Mimicry (postcolonialism term)

A term used in Postcolonial Studies to describe the paradoxical (or doubly articulated) state of affairs in colonial countries whereby the colonial power desires its subjugated others, namely the indigenous population of the occupied country, to look or at least act the same as the occupiers and yet fear that very outcome because it would dilute their own sense of difference and superiority. Mimicry is thus, as Homi Bhabha theorizes, an ambivalent strategy whereby subaltern peoples simultaneously express their subservience to the more powerful and subvert that power by making mimicry seem like mockery. A contemporary form of this can be seen today in the way in which call centre jobs from Australia, the UK, US, and elsewhere are exported to India precisely because as a direct result of colonization there are operators there who can mimic English speakers from those countries.

Further Reading:
H. Bhabha The Location of Culture (1994).


How to cite this entry:
"mimicry" A Dictionary of Critical Theory. by Ian Buchanan. Oxford University Press 2010. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Career Education Corporation (Greenspoint). 10 December 2010

Marnie Weber resurrects the Spirit Girls for exhibition and performance in mausoleum

What a specimen of current Gothic! Read this article about the performance at the cemetery!

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/11/marnie-weber-resurrects-the-spirit-girls-for-one-last-performance.html

The Nurturance of the Gothic [on _The Turn of the Screw_]

The Nurturance of the Gothic

The Turn of the Screw

That The Turn of the Screw is `Gothic' seems obvious enough. A castellated great house haunted by ghosts redolent of eros ... a heroine prone to hallucination and driven by repressed passion ... I believe there's more to be said, however. A more complicated notion of Gothic as a mode can be fostered through engagement with a new view of James' novella. To effect this interchange, I will first sketch out a theory of Gothic, then sketch in a view of The Turn of the Screw that enlists cultural studies and psychoanalytic theory in the service of close analysis. My reading of James' novella will suggest, as critics have not yet done, that the death of Miles as he is `held' by the governess implicates all of late-Victorian culture. The abuses of power that enabled domination in imperial and gender relations were paid for at terrible cost. The Turn of the Screw is about the return of the oppressed as well as the repressed.(n1)
The Nature of the Gothic

In `The Nurture of the Gothic', I have proposed that Gothic literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is more than a phenomenon of Anglo-American life.(n2) It is a project. My understanding of this project resists what some theorists of Gothic posit -- an opposition between inside and outside, between Gothic as an exploration of the unconscious and Gothic as a comment on, and even an intervention in, social reality. In refusing this binary of Freud vs. Marx, I want to define a Gothic praxis that involves -- necessarily -- the interplay of psychological and social forces. `The nurture of the Gothic' plays obviously on the phrase already old by John Ruskin's time -- the nature of the Gothic -- because I believe the nature of the Gothic is to nurture. This belief derives from what I take to be a basic fact of communal life: that societies inflict terrible wounds upon themselves and at the same time develop mechanisms to help heal these wounds. Gothic fiction from the later eighteenth century to the present is one such mechanism. Not consciously and yet purposively, Anglo-American culture develops Gothic in order to help heal the damage caused by our embrace of modernity. Gothic's nature is the psycho-social function of nurture; its project is to heal and transform.

In defining Gothic as the simultaneous exploration of inner and outer, I'm aware that the same thing can be said for other genres and for the various modes of fiction. I make no claim for the absolute uniqueness of Gothic, for any rigid opposition between Gothic and, say, the novel of manners. All fiction engages some psychological factors and social forces. Granted, however, that any difference will be a matter of degree, not of kind, I believe Gothic is, of all fiction's modes, the one most intensely concerned with simultaneously liberating repressed emotions and exploring foreclosed social issues, since Gothic presents most aggressively the desires and themes conventionally considered beyond the pale - incest, patricide, familial dysfunction, archaic rage, the homoerotic.

Emphasis on the social as well as the psychological aspects of Gothic introduces the question of context. Why did Gothic not flower at the time of its inception in 1764? Why did all the major Gothic texts --with the exception of The Castle of Otranto -- appear after the French Revolution? Answers proposed by Gothicists have focused on political, economic, racial, gendered, and religious aspects of Anglo-American life. What I want to add to this discussion is a contextualization of my thesis about social healing. Granted that societies simultaneously inflict terrible injuries upon themselves and develop ways of healing those injuries: the severest injury suffered by the Anglo-American middle class readership in the later-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was, I believe, inflicted by a force that drew strength from every site of conflict in every decade of the period. This force of injury was repression.

Gothic can help heal the wounds of repression by putting into play what the discursive systems studied by Foucault try to restrict.(n3) Through its insistence on the forbidden, Gothic acts as a counter-discursive formation that releases repressed affects and explores foreclosed topics. To suggest how this can provide healing, I've turned to anthropologist Michael Taussig. Subtitled `a study in terror and healing', Taussig's Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man explores how terror heals. Today in Guatemala, white people seek help from Indian shamans whose power is presumed by the whites to be indigenous, a consequence of viewing the Indian essence as dark Other. What Taussig establishes, however, is that the shaman's demonic power derives from the white Spanish missionaries who came to Guatemala in the sixteenth century and who `believed firmly in the efficacy of sorcery, which they supposed Indians to be especially prone to practice on account of their having been seduced by the devil .... the magic of the Indian is a colonial creation.'(n4) Taussig is not simply recycling the banality that conquerors project their fears onto the lowly who then come back to terrorize them. What occurs with the Guatemalan shaman is not the return of the repressed to haunt but the return of the projected to heal. The healing, in turn, is self-healing. What the whites encounter in the shaman is white magic, not black; not his power, but theirs displaced. The colonizers had been injured by projecting onto the colonized a puissant part of their own being, those desires that were unacceptable to the European orthodoxy of their time. The wound that lingers in the Guatemalan whites today is self-division. They can therefore be healed only by regaining contact with their own puissant desires through the mediation of the terrifying Other. They can be healed only by themselves.

This is what Gothic does -- self-healing through terror -- though with a difference which I must specify immediately. That white Guatemalans receive great benefit from shamans is largely fortuitous. Projection of terrifying desires onto the dark Other was originally a tactic of imperialist conquest; `facilitating the legalities of enslavement and the use of military force ... . the colonizers provided the colonized with the left-handed gift of the image of the wild man -- a gift whose powers the colonizers were blind to' (142,467). What was inadvertent with colonialism is constitutive of Gothic. Reading parodies the repressive processes of culture, since Gothic fiction displaces onto characters and scenes our terrifying desires which are thereby positioned so that we can call them back to us in creative play. What Taussig makes clear is that engagement with the projective Other means reengagement with our own power, our own magic. Repression enfeebles. In the projective Other of shamanism and the displaced Other of Gothic, we regain contact not simply with forbidden desires but with desires forbidden because of their terrifying -- and thus potentially therapeutic -- power.

To indicate how Gothic as a healing process is produced from the specific context of nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture, I've turned to the work of Peter Stallybrass and Anon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression proceeds from a fact of cultural history: carnival was increasingly suppressed during the nineteenth century. There appeared concurrently three phenomena -- hysteria, psychoanalysis, and the ghost story revival -- which exemplify the general cultural mechanism I've posited. Society wounds itself and then develops ways to heal the wounds. In the later nineteenth century, the wound of choice was hysteria. Stallybrass and White relate the outbreak of hysteria to an aspect of cultural life that Bakhtin emphasizes -- `post-romantic culture is, to a considerable extent, subjectivized and interiorized and on this account frequently related to private terrors, isolation and insanity rather than to robust kinds of social celebration and critique'.(n5) Stallybrass and White demonstrate that a carnival confined to the private theater of the psyche is hell on earth.

It is striking how the thematics of carnival pleasure -- eating, inversion, mess, dirt, sex and stylized body movements -- find their neurasthenic, unstable and mimicked counterparts in the discourse of hysteria ... . It is as if the hysteric has no mechanism for coping with the mediation of the grotesque body in everyday life except by violent acts of exclusion. (182,184)

Where mediated self-recognition can occur for hysterics is in a space provided by an institution which appeared as carnival was disappearing -- psychoanalysis.

Freud uses the resonant term `agencies of disgust' to describe the forces arrayed against him in the struggle to cure hysterics. Those `agencies of disgust' are the same agencies which, in their public form, mobilized religious and civil authorities against carnival ... . Carnival allowed the society involved to mediate into periodic ritual the culturally structured `otherness' of its governing categories. We might call this process of periodic mediation active reinforcement ... . This contrasts strongly with the mechanism of hysteria which Freud called reactive reinforcement ... . `Contrary thoughts are always closely connected with each other and are often paired off in such a way that the one thought is exaggeratedly conscious while its counterpart is repressed and unconscious.' (188,189)

Psychoanalysis was one mode of active reinforcement that the fin de siecle developed. `Periodic' in the regularity of the analysand's `hour', psychoanalytic ritual utilized the couch, as carnival utilized its site, to actively facilitate mediation of governing categories and reengagement with denied desire. I believe Gothic fiction also provides this kind of reinforcement.

The years when hysteria proliferates and Freud begins his major work are, after all, precisely the time of `the ghost story revival' in Europe and America. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, `The Phantom Rickshaw', `The Yellow Wallpaper', The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Monster, The Turn of the Screw, Dracula, The Phantom of the Opera, plus the best short stories of Robert W. Chambers, M. R. James, and F. Marion Crawford, all appear between 1885 and 1914. Like psychoanalysis, Gothic proves to be a site where human beings can forego reactive reinforcement and can actively reengage with `component' thoughts that have been repressed. Moreover, Gothic, like psychoanalysis, has its strikingly carnivalesque features. It too allows us access to the `grotesque' as defined by Stallybrass and White -- `a boundary phenomenon of hybridization or in mixing in which self and other become enmeshed in an inclusive, heterogeneous, dangerously unstable zone' (193). This process of grotesque hybridization is particularly prominent in fin de siecle Gothic. Dorian Gray exemplifies the `"grotesque body"' which carnival celebrates and which `transgressions of gender, territorial boundaries, sexual preference, family and group norms are transcoded into' (Stallybrass and White, 24). Grotesque bodies recur in Dracula where the Count grows physically younger every day he threatens Britain; in The Monster where a black man already effaced politically and socially in a racist culture is effaced literally by a fire that burns his face to a cinder; in `The Yellow Wallpaper' where pregnancy so distorts the protagonist's self-image that she sees herself reflected in wallpaper patterns of `bloated curves' that `go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity'.(n6) In these and other carnivalesque masterpieces of the fin de siecle, `hybridization ... produces new combinations and strange instabilities' (58). Gothic is reborn at the moment when psychoanalysis is born and carnival is dying, thus helping to assure that healing remains available to repression's many.

The Turn of the Screw is Gothic in the sense I've defined. It's a story about nurturing, about parenting orphans, of course, but it's also about fostering the reader. This double nurturance is established by a tour de force amazing even for Henry James. The first verb of the first sentence and the last verb of the penultimate sentence of the novella are the same -- `held'; moreover, `breathless' occurs in the story's first line and characterizes Miles at the end. `The story has held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless ... . at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was I held.' Holding/breathless thus brackets The Turn of the Screw. The similarity between the story's beginning and end should not obscure, however, a profound difference between them. What `held us ... breathless' initially is a text; Miles dies in the smothering hold of the governess. How do texts and people differ in the way they hold?

This question is my way into James' drama of Gothic nurturance. To study holding - and its perversions, dropping and smothering -- can increase our understanding of the governess by foregrounding the social and domestic forces that produce her. Holding also enables us to see in Miles' death a political valence unnoticed before. Finally, I want to explore how holding is practiced by texts as well as people, and thus how tradition can act as a type of parenting. Before undertaking these explorations, however, I must address briefly an issue announced in James' comments on The Turn of the Screw and debated by critics especially in the last quarter century - the text's indeterminacy. Haggerty summed up the problem of the governess in 1988: `that there's no way to decide her case is a critical commonplace'.(n7)

Obviously things haven't gotten any simpler with the dozens of additional turns of the critical screw since 1988. The issue today is not whether we'll try to force simple unicameral, yes-no answers onto the resistant materials -- are the ghosts real, did the governess murder Miles? -- but rather how adequate we can be in responding to these materials' intricacies. My practice will be insistently heuristic. How might we increase our understanding of, say, the governess' childhood if we attend to data suggesting maternal deficit ... and then consider the possibility of paternal eccentricity ... and of sibling rivalries ... which could be exacerbated by gender stereotyping ...? What can occur is a deepening of sympathy, an increased sensitivity to intricacy, a further humbling of our judgmental proclivity. If we keep in touch with the truth that our best books, like our own lives, are braver and smarter and more generous and promising than we are at most moments of the day, we can read The Turn of the Screw with a readiness to take chances. For example, to ask not what's the matter with the governess but how she got this way will open us to textual intricacies that critics haven't even mentioned, let alone studied. Why is the governess late picking up Miles upon his return from school? Why does Bly (suddenly) have two towers? And what about those gloves of hers?
How People Hold

Holding and its discontents surface in James' initial notebook entry for a story about beset children: `They try and try and try, these evil presences, to get hold of them' (12 January 1895). In the completed story, `hold' and its variants recur at least forty-three times.(n8) When we add in related gestures -- catching, clasping, clinging, clutching, drawing dose, embracing, enfolding and folding, gathering, grabbing, grasping, gripping, having, hugging, keeping a hand on, laying a hand on, letting go, passing a hand or arm into an arm, possessing, pressing, pressuring, putting a hand on, releasing, seizing, shaking, springing upon, staying, sticking to, supporting, taking the arm or hand of, taking in arms or to the breast, touching, throwing oneself upon, thrusting -- the total exceeds the number of pages in the text.(n9) In turn, smothering recurs when the governess contrasts her `small smothered life' at the parsonage with her early days at Bly where for `the first time ... I had known space and air and freedom' (364). Subsequently she `had to smother a kind of howl ... . began to watch them [the children] in a stifled suspense ... . held my breath' (377,379,380); later still she likens her life at Bly to `a day of suffocation' (407).

That this phenomenon of holding/smothering hasn't been much attended to by critics is surprising, not only because of its insistent recurrence in the text but because of Shoshana Felman's pioneering work two decades ago: `How is this hold on meaning at the very heart of the story linked with the turn of the screw of its reading-effect?'(n10) The strength of Felman's work with holding resides in her ability to implicate the reader in the protagonist's desire to possess: `The reading enterprise and the reading-effect turn out to be diametrically opposed: to hold the signifier (or the story's meaning) is in reality to be held by it' (184). Felman's allegory of the signifier is limited by its strengths, however. So intense a commitment to deconstruction occludes not only specific phenomena (such as smothering) but also the more general phenomenon of context. Or rather, contexts. What Henry lames called The Spoils of Poynton -- `a small social and psychological picture' (notebook entry, 24 December 1893) - characterizes also The Turn of the Screw. Holding is a social and a psychological phenomenon whose intricacies are suggested in lames' novella through a comparable intricacy of overdetermined detail. By attending to specificities of pain as they relate to particularities of the governess' unnurturing social and domestic environment, we can understand better why she drops and smothers -- and thereby how her final act accrues political valences that comment back upon the repressive forces which have produced her.

1

I'll begin with the social, and specifically with how power operates in the novella's prologue. Here gender is revealed as one of several factors that are manipulated by patriarchal males intent upon retaining their privileged place in the social hierarchy. How Britain drops and smothers those who most need holding is evident if we explore four sites -- India and the three bachelors.

India is mentioned only once in The Turn of the Screw, and even our profession's intense interest in colonial and especially subaltern issues has generated only one article -- Graham McMaster's essay on India's role in the novella,(n11) lames establishes that the uncle `had been left, by the death of his parents in India, guardian to a small nephew and a small niece, children of a younger military brother, whom he had lost two years before' (353). What were the uncle's parents doing in India? McMaster's suggestion -- the children's grandparents worked in India, prospering enough to eventually purchase Bly but not living long enough to return to England and settle there -- is contradicted by James' previous sentence. Bly is `an old family place in Essex.' I can therefore reframe my question: what were English landed gentry of a certain age doing in India?

Of the many contextual forces operating in The Turn of the Screw, India is among the least accessible, subcontinent as subtext. Taking the details that James provides, I'll offer a scenario different from McMaster's:

1. Given two basic features of British life in the nineteenth century --that inheritance proceeds according to primogeniture and that the burgeoning empire must be staffed and defended -- the uncle's younger brother follows the route of second sons and joins the military. He's sent to India, marries, sires two children, and dies along with his wife.
2. Miles and Flora are especially precious to their grandparents because their older son's frivolous lifestyle suggests that the grandchildren may well be the line's only heirs. The grandparents therefore take no chances about having the orphans shipped back to England; they go themselves to India, and die there before they can bring the `poor chicks' back to the nest.

Immediately I want to repeat what I said above about indeterminacy: there are no definitive answers. My scenario about India attempts to be heuristic, not preclusive. (I can't even prove the younger brother died in India!) My point is to ask what we can see about the governess' life if we view Britain's social workings through an Empire lens.

James seems to be pointing out the costliness of social arrangements. Count the victims. The landed gentry who controlled England when imperial ventures began in the seventeenth century and who were still in control when India was invaded in the eighteenth century are now, in the person of Miles' grandparents, destroyed in the nineteenth century. Et in arcadia ego. Even pastoral Essex isn't safe from the violence of Empire, as their second son learns. This younger brother dies in defense of a system that has both disinherited him through primogeniture and entitled his elder brother to live in the safety he must defend to the death, a safety irresponsible and luxurious. Victims multiply when we look to the soldier's wife. The fact that the mother of Miles and Flora is not even mentioned in the India sentence implicates gender in the working of power relations. Once a wife has provided heirs, she is expendable.

That the will to power which fosters colonial conquest across the globe also determines gender relations at home is crucial to James' commentary on fin de siecle life. The imperial society that doesn't hold well the sons who defend England also neglects the women who repopulate it. More specifically, the dropping that excludes younger sons from inheritance and the smothering that erases woman from the India narrative are acts also experienced by the prologue's most vulnerable characters, the governess and the orphans. Here the agents of power are those three patriarchs, the bachelors. Neither the uncle nor Douglas nor the narrator is affiliated with a wife-mother figure. Critics have registered various intensities of misogyny in these bachelors, beginning of course with the uncle. Rowe notes pointedly that, given the governess's obvious vulnerability -- poor, inexperienced, star-struck-the uncle proceeds in the way most certain of success.(n12) `He put the whole thing to her as a kind of favour, an obligation he should gratefully incur' (353), as though she were the one in power. The violence inherent in such graceful social dealings is suggested syntactically. `He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid' (353). Obviously James could have written: `He inevitably struck her as gallant and splendid.' The difference between the two sentences is also obvious. The comma that makes us pause after `he struck her' emphasizes the violence inherent in gender-inflected class negotiations.

James undermines the uncle -- and Douglas and the narrator -- throughout the prologue. The uncle's rationalizations for abandoning the children, for example, are articulated in ways that evoke hostile reactions in us rather than the exonerating approbation he clearly intends. `The proper place for them being of course the country [as though children couldn't be raised happily in London] ... with the best people he could find to look after them [Quint and Jessel?] .... his own affairs took up all his time [affairs indeed] ... . what else could he have done [be loving rather than self-centered].' That the uncle is treating the children with the same cavalier instrumentality we've seen him use with women is emphasized not only by his association with Jane Eyre's Rochester (who abuses his wife and virtually ignores his illegitimate child) but also by his repetition of the word `awkward': `She [Jessel] had done for them [the children] quite beautifully -- she was a most respectable person -till her death, the great awkwardness of which had, precisely, left no alternative but the school for little Miles.' (354) I share Bruce Robbins' irritation:

Not only is there no expression of sympathy or other comment on the death, as one might have expected, but the speaker does not even consider the death important enough to bring the sentence to a close, thereby leaving a decent interval before returning to business. Instead the sentence rushes on to another subordinate clause. (Significantly, the death itself is in a subordinate clause ...) (n13)

The syntax remains open because there's no end to patriarchal instrumentality. `Awkward' is how the children's very existence strikes the uncle: `the awkward thing was that they had practically no other relations' (353). That such callousness to blood relatives can mask a still more dire inclination -- to deal with the awkwardness by extirpating it -- is suggested by an allusion. When the uncle sends the children down from London to `the other house' (353), he inadvertently introduces the title of James' 1896 murder story. The victim killed in The Other House is a child.

So, although I agree with Heath Moon about the uncle being `a good-for-nothing gentleman of leisure', I can't agree that `we are lulled into accepting the good-for-nothing gentleman of leisure as a donnee of the plot.(n14) I feel the prologue makes readers feel forcefully James' criticism of the uncle. In turn, I see James' social commentary somewhat differently from Moon: not that `the servants have appropriated this [the family members'] function as guardians' (25) but that parental functions have defaulted to the servants through the uncle's insouciance. At stake in the distinction are the emotions that James is generating. That `the absence of the master, like the weakening of the superego, allows for the energies below stairs to surge upward, subverting ...' (26) sounds too insurrectionist to me, as though James were a Roman fearful of slave uprisings. Jessel as governess and Quint as valet are not `below stairs' employees, and Mrs Grose (who is one) is anything but subversive. Moreover, the uncle visited Bly regularly while Quint and Jessel coupled there. And so, although it's probable that James as a social conservative felt `anxieties over the loss of vitality and social hegemony of the English upper classes' (27), I believe that his chief affect in The Turn of the Screw is empathic outrage, a championing of `the helpless plasticity of childhood that isn't dear or sacred to some body'.(n15) The failure of British upper class authority in the 1840s, the dropping and endangering of precious heirs, reenacts the James family scenario of the 1840s where children of privilege were let down and endangered again and again by a father readier to indulge in the privileges of patriarchy than to assume its responsibilities. This was a scenario for which his son never forgave him.(n16)

How do Douglas and the narrator respond to the uncle? `One could easily fix his type; it never, happily, dies out' (353). These elegant bachelors are birds of a feather. Like the uncle, Douglas and the narrator are hostile to women. The narrator's relief that `the departing ladies who had said they would stay didn't, of course, thank heaven, stay' (352) does more than indicate misogyny; it indicates that Douglas' prior outburst -- `"Isn't anybody going?" It was almost the tone of hope' (351) - was covertly gendered. Douglas has trouble with women. That he is not consistently the `discrete, intelligent, and perceptive' fellow eulogized by John J. Allen is indicated by his inability -- on four occasions -- to tell the truth where governesses are concerned.(n17) Most egregious is his double gaff regarding Jessel: `She was a most respectable person ... . "That [how she died] will come out"' (354). On the one hand, the manuscript never does establish how Jessel died (suicide? childbed? botched abortion?); on the other hand, the manuscript establishes unambiguously that `respectable' she was not. Why does Douglas open himself to inevitable exposure? Protesting too much about Jessel's respectability both evokes immediate skepticism in his auditors (`and what did the former governess die of? -- of so much respectability?') and assures eventual unmasking by the narrative (`"He [Quint] did what he wished." ... "It must have been also what she wished"' (384)). Is Douglas simply squeamish about a lady's honor? Or is female eros something he cannot face? Or is he desperate to protect his fellow patriarch, the uncle, by denying the irresponsibility manifest in commending innocent children to a `fallen' woman? Or all three?

Questions multiply when Douglas discusses the new governess. `"Who was it she in love with?" ... "The story won't tell," said Douglas, "not in any literal, vulgar way"' (351). This is the flip side of his misstatement about Jessel's death. The manuscript establishes unambiguously whom the new governess was in love with. She immediately confesses to being `"carried away in London!"' (357), and later refers ironically to `"my slighted charms'" (403). In fact, two nights later in the prologue when the narrator, discussing `the beauty of her passion', refers expressly to `the seduction exercised by the splendid young man', Douglas admits, `It was the beauty of it' (354). Why then does he pretend that the story won't tell? Is `vulgar' the key? Must any suggestion of eros be denied, even at the risk of overstatement? Can Douglas acknowledge `her passion' only when it is mantled in `the beauty' of unfulfillment (`she saw him only twice' (354))? A different kind of denial is implicit in Douglas' characterization of the governess as `the youngest of several daughters of a poor country parson' (352). Many critics have echoed this account, but Douglas knows, and the critics should remember, what the governess establishes: `I had had brothers myself' (391). Why does Douglas erase the brothers from her life? Is he made jealous by her including herself among `the slavish idolaters of little boys' (391)? Is his purifying idealization of the governess again jeopardized, this time because the presence of young men in the parsonage makes uncomfortably probable the familiarities of close quarters?

As with the perennial questions about ghosts and murder at Bly, my point about Douglas' misstatements is not that we can explain them. We can, however, use them to explore how patriarchs manage gender relations. `"She mentioned to me that, when, for a moment disburdened, delighted, he held her hand, thanking her for the sacrifice, she already felt rewarded." "But was that all her reward?" one of the ladies asked' (355). No wonder Douglas wants the ladies to leave. Bell defends him by dismissing the questioning lady as someone `who has read too many governess novels' (103), but I believe she's touched a nerve. Momentary hand-holding is hardly an adequate reward for all that the uncle gains and all that the young woman will endure. Douglas' inability or disinclination to see this indicates that he, like the uncle, envisions the governess chiefly in terms of services rendered. Nameless, she has only the identity of her function. Patriarchal holding is an act of dropping.

Moreover, idealization is smothering. Allen's claim that `Douglas's forty-year silence fosters the assumption that he is reasonably detached' (76) seems to me to have it backwards. Douglas is unreasonably attached. His life-long crush on the governess constitutes apparently his sole moment of `love'. He surely never marries. Has an idealizing erasure of her eros allowed a romantic sublimation of his own? If so, the governess has been used to service him no less than she has the uncle. `What is your title?' (355) asks the same lady who questioned the governess's reward. Douglas' answer, `I haven't one', admits much more than that he hasn't named the manuscript. Felman's explanation -- `he has not title to that narrative which is not his own' (127) -- accounts for the textual but not for the gendered aspect of the moment. Douglas has no title to speak about the governess because he as a patriarch cannot comprehend her plight. Which, of course, hasn't prevented him from speaking about her at length.

Douglas' misogyny reveals a homoerotic inflection when we look to his relations with the narrator. Or rather, it does so if we assume the narrator is male. Some critics argue for female, and others find the issue undecidable. I must therefore postpone the issue of homoerotism and address the prior question: male or female? Let's see what we gain by positing a male narrator who is gendered both masculine and feminine in The Turn of the Screw.

First, masculine. The narrator joins Douglas in a proprietary relationship with the governess that replicates the uncle's. Consider the transmission of her text: her actions at Bly are conveyed to Douglas first orally and then on paper at her death; he keeps her story in his locked drawer until he reads it to the Christmas group; years later he gives it to the narrator who retains the manuscript (352), sending a copy to the printer. Christine Brooke-Rose rightly questions `this apparently gratuitous recopying of the text by the I-narrator (for there is no plausible reason why he should not have given us the original as given to Douglas)'.(n18) `Plausible' isn't the half of it. Copying the manuscript is implausible, is counterproductive, insofar as publication is concerned. Even if the narrator transcribes the governess-Douglas text in order to guard against the only copy getting lost at the printers, a good editor would keep hold of the transcription and use the original as the printer's text, so that any errors made in transcription would not be passed on to readers. In turn, although Brooke-Rose's explanation (`[the copying] further emphasizes the loss of origin' (173)) is useful at the metatextual level, I want to stay focused on the narrator. If we assume that no act is considered illogical by its agent at the moment of perpetration, the illogic of the counterproductive copying must have seemed to the narrator productive at some other level. Sending a copy of the story to the printer assures that the narrator retains unbroken possession of the governess' manuscript -- and thus continuity. The continuity is first and foremost with Douglas (`I can see Douglas there before the fire' (349), years later), and more generally with patriarchy's ideals. The network of male relations is seamless in the prologue, since the narrator has outlived all the story's participants and conveys to us his unqualified approval of the uncle as a type that happily never dies out. Yet dying out is precisely at issue. To see the uncle as a timeless, transhistorical type is to practice denial: terrific changes are visiting England by the time that the narrator is preparing the manuscript for publication, changes generated in part by the growth and ordeals of empire. To insist upon the uncle as a type happily eternal shows how intensely the narrator needs to believe in the continuity of traditional values and ideals.

It shows, as well, the price(s) paid for patriarchal continuity. On the one hand, holding and smothering: males are held in affiliative perpetuity by the act of erasing the female after appropriating her `life'. On the other hand, there's a second, paradoxical price. The very act of rendering service to patriarchy puts the narrator in the `feminine' position. Wholehearted service is, after all, the specialty of the governess. How assiduously the narrator attends upon Douglas throughout the prologue has not been noted by critics. `It was to me in particular that he appeared to propound this -- appeared almost to appeal for aid' (350). The narrator, having fixed on Douglas since the initial paragraph (`I saw he was not following. This I took for a signal ... .'), proceeds immediately to his aid. `I adjured him ... then I asked him ... .' (350). The narrator's aid from here on resembles resuscitation. When memories of the governess's infatuation cause Douglas to lapse into silence, the narrator restarts the discussion by switching to less volatile, technical matters (`you'll receive the packet Thursday morning?'). And Douglas is going again, at least until the resurfacing of the governess' infatuation causes him to once more falter: `"... she engaged." And Douglas, with this, made a pause that, for the benefit of the company, made me throw in -- "The moral of which was of course ..."' (354). It's for the benefit of Douglas that the narrator interposes, of course, as it is when Douglas falters again, this time because he's broached the one topic touchier than that of the governess' infatuation, the uncle's irresponsibility. `"... his main condition." "Which was -- ?" "That she never trouble him"' (354). Douglas' last lack, a title for the narrative, is also supplied by the narrator: `O, I have [one]!' (355).

More is at stake here than simply the functioning of a typical Jamesian ficelle. By actively aiding Douglas, the narrator is rewarded with affiliation. `The others resented postponement, but it was just his scruples that charmed me' (350). Opposing the others as a way of endearing himself to Douglas draws the narrator into the prologue's tensest moment. After Douglas has answered the question about Jessel's respectability with the preemptory `don't anticipate' and has immediately paid for his imperative with the repost `excuse me -- I thought that was just what you are doing', the narrator gets Douglas off the hook by redirecting the conversation to the ostensibly safer topic of the new governess. His gambit -- `"In her successor's place," I suggested, "I should have wished to hear if the office brought with it --"' -- leaves the syntax open in order to invite a reply from Douglas: `Necessary danger to life?' The point is not simply that `Douglas completed my thought' but that the narrator has created a dramatic situation that facilitates male conjunction. By each of them contributing half of the sentence, the men enact their version of the complementarity that constituted -- in the ideology of Complementary Spheres -- the model for Victorian wedlock.

Thus the homoerotic re-enters my analysis. I agree with critics who sense in the narrator's exchanges with Douglas `a curious, provocative intimacy ... a discrete erotic connection'.(n19) Furthermore, I believe that Douglas' name is resonant in this connection. While Oscar Cargill looks to the gallant Douglas of Henry IV,, Part I, I believe James' audience of the later 1890s was likelier to associate the name Douglas with a principal in the most infamous trial of the century -- Alfred Lord Douglas.(n20) I must add, however, that the homoerotic features of the narrator's bond with his Douglas do not, for me, function to affiliate him with Oscar Wilde. The narrator's chief desire seems to be not for erotic release but for affiliative confirmation, the homosocial more than the homosexual.

Which returns me to the narrator as feminine. In the uncle's world, as in all patriarchies, being `one of us' means being not one of them. To be held you have to drop. But since what women do is serve and what the narrator does is serve, he must make damn sure to distinguish himself from them. Thus his misogyny reveals the defensiveness that the uncle hides quite carefully and that Douglas shows only under duress. `He took no notice of her; he looked at me' (350). This feels to me less like a gay come-on than like affiliative reassurance, as does their pas de deux:

He continued to fix me. "You'll easily judge," he repeated: "you will" I fixed him too. "I see. She was in love." He laughed for the first time. "You are acute." (351)

A cutie, maybe. But the homoerotic seems to me secondary here to the need to fix identities by the mutual exclusion of others. Douglas confirms the narrator's superior acuity; the narrator provides undeviating aid. That this male bond is also oppositional, and hence misogynistic, is confirmed near the end of the scene when Douglas, stung by the lady's question about the governess's reward, can only reply by repeating, `"She never saw him again" "Oh,' said the lady; which as our friend immediately left us again, was the only other word of importance contributed to the subject' (355). The phrase `our friend' is deployed to smooth over the tenseness by insisting we're all one big happy family, but what is the tone of `importance'? I find the lady's `Oh' important because it archly highlights for me Douglas' failure here (is he an `o', a zero?). But I can't believe that the narrator who's aided Douglas so assiduously shares my take on the lady. Sarcasm seems to me more likely the tone of his `importance', since dismissing her as unimportant would confirm his bond with patriarchy by further separating both men from ladies.

Denial will not suffice, however. As Douglas protests too much about Jessel's respectability, the narrator's attempt to distinguish himself from the ladies calls attention to the ways he resembles them - not simply because he too serves patriarchy but because he, like most of the women in the audience, lacks profundity of vision.

"Nothing at all that I know touches it [the governess' story, Douglas says]." "For sheer terror?" I remember asking. He seemed to say it was not so simple as that ... . "For dreadful -- dreadfulness" (350).

Especially in contrast with the banal conventionality of the narrator's `sheer terror', Douglas' inarticulateness here is a mark of probity: he cannot express the ineffable, but he can feel it. The narrator's shallowness is emphasized by his immediately making another mistake --`"Well then," I said, "just sit right down and begin"' -- and receiving another correction, `"I can't begin"' (350). A third correction results from his attempt to one-up Mrs Griffin when she asks `"who was it she was in love with?" "The tale will tell," I took it upon myself to reply' (351). This attempt to speak for Douglas and thus to be one with him evokes reproof (`"the story won't tell"'), thus justifying Mrs Griffin's question and locating the narrator tellingly. Mrs Griffin is the prologue's canniest woman. Unequal to her, the narrator settles in with the prologue's choric ladies who seek nothing more from Douglas' tale than the safe scare provided by the traditional Christmas crawler. `"The outbreak [of Douglas' long-delayed tale]" I returned, "will make a tremendous occasion of Thursday night"; and everyone agreed with me' (352). Despite Douglas' attempts at education, `returned' is what the narrator has done -- to the mindset of `everyone', to an expectation of the "tremendous" rather than an appreciation of the dreadful tangles of the heart that Douglas has pointed toward. Nor do matters improve by Thursday night. `We let him alone till after dinner, till such an hour of the evening, in fact, as might best accord with the kind of emotion on which our hopes were fixed' (352). Fixed indeed. Despite all his affiliative efforts, the narrator remains ultimately true to `our' allegiance to the conventional and the banal.

Is this why `Douglas looked at me, but as if, instead of me, he saw what he spoke of. "For general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain"' (350)? Terry Heller is the only critic to face up to this, the most disturbing moment in the prologue. Associating the narrator here with the woman who mindlessly cries `delicious!', Heller rightly defines the narrator's gaff as `her first error of reading' and concludes that `to misread ... is to become the horror Douglas associates with the governess' story.'(n21) Heller's decision to consider the narrator female strengthens his case for an affiliation with the `delicious!' woman. But the price seems to me high. I believe that affiliation with the choric women can gender the narrator feminine without requiring that the narrator's sex be female. Granted the question can never be answered definitively, think what's lost by making the narrator female. The manuscript ending up in `her' hands would mean that the governess' narrative has been returned to woman. No matter how sympathetic to patriarchy the female narrator would, like the governess, be, she, like the governess, can never be an old boy to the degree that a male narrator would. At stake is the focus of James' social criticism. If the male narrator is masculine in his willingness to appropriate the Other and feminine in both his willingness to serve and his `ladyish' insensitivity to the unconventional dreadfulness of Douglas' tale, then he embodies the limitations of patriarchy -- the acquisitiveness and the dependency -- as no woman could.

That these limitations constitute a strong indictment of masculinity is my chief point. The social world of the governess cannot hold her. Authority as manifest in the uncle is appropriative, irresponsible, and disingenuous; in Douglas, it's appropriative, defensive, and rhetorically slippery; in the narrator, it's appropriative, insecure, and sedulous. What is the governess to do? `Presenting herself, for judgment ...' Who speaks these words about her arrival at Harley Street (352)? Kevin Murphy attempts to distinguish Douglas from the narrator (the narrator's the one who's `sweet on' the uncle, adding the `happily never does out' clause after Douglas simply calls the uncle `a gentleman ... `(n22), but I believe such an effort is hopeless. Douglas and the narrator speak with one voice in the narrative because they share -- and share with the uncle whose indirect discourse they blend into their account -- a single vision. `Presenting herself for judgment' is how all three bachelors see the governess -- abject. But does she see herself any differently? At least on the conscious level? The governess is doing more in Harley Street than applying for a job; she's seeking certification of her worth. She's part of patriarchy because what else is there? What is she to do? Her best, in a very limited and limiting situation.

Another question is how she feels about all this. Here's where the governess differs radically from the bachelors, I believe. However she agrees with and accedes to them on the conscious level, unconsciously the coercion that she cannot not feel in the uncle's job offer and hand-holding will generate rage. As James feels outrage on behalf of the children, she will feel outrage on behalf of herself. The patriarchal will to power that has co-opted India, subordinated younger sons, and jeopardized orphans has restricted severely the governess' life. The question is how she'll express her anger. Since she can't acknowledge, let alone get at, the uncle or Douglas (or the narrator), what is she to do?

2

Before we can answer this question, we must, in effect, regress. The young woman who appears at Bly has been affected not only by Harley Street patriarchy but by years of prior upbringing. Inevitably, the way she responds to Harley Street is determined by that upbringing. James' social tale has a psychological, domestic component because the governess emerges into professional life only in her twentieth year. Her psyche has been profoundly shaped by the Hampshire parsonage, so how she raises Miles and Flora will depend substantially upon that upbringing.

Holding proves as important in the domestic sphere as it has in the social. Rather than deploying an abstractly theorized, highly generalized model of child development such as Lacan's, I believe a psychoanalytic orientation that attends to the intricacies of nurturing, to the fact that parenting differs from family to family and even from child to child within a family, is best suited to James' novella where finely specified, intricately overdetermined details suggest narratives that never find full articulation. Holding is central to the work of a post-Freudian theorist who has influenced Anglo-American clinical practice profoundly. D.W. Winnicott's famous epigram, `there's no such thing as an infant' sums up his core belief that `the infant and the maternal care together form a unit .... The inherent potential of an infant cannot become an infant unless linked to maternal care'.(n23) Thus, unlike Lacan, Winnicott concentrates on the specificities of parenting, on the way a particular infant's needs do and do not match up with the needs and instincts and skills and educability of particular parents. Winnicott's notion of `good enough mothering' has proven so useful clinically because it insists upon the variables involved in each child's maturation.

Technically, Winnicott restricts the term `holding' to the first stage of the parenting process, before `(b) Mother and Infant living together. (c) Father, mother, and infant, all three living together' (43). Winnicott is restrictive here because he wants to mark a difference in parent-child relations. When `mother and infant separate' in stage two,

it is as if she now realizes that the infant no longer expects the condition in which there is an almost magical understanding [on her part] of [the baby's] need. The mother seems to know that the infant has a new capacity, that of giving a signal so that she can be guided towards meeting the infant's needs (50).

Though it is technically over at this point for Winnicott, holding in the more general sense of attentiveness-to-needs remains basic to his view of maturation. Reiterating his insistence that `the infant has to give a signal', Winnicott adds, we find this subtlety appearing clearly in the transference in our analytic work. It is very important, except when the patient is regressed to earliest infancy and to a state of merging, that the analyst shall not know the answers except in so far as the patient gives the clues (50).

Attending to the clues constitutes holding, in so far as heeding signals is a prerequisite to providing what's truly needed by the other. Today's Support Groups indicate in their very titles what we all know: holding is crucial so long as there is life. How adequately our needs are met --and thus how successfully we develop -- will be affected at every stage by what Winnicott calls the `facilitating environment'.

How facilitating was the governess' domestic environment? Was the holding adapted to her developing needs? How empathically were her clues heeded? In turn, what signals can we readers attend to? We might begin by acknowledging that the governess herself won't be much help with our questions. She has trouble with beginnings. Critics tend to agree that what she calls in the first line of her narration `the whole beginning' is no such thing. On the one hand, the beginning of her engagement with Bly -- her exchanges with the uncle -- have already been provided by Douglas and are nowhere reproduced in her narrative. On the other hand, her life before Harley Street enters only in brief surfacings later on. We thus never comprehend her `whole' beginning. Her word `whole' functions in place of a complete narrative, constitutes in fact a denial of the absence of such a narrative, a repression of repression. Beidler's formalist account of this absence -- `Her narrative simply does not begin, and it cannot: a beginning would violate the form'(n24) -- seems problematic, since `form' is anything that Henry James wants to build. I believe James creates an incomplete beginning because he wants to present a young woman who cannot get in touch with her beginnings. Her block on narration is psychological, a lack reflected in the tale's form, a denial enacted formally. What doesn't the governess know about her origins and what does she fear about them? To explore these questions, we readers need to take the clues we're given and construct what might have been the governess's past -- in order to comprehend better what seems to be her present.

Thirty years ago, Thomas Mabry Cranfill and Robert Lanier Clark, Jr, quoting Douglas' characterization of the governess as `the youngest of several daughters of a poor country parson', went on to observe: `These words provide an interesting if brief revelation of her background that might invite the attentive reader to all sorts of speculation' (22-23). They might, but they have not. Paula Morantz Cohen has gone so far as to state that the governess `has no history'.(n25) Virtually no one, however `attentive' to other features of The Turn of the Screw, has explored the relationship between the governess' past and her behavior at Bly. Cranfill and Clark did speculate briefly about this

youngest of several daughters. Was she doomed perpetually to wear clothes handed down from elder sisters? ... Did she spend her girlhood in genteel poverty surrounded by the countrified and the narrow? ... As she savors the baronial appointments [of her bedroom at Bly], one guesses that the draperies at the scant parsonage were neither full nor figured and that she shared a bed with several of her sisters, with whom she took turns at the mirror. (23-24,24)

Cranfill and Clark then quote the only critic who has risked serious speculation about the impact of the governess's homelife. Goddard, attending to the characterization of the parson/father (in the 1898 edition) as `eccentric', finds him `of a psychically unbalanced nature; he may, indeed, even have been insane' (26). This seems to me unwarranted, as it did to Cranfill and Clark. They offered a more moderate conclusion: `Everyone must agree that being reared by such a poor country parson -- whether given to eccentricities or whims -- could have done little to stabilize his daughter's psyche.' At issue for me is how we readers can use textual data to explore the shaping influence of the parsonage. First, what do we know?

They [Miles and Flora] were in possession of everything that had ever happened to me, had had, with every circumstance the story of my smallest adventures and those of my brothers and sisters and of the cat and the dog at home, as well as the many particulars of the whimsical bent of my father, of the furniture and arrangement of our house and of the conversation of the old women of our village ... . I was invited --with no visible connection -- to repeat afresh Goody Gosling's celebrated mot or to confirm the details already supplied as to the cleverness of the vicarage pony. (404)

What strikes me most here is what's not here. Father, brothers, sisters, pets ... where is mother? This daughter never mentions her mother, though she tells Miles and Flora `everything'. Why? Is repression so complete that the daughter `forgets' to mention someone as important as a mother? Is anger so intense (because she like many children sees the parent's death as an abandonment?) or is guilt so pervasive (did the mother die delivering this last child?) that the daughter cannot risk taking up the subject of maternal absence? How much mourning can the governess have accomplished?

James' text makes sure we cannot answer the factual questions it has evoked about the mother, but we are allowed some indication of how her absence affected her daughter. Notice, for instance, that a biographical sketch which omits mother includes multiple mother-surrogates. Does the daughter's mention of `the conversation of the old women of our village' indicate that she sought from these figures the maternal nurturance she lacked at home? Was Goody Gosling special in this regard? (If I'm unkind enough to doubt that Goody's `celebrated mot' ranks with those of Rochfoucault -- a Gosling is, after all, a goose -- I am nonetheless touched by the motherless daughter's clinging to some spark of liveliness from a maternal figure.) In turn, the absence of mother helps explain the intensity of the governess's bond with Mrs Grose. `There immediately appeared at the door [of Bly], with a little girl in her hand, a civil person... .' (355). Did it seem like a miracle, like a fairy tale come true, that the motherless daughter who leaves a `scant home' (355) finds waiting at Bly what she's always lacked, a kindly maternal person holding onto a little girl? More wonderful still, Mrs Grose has had no child herself, so each woman can fill a vacancy in the other's life.

As the narrative proceeds, many of the most benign moments of holding occur between these two. Early on, Mrs Grose pledges

`I'll stand by you. We'll see it out.' `We'll see it out!' I ardently echoed, giving her my hand to make it a vow. She held me there a moment. (363)

This echo of reciprocation leads the women to kiss and embrace `like sisters', but as sorrows intensify they move on to a more expressly mother-child relation: `She took me to her motherly breast and my lamentation overflowed' (384). Soon the governess replaces not only the daughter whom Mrs Grose never had but also the orphans whom she'd initially cared for. `[Since] our young things could, after all, look after themselves, she addressed her greatest solicitude to the sad case presented by their instructress' (397). The idealized status of Mrs Grose is crystallized in the governess's subsequent tableau.

Amid the smell of the late-baked bread, but with the place all swept and garnished, I found her sitting in pained placidity before the fire. So I see her still, so I see her best: facing the flame from her straight chair in the dusky, shining room, a large clean image of the `put away' -- of drawers closed and locked and rest without remedy. (413-14)

Given the maternal qualities here, the warmth and cleanliness, the association with oral satisfactions, the probity of facing life's fires straight on, the reliability of being right at the hearth where mother should be: this picture's intensity suggests we're seeing all that the governess has never experienced and has always craved. Something else is suggested as well, however.

The wish-fulfillment element of the tableau fits oddly with the almost carceral quality of the last images. After `all swept and garnished' establishes the tidied-up aspect of the scene, why does the governess return to and emphasize with quotation marks `the "put away"'? Why stress that the drawers are `closed and locked'? Does the governess see Mrs Grose's domesticity resisting a chaos that seems imminent and eminently threatening to the motherless daughter? Does order for the governess entail the vigilant repression of the disorder that may well have marked the household of a whimsical widower? (Her initial characterization of her childhood listed no housekeeper among the mother-surrogates.) Certainly any hints of precariousness in the idealized tableau prove prophetic. When Flora's rage explodes,

she hugged Mrs Grose more closely .... `Take me away, take me away --oh, take me away from her!' `From me,' I panted. `From you -- from you!' she cried. Even Mrs Grose looked across at me dismayed. (428)

The governess is dropped terribly here. Flora, whom she's depended upon, has not only repudiated her but clings now to Mrs Grose. In turn, her mother surrogate will on the morrow reverse the fairy-tale arrival scene and leave Bly with the (other) little girl. You can lock up the kitchen drawers but you can't control the front door.

You also can't compete successfully against other little girls. Flora as rival is all the more devastating because she may well be reenacting with Mrs Grose what the governess experienced in childhood. Competition for a limited supply of attention and affection at the parsonage seems likely. That the youngest daughter had to fight hard against elder sisters is suggested by her gendered competitiveness in adulthood, for she later delights in the express fantasy of the master seeing `that I could succeed where many another girl might have failed' (378). That the governess experienced herself as underappreciated at home seems especially likely because her siblings were not all female.

I had had brothers myself, and it was no revelation to me that little girls could be slavish idolaters of little boys. What surpassed everything was that there was a little boy in the world [Miles] who would have for the inferior age, sex, and intelligence [Flora] so fine a consideration. (391)

So disparaged a view of the feminine did not derive exclusively from the parsonage, of course. But clearly the governess' upbringing did little to resist traditional stereotyping. Her idolization of her brothers surfaces not only in her praise for Miles but in the disparagement of Flora that recurs in The Turn of the Screw. Though initially the governess expresses surprise at the uncle's slighting of Flora (356), she makes no murmur when Mrs Grose immediately repeats the process.

`Oh Miss, [Miles is] most remarkable. If you think well of this one [Flora]... . You will be carried away by the little gentleman.' (357)

Class barriers fall when solidarity is required on behalf of the male stereotype. `"You mean that a boy who never is --"', the governess asks Mrs Grose about Miles being bad occasionally, `"Is no boy for me!" I held her tighter. "You like them with the spirit to be naughty? ... So do I!"' (361).

The slavish idolater of little boys proves predictably docile with authoritative men. As `Miles's whole title to independence, the rights of his sex and situation' means that `if he had suddenly struck for freedom I would have had nothing to say' (408), so with his uncle the governess adds a weight of irony to her tone but repeats the basic message. `The way in which a man pays his highest tribute to a woman is apt to be but by the more festal celebration of one of the sacred laws of his comfort' (407). The present thus reenacts the past. When the governess cannot imagine herself as special in the uncle's eyes -- `"He seems to like us young and pretty"' (361) -- she sounds like a daughter in a family that prioritized sons and like the one-more sister who felt indistinguishable from the rest. She also sounds like the youngest sibling who could never get enough attention when she says `"Oh, I've no pretension... . to being the only one"' of the uncle's conquests (357-58). Moreover, she reenacts with Miles and Flora this core scenario of never being chosen. When she sees Miles staring up at the tower from which she's watching him (397), she assumes that he can't be looking at her, that there must be a man, probably Quint, above her who warrants the attention. (In fact Miles is staring at Flora on the floor below!) This scene, in turn, replicates her reaction to Quint's second visitation: `There came to me that added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come there. He had come for someone else' (370). She sounds positively excluded when she insists that the ghosts are `addressing to their younger victims some yet more infernal message or more vivid image than they had thought good enough for myself' (406).

This sense of not being good enough goes back ultimately to the whimsical father. Critics are persuasive when they speculate that this cleric is the source of the governess' tendency to see life as a Manichaean struggle between Good and Evil. Dennis Grunes, however, takes a different line: `The governess herself has committed the crime she projects onto her charges. Has she not gone the independent route? ... By leaving her father, an apparent widower, she has deprived him of a woman's help around the parsonage.'(n26) This feels to me like blaming the victim. Does the governess ever express guilt over `desertion' (228)? I believe she's damaged not by leaving home but by having lived there. Crucial in this regard, of course, are the `disturbing letters from home, where things were not going well' (369). Bell suggests `the news from home is economic' (101). That money is part of the problem is surely possible, but the text feels overdetermined to me here. For one thing, what does financial trouble mean? Since there are sons in this family, and since they must be older than their baby sister who's twenty, why aren't they helping out their poor father? Are they themselves unable to work, and what would this mean? Or have they cut ties with home, and for what reason(s)? In turn, what about the elder sisters? Are none of them married and thus able to help out? Do none work and send money back? And what does this say about their lives? Another line of speculation is triggered by the fact that the letters are multiple. Several correspondents could of course be singing the same sad song of poverty, but the multiplicity of writers may indicate that the problems at home are manifold and thus that damage has been done to more than just the youngest sibling. `Whimsical', like `eccentric' in the 1898 text, points to instability at the center of the household, especially since the governess admits to `many particulars' regarding her father's behavior. Rather than accepting Cranfill and Clark's association of whimsicality with severity and sternness (26,28), I feel the governess suffers not only from doctrinaire moralism but also from its opposite. Whimsical/eccentric suggest to me the random vagaries of a father whose household couldn't hold. Dropping and smothering seem to have ensued. On the one hand, did the widower find himself with too many children to hold them all, dropping hardest the last arrival? This daughter, on the other hand, calls her small life `smothered.' Did she feel stifled by her siblings' competitiveness as well as her father's orthodoxy? In turn, the governess couldn't resist this patriarch any better than she can the uncle, since her father was hallowed not only as paterfamilias but also as Father, as Shepherd of his flock, God's agent in the land. Moreover, as `whimsical' he may have seemed sufficiently vulnerable in his eccentricities, sufficiently childlike himself, that his daughter felt she couldn't risk expressing her frustrations and her needs. What could she do?

3

Having explored how domestic and social environments malfunction, how holding becomes dropping and smothering, we can now focus on the young woman who arrives at Bly. `There had been a moment [during her first night] when I believed I recognized, faint and far, the cry of a child; there had been another when I found myself just consciously starting as at the passage, before my door, of a light Footstep' (356-57). Is there a literal explanation for this data? The crying child can't be Miles, who's still away at school. Flora, sleeping with Mrs Grose below stairs, could probably not be heard by the governess two floors above, and, more probably still, would not be crying, since she seems happy with Mrs Grose. This, in turn, would make it unlikely that the sound of a footfall in the corridor is caused by Flora coming up to visit the new governess (`light' would rule out Mrs Grose's footfall in a corridor where even the governess sounds like the cavalry (416)). We're left with the young woman herself. Is she hearing her child within, the motherless youngest girl crying unheeded in the parsonage night? In turn, since Bly is a dream come true, does she engage in a wish-fulfillment and project what the parsonage failed to provide -- mother coming light and quick to hold the frightened daughter? Certainly we can say about her psychological state as a whole what Grunes says about her letters: `the young woman has brought her troubles with her' (227).

Let's list the troubles. A capacity for self-knowledge - `I recognized ... I found myself' -- has apparently not been encouraged at home, for the governess on her first night at Bly cannot go on to recognize who the child is and thereby find herself in the fantasy. Instead, repression kicks in immediately, as negatives multiply defensively. `These fantasies were not marked enough not to be thrown off' (357). Unchecked by self-scrutiny, the projective proclivity that the governess demonstrates here will leave her prey to ghostly visions soon enough. Second, she seems to have problems inter-personally as well as intra-personally. `"I had then to come back [to the house] to see a friend." She [Mrs Grose] showed her surprise. "A friend - you ?"' (414). The governess' reply is so lame -- `Oh yes, I have a couple' -- and the evidence for friends so slight (one reference to `friends' (404); no visitors; no letters mentioned except those from `home') that I almost wonder if the `couple' is Quint and Jessel.

For certain, the governess' capacity for interpersonal relationships is crucial to her holding of Miles and Flora. In addition to physical embraces, the form of holding that's most in evidence in The Turn of the Screw is one that has received prominent attention in post-Freudian psychoanalysis: mirroring. Critics of James' novella have been influenced almost exclusively by a single theory of mirroring, Jacques Lacan's le stade du miroir. At its best, Lacanian criticism has increased our understanding of the governess. Her moment in the cheval glasses -- `for the first time, I could see myself from head to foot' (356) -- is convincingly related by Brooke-Rose to the Lacanian moment where the child escapes fragmentation and sees herself whole for the first time. Beth Newman manages not only to utilize Lacan effectively in her discussion of `fixing' but also to move beyond his limitations in two ways. She recognizes that the gaze `can in some circumstances be pleasurable -- even sustaining and necessary', and she engages historical context by noting `the way gender relations in the nineteenth century were structured around the gaze, and by a contradiction that inhabited the definition of (middle-class) femininity'.(n27)

What seems to me limiting about these strong studies is that they do not account for the specificities of James' narrative, in particular for a trauma as severe as the governess's. Brooke-Rose seems hampered by Lacan's essentialism. Since we all go through a mirror phase which alienates each of us from our `selves', what makes the governess so extremely neurotic? Why does controlling her desires for sex and power prove so difficult that she ends up seeing ghosts and killing Miles? Newman's move out to `history' seems troubled in a related way. Since all governesses, and in fact almost all Victorian women of the middle class, were `caught between two definitions of ideal femininity -- one valuing the inconspicuous but vigilant woman, the other representing the desirable woman as an object of visual pleasure' (61), what brings this particular governess to the verge of psychosis?

To explore the governess's bizarre behavior, I will look to a different view of seeing, to theories grounded in the specificities of particular mirroring situations. For Lacan, self-alienation is inherent in human being. The very fact that we're mirrored by someone or something means that we're by definition alienated from the wholeness and identity conferred from outside. Lacan is anything but clear about the role of individual agency in mirroring. What difference does the quality of our particular mirrorers make? This question seems especially relevant to literary criticism, since fiction's narratives dramatize specific situations. A promising approach to the question is offered by the less philosophically-oriented, more clinically-based theories of mirroring developed in Britain by Winnicott and in America by Heinz Kohut.

We've already seen how Winnicott evaluates nurturing in terms of the specific fit between holder and held. With mirroring, his famous notion of `the gleam in the mother's eye' makes visual nurturance a matter of the individual case. Winnicott acknowledges that `Jacques Lacan's paper "Le Stade du Miroir" (1949) has influenced me. ... However, Lacan does not think of the mirror in terms of the mother's face in the way that I wish to'.(n28) Unlike Lacan for whom the gaze is alienating by definition, Winnicott believes that alienation occurs in proportion to the malfunctioning of the individual environment. He distinguishes insufficient and good-enough mirroring by contrasting `the case of the baby whose mother reflects her own mood, or worse still, the rigidity of her own defenses' and the nurturing `mother [who] is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there' (112). In other words, the fact that we find out who we are by finding ourselves in others does not necessitate self-alienation. And as with our need for holding, our need for mirroring lasts as long as life. Kohut agrees.(n29) His theorizing proceeds from the fact that babies need love of two types. On the one hand, parents must mirror back, must confirm unqualifiedly, the child's archaic grandiosity; on the other hand, parents must be idealizable, must model in their own lives the possibility of the child's success later on.

The type of mirroring described by Kohut and Winnicott is what characters demonstrate a need for in The Turn of the Screw. Their particular difficulties are, in turn, caused by particular problems in the mirroring environment. I believe that the governess's anxiety derives not simply, as Newman argues, from her desire to be seen, but from her inability to acknowledge the particular person whom she wants to be seen by. I'll return to this later. For now I want to make a related point about Brooke-Rose's reading of the governess's mirror scene. Why `glasses'? Since Lacan's argument about self-alienation posits just one mirror, why would James need to multiply mirrors to make the same point? I believe that the very multiplicity of the mirrors reflects the childhood experience of this particular young woman. What occurs at Bly is not simply her first view of her whole body but the latest in a life-long series of fragmentations. In Kohutian terms, the plural glasses replicate an unfocused homelife incapable of mirroring the daughter: no mother figure sitting calm and central at the hearth like Mrs Grose; and a father too whimsical/eccentric to compensate by providing either a steady and steadying gaze or an idealizable model of conduct. With too many siblings competing for too little attention, the youngest child, I believe, experienced herself as seen from all sides and yet nowhere, too much and too little, smothered and dropped. Apt also is Winnicott's observation that `when the average girl studies her face in the mirror she is reassuring herself that the mother-image is there and that the mother can see her and that the mother is en rapport with her' (113). Is the obverse also true? Does the absolute erasure of mother from the daughter's narrative indicate how little of herself the young woman can see, even when the cheval glasses multiply? She certainly confesses her herself characterless when she describes her pleasure at the part she's assigned in the children's games: `My time was taken only with being, for them, some remarkable person or thing that the game of the moment required. I forget what I was on the present occasion [before Jessel's first appearance]; I only remember that I was something very important and very quiet' (379).

Given all this, the governess will find Bly a challenge, for she's entering a situation where mirroring is expected of her. Mrs Grose sounds like Winnicott and Kohut when she admonishes the young woman about the possibility of Miles' wickedness: `"See him, Miss, first. Then believe it! ... Bless her" she added the next moment -- "look at her." I turned and saw that Flora ... now presented herself to view' (360). The message to the governess is clear: mirror and believe; reflect back the child's grandiosity well enough and the child will prove to be good enough. Mrs Grose repeats the lesson three pages later. `My dear woman, look at him. ... I assure you, Miss, I do nothing else' (363).

Mirroring is, in turn, what the governess cannot provide because she herself needs desperately to be mirrored.(n30) `I only asked that he [the uncle] should know, and the only way to be sure he knew would be to see it, and the kind light in it, in his handsome face' (365). Though class and gender are clearly important here, the governess does not restrict her mirroring audience to patriarchs. `I was conscious as I spoke that I looked prodigious things, for I got the slow reflexion of them in my companion's face' (381). The word `reflection' stresses here the mirroring role that Mrs Grose enacts throughout. (`I was left ... to study Mrs Grose's odd face ... I winced at the fair show of the scene in Mrs Grose's face' (413,430)). Even the lower servants constitute an audience for the governess, especially after Mrs Grose departs with Flora.

I could see in the aspect of the others a confused reflection of the crisis. ... The maids and the men looked blank; the effect of which on my nerves was an aggravation. ... So, for the benefit of whom it might concern, I paraded with a sick heart. ... To mark, for the house, the high state I cultivated I decreed that my meals with the boy should be served, as we called it, downstairs. (435,436)

To live for others is to live one's life comparatively. Henry James critiques such dependency throughout his fiction, and never more devastatingly than with what is arguably his least attractive protagonist. The narrator of The Aspern Papers, nameless like the governess, inquires about Julianna's health:

she replied that it was good enough -- good enough; that it was a great thing to be alive. "Oh, as to that, it depends on what you compare it with!" I exclaimed, laughing. "I don't compare -- I don't compare. If I did that I should have given everything up long ago" (256).

Julianna, wonderful here in her fortitude and self-sufficiency, highlights the governess's sad need to have others confirm what she's otherwise unsure of: `She [Jessel] was there and I was justified. ... "It [that Flora `"says things"'] so justifies me!"... "And if he's saved --" "Then you are?"... `if he were innocent then what on earth was I?' (426,432,434,443).

Living comparatively precludes mirroring effectively. The governess is too needy to attend concertedly to the needs of others. Instead of holding, she smothers, because instead of mirroring she maims the scopic process -- in three ways: projection, reverse mirroring, and sexual repression. Rather than mirror back the children's grandiosity, the governess projects onto them identities that make her feel grand. If Miles and Flora can be seen as `a pair of little grandees, princes of the blood' (364), or if they are beset by `demons' (401), or if Miles who's in `the bloom of health' (364) can be construed `as some wistful patient in a children's hospital' (417), then she becomes the royal tutor, or the savior, or `the nurse or the sister of charity' (417). Much more frequently, projection occurs whenever the governess attributes to Miles or Flora a quality that fosters not the child's life but her own. `It was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connection with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl' (356). My little girl, or rather my radiant image, provides comfort that wards off uneasiness - at least until Flora screams `I don't like you!' Then `her incomparable childish beauty had suddenly failed. ... she was hideously hard; she had turned common and almost ugly' (428). This obvious remaking of Flora according to the governess's immediate needs is compounded by likening the child to `a vulgarly pert little girl in the street'. With a fall in class and a fall from virtue, Flora becomes a projection of a projection, is transformed into the governess's bete noire, the `fallen' Miss Jessel.

A second form of smothering is what Kohut calls reverse mirroring. That the governess with increasing consistency reverses the mirroring process and makes the children reflect her is signaled by a fine pun: `In constant sight of my pupils' (389). Though she insists she's an attentive overseer, the pun reveals that the governess's tutorial pupils have become the ocular pupils she needs to be seen by. The instrumentality of this process is chilling.

After my first outbreak [of weeping upon learning about Quint and Jessel], I had of course returned to my pupils, associating the right remedy for my dismay with that sense of their charm which I had already found to be a thing I could positively cultivate and which had never failed me yet... . I have spoken of the surrender to their extraordinary childish grace as a thing I could actively cultivate, and it may be imagined if I neglected now [after learning more about the children's relations with Quint and Jessel] to address myself to this source for whatever balm it would yield. (385,389)

Notice the reification here: `a thing ... a thing' The children are nowhere in either sentence, or scene. `Charm' and `grace' are what the governess needs to remedy her dismay and to provide her balm. Her effort is to compulsively `cultivate ... cultivate' these qualities rather than to nurture the children. And she gets away with it, at least for a while. Flora `could put her little conscious hand straight upon the spot that ached. ...the immediate charm of my companions was a beguilement still effective. ... the homage of which they were so lavish succeeded, in truth, for my nerves' (385,389,390). Miles sounds like that darling of recent psychotherapy, the co-adaptive child, when he says `we must do nothing but what she likes' (414).

The horror in all this reverse mirroring is signaled when the governess likens Miles' playing the piano for her to `David playing to Saul' (420). David, as Cargill reminds us, is trying to soothe Saul who's possessed of an evil spirit (155). Possessed by her needs for projection and reverse mirroring, the governess is smothering the life out of her pupils. Eventually they fight back. First, they act out, Miles roaming the grounds at night, Flora escaping to the pond by day. Miles as the elder articulates his acts' intent: `Think me -- for a change -- bad!' (399). The pun here is fine: in order for maturational change to occur, the governess must change her mode of perception, must for a change see him as he is. She must see, in fact, as Flora does. `So she [Flora] disturbed you, and to see what she was looking at, you also looked --you saw' (400). Miles is being sanguine here. The governess sees nothing, acknowledges only his danger out `in the night air!' So he's forced to make his point again. `How otherwise should I have been bad enough?' Rather than Winnicott's good enough mothering, what's required at Bly is bad enough childing. And even Miles' version of it is insufficient to educate the governess. After Mrs Grose sounds a hopeful note -- `Lord, you do change!' -- the governess dashes all hope. `I don't change -- I simply make it out' (400).

So Flora tightens the screw: `"I don't like you!" Then, after this deliverance ... she hugged Mrs Grose more closely and buried in her skirts the dreadful little face' (428). Again a pun cues us. The words that Flora delivers will deliver her from smothering. When we see that Flora's previous gesture of `holding tight to our friend's dress' (428) is now intensified to burying her face in the skirts, we understand that `buried' is only metaphorical. Flora will in fact be reborn from these skirts when Mrs Grose carries her up to London. Miles alone is left for the governess. Another embrace in the skirts awaits, and this time the burial will be no metaphor.

This is especially ironic since Miles tries to effect separation more gently than his sister did. He doesn't shout when he says `I want to get away' (418); he `ever so gently' asks the governess `to let me alone' (419). More importantly, Miles once again assumes the adult role and tries to teach her that the separation/individuation process need not involve dropping. It can be a form of holding.

`You'll cease to worry and spy upon me, won't keep me so close to you, will let me go and come. Well, I "come", you see -- but I don't go' (420)

A new mode of seeing is what Miles is advocating, a seeing that recognizes that his need for maturation need not result in her abandonment. The governess has just demonstrated a need for precisely this lesson. `I felt that merely, at this, to turn my back on him was to abandon, or to put it more truly, to lose him' (419). Initially here she tries to retain agency by deploying a professional standard of considerable moral force -- the good governess doesn't abandon her charge by turning her back on him -- but this patent rationalization collapses. What she fears is her abandonment. To calm this fear Miles goes beyond verbal admonition and, like a good therapist, provides her with the affective experience of a separation which is also a holding: `He had his freedom now -- he might have it to the end! Well, he did have it; and it consisted -- in part at least -- of his coming in at about eight o'clock and sitting down with me in silence' (429). In turn, she knows he's right; counter measures are useless, separation is inevitable. But she cannot help herself. `I was infatuated -- I was blind with victory, though even then the very effect that was to have brought him so much nearer was already that of added separation' (443).

She cannot help herself, in part, because she's driven by a desire I haven't yet addressed: Eros. To explore how sexuality functions as a third type of smothering, I'll begin with the governess's initial hallucination, Peter Quint on the tower. Most readers believe that Quint expresses the governess's passion for the uncle. This line of interpretation began with Harold C. Goddard in 1924 (`she scarcely admits it [her passion] to herself, for in her heart she knows that her love is hopeless, the object of her affection being one socially out of her sphere'(n31)). Brooke-Rose disagrees. `Nor does she "scarcely admit it," she admits it easily. ... Never for one moment does she elaborate it in terms of hopelessness or social impossibility' (138). The governess seems to side with Brooke-Rose, given all the unambiguous admissions of attraction we've already noted ("`I was carried away in London." ... "He seems to like us young and pretty." ... "Oh, I've not pretension ... to being the only one". ... the fine machinery I had set in motion to attract his attention to my slighted charms'). Why, then, have critics consistently echoed Goddard? Because they are paraphrasing his source. What is the textual warrant for, say, Stanley Renner's description of the governess's `idealized romantic fantasy of her employer. ... .Her idealized and spiritualized notions about love'?(n32) The governess never characterizes herself this way, but the bachelors in the frame do, or rather one bachelor does. If we don't share the idealized romantic and spiritualized love that impels Douglas to see the governess as pure, and if we attend instead to her own account of her infatuation with the master, we find a self-awareness that warrants Crowe's observation that `she even makes a joke about it' (45). The danger in pushing this line too far is indicated, however, by Charles G. Hoffman's claim that `nowhere is her love [for the master] described or even suggested to be abnormal.'(n33) Brooke-Rose seems closer to the mark: `It is clear that her falling in love and surmounting this love because unattainable is not in itself a sufficient cause for hallucinations of this order, although it is at the base, as is all desire, of the triggering elements' (159). Brooke-Rose proceeds to focus on how visuality contributes to psychological fragmentation. I want to stick with the governess and her men. If fragmentation as serious as hers comes from repressed passion, and if her passion for the uncle is manifest, who is the latent object of her desire?

`It was as if I had been looking at him for years and had known him always' (370). This sentence is, for me, fundamental to understanding Quint's role, and indeed the entire novella. Can the man whom the governess is referring to here be the uncle, whom she's known, not `for years', let alone `always', but for a matter of days? In turn, who is the man she has known all her life?

That the governess's father stands behind the uncle and Quint as ultimate object of desire is a possibility that has not escaped critics entirely. M. Katan says `the figure [on the tower] represents someone whom she has always known, presumably her father.'(n34) But then, rather than elaborating, Katan illogically settles for the uncle as object of desire. Quint and he are `the sexual and asexual sides of one person'. This seems an odd pairing since there's nothing asexual about the uncle. With his `affairs' and his `trophies of the chase' (353), he has seemed to most readers a thoroughly promiscuous figure. So, if the governess's projective fantasy structures Quint as the sexual side of a composite male, the uncle seems a less likely candidate for the asexual side than the poor rural pastor does -- especially since Katan proceeds to a biographical analysis that configures the governess `as standing in for Henry [James]'s mother. The bachelor is then, of course, a substitute for his father' (490). Though Katan's biographical comments are at times reductive and mechanical, he is persuasive here because he's pointing to the smothering propensity of Mary James and the weakness of Henry Sr. that James himself documents throughout A Small Boy and Others. `Henry must have felt a great need for his father's protection against his mother's overbearing attitude. To such an expectation the story emphasizes the great extent to which the father failed to live up' (490).

A daughter's unresolved desire for her father is also in play when critics discuss incest in The Turn of the Screw. Crowe asks promisingly, `who is the recipient of that unspoken and unspeakable love about which the story will not tell?' (45). Her answer -- `Miles of course' -- seems especially timid because clinical data indicates that a woman's sexual fantasies about her son usually mask oedipal desire for her father. Grunes is bolder. To indicate that the governess is repressing incestuous desire, he begins with `the unspeakable nature of Jessel's and Peter Quint's intimacy' (280) and argues by way of substitution. Jessel is doubly related to the heroine, as previous governess at Bly and as ghost/projection of her repressed sexual desires. Quint is paternal through his first name, St. Peter being the Father of the Church. Grunes concludes that `the unspeakable nature of Jessel's and Peter Quint's intimacy hints at incest, once we exchange one governess for the other. Quint's ghost looms as an unshakable infernal image of the governess's own father.' I believe that this is correct and that we can establish it by a route more direct than substitution. There are multiple, intricate textual suggestions that what drives the governess's relations with the uncle and Miles is repressed oedipal desire.

Why does Bly have two towers? Why does James rewrite the father from `eccentric' to `whimsical'? Why does the governess convert the maid into a waiter when she makes a simile about a wedding-journey supper? Why is `three miles' the distance that Henry James has her walk after seeing Quint? To address these and other textual dilemmas, I want to proceed carefully. Though the master is a handsome rogue, other women -- the governess goes out of her way to tell us -- have managed to resist his proposal of employment. What makes him irresistible to this particular parson's daughter? That she's impressionable and poor have sufficed for most critics, but in all probability the other applicants for the Bly position were also unmarried and in need of work. What proves irresistible to this applicant? I believe the eros excited in her by the uncle rekindles oedipal desires that have been repressed rather than worked through. Surely working through such phase-appropriate desires would have been difficult in the `small smothered life' lived by the governess in her `scant home'. In addition to the dour ambiance that forbade novel-reading and play-going, there's also the absence of mother. Ruin may not be inevitable without her (indeed the dead mothers of Victorian literature are legion, and sometimes their bairns muddle through quite pluckily), but questions about maturation do arise, especially in a James text. How successfully, for example, has the daughter's attraction to her father been bounded and redirected when the wife/mother is not present to assert her rightful place as the object of his love? And with regard to the husband/father, where has his eros found a `natural' outlet?

I want to address these questions by reposing the one I raised earlier: why does Bly have two towers? Or rather, why are we lead to believe there's one tower -- only to have the number doubled at the moment of Quint's appearance? Here's a second turn of the screw, surely, and easily avoided by having the fact of a second structure established either in the initial description of Bly's facade or during the governess' house tour with Flora.(n35) The explanation that the two towers represent Quint and the uncle is made problematic for me by the same factor that prevented either man from being the figure whom the governess had known `for years ... always'. Time. The two towers `were distinguished, for some reason, though I could see little difference, as the new and the old' (365). Nothing in the text indicates that Quint is substantially older than his `young' master (354), so we need another explanation for `old' Freud is helpful here. By demonstrating how the past inhabits and shapes the present, he dissolves the binary between old and new. I believe the governess cannot distinguish old from new because -- especially in the transitional dusk -- her conscious fantasizing about the new man, the uncle, rekindles her repressed desire for the old man, her father. (That she never does specify in the scene which tower Quint is on indicates her elision of past and present; that she later confirms it was the old tower [372] affiliates him finally with the father). The old and new towers `flanked opposite ends of the house', as two desirable men, archaic and recent, bracket her life, a life whose emotional development in the rural parsonage is aptly characterized by the word she uses to describe her reaction to Quint, `arrested'. Fixation is further suggested by her diction. `This visitant ... seemed to fix me ... . and even as he turned away still markedly fixed me' (366,367). Additional language play suggests the erotic aspect of her arrested development. `Romantic revival', for instance, can characterize the return of her oedipal fantasy as well as the towers' architectural style; a `respectable past' may have `redeemed' Bly from charges of aesthetic bad taste, but a comparable attempt to certify Jessel's virtue failed, as we've seen, to redeem her (`And what did she die of -- too much respectability?'). What we question about the present governess is not her virginity but her self-awareness. Desire denied will return in damaged and damaging form.

Enter Miles. The sexual inflection of his relationship with the governess is evident -- and evidently oedipal in so far as she stands in for his mother. To what extent can he stand in for her father? `Three miles' (367). By using these words to specify the length of a walk whose length is irrelevant (the governess wanders a while, stunned, after Quint appears), lames suggests that there are three Mileses in her life. One way to link the boy, the uncle, and her father is through substitution (Quint being the site where the substitutions occurs, the shape-shifter). We've seen how the uncle replicates the father, and critics have had no trouble establishing several links between the uncle and Miles. Thus Miles = father. Less schematic and more persuasive to me are textual associations of boy and father:

We [the governess and Miles] continued silent while the maid was with us - as silent, it whimsically occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding-journey, at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter. He turned round only when the waiter left us. (437)

It's the maid who leaves! So intense is the governess's need to gender the surveillance- figure male that she generates a simile that converts the maid into a waiter, and then projects this male back onto reality. To understand such intensity, we might begin with the word `whimsically'. The 1908 version of The Turn of the Screw alters her father's `eccentric nature' (404) to a `whimsical bent'. Why? `Whimsical ... whimsically'. I believe that the governess at her most sexually explicit moment with Miles uses -- unconsciously of course --`whimsically' in her simile to associate herself with her father. As the benign denotations of `whimsically' function defensively to deny the erotic -- and thus seriously perverse -- nature of her engagement with Miles (notice also the distancing effect of her impersonal verb `it ... occurred to Me'), so `whimsical' denies any comparable eroticism in her father. That he remains intensely present for her in her `wedding journey' fantasy, however, is indicated by the waiter's insistent, transforming `presence' On the one hand, the waiter makes the governess-Miles pairing into a threesome, and thus into a primal scene. The fantasy here would involve the daughter's pleasure at her father watching her intimacy with a younger man. On the other hand, the surveillance male may also constitute a superego figure. The governess cannot escape the clerical eye because every new surfacing of desire brings with it a love both interdicted because it's taboo and interdicting because her clerical Father is God's agent. The waiter awaits her at whatever `inn' she escapes into. And when he leaves the scene? Eros leaves with him. Miles' come-on, `Well, we're alone' is met by her denial `Not absolutely. We shouldn't like that' (437). Shouldn't, and yet they do. And yet the only consummation possible is no petite mort.

That the figure of desire fantasized by a parson's daughter would be characterized by superego- as well as id-functions seems expectable enough. It is also confirmed by the actions of the uncle, and Miles, and by their shape-shifter, Peter Quint. The uncle seduces the governess but says No to any subsequent intimacy. His protege, Miles, calls her `dear' and blows out the candle when she sits on his bed, but he speaks the ultimate No when he establishes his desire to leave Bly. And as for Quint:

Coming downstairs to meet my colleague [Mrs Grose] in the hall [on the way to church], I remembered a pair of gloves that had required three stitches and that had received them -- with a publicity perhaps not edifying -- while I sat with the children at their tea, served on Sundays, by exception, in that cold clean temple of mahogany and brass, the `grown-up' dining-room. The gloves had been dropped there, and I turned in to recover them. (369-70)

Why such ado about these gloves? Apparitions seem to appear whenever the governess needs them, so James needn't concoct a laborious plot coincidence. Why gloves? Traditionally a lady drops her glove to evoke a gentleman's attention. Quint enters right on cue. But these are gloves with a difference. `Three stitches.' Three Mileses. Each of her three men opens the governess to desire. Especially if this desire is oedipally driven, her vulnerability -- `a publicity perhaps not edifying' -- must be repaired at all cost. Three stitches, three No's. I want to repeat, however, that I do not believe the denial here is of desire per se. Even after much sophisticated historical research in the last decade, critics still tend to simplify how attraction plays for Victorian women. Desire for the right man at the right time was not immobilizing, as Elizabeth Barrett demonstrated in the 1840s. Believing as I do that James' governess in the 1840s is not ashamed of infatuation when its manifest object is the uncle, I need another explanation for the glove's `required' stitching. Has desire been contaminated at the source for the governess? Oral hunger in the `grown-up' dining room is the appropriate context for her three stitches if the desire is archaic. Appropriate too is Peter Quint's intrusion on her way to church. He embodies both the fantasy and the horror of oedipal sexuality, like the three males he stands in for. Desire and interdiction, id and superego. With Eros denied, Thanatos becomes inevitable.

4

The governess I'm describing is, by the end of the novella, a very angry woman. She's angry at her father and her employer, the domestic and social patriarchs, and at her brothers too, I believe, those future patriarchs domestic and social whom she's idolized abjectly; and she's angrier still because she can't get at any of these males. Immediately to hand, however, is someone who can stand in nicely for all of them. As family member and patriarchal heir, Miles is ideal for reprisal. The governess's first aggressive act against him occurs, as no critic has analyzed, before she even meets him.

I was a little late on the scene, and I felt, as he stood wistfully looking out for me before the door of the inn at which the coach had put him down, that I had seen him, on the instant, without and within, in the great glow of freshness, the same positive fragrance of purity, in which I had, from the first moment, seen his little sister. (362)

Here is, I believe, the core vision of Henry James: a little boy dropped by a woman who imagines that she, as a good-enough mirror, is seeing him as he really is. In the governess's totalizing gaze (`without and within'), Miles is elided with his sister in a projected `positive fragrance of purity' that disinfects individuality (especially male) and redeems anything negative by positing preemptively that favorite of pious Christians, the odor of sanctity. Wistful indeed.

This moment of dropping is all the more important because it reverberates both back and forward. Three days before, when the governess herself arrived on the same coach at the same inn, Mrs Grose had made sure that the carriage from Bly was waiting there for her. By being late for Miles, the governess shows she's sufficiently damaged that even when she is being held well, she will still drop an heir. On the other hand, months from now this inn scene will be replayed when the governess's relationship with Miles is fragrant with eros. The real Miles at the real inn will be transformed into the bridegroom-Miles who dines with the bride-governess in her projective simile of a fantasized honeymoon `inn'. Holding again malfunctions in this final scene of the novella; what's different now is that dropping has become smothering, as the initially absent governess proves finally all too present. Miles, in turn, is still lost. Despite what critics so frequently insist, the boy's last words are not `Peter Quint -- you devil' After this he asks `where? Miles thus exits the story as he entered it -- lost in space. `Put down' by the public conveyance at the inn where the governess was not present to pick him up, Miles has been dropped his whole life --unavoidably by his parents and grandparents in death, irresponsibly by his uncle, by Quint and Jessel, by his school, and now by his governess. `Where' indicates that he still doesn't know where he is. Sadly, savagely, death makes his question rhetorical.

The governess' final embrace of Miles climaxes her steadily mounting rage at all he represents. The uncle, for instance: `"His indifference must have been awful"... He never wrote to them [the children] .... "It's their uncle's fault. If he left them with such people --" ... "And him who thinks so well of you! .... He has an odd way -- it comes over me now", I laughed," -- of proving it"' (402,407,415,431). So long as the object of her anger is the uncle, however, the governess manages to reign herself in. Paradigmatic are `He never wrote to them -- that may have been selfish, but it was part of the flattery of his trust of me' and `"He has an odd way, it comes over me now" I laughed," -- of proving it. But that doesn't matter."' Although no `but' actually appears when she discusses the uncle's being taken in by the fiends, Quint and Jessel, it's implied in the governess's exculpatory gesture: `" ... his indifference must have been awful. [But] As I'm not a fiend, I shouldn't take him in."' What's also evident here is what's implicit in the other moments. By using `shouldn't' rather than `won't', the governess suggests what she's really feeling. She shouldn't, as a Christian lady, do the uncle dirty as Quint and Jessel did, but she'd love to be a fiend and do so. Instead, she does it to Miles. Warfare comes to replace nurture as the governess' mode with the boy:

I felt this time, over his real embarrassment, a curious thrill of triumph .... I can't begin to express the effect on me of an implication of surrender even so faint .... It was as if he were suddenly afraid of me -- which struck me indeed as perhaps the best thing... .complete was the ravage of [his] uneasiness ....my personal triumph. (398,439,442)

What I want to stress in the governess's conduct is premonition, if not premeditation, the not so vague awareness that accompanies the return of repressed affect. `I used to speculate ... as to how the rough future (for all futures are rough!) would handle them [the children] and might bruise them' (364). This, in her sunny first weeks at Bly! By Miles' last scene the governess has become the self-confessed cause of the bruising, deny it though she tries.

So we circled about, with terror and scruples, like fighters not daring to close. But it was for each other we feared!. That kept us a little longer suspended and unbruised. (440)

What she called speculation in the early days is now `a prevision of the anguish that was to come'. It's also a confirmation of her solidarity with the uncle. As he could discuss the children's lives and Jessel's death in terms of awkwardness, the governess can say of her final assault on Miles, `Wasn't it base to create for a being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness?' (440).

To show that this link with the uncle indicates a more than personal, a social/political, valence to the governess's rage at the little boy, I want to begin with his name. Why Miles? His soldier father has christened him `soldier'. Especially since the father has paid the double price of primogeniture and empire before the story opens, the ending seems to dramatize the sacrifice of a second soldier to patriarchy. Sacrifice is emphasized by a nexus of Christian references not attended to by critics studying religion's role in the novella. `"My other pupil, at any rate, as I understand, comes back tomorrow?".... "Not tomorrow -- Friday, Miss"' (358). Why specify the day? and why these particular days? Having endowed the martyred Morgan Moreen with Christological associations in `The Pupil' (1891), is James using Thursday and Friday here to evoke the Last Supper and the Crucifixion? Is Miles as a Friday arrival doomed from the start? `The roast mutton was on the table ... . "Come here and take your mutton." He alertly obeyed me' (436,437). Why specify the particular food at what is literally Miles' last supper? His association with mutton suggest to me that his is the role of Pascal Lamb, the sacrifice for the sins of the world.

I'm inclined to see Miles' death in such enormous terms because I read The Turn of the Screw as an ambitious commentary on fin de siecle life. I see James responding to the `autumnal chill' of the 1890s, the widely-felt sense of decline that haunted the ostensibly inspiriting facts of Britain's international prestige and still-expanding empire. Miles the heir to patriarchy -- and there's no one to replace him. James' particular version of the autumnal chill, and thus his social-political vision, can be gotten at by attending carefully to the agent of the heir's extirpation. Among authors dramatizing threats to Britain in the later 1880s and 1890s, some define the menace as external. Rider Haggard posits a timeless female force in She who plans to leave Africa and replace Victoria on England's throne; in Dracula a second timeless predator actually reaches London before being driven back and, like She-who-must-be-obeyed, killed. There is, however, another way to define the threat to Britain's future. Robert Louis Stevenson dramatizes chaos in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the murder of the very figure of the law, the titled, silver-haired Member of Parliament, Sir Danvers Carew. The killer is not, however, a predator from ancient lands to the east; he is London's most distinguished healer, `Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., ER.S, etc.' The patriarchs are destroying one another. `Je kill' indeed. Henry James was, I believe, closer in vision to his dear friend Stevenson than to Haggard, whom he reprobated. In The Turn of the Screw, the distant cause of Miles' death is empire (since India makes him an orphan), but we can't forget that the boy gets back to England safely enough. What does him in is Home. Determining whether Miles dies of smothering or shock or heart failure is less important than exploring the possibility of smothering, for here we can engage with the larger issue of Britain as an environment that stifles rather than facilitates.

On the one hand, Miles dies for empire, in the sense of dying for the sins of empire. Without his parents' death in India, Miles would never have fallen into the hands of smothering Bly. This is one of the connotations of the final characterization of Miles as `dispossessed'. Possession of hereditary lands -- that paramount concern of the English gentry -- will pass from the uncle's family upon his and Flora's deaths. The violence that is British India has taken possession of the home island. To leave it at that, however, is to tell only half the story. By having -- in effect -- the agent of empire be a parson's daughter, James extends his critique to include the domestic in the social. Drop and smother the daughters of England (the title of Mrs Ellis' widely-read guidance book of the 1840s) and you'll produce angry women who drop and smother the heirs of empire. Thus the answer to my recurrent question --what can the governess do about the way patriarchs have failed her --is, plenty. She can deepen the autumnal chill by killing the future.

Making woman the agent of empire's homicidal tendencies could be misogynistic. Blame the victim. I believe it's not, however, in The Turn of the Screw. Granted James' life-long fear of and rage at women who drop and smother: his novella does more than simply project onto the page some version of `it's all mother's fault'. Its the fault of us all. Woman in The Turn of the Screw is not inherently violent, as in the archaic fantasies of devouring mothers and vagina dentata. Women are made violent by the way we nurture our daughters and treat our adult females. The word `awkward' links governess and employer because she is made furious by the same domestic/social system that makes him callous. Together they destroy Miles. The governess is frightening, not because she's Haggard's She, but because she's not. She's Every Girl next door. She denies England's domestic and social responsibility for violence, since Haggard's enactment of archaic fantasy projects a female malevolence out there. James, by managing empathically to understand why women are angry here at home, generates a far more telling social analysis. Forget invasions from Africa or Transylvania. If a parsonage in rural Hampshire can't nurture and generate nurturers, what hope is there for this green and fertile land? Autumnal chill.
How Texts Hold

Do texts hold differently from people? The Turn of the Screw speaks the hard truth about cultural sites sacred to patriarchal ideology, sites which, in fact, that ideology is deployed to mystify us about. Home will kill you; women will drop and smother you; patriarchs will hold their own by holding only their own. Gothic, of course, has no monopoly on the truth. What Gothic does have is a consistent commitment to release repressed affects and reopen foreclosed issues. Gothic texts hold us because their express role in culture, certainly by the 1890s, is to help reveal and heal the wounds caused by the dropping and smothering widespread in Victorian culture. What makes Gothic nurturance efficacious is the fact that it's actually a two-fold effort. An individual text draws strength from not being individual, from being part of a tradition committed to nurturing. The Turn of the Screw exemplifies this two-fold holding, even as it enacts it -- in a way no critic has indicated. Granted that formally the novella features an opening frame but no closing counterpart and that thematically and affectively this open-endedness is crucial to the indeterminacy which everyone recognizes today: how did James hit upon such a structure? I believe it was commended to him by the Gothic tradition, specifically by the popular High Victorian Gothicist Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu whom James celebrates in `The Liar' (1881).

Le Fanu's novella Carmilla (1872) presents the manuscript of a motherless young woman who suffers supernaturally-induced terrors in an isolated great house. The almost nameless heroine (she's called `Laura' once in the middle of the story) suffers from untoward emotions --oedipal attraction to and rage at her weak father, lesbian attraction to and repulsion at the beautiful vampire Carmilla -- which she deals with largely through repression and denial. Formally, Le Fanu achieves a major innovation in frame narration. Gothic's paramount contribution to the form of nineteenth-century fiction is its development of increasingly sophisticated ways of rendering point of view. Three decades after Mary Shelley created her triple interlocking frames in Frankenstein (Walton [Victor (creature-creature) Victor] Walton), Emily Bronte gives the screw a turn by gendering the frames of Wuthering Heights (Nellie takes over from the inadequate Lockwood who then closes the novel with his final misperception). The next turn comes a quarter century later when Le Fanu addresses both gender and form. In Carmilla's opening frame, a nameless male editor presents us with a narrative he's received from a Dr Hesselius, to whom it was sent by the woman whose adventures of many years ago it recounts. The parallels with James' governess, Douglas, and narrator are particularly striking because of the male attitudes reflected in Le Fanu's frame. In the process of appropriating her `life' for scientific and literary purposes (Hesselius has already written a medical paper on the young woman's psychological condition), Le Fanu's men presage James' in both their sanitizing of the woman and their lack of self-awareness (`she, probably, could have added little to the narrative which she communicates in the following pages, with, so far as I can pronounce, such a conscientious particularity').(n36) Equally crucial for The Turn of the Screw is Le Fanu's paramount formal innovation: no closing frame. So disqualified are the obtuse, appropriative men of the opening frame that they're denied even the pretense of containing the rage and eros unleashed in the young woman's life. She, in turn, can provide no closure. Her final sentence makes evident that she hasn't managed to understand and to be reconciled with either her emotions or her losses. Le Fanu's readers are left to decide for themselves, to effect meaning and to provide closure as they can.

These tasks become still more difficult for readers a quarter century later, since Henry James confronts us with a more resolutely indeterminate situation. The vampires of Le Fanu and the death of Carmilla are as `real' as the ghosts of Bly and the cause of Miles' death are problematic. James' young woman is also more desperately alone than Le Fanu's Laura, who has not only a first name but also at least one `friend', a city woman for whom she writes the narrative. James' intensifications and complications (of social vision as well as psychological intricacy) make The Turn of the Screw another major moment in the Gothic tradition, but he carries on Le Fanu's determination to free readers from Victorian repressiveness. Le Fanu knows that we can get beyond the heroine's subjection to patriarchal ideals and stereotypes and can engage fully with her outre desires only if we are given responsibility for our own desires, however outre. With no closing frame, the rest is up to us.

That Henry James shares Gothic's commitment to the shared production of meaning/affect is demonstrated in his 1866 insistence that when the art is great, `then the reader does quite half the work'.(n37) The text holds us in so far as it both opens possibilities and suggests limits to plausibility. I'm thus going further than critics do when they argue that The Turn of the Screw allows to readers what the governess never allows to Miles or herself -- a freedom of discovery and an escape from any single determinate meaning. I believe James can provide us with good-enough holding in part because he's being held well enough himself. He produces his masterpiece by developing Le Fanu's development of Gothic formal developments. Tradition fosters the individual talent, even as it fosters readers' creativity. Tradition is a good enough parent. We readers, in turn, are part of a nurturing community within a wounding repressive society, at the same time that we are citizens of that society. There's no us vs. them. There's only our self-fostering and our self-damaging proclivities. Given the power of the latter, we are indeed fortunate that great Gothic texts hold as people do all too rarely. I guess that's why we keep on reading.
Notes

With deep gratitude I want to acknowledge the contributions made to this essay by Paul J. Emmett, Jr., Terry Heller, Michael Robertson, Suzanne Skubal, Adeline Tintner, and by my patient, generous editor, Jerrold E. Hogle. My debt to the literally hundreds of scholars who've written on The Turn of the Screw is inadequately registered in my endnotes, because the length of my essay has required severe restriction of the number and length of those notes. Finally, for her help with the essay, and for the incomparably more important transformation that she's worked on my life, these pages are, like all my days, dedicated to Susana Cavallo.

(n1) For James' texts I'm using the revised `New York' version of The Turn of the Screw, reprinted in Great Tales of Henry James, intro. Dean Fowler (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1966); notebook entries are from The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); The Aspern Papers from Great Tales of Henry James.

(n2) See American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, ed. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: The University of Iowa Press, 1998), pp. 20-39.

(n3) In `The Nurture of the Gothic' I discuss Foucault's attack upon `the repression hypothesis' and what seem to me serious limitations to his claims.

(n4) Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 142-43, p. 445.

(n5) Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 180.

(n6) Charlotte Perkins Gilman, `The Yellow Wallpaper' in The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader, ed. Ann J. Lane (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 9.

(n7) George E. Haggerty, Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), p. 152.

(n8) p. 349, p. 355 (twice), p. 361 (twice), p. 363, p. 367, p. 371 (twice), p. 374, p. 379, p. 380, p. 381 (twice), p. 383 (twice), p. 385, p. 392, p. 394, p. 395, p. 396, p. 398, p. 399, p. 401 (twice), p. 402, p. 407, p. 415, p. 416 (twice), p. 417, p. 418, p. 422, p. 425, p. 428, p. 430, p. 432, p. 441 (thrice), p. 442, p. 445 (twice).

(n9) catching (p. 360, p. 389, p. 445 [twice]),clasping (p. 425), clinging (p. 382), clutching (p. 382, p. 435), confining (p. 443), drawing close (p. 425, p. 441), embracing (p. 363, p. 398, p. 400, p. 411, p. 418, p. 425), enfolding (p. 441) and folding (p. 399), gathering (p. 379), grasping (p. 402, p. 411, p. 427, p. 441, p. 445), gripping (p. 394), having (p. 445), hugging (p. 390, p. 428), keeping a hand on (p. 425), laying a hand on (p. 409), letting go (p. 443), passing a hand (p. 409, p. 421) or arm (p. 411) into an arm, placing hands on (p. 399), possessing (p. 404, p. 419, p. 422, p. 428), pressing (p. 389, p. 415, p. 444), pressuring (p. 410, p. 422), releasing (p. 419), seizing (p. 419, p. 426, p. 427, p. 433, p. 437, p. 444), shaking (p. 443), springing upon (p. 444), sticking to (p. 423), supporting (p. 433), taking the arm (p. 398) or hand of, (p. 363) or to the breast (p. 384), touching (p. 427), throwing oneself upon (p. 418), thrusting (p. 427).

(n10) Shoshana Felman, `Turning the Screw of Interpretation' in Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Felman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 184. Among critics who've discussed holding, Millicent Bell notes that `she has tried -- improperly -- to hold the boy... he will not be held' (`Class, Sex, and the Victorian Governess: James's The Turn of the Screw', p. 109). Muriel West stresses `the governess's propensity for clutching, gripping, throwing herself on people' (`The Death of Miles in The Turn of the Screw' PMLA, 79 (1964), 287). Thomas Mabry Cranfill and Robert Lanier Clark, Jr. were among the earliest of several critics to note the governess' tendency to think in terms of flights and drop' (An Anatomy of `The Turn of the Screw' (New York: Gordian Press, 1971), p. 31). Among critics who've discussed smothering, Fred L. Milne observes that `ironically her attempt to escape her `small smothered life' has smothered the life out of Miles' (`Atmosphere as Triggering Device in The Turn of the Screw' in Studies in Short Fiction, 18 (1981), 299); Stanley Rennet argues that the governess `stifles the heart of natural life in the male child' (`"Why Can't They Tell You Why?": A Clarifying Echo of The Turn of the Screw' in Studies in American Fiction, 14 (1986), 212).

(n11) Graham McMaster, `Henry James and India: A Historical Reading of The Turn of the Screw' in Clio, 18 (1988), 23-40. McMaster discusses usefully the fact that James' novella deals with a threat to the hegemony of the landed plutocracy (39). Rowe [see next note] mentions India by way of introducing a discussion of patriarchal power, gender, and possession of property (132ff.) quite different from mine.

(n12) John Carlos Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 138-39.

(n13) Bruce Robins, `Marxist Criticism and The Turn of the Screw' in Henry James, The Turn of the Screw: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Peter G. Beidler (Boston: Bedford Books, 1995), p. 286.

(n14) Heath Moon, `More Royalist than the King: The Governess, the Telegraphist, and Mrs Gracedew' in Criticism, 24 (1982), 22.

(n15) James expresses his sympathy with beset children not only in this letter to Dr Louis Waldstein (21 October 1898), but also both in a 19 December letter to E W. H. Meyers (`as exposed as we can humanly conceive children to be') and in his later Preface to volume XII of the New York Edition (`the very worst action small victims so conditioned might be conceived as subject to'). For all these texts see Robert Kimbrough's Norton Critical Edition of the novella (New York, 1966).

(n16) I discuss James' vexed relations with his parents and his use of fiction to work out his troubles in `The Feminine Orphan and the Emergent Master: Self-Realization in Henry James' in The Henry James Review, 12 (1991), 20-54.

(n17) John J. Allen, `The Governess and the Ghosts in The Turn of the Screw' in The Henry James Review, 1 (1979), 75. M. Karen Crowe is also laudatory: `The enemy of the vulgar and the literal minded, Douglas, in keeping with his character, acknowledges the evil, the sheer dreadfulness that is in the story despite his continued respect for the first teller' (`The Tapestry of Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw"' in The Nassau Review, 4 (1982), 46). As I will show below, I agree that Douglas is superior to the narrator in his perception of the true nature of the governess' story, but I also feel that Douglas shares many of the narrator's limitations.

(n18) Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 173.

(n19) Michael J. H. Taylor, `A Note on the First Narrator of "The Turn of the Screw"' in American Literatue, 53 (1982), 717. See also Felman, `Turning the Screw of Interpretation', p. 130. The most extended discussion of the men's homoerotic attractions is Anthony J. Mazzella's `An Answer to the Mystery of The Turn of the Screw' in Studies in Short Fiction, 17 (1980), 327-33.

(n20) Oscar Cargill, `The Turn of the Screw and Alice James' in PMLA, 78 (1963), 238-49; reprinted in Kimbrough's Norton Critical Edition of the novella, from which the quotation here is cited (p. 148).

(n21) Terry Heller, The Turn of the Screw: Bewildered Vision (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), p. 46.

(n22) Kevin Murphy, `The Unfixable Text: Bewilderment of Vision in The Turn of the Screw' in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 20 (1978), 548.

(n23) D.W. Winnicott, The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment (New York: International Universities Press, 1965), p. 39, p. 43.

(n24) Peter G. Beidler, `Frames in James', English Studies, University of Victoria, 59 (1993), 52.

(n25) Paula Morantz Cohen, `Freud's Dora and James's The Turn of the Screw. Treatments of the Female "Case", Criticism, 28 (1986), 79.

(n26) Dennis Grunes, `The Demonic Child and The Turn of the Screw', Psychocultural Review, 2 (1978), 227, 227-28.

(n27) Beth Newman, `Getting Fixed: Feminine Identity and Scopic Crisis in The Turn of the Screw', Novel, 26 (1992/93), 43, 50. In addition to Newman and Brooke-Rose, the critic most helpful with mirroring is Heller (especially pp. 4448 and pp. 96-103).

(n28) D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971), p. 101.

(n29) Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1971) and How Does Analysis Cure? (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984).

(n30) Cranfill and Clark have noted that `those whom the governess is employed to care for are obliged to care for her instead' (An Anatomy, p. 161). Brooke-Rose (Rhetoric, 180) and Felman (`Turning the Screw, p. 176) second this view. Heller adds usefully that `losing Miles as mirror seems to mean losing forever the opportunity to impose the mirror role on others' (Bewildered Vision, p. 118). Leon Edel provides one of his finest insights when he observes that `the horror of the story lies in how the sane seek to accommodate themselves to the sick': Henry James: The Treacherous Years (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1969), p. 205.

(n31) Harold C. Goddard, `A Pre-Freudian Reading of The Turn of the Screw' in Kimbrough, Norton Critical Edition, p. 186.

(n32) Stanley Renner, `Sexual Hysteria, Physiognomical Bogeymen, and the "Ghosts" in The Turn of the Screw' in Ninetieth-Century Fiction, 43 (1988), 181.

(n33) Charles G. Hoffman, `Innocence and Evil in James's The Turn of the Screw', The University of Kansas City Review, 20 (1953), 97-105; reprinted in Gerald Willen's A Casebook on `The Turn of the Screw' (New York: Crowell, 1960) where I cite from p. 214.

(n34) M. Katan, `A Causerie on Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw"' in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 17 (1962), 480.

(n35) That Foster Castle which James visited in 1897 has two towers seems no answer to my question. On the one hand, readers of the novella would know nothing about James' association with the castle; on the other hand, James is nowhere in his fiction after the `Naturalist' novels of the 1880s so dependent on verisimilitude that he introduces major details irrelevant to the immediate dramatic situation.

(n36) Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla in Best Ghost Stories of J. S. Le Fanu, ed. E. E Bleiler (New York: Dover, 1964), p. 274.

(n37) Henry James, `The Novels of George Eliot' in Atlantic Monthly, 1866, p. 485.

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By William Veeder, University of Chicago
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