Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James: The Turn of the Screw at the Turn of the Century (review)

290 The Henry James Review the essay (Harper's Weekly 31 [February 12, 1887]: 114-15). Remarking that in her work "there is only one element unaccounted for—die inevitable European element, which oddly enough, is nowadays almost the sign and hallmark of American experience," James asked: "Has she a story about Europe in reserve (I remember two or diree very short ones, which, apparendy, she has been shy of republishing), or does she propose to maintain her distinguished independence?" This challenge, in its playfulness and intimacy, in its implicit argument about the right direction for American fiction and its perhaps unconscious fear that there is more to staying home than he has admitted, points to a complex and stiU not well enough understood relation between these two writers. The lurid detaUs of Woolson's suicide have too long dominated our reading of her place in James's Ufe and art, and Torsney's book will be indispensable to arriving at a more balanced view of Constance Fenimore Woolson, the writer James knew weU and the woman who cared so much to become an artist. Caroline Gebhard Grinnell CoUege Peter G. Beidler. Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James: The Turn of the Screw at the Turn of the Century. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1989. 252 pp. $25.00 Beidler contends that since much of Üie criticism of The Turn of the Screw over the past fifty years and more has directed readers away from its contemporary context and therefore from its author's intentions: "The time has come for us to try to reorient ourselves, away from the assumptions prevalent at die end of die twentiedi century and toward the assumptions prevalent at the end of the nineteendi.... The time has come, in other words, to look at the context out of which 77ze Turn of the Screw was written, and to reconstruct the intellectual climate that James and his first readers shared" (13). With this approach Beidler joins recent efforts to see James's work within its contemporary context—for example, those by Michael Anesko in "Friction with the Market" : Henry James and the Profession of Authorship, Marcia Jacobson in Henry James and the Mass Market, and Leon Edel and Adeline Tintner in "The Private Life of Peter Quinft]: Origins of The Turn of the Screw" (Henry James Review 1 [1985]: 2-4). Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James employs an historicist strategy to offer readers an alternative to the familiar "Deluded Governess" reading of the story, which includes the various psychological and linguistic approaches Üiat have dominated criticism of James's short novel since the mid 1920s. Beidler's alternative derives from the "Evil Ghosts" school of criticism, whose chief advocates are Roellinger, Banta and Sheppard. Beidler caUs his version of üie "Evil Ghosts" approach "üie possessed children reading" because demonology provides crucial answers to interpretive problems that even other pro-ghost readers find troublesome. Mediating between today's readers and James, and ignoring almost completely Üie labyrinth of die "Deluded Governess" arguments, Beidler works to show that "almost every characteristic associated with Peter Quint and Miss Jessel—every detail of appearance, every action, every motive—was derived direcdy or indirectly from some 'factual' tradition" (239). To reconstruct the context out of which The Turn of the Screw was written, Beidler examined approximately two-thousand published ghost narratives and reports of ghost sightings in the United States, Great Britain, Europe, and India during die second half of the nineteendi century. Beidler gathered his contextual evidence from sources Üiat range from the rigorously investigated Proceedings of a skeptical English scientific group, the Society for Psychical Research, with which William James was affiliated and several of whose members Henry James knew, to more sensational narratives of actual sightings, such as die ones William T. Stead printed in his popular Review of Reviews and Book Reviews 291 Borderland magazines. From the two-thousand cases Beidler has distiUed fourteen recurrent thematic and structural motifs: for instance, ghosts appearing to two children; noises in the night; the face at die window; precise description of ghosts; identifying the ghosts; ponds, tables and stairs; a feeling of cold and cold winds. The appearance of the fourteen...