Here's Looking at You, Peter Quint: "The Turn of the Screw," Freud's "Dora," and the Aesthetics of Hysteria

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This discussion will extrapolate interpretations from a speculative alignment of two nearly contemporary texts, “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James (1898) and “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (usually known as “Dora”) by Sigmund Freud (1905), ¹ but it will remain an essay because the furthest horizon of extrapolation remains beyond the reach of any reading—and especially speculative reading—of only two texts. I therefore feel free to convey a sense of that horizon, even before the appearance of supportive evidence, because I think it will contribute to the interest of the discussion, and because any reader who feels abused by my interpretations can easily check to see what influence it has exerted on them. In a discussion which today evokes psychoanalysis, it is anyway useless to try to preclude scepticism, and the best way forward (as in psychoanalytic practice itself) is sometimes to facilitate the way back to one’s most fundamental motivations. In this case these have included a sense that the Freudian explanation of hysteria, which unfolded at the end of the nineteenth century (and which became the foundation of psychoanalysis) is very intimately related to a parallel evolution, to the same period-point, in aesthetics. My idea is not that aesthetics has so much to tell us about hysteria (I imagine not the “aestheticization” of hysteria) but rather that hysteria still has much to teach us about aesthetic practice and theorizing. The lesson is not that the latter are “neurotic”—or at least any more than any other comparable mental activity—but that certain of their dilemmas and informing structures are, in surprising ways, available in Freud’s 1905 text about hysteria. When discovered, these elements can be re-referred to aesthetic activities which are historically contemporaneous to Freud’s essay. My choice of texts would doubtless seem a dramatic exaggeration of this claim if I were to confess to trying to read “Dora” as Freud’s own version of “The Turn of the Screw,” or were I to describe the case-study as unconsciously a variation on the narrative formalities of James’s tale, but I do mean to argue that if there had been intertextual traffic between the works (almost certainly not the case) it would be difficult to exaggerate certain formal aspects of the analogy. In the absence of intertextuality, however, such analogy is almost more impressive, because it suggests at a moment in history a common root simultaneously feeding a mute symptomology and popular forms of literary expression. I need to make clear, however, that these points methodologically will emerge from an analysis of the mutuality of these two texts, and this will perhaps allay the suspicion that my enthusiasm intends yet another imperial reduction of literary analysis by psychoanalysis. On the contrary, it will seem, I believe, that if anything literary analysis has the upper hand in this discussion, but the story I have to tell would be impossible without the contribution of psychoanalysis, even if the latter is subjected to some stress in the process.

However limited this demonstration has to be, a few examples tied to the larger implication will be useful. The first example will, I hope, be simple as clarification, but it will no doubt also convey a dismaying sense of how much intricate aesthetic history has to be swept through on behalf of my large generalizations. It is Martin Meisel’s magisterial analysis of the evolving relations among narrative, drama, and picture in the nineteenth century, Realizations. Freud does not appear in the index of this book, but he lives in Meisel’s habits of thought, and an interesting register of this comes casually forth in the midst of a discussion of the relationship between the illustrative and the symbolic in a genre-painting by David Wilkie, Rent-Day. Wilkie had been looking for a way to reliably remind the viewer that the mother-subject of the painting was a widow, and that there was no husband waiting at home. He struck on the...