Reading into Henry James

Criticism, Wntr, 2004 by Jonathan Flatley

for Janice Radway

All of these melancholies were qualified indeed by one redeeming reflection--the sense of how little, for a good while past ... I had been producing. I did say to myself "Produce again--produce; produce better than ever and all will yet be well."

Henry James to W. D. Howells, January 22, 1895

HENRY JAMES'S LITERARY career reached what was probably its nadir on January 5, 1895, when, on the opening night of his play Guy Domville, James was booed, jeered, and even assaulted with tomatoes by a literally riotous crowd. (1) This spectacular rejection left James, who in any event tended toward depression, feeling that he had "fallen upon evil days--every sign or symbol of one's being in the least wanted, anywhere or by anyone, having so utterly failed." (2) Even a year after the incident, James would write: "In spite of my gain of private quiet I have suffered very acutely by my loss of public." (3)

James's inability to capture a theatrical audience reverberated with special emotional force because his foray into playwriting had been an attempt to redress an earlier failure to keep the audience that had existed for his novels and stories. The process began in the late 1880s, when the sales o f his novels declined and he ceased being able to publish in The Atlantic. This journal, probably the most popular literary magazine of his time, had serialized almost all of his early novels, providing James with a regular place to publish, a reliable income, and a secure sense of readership. (4) However, the literary public sphere changed rather dramatically in the late 1880s and early 1890s as a modern mass culture originated in the United States. (5) The hegemony of The Atlantic ended as picture magazines like Ladies Home Journal, McClure's, and others gained unprecedentedly large circulations. For the first time, magazines made their money not on subscriptions but from advertising revenue. Their function was to provide audiences--the bigger the better--to advertisers, and the "literature" thus had the primary function of attracting that advertising audience. This development was a major step in what Adorno and Horkheimer called the "amalgamation" of advertising and culture, and James, like many writers, had a difficult time adjusting. This was not only because he chafed at the need to subordinate his authorial aspirations to the aims of advertising but also because, as Meredith McGill has put it, the changes produced a rupture "between the available models of authorship and the conditions of publication they sought to describe." (6) One response to this situation was the creation of modernist and avant-garde journals for smaller, avowedly not general, audiences. (7) James would eventually move in this direction, but in 1895 he had not given up the hope of resisting the amalgamation with advertising while still managing to achieve the sensation produced by the "audible vibration" of a sizable reading public. Indeed, depressed by loss upon loss, he desired to feel that vibration more than ever. He hoped to write his way out of his depression, reminding himself that the key was to "produce ... produce; produce better than ever and all will yet be well." (8)

Just a few days after the Guy Domville debacle, while vacationing in the English countryside, James heard the story, that would become the basis for the production that restored his sense of readership, The Turn of the Screw. (9) It concerns a poor woman who is hired by a wealthy, attractive bachelor to take care of his nephew and niece at a luxurious country estate. She is thoroughly charmed by the "gorgeous" children, Miles and Flora, the estate itself, and the general sense of privilege that attaches to the position. However, things almost immediately start to unravel, as Miles is kicked out of school, and then she starts seeing ghosts around the estate. They are ghosts, she gradually comes to realize, of a now deceased servant and erstwhile governess, who, she learns through innuendo, seem to have had vaguely and unspeakably improprietous, perverse relations with the children. They have come back, it is clear to the governess, to get the children, who, however, refuse to admit their intercourse with the ghosts. The story becomes a quest for the governess to find out the secret of the ghosts' relation to the children, to get the children to confess to this relation, and thereby to purge and save them from the ghosts. First, however, the presence of the ghosts allows for a certain pleasurable intimacy with the children, because it forces her to be extra attentive and imaginative in her interactions with them as she tries to read into the children's behavior for signs of their knowledge. Crucial to the story's effect is the fact that this is all narrated in a highly' ambiguous style which makes it impossible to tell whether or not the ghosts are real or the governess is crazy: Like the governess, the reader is put in a position of having to read into an unclear text. Gradually the governess's pursuit becomes more aggressive and less rewarding. She frightens and alienates Flora, and then, in the final scene, she gets Miles to utter a kind of ambiguous confession and, in the process, apparently kills him.