The Hideous Obscure of Henry James

Correction:
Jean Lee Cole. “The Hideous Obscure of Henry James.” American Periodicals 20(2): 190–215.

This article was originally published with two pages that had been transposed (209–210). The error has now been corrected on MUSE. Click here for the original uncorrected PDF.

The Turn of the Screw is probably the most widely read of Henry James's works. After making a splash on both sides of the Atlantic at its initial publication, it has remained popular to this day. Yet studies of the novella's reception have focused almost exclusively on its appearance in book form: it was published in England and the United States. with another long tale, "Covering End," in a volume entitled The Two Magics in the fall of 1898. Almost completely ignored is the novella's first actual appearance, in Collier's Weekly, where it was serialized from January to April earlier that year. Yet this serialization, commissioned by Collier's at the nadir of James's popularity, helped re-establish James's career in the United States and shaped the tale's later reception when it appeared in book form.

Relocating James's tale in its original publication context helps to explain why it achieved such popular success when it was published as a book. In fact, it was not the story by Henry, but the photographs by a different James—James "Jimmy" Hare—which drew readers to these issues of Collier's. Hare's photographs of the wreckage of the U.S.S. Maine, which exploded in Havana harbor early in The Turn of the Screw's serial run, and his continuing coverage of the Cuban crisis established Collier's as one of the most up-to-date sources for images of the war. Hare's photographs—nearly all of which were taken by the newly developed "pocket camera"—effectively shaped readers' responses to James's text. The photographs provided a visual correlative to the evils and horrors that the governess in James's story imagines but cannot bring herself to name. At the same time, James's story articulated anxieties about the changing nature of sight and image that deepened the impact of Hare's photographs. Thus, while Hare's photographs brought readers to James's text, James's text, in turn, provided a context for reading Hare's photographs. This reciprocity ensured the success of both Jameses: the master novelist and the upstart photographer.

By the mid-1890s, Henry James's career, like the nineteenth century itself, appeared spent. After the tepid reception of The Bostonians (1886) and The Princess Cassamassima (1887), and his disastrous foray into the theater in the early 1890s, he had become, apparently, irrelevant. While several British magazines continued to publish James's fiction (Black and White and The Anglo-Saxon Review, to name two), between 1893 and 1898, American magazines effectively snubbed him. If they published him at all, they preferred his reviews and travel pieces—works consistent, in their vantage point and tone, with the figure of the doyen of the Anglo-American literary establishment; the only major fictional work James published in American periodicals during this period was What Maisie Knew, which was serialized in Herbert Stone's effete and somewhat experimental Chap-Book magazine in 1897. In 1895, he wrote his friend William Dean Howells, "I have fallen upon evil days—every sign or symbol of one's being in the least wanted, anywhere or by any one having so utterly failed. A new generation that I know not, and mainly prize not, has taken universal possession."¹

James was not far off the mark. A new generation had indeed taken possession of the world that James had once ruled. In the 1890s, the sudden and spectacular efflorescence of the cheap mass-market periodical transformed the literary landscape in ways that James could not have imagined when he achieved his first great success with Daisy Miller in 1881. The Ladies' Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, and the Saturday Evening Post, at least in the mind of the mainstream public, completely eclipsed the stalwart institutions of James's youth, the Atlantic...