Remembered Future: Neuro-Cognitive Identity in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, The

Given her apprehensions, the death of Miles is vivid in the governess's memory not only because it is sad and frightening, but because it symbolizes the utter collapse of her projected identity as the caretaker of children. The questionable death of the child she is responsible for indicates the total failure of the governess, for whom, it is important to note, the diction of the story allows no other name or identifying term. As a document of psychological disturbance, The Turn of the Screw illuminates the complexities of the creation of selfhood in a restrictive environment.

An originating event, like a turning point, dates the change of a life course and predicts its new and continuing direction, while an anchoring event serves as "a touchstone for a continuing set of beliefs." Miles's death is both an anchoring and a pivotal event for the governess. According to Pillemer, the power of an experience is sometimes so great that the "memory of a specific incident" provides "more than an emblematic surrogate for a long established lifescript-it is an active force in forming, redirecting, and sustaining the life course" (1998, 24). While the bulk of the novella provides a detailed representation of its precipitating circumstances, the prefatory chapter, tracing multiple renditions, demonstrates that the abiding project of the governess's life has been the narration of the momentous memory of the death of little Miles as a means of redefining selfhood in the face of her early, painful failure to realize a new identity.

Social Narrative

To think of identity in terms of storehouses or ghosts supports the conventional belief that the human self, as either conscious essence or unconscious potential, exists prior to or outside of its manifestation as consistent autobiographical presence. But the theories of both Damasio and Pillemer stress the production rather than the realization of selfhood. In their models, identity is made instead of merely fulfilled, and the agent of this creation is narrative memory. For Damasio, consciousness consists of perception recollected in conjunction with dispositional record. Thus the self develops, at least in part, in response to the social world it reacts to. But for Pillemer the self develops in direct conjunction with culture. Narrative by form rather than formation, Pillemer s nodal memories, like stories, are comprised of particular "episodes," are experienced by identifiable characters, occur in specified locations and times, and contain "feelings, perceptions, and bodily sensation" (1998, 1). In fact, Pillemer points out that "when in our everyday lives we say that we clearly 'remember' a specific past event, we usually mean that we can produce a detailed narrative description of the episode as it was personally experienced" (4). To define memory as story-replete with protagonist, setting, imagistic description, and episodic demarcation-is to define it as coextensive with narrative patterns provided by culture. Citing the research of Katherine Nelson, whose studies of young children suggest that storytelling competence emerges in conjunction with speech,6 Pillemer argues, in effect, that memory, popularly believed to be a biological product of the brain, is, like language itself, also significantly structured by social systems.