"The Reality of the Unseen": Shared Fictions and Religious Experience in the Ghost Stories of Henry James

PERICLES LEWIS "The Reality of the Unseen": Shared Fictions and Religious Experience in the Ghost Stories of Henry James IN a ghost story from Henry James's early period, "The Ghostly Rental," printed in Scribner's Monthly in 1876 and never reprinted during James's lifetime, Captain Diamond, a man haunted by the ghost of his daughter, lectures the narrator, a young student at the Harvard Divinity School: "You have read about the immortality of the soul; you have seen Jonathan Edwards and Dr. Hopkins chopping logic over it, and deciding, by chapter and verse, that it is true. But I have seen it with these eyes; I have touched it with these hands!" (CS 2:i75).1 The student, though attracted to Captain Diamond and his story, remains skeptical. Later in the story, he confronts the ghost in the Diamonds' haunted homestead, pulling off the veil of the Captain's flesh-and-blood daughter, who has disguised herself in a ghost suit in order (it seems) to punish her father for his reaction to her youthful love affair: "Instinctively, irresistibly, by the force of reaction against my credulity, I stretched out my hand and seized the long veil that muffled her head. I gave it a violent jerk, dragged it nearly off, and stood staring at a large fair person, of about five-and-thirty" (187). The narrator seems to have succeeded in debunking a tale of the supernatural.2 Yet a suggestion of occult forces lingers. For, a moment after the skeptical theology student tears the veil of the daughter's costume, he hears a thud at the bottom of some stairs, and the daughter claims to see her Arizona Quarterly Volume 61, Number 2, Summer 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 6 10 34 Pericles Lewis father's ghost. The next day, it turns out that the father, about three miles away from the confrontation, has indeed died in the night. When the narrator returns to the old, haunted Diamond house, it has burned to the ground and the daughter has disappeared. James thus poses, in somewhat clumsy form, the sorts of questions that will bedevil interpreters of his later ghost stories. Was the father's death a natural result ofhis anxiety over the fake haunting, or did the narrator's tearing of the daughter's veil somehow, supernaturally, cause it? And did the daughter see a real ghost of her father or merely suffer a hallucination? James's refusal to answer these questions provides an early example ofthe workings of what I shall call "shared fictions" in his later ghost stories. The ambiguous relationship between a traditional notion of "the supernatural" and an emergent modern conception of "the unconscious " in James's fiction has generated a great deal of critical debate about the ghost stories. This very ambiguity points to ways in which James's psychological and novelistic explorations continue to invoke structures of feeling and experience associated with religion. In James, the unconscious is structured rather like the supernatural. The visible, conscious world, with its familiar motives such as desire, ambition, and greed, interacts in subtle ways with an unseen realm, inaccessible to consciousness, where desire, ambition, and greed have more deepseated , even uncanny, equivalents. This other world, whether we label it unconscious or supernatural, lies beyond our control. The image of the veil which shrouds the other world in its secrecy recurs frequently in James's ghost stories to suggest the danger of trying to have direct access to the other realm. Yet the ghost stories seem to invite a criticism based on a "hermeneutics ofsuspicion." From Edmund Wilson's identification of the governess in "The Turn of the Screw" (1898) as "a neurotic case of sex repression" (115) to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's claim that, in "The Beast in the Jungle" (1903), "to the extent that Marcher's secret has a content, that content is homosexual," (161) critics have sought to tear away the veil that James has placed between the reader and the unconscious lives ofhis characters. Brilliant and suggestive though such approaches often are, the critics who propose them inevitably share something with the narrator of...