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Remembered Future: Neuro-Cognitive Identity in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, The
College Literature, Spring 2004 by Wesley, Marilyn C
The governess is surprised at the prominence of such homely curiosity at this precipitous time. But assuming that she projects her own preoccupation with the "ghosts" onto the children, she also assigns to them her own escalating need to reproduce a sense of "self" in conjunction with the troubling events which occupy her thoughts. The dislocation occasioned by her new situation would evoke this necessity and her later recollection in light of Miles's death must have required a similar reformulation of her own identity. The self-ordering unnoticed in the ordinary course of experience is remarkable at this point precisely because it is problematic. The parson's daughter and the governess are in important aspects unrelated. If the ghost story is the narrator's perceptual objectification of disturbing conditions and events, the narration of her past is a contingent effort at dispositional subjectification. The governess's report of the peculiar linkage of the ghost story and her personal narrative, while demonstrating the difficulty of endeavoring to establish a new identity, also supports Damasio's contention that both the world and the self are necessarily memorialized within the unfolding story that constitutes human consciousness.
Central Stories
Story-telling, which for neurologist Damasio remains a suggestive metaphor for autobiographical memory, provides the literal basis for the process of self-definition posited by cognitive psychologist David B. Pillemer. Whereas Damasio theorizes that the world and the self are continuously recreated by memory, Pillemer suggests how this process actually takes place. In Momentous Events, Vivid Memories, Pillemer argues that associative networks of significant personal event memories form an individual's sense of autobiographical identity and that these central memories are structured as narrative. According to Pillemer, this kind of nodal memory,
represents a specific event that took place at a specific time and place; [it] contains a detailed account of the rememberer's own personal circumstances at the time of the event; [the] verbal narrative account of the event is accompanied by sensory images, including visual, auditory, olfactory images or body sensations, that contribute to the feeling of "reexperiencing" or "reliving"; [the] sensory details and images correspond to a particular moment or moments of phenomenal experience; [and the] rememberer believes that the memory is a truthful representation of what transpired. (Pillemer 1998, 50-51)
Pillemer's inclusion of perceptual imagery along with his account of the persistence of emotionally significant episodes combines the biological immediacy of Damasio's "core memory" with the permanence of Damasio's "autobiographical memory," an experiential combination only available to an individual through the cultural framework provided by narrative.
The last chapters of James's novella, which conclude abruptly with the bizarre death of the governess's young charge, Miles, encapsulate the principal personal event memory at the center of the governess's identity-that of her failure to nurture and protect the children. After the departure of little Flora, whom the governess has frightened with accusations about the ghost of Miss Jessel, she is left alone with the boy. Her last confrontation with him culminates in the sudden, inexplicable cessation of his heart. During this final interview, the governess demands the truth about two mysteries concerning Miles-whether or not he pilfered her letter to his uncle and the reason that he had been dismissed from boarding school. Although evidently upset by her uncharacteristically direct questions, Miles bravely confesses the circumstances of his guilt in both instances, but when this information does not allay her continuing agitation, he infers that she is again disturbed by the ghost of the former governess, as she revealed the previous day.4 However, when even this inference is rejected, he apparently conjectures that his governess is responding to yet another ghost-that of Peter Quint, Miss Jessel's notorious paramour-although, according to the governess's own account, Miles himself is unable see the specter that she intermittently observes peering in through the window.5
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