Postgothic fiction: Joyce Carol Oates turns the screw on Henry James - Critical Essay

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1998 by Diane Long Hoeveler

James's tale has famously persisted to enthrall and puzzle readers who are drawn to its glossy surface and its unspoken depths. Oates, on the other hand, begins her story in those depths. She forces her readers to confront the polymorphous perversity that is implicit in human relationships, and she portrays a world that has no neat boundaries, either in morality or mortality. In an essay in which she attempted to define "The Short Story," Oates observes that years earlier she believed that "art was rational, at bottom, that it could be seen to `make sense,' that it had a definite relationship with philosophical inquiry, though its aim was not necessarily to resolve philosophical doubt." Now, however, she thinks such is not the case: "the short story is a dream verbalized, arranged in space and presented to the world, imagined as a sympathetic audience; the dream is said to be some kind of manifestation of desire, so the short story must also represent a desire, perhaps only partly expressed, but the most interesting thing about it is its mystery" (Oates, "Short Story" 214). "Postgothic" fiction brings us precisely to this point, the place where the reader is forced to realize--like Oates--that there is no reality outside the fictional, no truth beyond the constructions, no death, and finally no life apart from the pain. Postmodern gothicists like Poppy Z. Brite take us just to the edge of life. Oates takes us over the edge so that the dead speak and feel and yearn and we postgothic readers, in turn, know that there will be no final escape for any of us--only more texts.

(1) Readers who have struggled with the vexed and vexing narrative and thematic issues in James's tale are legion. Shoshana Felman has summed up the "trap" that the reader of James's text falls into quite succinctly: "The reader can choose either to believe the governess, and thus to behave like Mrs. Grose, or not to believe the governess, and thus to behave precisely like the governess. Since it is the governess, who, within the text, plays the role of the suspicious reader, occupies the place of the interpreter, to suspect that place and that position is, thereby, to take it" (190; original italics).

(2) The governess's insanity or psychic problems have been discussed by numerous critics, including Paula Marantz Cohen and Stanley Renner. Lacanian readings of the causes of the governess's neuroses have included those by Christine Brooke-Rose and Beth Newman.

(3) Critical controversy has raged around James's text, and the most famous (or infamous) critical statements are readily available in a number of sources: see Gerald Willen, Terry Heller, Peter Beidler, and Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren.

(4) All quotations are from the 1995 version published in Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (New York: Plume, 1995), pp. 254-83, and will be cited in parentheses in the text. Alice Hall Petry has explored all of the allusions to the presence of Jane Eyre in James's tale and argued that they reveal that James's intention was to write "a remarkably clever parody" of the Bronte classic (75).