The Literal Turn of the Figurative Screw

Among the many curiosities of her notoriously enigmatic narrative, James's governess displays an arresting rhetorical mannerism that appears not to have attracted critical attention. I refer to her use of the word "literally" in contexts that call attention to themselves as incongruous and counterintuitive, as in the following examples:

. . . I was in these days literally able to find a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded of me.

(53)

What was it you had in mind when, in our distress, before Miles came back, over the letter from his school, you said, under my insistence, that you didn't pretend for him he hadn't literally ever been 'bad'? He has not, truly, 'ever,' in these weeks that I myself have lived with him and so closely watched him.

(61)

The homage of which they were so lavish succeeded in truth for my nerves quite as well as if I had never appeared to myself, as I may say, literally to catch them at a purpose in it.

(65)

[Miles] literally bloomed so from this exploit that he could afford radiantly to assent.

(75)

I seemed literally to be running a race with some confusion to which [Miles was about to reduce me, but I felt he had got in first when, before we had even entered the churchyard, he threw out— "I want my own sort!" It literally made me bound forward.

(85)

I had by this time formed the habit of having Mrs. Grose literally well in hand in advance of my sounding that note. . . .

(90)

These appearances of "literally" give the reader pause, though not for the same reason in each case. In several instances ("literally to catch them at a purpose in it," "seemed literally to be running a race," "having Mrs. Grose literally in hand"), the governess says "literally" when she means "figuratively." In others, the categories of literal and figurative have no clear application to the idiom in question, which is neither overtly figurative in character nor contains a dead metaphor that could be activated. What would it mean "literally" to find a joy—or "figuratively" to find a joy, for that matter? It is uncertain what the force of the term "literally" here is meant to be. So too, the assertion that Miles "literally bloomed" raises the question of the semantic priority of the horticultural and abstract senses of "bloom": which is literal, and which figurative? The OED gives priority to the horticultural meaning, citing an Old Norse word for flower as the root. If the horticultural sense of "bloom" is the etymon "bl¯om," then the governess's abstract use of the word is a troping on the original meaning, and is therefore strictly figurative in character; her "literally" is an awkward catachresis. In her recollection of running a race, the first "literally" is obviously figurative, the second less clearly so; the governess may physically have bound forward in response to Miles's candid outburst, as if in literalizing activation of the first "literally," but because we cannot be sure of this, her bounding is undecidably poised between the literal and figurative. And finally, the governess's query to Mrs. Grose about Miles's "literal" badness is laced with ironizing qualifications. Here "literally" appears to mean "in fact," but the scare quotes surrounding "bad" place it under ironic erasure, as if she means to challenge accepted notions of what constitutes bad behavior in boys. A similar disavowal marks "ever," which is first underlined for emphasis and then undercut by ironizing scare quotes. The governess's invocations of the literal in these passages create a semantic and rhetorical jamming that, like catachresis, a figure for which there is no literal term (leg of a table, face of a mountain), confounds the distinction between literal and figurative.¹ The collective appearances of "literally"—fifteen times in some one hundred pages—suggest a sustained interrogation on James's part of the category of the literal as it pertains to the governess's acts of interpretation, especially in a text whose title foregrounds the turnings of trope itself, and...