideal function is to
penetrate and shape the soul. James's fondness for allegorical
names is commonplace knowledge: Mrs. Grose is not called Mrs.
Grose for nothing 25 (just as the governess is not the governess for
nothing: the narrator exhibits the ideal function of the tutorial
type). But as, little by little, the tangible evidence, such as that
of Flora's language, corroborates the racing intuitions of the
governess, Mrs. Grose comes to grasp the main points of the issue
as it is seen totally by the governess and to share her understanding
of the moral atmosphere. The acceptance by Mrs. Grose is unim-
peachable substantiation. We ought to observe here, also, how
carefully the governess records all the initial doubts felt by Mrs.
Grose in each new crisis-doubts which at times shake her belief
in her own mental soundness.26 This is one of James's wavs of
establishing the reliability of the governess.
As for the children's appearing not to see the apparitions: this
is one of the author's finest artistic strokes. James says that he
wants to evoke a sense of evil: one of his basic ways of doing it is
the suggestion, by means of the symbolic refusal to acknowledge
24 pp. 125-26.
25 " But she was a magnificent monument to the blessing of a want of
imagination, . . ." (p. 230).
26 Note pp. 168-69, 204, 230-231, 278 (". . . so I was neither cruel nor
mad "), 280-81, 290-91.

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TIIE TURN OF THE SCREIW' 439
the ghosts, of a sinisterly mature concealment of evil. But almost
as if to guard against the mistaking of the denial of the ghosts for
the non-existence of the ghosts, James takes care to buttress our
sense of the reality of evil from another direction: he gives us
the objective fact of the dismissal of Miles from school-a dismissal
which is unexplained and which is absolutely final.27 This dis-
missal Wilson, in plain defiance of the text, must attempt to put
aside as of no consequence; of such a situation he says, indeed
frivolously, that the governess " colors [it], on no evidence at all,
with a significance somehow sinister." 28 James invests the letter
from the school with further significance by the fact that, despite
her real shock, which is elaborated later, Mrs. Grose finds a private
meaning in the dismissal-" She gave me a look that I remarked
at the moment; then, visibly, with a quick blankness, seemed to try
to take it back"; 29 so, unless we are to repudiate the governess's
testimony entirely, the letter gains dramatic value through what it
intimates to Mrs. Grose. Further, Wilson cannot deal with the fact
that at the end of the final scene Miles, without hearing them
spoken by anyone else, speaks the names of Miss Jessel and Quint
and indicates his belief that they may be present. Again in plain de-
fiance of the text Wilson says that Miles has managed to see Flora
before her departure and thus to find out what the governess is
thinking about.30 Wilson says they met; James clearly indicates
that they did not. But even if they had met, their meeting would
not help Wilson especially. From Flora Miles might have learned
the name "Miss Jessel "; but his spontaneous bursting forth with
"Peter Quint " would still have to be explained.
Wilson admits that one point is inexplicable: the " gust of
frozen air " felt by the governess when, at Miles's bedside, her
effort to break down his moral resistance to her is interrupted by
his shriek, a shaking of the room, and sudden darkness.31 Despite
her feeling a strong blast, no window is open. Wilson takes literally
Miles's statement that he turned out the light and suggests that the
motive is shame at having to tell about his disgrace at school. But,
for one thing, Miles does not tell about his disgrace, and, more
important, his turning out the light of his own accord is absolutely

97 Pp. 165-66. 29 P. 165.


28p. 123. 'OP. 129.
31 Pp. 127-28. The scene discussed is at the end of Chapter 17.

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440 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES, NOVEMBER, 1947

incompatible with the theory that the governess is unbalanced. If


she is unbalanced we must assume, at this stage of the story, that
the children sense her disorder and are humoring her and treating
her very carefully, not engaging in violent pranks that might be
expected to be dangerously aggravating.
There are still other parts of the story that, on the Freudian hypo-
thesis, are wholly inexplicable. First, as we have seen, is the fact
that Mrs. Grose always comes into agreement with the governess-
an agreement that is especially forceful because it usually follows
upon doubt and hesitation.32 Further-and this is a very large
point-the Freudian hypothesis fails completely to deal with the
conduct of the children. In the first place, their night-time
escapades 33 are, for an eight- and a ten-year-old, virtually beyond
the bounds of physical possibility. Wilson says blandly that the
children "are able to give plausible explanations of their be-
havior "; 34 but the fact is that children of that age simply are not
wide awake, imaginatively alert, and capable of strategic maneuver-
ing in the middle of the night. The fact that they are earnestly and
imperturbably plotting in the middle of the night, and that they
are sophisticatedly evasive in their gay response to questioning, is
one of James's subtlest ways of suggesting moral disorder. What
Wilson takes to be their " plausibility " is an index of their corrup-
tion. Second, the children's daytime conduct makes sense only in
the light of the ostensible meaning of the story-the entertainment
of the governess by one of them while the other escapes, Flora's
difficult solitary trip on the final Sunday afternoon, her crossing
the pond in a boat and hiding the boat apparently unaided (" All
alone-that child?" exclaims Mrs. Grose),3 her majestically non-
committal manner when she is found strangely alone at a consider-
able distance from the house.36 Wilson simply ignores all these
matters-ignores them as facts, and of course as the brilliant

32 The corroborative value of Mrs. Grose's information on the past and of


her establishing of connections between past and present cannot be ques-
tioned at all in terms of the theory of ambiguity. To dispose of her evidence,
the psychological critic must impugn the veracity of the governess from
beginning to end. But such a method would completely dissolve the story by
leaving us no dependable facts for investigation. Moreover, it would
ignore the sense in which James gives the governess " authority."
3" Chapter 10. P6 p. 275.
3" P. 126. "6 Chapters 18, 19, and 20.

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THE TURN OF THE SCREW 441
dramatic symbols they are of something unchildlike and inexplicably
wrong. Third, there is the vulgarity of Flora's language after
the governess has openly asked her about Miss Jessel-important
evidence which can be intended only to show a temporarily con-
cealed deterioration of character coming at last to the surface.
Notably, too, it is Mrs. Grose who tells about this language and
who, what is more, initiates the subject: " horrors," she calls what
she has heard, showing no sign of suggestive pressure from the
governess.37 Further, the whole manner of the children is incom-
patible with their being terrified and perverted by the " authority "
of the governess. What is inescapable in them, despite the
admirable subtlety with which all this is conveyed, is precisely their
freedom, their skill in spending their time as they wish without
open challenges, their marvelously disciplined catering to the
governess-or appearing to do so-while doing exactly what they
please. After Flora's departure what the governess especiallv feels
is the slenderness of her personal, and the disappearance of her
official, hold upon the boy.38 At no tinme do the children show any
sign of unwillingness, compulsion, or fright-except in the final
scene, in which Miles's fright, it seems logical to suppose, proceeds
from the causes which the story says it does. In fact, James
emphasizes strongly the falseness of Flora's apparent fear of the
governess at the end by giving her a "grand manner about it"
and having her ask " every three minutes " whether the governess
is coming in and express a desire " never again to so much as look
at you." These are signs of artifice, not fright; they indicate
self-conscious acting, righteous indignation strategically adopted,
the truculence of the guilty person who still seeks loopholes.
Such evidence suggests that a great deal of unnecessary mystery
has been made of the apparent ambiguity of the story. Actually,
most of it is a by-product of James's method: his indirection; his
refusal, in his fear of anti-climax, to define the evil; his rigid
adherence to point of view; his refusal-amused, perhaps ?-to
break that point of view for a reassuring comment on those uncom-
fortable characters, the apparitions. This theory seems to come very
close to James's own view of the ambiguity, upon which, it con-

37 P. 289.
88 See especially paragraph two of Chapter 22 (pp. 294-95).
39 Pp. 286-87.

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442 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES, NOVEMBER, 1947

veniently happens, he commented in the year of the story's appear-


ance.40 The disturbing ghosts, of course, are to be taken as
symbolic,4' a fact which the modern critic might easily grasp if
he did not have to wrestle with another problem peculiarly uncon-
genial to modernity-the drama of salvation. The retreat into
abnormal psychology is virtually predictable.
There is a final irony, however: if he does not break the chosen
point of view, James at least does not adopt it until his main story
is under way. At the start, tlhen, we see behind the curtain and
find important objective evidenice for use in interpreting the gover-
iiess's narrative. Now AMiss Kenton, with considerable amusement
at less observant readers, has discovered what she calls "the sub-
merged and disregarded foreword," 42 and what she has got from
it is that the governess is in love with the master. Hence her
whole interpretation. But had Miss Kenton herself read the fore-
word more observantly, she would have found the evidence that
makes her interpretation untenable. For this initial section tells
us what the governess was like some years later.
The governess, Wilson assures US,43 " has literally frightened him
[Miles] to death ": the neurotic approaches criminal insanity. For
such an individual, only the gravest kind of prognosis could be
made. We might expect progressive deterioration, perhaps pathetic,
perhaps horrible. We might barely conceive of a " cure," but we
could hardly expect that it would obliterate all traces of the
earlier disastrous tensions. What, then, does happen to the gover-
ness who at twenty is supposedly in so terrible a neurotic state?
The prologue tells us explicitly: at the age of thirty or so she is still
a spinster, still a governess, and therefore still heir, we may assume,

40 To F. WV. H. Myers, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical


Research, James writes that he cannot give "any coherent account of
my small inventions ' after the fact.' . . . The one thing and another that
are questionable and ambiguous in them I mostly take to be conditions of
their having got themselves pushed through at all " (Letters, I, 300).
'" In The Supernatural in the Writings of Henry James (Unpublished
Thesis, Louisiana State University, 1939), Benjamin Carroll acutely
discusses the use of the symbolic ghost as a general practice of James,
and the kind of " authority " which James gives to his narrators-the
authority of the observing and recording consciousness which is central

42 P. 251. P p. 130.
in his method.

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THE TURAT OF THE SCREW 443
to all psychic ills which Wilson imputes to her at the earlier stage.
But at this age she seems, to a Cambridge undergraduate whom,
ten years her junior, we may expect to be thoroughly critical, a
fine, gracious woman who can elicit liking and respect. She charms
him so thoroughly that many years later he in no way repudiates,
qualifies, or smiles at his youthful feeling. Many years later, in
fact he can still say of her,

She was a most charming person. . . . She was the most agreeable person
I've ever known in her position; she would have been worthy of any what-
ever ... she struck me as awfully clever and nice. I liked her
extremely and am glad to this day to think she liked me too.-"

To challenge this characterization of her one would have to chal-


lenge the testimony of a poised and graceful middle-aged gentle-
man; and, in addition to that, the testimony of the perceptive
first-person narrator in the prologue, who is completely en rapport
with the middle-aged gentleman. James's unqualified initial picture
of the governess, then, is wholly irreconcilable with the Freudian
interpretation of her. The conclusion is obvious: at twenty the
governess was, aside from her unusual sensitiveness and charm, a
perfectly normal person.45
The Turn of the Screw may seem a somewhat slight work to call
forth all the debate. But there is something to be said for the
debate. For one thing, it may point the danger of a facile,
doctrinaire application of formulae where they have no business and
hence compel either an ignoring of, or a gross distortion of, the
materials. But more immediately: The Turn of the Screw is
worth saving. Wilson turns the story into a commonplace clinical
record, at the same time feeling-in one of the loveliest ironies of
contemporary criticism-that he is giving it stature. He com-
placently announces that "the story, on any other hypothesis,
would be, . . . the only thing James ever wrote which did not
have some more or less serious point." 4B But his interpretation is,

"4Pp. 149-50.
45 Commenting upon the technique of this novel, the able critic R. P.
Blackmur remarks quite casually that the evil "had to be represented,
. . . in the consciousness of it of normal persons " (introduction to Henry
James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, New York and London:
Scribner, 1937, p. xxi).
4" P. 131.

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444 MODERN LANGUAGE NOTES, NOVEMBER, 1947

in the words of Philip Rahv, a "fallacy of rationalism"; 47 for


the story has a very serious point indeed. The Turn, F. 0. Mat-
thiessen says, illustrates James's "extraordinary command of his
own kind of darkness, . . . the darkness of moral evil." 4 The
darkness is not obvious: Miss Kenton has fittingly laughed some
of the simpler didacticisms out of court. How it is to be defined is
another problem, at least part of the answer to which may be
found in James's extrordinarily suggestive use of language.
In a subsequent obiter dictum on The Turn of the Screw Wilson
seems to hedge somewhat and to modify the rigor of his earlier
pronouncement.49 Thus he suggests the flexibility which makes
him, at his best, a very good critic. But his capacity for doctrinaire
inflexibility deserves a word because it tells us something about the
intellectual climate in which he works. In that climate there is
so strong a suspicion of the kind of elements that are central in
The Turn of the Screw-salvation, the supernatural, evil as an
absolute-that the critic ripened in the climate runs into a mental
block: he is compelled to find a "scientific" way around these
irrationalities; and in doing so he is likely to lose sight of the
proper imaginative values. We run again into the familiar clash
between scientific and imaginative truth. This is not to say that
scientific truth may not collaborate with, subserve, and even throw
light upon imaginative truth; but it is to say that the scientific
prepossession may seriously impede the imaginative insight.
Wilson, for instance, is downright embarrassing in his occasional
paeans, in The New Yorker, to books about animals, which, he goes
out of his way to tell us, with James Ilarvey Robinson assurance,
will really throw light upon the human, i. e., the spiritual, situation.
Even in Wilson's formal critical essays the psychologist is likely
to defeat the aesthetician. In "Dickens: The Two Scrooges"
Wilson's literary judgments tend to tag along behind the operations

47The Great Short Novelhs of Henry James (New York: Dial, 1944), p.
624. Mr. Rahv also makes the excellent point that the Freudian interpre-
tation is so commonplace as to make the story less than interesting, that
it " reduces the intention to a minimum."
*8 Henry James: The Major Phase (New York: Oxford, 1944), p. 94.
For a series of similar comments see the already quoted essay by Graham
Greene in The English Novelists, pp. 231-46 passim.
49 The New Yorker, May 27, 1944, p. 69.

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TIlE TURN OF THE SCREIV 445
(and these are often shrewd enough) of the psychoanalyst.50 But
some watchful spirit-the opponent, we may assume, of Quint
and Miss Jessel-saw to it that Wilson, in sending into the world
the volume containing the Dickens essay, took its title from, and
gave its final pages to, his essay on the Philoctetes of Sophocles. Of
Sophocles we know so little that there is no opening for the
psychologist; Wilson sticks to the drama itself; and his explication
of it is masterly.51
ROBERT B. HEILMAN
Louisiana State University

THE FIFTH GOSPEL


(As projected in the novel, The Legend of Thomas Didymus, by James
Freeman Clarke).

In 1881, Dr. James Freeman Clarke, prominent New England


minister, lecturer and author, published his novel, The Legend of
Thomas Didymus, The Jewish Sceptic. This is written as a bio-
graphical account by the Apostle Thomas who describes the con-
ditions in the Holy Land during the early part of the first century;
the character and activities of Christ; and his own life and develop-
ment. In this last respect the novel differs most from the Gospels
of the other dlisciples, for it is Thomas, rather than Jesus, who is
the principal figure.
Clarke's main sources are readily apparent. The original inspira-
tion for his work was probably DeWette's novel, T'heodore, or the
Sceptic's Conversion, which Clarke had translated, in 1841, for
George Ripley's Specimens of Foreign Literature.' Both Thomas
Didymus and Theodore are " Entwickelungsromane." They treat
the moral and spiritual development of a young man who was raised

50 The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature (Cambridge:


Houghton Mifflin, 1941), pp. 1-104. The same psychological materials,
while given due emphasis, are somewhat more firmly disciplined in Dame
Una Pope-Hennessy's Charles Dickens (New York: Howell, Soskin, 1946).
51 Ibid., pp. 272 ff.
1 The translation of Theodore was begun in 1836 and the first part of the
novel appeared serially in The Western Messenger from 1836 to 1839. The
completed translation became the tenth and eleventh volumes of the Ripley
series.

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