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Reading into Henry James

Criticism, Wntr, 2004 by Jonathan Flatley

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   I don't mean that they had their tongues in their cheeks or did
   anything vulgar, for that was not one of their dangers: I do mean,
   on the other hand, that the element of the unnamed and untouched
   became, between us, greater than any other, and that so much
   avoidance couldn't have been made successful without a great deal of
   tacit arrangement. It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually
   coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short,
   turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind,
   closing with a little bang that made us look at each other--for like
   all bangs, it was something louder than we intended--the doors we
   had indiscreetly opened.... Forbidden ground was the question of the
   return of the dead in general and of whatever, in especial survive
   for memory, of the friends, the little children had lost. (51)

The goal of the game of keeping secrets is not actually to conceal knowledge so much as to employ the shared knowledge of a secret to allow for scenes of mutual reflexive glances, the prosopopoetic reading into that is required when a "tacit arrangement" continually forces them to "look at each other."

The governess knows that her increased and intense interest in the affective lives of her "charges" makes her relationship to them a bit queer in its own right. "I used to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I thought strange things about them; and the circumstance that these things only made them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping them in the dark. I trembled lest they should see that they were so immensely more interesting" (38). Like an analyst who falls in love with his or her patient, or who is turned on by or even obsessed with the details of the patient's sexual life or fantasies, the governess feels a prurient kind of interest in the children that she knows she should keep secret. But this has its affective rewards as well: it means that she can then imagine that they are reading into her. She writes: "For it occurred to me that I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little outbreaks of my sharper passion for them, so too I remember asking if I mightn't see a queerness in the traceable increase in their own demonstrations" (38).

As I noted above, the appearance of the secret of the ghosts encourages the governess to read into the children and at the same time is the device that gets us to read into the story: We repeat the governess's reading into as we try to understand not only what the ghosts have done with the children but whether there are any ghosts at all. We scour the governess's narration for signs of unreliability or for signs of proof of the ghosts existence. As Shoshana Felman has detailed, quite a critical debate raged over the reality of the ghosts. (33) In the first mode of reading, the governess was heroic and tragic, doing battle against evil ghosts and ironically, tragically, killing Miles through her efforts to save him. In the second, inaugurated by Edmund Wilson's 1934 Freudian reading, the ghosts were but inventions of the governess's hysterical imagination, the projections of her repressed desire for the absent master. (34) Felman reads the debate as a reading effect predicted and produced by James's text itself. (35) The textual situation that demands reading into is also itself about reading into: the appearance of the secret of the ghosts is not only the mechanism for provoking the governess to read into the children but for us to read into the governess. As it demands that we read into it, the story comments upon that demand itself.

Reading into Henry James

Criticism, Wntr, 2004 by Jonathan Flatley

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