Fairy Tale Turned Ghost Story: James's The Turn of the Screw

Fairy Tale Turned Ghost Story: James's The Turn of the Screw Lisa G. Chinitz, The Chicago School of Professional Psychology In The Ambassadors Lambert Strether describes the disorientation he feels in Paris in terms that lend his perceptions material reality: that modern Babylon hangs before him like a jewel whose "parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next" (AM 64). Just as Strether negotiates the difficult passage between America and Europe only to find that what is foreign is entangled with exactly what he thought he had left behind, so do we as readers experience a fundamental confusion of boundaries in James's fiction. So must we find our way in a world governed, as Ruth Bernard Yeazell observes, by the same laws as "those optical illusions where figure and ground continually shift" (8). For if Henry James raised confusion to the level of high art, he regarded it as central to the art of the novel. Increasingly in the course of his experiments with narrative form, the familiar boundaries that govern the process of reading break down: the line dividing fact from fiction blurs in characters' minds, characters merge with one another, and narrators find themselves reflected by narratives they are supposed to be telling. When the boundary between truth and fiction itself disintegrates, when we are ourselves unsure what is real or "only" fiction, we, too, are drawn into the epistemological uncertainties of the Jamesian universe.1 The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 264-285. © 1995, The Johns Hopkins University Press Fairy Tale Turned Ghost Story 265 Nowhere is the boundary confusion that becomes central to James's discourse more pervasive and profoundly disturbing for readers than in The Turn of the Screw, where his conflating of the inside and outside of narrative becomes an exploration of the limits of genre itself. In this essay, I shall argue that our response to The Turn of the Screw is carefully orchestrated by James's deliberate genre confusion: by twisting a fairy tale into a ghost story, the turns (and returns) of the narrative create in the reader's experience a crisis in reality testing that is nothing less than uncanny. The uncanny, after all, as Freud tells us in designating "that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar," is rooted in a fundamental boundary confusion (Freud 220). It unsettles because it undoes the difference between truth and fiction, frightens because it calls into question the boundaries of self. Tellingly, the particular fairy tale James chooses to turn inside-out in his story of the governess—the Grimms' "Hansel and Gretel"—is a recounting of the origins of identity in the confusion of boundaries between child and mother, whose unconditional care renders growth into the separateness of autonomy a conflicted and ambivalent process indeed. By reimagining the boundaries of self in terms of the uncanniness of mothering, James reaches in The Turn of the Screw for a new way to represent the contradictions that make up identity, finding in the confusion of boundaries between truth and fiction a fruitful means of representing, in particular, the experience of a woman. An analysis of Freud's essay "The 'Uncanny'"—essentially an extended consideration of boundary confusion in relation to reality testing (the acquisition of which Freud saw as essential to defining identity)—sheds light on why the psychology of women remained for him the dark continent whose boundaries remained ever elusive. There is even in Freud's own description of the uncanny a recognition, murky though it is, of the boundary confusion that object-relations theory later recognized as a critical means of understanding the construction of female identity.2 Most importantly for my purposes here, the boundary confusion at work in Freud's own argument illuminates James's use of the uncanny to retell and revise the story of female identity. To see the governess's story in terms of the uncanniness of mothering (as feminist psychoanalysts like Nancy Chodorow have urged us to do) rather than exclusively in relation...