"Through the Cracked and Fragmented Self": William James and The Turn of the Screw

Author(s): Karen Halttunen

Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 4, (Dec., 1988), pp. 472-490
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2712998
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 "Throughthe Crackedand FragmentedSelf":
WilliamJamesand The-Turnof the Screw

KARENHALTTUNEN
Northwestern University

WHEN A READER TOLD HENRY JAMES THAT THE TURN OF THE SCREW WAS
"the most powerful, the most nerve-shatteringghost story" he had ever read,
the authorwas pleased, remarking, "I meant to scare the whole world with
that story."' But since its publication in 1898, literarycritics have debated
whetherThe Turnof the Screw is a ghost story or a Freudianstudy in delusion.
The Freudianschool took as its point of departureEdmundWilson's argument
that"theyoung governesswho tells the storyis a neuroticcase of sex repression
and the ghosts are not real ghosts at all but merely the governess's halluci-
nations."2 Several generations of anti-Freudiancritics took this case apart
point by point, with argumentsrangingfrom the obvious-the governess can
hardlybe called a frustratedspinsterat the age of twenty-to the authorial-
Henry James plainly stated his intention to representPeter Quint and Miss
Jessel as agents of evil.3 In 1955, Leon Edel understandablydeclared the
debate "long and rather tiresome."4 Over the last few decades, however,
critics have come to accept that The Turnof the Screw, as Dorothea Krook
observed, "yields two meanings, both equally self-consistent and self-com-
plete." James's triumphin the tale was to make his reader "believe both in
the ghosts and the obsession, until we could not be sure which was true."5
As Tzvetan Todorov has argued, The Turn of the Screw is a "remarkable
example" of the literatureof the fantastic, a genre defined by the reader's
hesitation between a naturaland a supernaturalunderstandingof the events
described.6

KarenHalttunenis Associate Professorof History at NorthwesternUniversity and the authorof

ConfidenceMen and Painted Women:A Study of Middle-Class Culturein America, 1830-1870
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

The authorwishes to thank Robert Finlay, David Joravsky, B. J. T. Dobbs and the American
Studies faculty at Hobart-WilliamSmith Colleges for their criticism and encouragement.

472
 WILLIAMJAMES AND THE TURN OF THE SCREW 473

Todorov's perspective suggests an historicist explanation of the ultimate

sterility of the Freudiandebate over The Turnof the Screw. The literatureof
the fantastic,in its purestform, had a relativelybrief lifespan;its characteristic
hesitation between supernaturaland naturalinterpretationswas an historical
phenomenon that spanned the period from the late eighteenth to the late
nineteenthcentury, when psychoanalysistook over its majorthemes-sexual
desire, demonic possession, the nightmare,the double-and interpretedthem
as naturalphenomena.7Freud's historical role in underminingthe literature
of the fantastic thus casts doubt not only on the Freudianapproachto The
Turnof the Screw, which would resolve the reader's hesitationby offering a
naturalinterpretationof what happens at Bly; but also on any anti-Freudian
approachthat, in insisting on a supernaturalunderstandingof the tale, es-
sentially accepts a post-Freudiandichotomybetween naturaland supernatural
that is inconsistent with the nineteenth-centuryfantastic. But the tale's un-
relenting concentrationupon the nature of perception continues to call for
systematicpsychological understanding.I propose to offer that understanding
not from a twentieth-centuryperspectivewhich demandsthatthe readerdecide
between a psychoanalytic and a supernaturalunderstandingof the tale, but
from the perspectiveof a nineteenth-centurypsychology which, in confronting
certainmental disorders(such as multiple personality),fundamentallyequiv-
ocatedbetween materialistand spiritistexplanationsof them. Anglo-American
psychology in the 1890s-that set of culturally and historically specific as-
sumptions,theories, and metaphorsthat made up what anthropologistswould
call Henry James's "indigenous psychology"-hesitated between a natural
and a supernaturalunderstandingof strangepsychic phenomena.8It was thus,
to borrowTodorov's term, a psychology of the fantastic, which may offer a
more historically useful psychological approachto The Turnof the Screw.
One of the most authoritativevoices in this field was, of course, Henry
James's older brother.In 1896, one year before Henrywrote his tale, William
James delivered a series of Lowell lectures on "ExceptionalMental States,"
which have been reconstructedby Eugene Taylor, an historianof psychiatry,
from James's lecture notes, with some assistancefrom his librarymarginalia,
correspondence,and other writings on abnormalpsychology.9 The foremost
Americanpsychologist of his day, William James was a pioneer of psychical
research, the scientific investigation into such phenomena as trances, clair-
voyance, and telepathic communication,including messages allegedly from
the dead. As a psychical researcher,William James has been enlisted before
in the critical debate over The Turnof the Screw, usually on the side of the
anti-Freudians,who arguethatHenryJames drew on his brother'sknowledge
of spiritualistphenomena in his depiction of Quint and Miss Jessel.'0 But
William's psychological views in 1896, at the halfway point between his
Principles of Psychology (1890) and Varietiesof Religious Experience(1902),
474 AMERICANQUARTERLY

were chargedwith the same hesitationthat pervades The Turnof the Screw:"
"if thereare devils," he wrote, "if thereare supernormalpowers, it is through
the cracked and fragmentedself that they enter" (110).
In his Lowell lectures, covering such subjects as dreams and hypnotism,
hysteria, multiple personality, and demonic possession, William James de-
veloped two central themes: normal mental operations overlap significantly
with morbid activity, and morbid phenomenamay open a window onto the
supernatural.The significance of Exceptional Mental States for The Turnof
the Screw is that it makes possible a detailed psychological discussion of the
governess that resolves some of the problems of the Freudianinterpretation
while refusing to rule out a supernaturalunderstandingof what happens to
her at Bly. Though a Jamesian interpretationneed not entirely displace the
Freudianapproachto The Turnof the Screw, it may prove more useful for
threereasons. First, as I have suggested, it offers a psychology of the fantastic
better suited to a literatureof the fantasticthan Freudiannaturalism.Second,
the psychology of William James is more useful to an understandingof The
Turnof the Screw thanFreudianpsychology in termsof such specific concerns
as the natureof hallucinationsand the phenomenonof multiple personality.
Finally, though there is no evidence for a direct influence of Exceptional
MentalStates on The Turnof the Screw, thereis betterevidence for its indirect
influence than for any Freudianinfluence. The psychology of William James
was, in a literal sense, the "indigenous psychology" of Henry James, who
was, as his older brotheronce informed their sister, "a native of the James
family, and has no other country."'12
In his first Lowell lecture, on "Dreams and Hypnotism," William James
discussed a mental state that he called hypnagogic, a twilight state between
wakefulness and sleep that is characteristicboth of hypnosis and of normal
sleeping activity. Twice a day, upon waking and falling asleep, each of us
passes through the hypnagogic state in which, suspended between waking
and sleeping, we fall into a semi-dream consciousness; we imagine things
that never happened, and later cannot distinguishthe dreamingfrom waking
reality. Although this imagining may be called a hallucination, James em-
phasized that it is simply a normal form of dreaming, distinguishedby two
characteristicsof that state: a narrowingof the field of consciousness, and
the vividness of the contents that remain. The main symptom of the twilight
state is the subject's suggestibility, which generatesthe vivid monoideism of
the dream, its focus on a single idea, isolated and sometimes personified.
James cited a number of waking experiences which exhibit some of the
monoideismof the hypnagogicor tranceconsciousness:daydreaming,building
"castles in the air" or concentratedintrospection,alcoholic intoxication, and
the "sleep-drunkenness"of the sleeperwho, thoughactive, is only half-awake
(19).
 WILLIAMJAMES AND THE TURN OF THE SCREW 475

In William James's understandingof the hypnagogic state, the governess

may be hallucinatingor dreamingQuint and Miss Jessel in a normal trance
consciousness. Much of the story occurs at twilight: there are abundantrefer-
ences not only to the "clear twilight" or "the fading light" of evening, but
also to "the fading dusk" or "the cold faint twilight" of morning.13 The hours
of transitionbetween sleep and wakefulness are thus importantin The Turn
of the Screw. All Peter Quint's appearancesare at or near twilight: the first
is at evening twilight, a point James makes clear with seven referencesto the
transitionalquality of the light (15-17); the second occurs as the "afternoon
light still lingered" (20); his third, during "the yielding dusk of earliest
morning" (41); his fourthand final appearance,after dinneron a "dim day"
(87).14 Similarly, it may be psychologically significant that both Quint and
Miss Jessel appearon the staircase, the route by which we pass from waking
to sleeping andback again. The possible link between the ghostly appearances
and the hypnagogic state is strengthenedby the governess's chronic state of
insomnia; she is an irregularand fitful sleeper, as well as a frequentnight-
walker who may be a victim of what William James called "sleep-drunk-
enness." She is also highly suggestible;no sooner does she spot Quint on the
tower than she begins to wonder, "Was there a 'secret' at Bly-a mystery of
Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionablerelative kept in unsuspectedcon-
finement?"(17) And she is prone to both daydreaming(fantasizingabouther
employer) and concentratedintrospection(shutting herself into her room to
brood over her situation).
The peculiar qualities of the governess's hallucinationsalso invite com-
parisonwith the hypnagogic dream. The apparitionsare all characterizedby
monoideism, focusing on a single idea, isolated and personified. Her first
sighting of Quintpresentsa virtualcase study in the two majorcharacteristics
of the dreamas identifiedby William James. First, her field of consciousness
narrows:"It was as if, while I took in, what I did take in, all the rest of the
scene had been stricken with death. I can hear again, as I write, the intense
hush in which the sounds of the evening dropped.The rooks stoppedcawing
in the golden sky and the friendly hour lost for the unspeakableminute all
its voice" (16). Immediately after, she is aware of the vividness of the re-
maining contents of her perception: "the man who looked at me over the
battlements was as definite as a picture in a frame" (16). William James
probablywould have identifiedthe governess's perceptionas a hallucination.
The twilight setting of many of the apparitions, the governess's irregular
sleeping patterns,her suggestibility, her daydreamingand brooding, and the
tunnelvision qualityof her perception,all suggest that she is peculiarlyprone
to whatJamescalled the hypnagogicstate, thatmentaltwilightzone resembling
hypnosis but requiringno hypnotist.
In comparing dreams and hypnotism, William James discussed the
476 AMERICANQUARTERLY

phenomenonof post-hypnagogicsuggestion. The abilityof a subjectto pursue

one line of thought in speaking and simultaneouslycarry out unconsciously
a commandreceived while asleep or in a hypnotictrance,led Jamesto observe,
"In all this we notice dissociation, polyzoism, or polypsychism" (33-34).
He put this point more simply in the opening to his next lecture, on "Au-
tomatism": "the mind seems to embracea confederationof psychic entities"
(35). Even the normal mind, under hypnosis, "loses its quality of unity and
lapses into a polypsychismof fields thatgenuinelyco-exist, andyet areoutside
of each other's ken and dissociatedfunctionally"(37). James's understanding
of polypsychism drew on the work of F. W. H. Myers, an English member
of the Society for Psychical Research, who had argued that "the stream of
consciousness in which we habituallylive is not the only consciousness which
exists in connection with our organism" (41). The ordinarywaking state,
which Myers called the "supraliminal"consciousness, was only a portionof
a greaterpsychic reality, which he called the "subliminal"or "transliminal"
consciousness. In James's understanding,the hypnagogicstate involved a fall
of the threshold of consciousness, which laid bare the operations of the
subliminal self in the form of dreams or hallucinations-the productionsof
consciousness "beyond the margin" (42).
From this perspective, the governess's hallucinationsarise from a mental
region "beyond the margin" of her everyday consciousness. The image of
the margin is introducedrepeatedly in The Turnof the Screw. Ghostly ap-
paritions appear at the far edge of the lake or at the other side of the win-
dowpane;they are sensed by the governess at the rim of her vision or across
the thresholdof the dining room. The governess proclaimsherself a "screen"
standingbetween the children and the dead servants(28); she refers to Bly's
horrorsas "a view of the back of the tapestry" (46). When she senses that
Mrs. Grose is withholdinginformation, she reportsthat "a small shifty spot
on the wrong side of it all sometimes brushed my brow like the wing of a
bat" (35), and continues, "I felt the importanceof giving the last jerk to the
curtain" (35). The window, the curtain, the screen, the tapestry, the brush
of the bat's wing-all are images for the boundarybetween the known and
the unknown, a margin which the governess both fears and longs to cross.
In her climactic confrontationwith Flora- "Where,my pet is Miss Jessel?"-
she does break throughthe margin, as "the quick smitten glare with which
the child's face now received it fairly likened my breachof the silence to the
smash of a pane of glass" (70). Like "the hauntedpane" (82) throughwhich
Miles gazes in the novel's final scene, thatshatteringglass reveals the haunted
nature of all marginal zones in The Turnof the Screw. Most significant in
psychological termsis the "blackhauntededge" of the "grey pool" thatFlora
pretendsis the Sea of Azof (a bay of the Black Sea), the hauntedmargin at
which the governess gazes "through the twilight" after Miss Jessel's last
 WILLIAMJAMES AND THE TURNOF THE SCREW 477

appearance(73). Of this pool, she has said, "My acquaintancewith sheets

of water was small, and the pool of Bly, at all events on the few occasions
of my consenting, underthe protectionof my pupils, to affrontits surfacein
the old flat-bottomedboat moored there for our use had impressed me with
its extent and its agitation"(68). For William James, the conscious self was
to the subliminalself like an island in the sea. 15 In ExceptionalMental States,
he explored the hauntingpowers of the marginof that sea, the marginacross
which hallucinationtakes place.
Polypsychism, according to James, is characteristicof the normal as well
as the pathological mind. It is polypsychism, for example, that enables one
to "walk and talk, or read aloud and think" simultaneously (41). Is the
governess in The Turnof the Screw in possession of a "normal" mind? Of
her background,we know only that she led a "small smotheredlife" (4) in
a Hampshirevicarage before coming to Bly, that her fatheris eccentric, and
that there is trouble at home. We learn that she is a "flutteredanxious girl,"
"young, untried, nervous" (4, 6), with a highly suggestible nature;as she
confesses to Mrs. Grose, "I'm rathereasily carriedaway" (9). Her suggest-
ibility is accompaniedby an exalted sensibility, what she calls her "dreadful
liability to impressionsof the orderso vividly exemplified" (25), a sensibility
that Henry James reinforcedin revising the novel for the New York edition,
replacingverbs of perceptionwith verbs of feeling and intuition.16 She is also
prone to melodramaticdisplays. Even before the apparitionsbegin, upon
deciding that Miles cannotbe guilty of misconductat school, she seizes Flora
(whom she has just met) and covers her "with kisses in which there was a
sob of atonement"(11); andas she determinesnot to reportthe boy's expulsion
to his uncle, she rhapsodizes, "I had made up my mind. . . . I was incisive.
... I was wonderful"(14). She is subjectto inappropriatehilarity;she laughs
upon informingMrs. Grose she has just seen Miss Jessel in the schoolroom,
and upon learningthatFlorahas spentthe night spewing evil invective against
her. Finally, her wild facial expressions frequentlyfrighten the housekeeper
and the children. Freudiancritics have labelled her an hysteric.
In strictlyhistoricalterms, however, the governessis not a Freudianhysteric;
that is, her mental state does not fit Sigmund Freud's theory of hysteria in
1897 when The Turnof the Screw was written. Freud's major work on the
subject, Studies on Hysteria (coauthoredwith Josef Breuer and published in
1895), assertedthat "hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences,"17 and ar-
gued that those reminiscences are of sexual traumas. For Henry James's
governess to be a Freudianhysteric, strictlyspeaking, she would have to have
undergone some kind of traumaticsexual experience in her childhood, like
the attemptedseduction of Freud's "Katharina-" by her father when she
was fourteen."8In 1895, Freud had yet to theorize that hysterics suffer from
impulses and desires, not memories, and to argue that his patients' tales of
478 AMERICANQUARTERLY

sexual seductionwere sheer fantasies.19Furthermore,Freud'scentralconcern

in Studies on Hysteria was "conversion," the transformationof traumatically
strangulatedaffect into bodily manifestationssuch as "FrauEmmy von N.'s"
leg pains, facial tics, and clacking noises.20HenryJames's governessexhibits
no such symptoms.
James's governess does, however, resemble one Freudiancase published
in the Studies: the case of "Miss Lucy R." Lucy R. was a young governess
who came to Freud depressed, fatigued, and tormentedby a constant hallu-
cinatorysmell of burntpudding, a smell which Freud soon tracedto a trivial
domesticincidentthathadoccurredtwo monthsearlier.Findingno satisfactory
explanationof her symptoms there, he challenged her to admit that she was
in love with her employer. At this point in her analysis, the smell of burnt
puddingwas replacedby the hallucinatorysmell of cigar smoke, which evoked
a scene in which the children's father had been thrown into a rage when a
family friendkissed his childrenon the mouth, and had blamed Lucy for this
incident and threatenedher with dismissal. Freud called Lucy R.'s case "a
slight and mild hysteria"of an "acquired"nature.2"HenryJames's governess
resemblesLucy R.: both are English governesses, fall hopelessly in love with
theiremployers, sufferhallucinations(althoughLucy R.'s areolfactory, Freud
called her "a 'visual' type"22),and are cast in the role of guardiansover two
children to whom unrelated adults make sexual advances. A beloved em-
ployer's anger at the lovesick governess for not preventing such advances
constitutedLucy R.'s traumaticshock and the fictional governess's greatest
fear. Most important, Lucy R. was not the victim of a childhood sexual
seduction-her traumawas the revelation of her employer's indifference to
her-and her "conversion"took the form of a hallucination;on both counts,
her case is, among all the Studies on Hysteria, most compatible with the
"case" of James's governess.23
The case of Miss Lucy R. is the only Freudianstudyin hysteriathatWilliam
James discussed in his Lowell lecture on hysteria (70-71). It is significant,
however, that James mistakenly attributedthe case to Freud's collaborator,
Josef Breuer,whose own views of hysteriawere in some ways more congenial
to the American psychologist. In Breuer's view (which Freud halfheartedly
accepted in 1893 but essentially rejected in the Studies), the cause and nec-
essary conditionof hysteriawas the hypnoid(or hypnagogic)state. Forpeople,
like Breuer's "Anna0." -with a strongtendencyto daydream-the "habitual
co-existence of two heterogeneoustrains of ideas" can lead to a seizure of
full control over the mind by the secondaryor hypnoid state; Anna 0. com-
plained of "having two selves, a real one and an evil one which forced her
to behave badly."24Breuer's emphasis on the splitting of consciousness by
the hypnoid state, which owed more to Frenchpsychotherapistssuch as Binet
andJanetthandid Freud'sgrowingemphasison the role of defense,25matched
 WILLIAMJAMES AND THE TURN OF THE SCREW 479

William James's central concern in his Lowell lecture on hysteria. In this,

his most confusing lecture of the Lowell series, he providedhis listeners with
a relatively undigested mass of material, drawing extensively from Charcot,
Janet, Binet, Breuer, Freud, and his standbyMyers, discussing such matters
as hysteric symptoms, elective anesthesia, acute sensibility, traumaticshock,
the ide'efixe,andthe role of autosuggestion.But in the midst of this confusion,
James made one point perfectly clear: in hysteria, "Consciousnesssplits, and
two halves sharethe field" (62). Jameswas inconclusive on how such splitting
came to pass. For him, what was most importantwas simply that the essential
condition of hysteria was the split consciousness.
The real function of James's lecture on hysteria in the Lowell series was
to lay the groundworkfor his fourth lecture, on multiple personality, a dis-
cussion which is far more useful to an understandingof The Turnof the Screw.
In multiple personality, "the division of personality"that is evident in hyp-
notism and hysteria "is more obvious" (73), because the contents of the
subliminalmind come togetherto form an alternateself or selves. There are,
Jamesargued,threepathologicaltypes of multipleor "alternating"personality:
the "fugue," in which the subjectpasses from one state of consciousness into
anotherwith no memory of the previous state;the "epileptic case," involving
the convulsive fits of the hystericalcrisis; and the "psychopathicand dreamy
state," in which morbid insanity induces transienthallucinationswhile the
victim is fully conscious. Not all instances of alternatingpersonality, James
stressed, are "hysteric cases" (77). Mary Reynolds, for example, was a
Pennsylvania woman who, in 1811, entered a long period of alternating
personality, in which her original melancholy self alternatedwith a buoyant
personality;finally, at the age of thirty-six, she settled into her second state
and developed into a maturewoman with a sense of social responsibility(77-
79). James discussed numerous other cases of alternatingpersonality, in-
cluding Molly Fancher,the "Brooklyn enigma," who exhibited at least five
different personalities (named Sunbeam, Idol, Rosebud, Pearl, and Ruby),
and the Reverend Ansel Bourne, a fugue case, whom James himself had
treated through hypnotism. He also cited several cases treated by Janet, in
which the multiple selves did not appearin succession but co-existed within
the person.
William James's understandingof the multiplepersonalityoffers an intrigu-
ing perspective on the governess's mental state in The Turn of the Screw.
Withinthis perspective, what the governess is hallucinatingin Quintand Miss
Jessel is her own "confederationof psychic entities," the other personalities
residing in her subliminal consciousness. This is indicated by the dominant
image of reflection in The Turnof the Screw. When the governess arrives at
Bly, she is most impressed by her first encounter with full-length mirrors,
"the long glasses in which, for the,first time, I could see myself from head
480 AMERICANQUARTERLY

to foot" (7)-that is, in her entirety. Reflecting surfaces play an important

part in the ghostly appearancesthemselves. Miss Jesselfirst appearswhen
the governess is seated on a bench overlookingthe mirroringlake in the bright
glare of a sunny day, with her eyes focused, not on "the other side of the
Sea of Azof" (29) where the apparitionlooms, but on the sewing in her lap.26
Peter Quint appearstwice at the window pane of the dining room and again
on the staircasenear a tall window, where "in the cold faint twilight, with a
glimmer in the high glass and anotheron the polish of the oak stair below,
we faced each other in our common intensity" (41). As Juliet McMasterhas
observed, "the question that James deliberatelyraises is whether that glass
is a transparentpane, through which Peter Quint can clearly be seen, or
whetherit is, as it may become at dusk, opaque like a mirror,simply giving
back to the governess a reflection of herself."27
The governess's report that she and Peter Quint "faced each other in our
common intensity" reveals her peculiar habit of identifying herself with the
ghosts in a variety of ways. When confrontingFlora with Miss Jessel's final
appearanceat the lake, she insists to the child that the apparitionis present-
"andyou know it as well as you know me!"(71) In the same vein, she reports
of the schoolroomscene thatMiss Jessel "looked at me long enough to appear
to say that her right to sit at my table was as good as mine to sit at hers"
(59). Most significantis the governess's repeatedcompulsion to assume the
place of the ghost, in what McMaster has called "an ironic reversal of lo-
cations."28After Quint's first appearanceat the window, she records, "It was
confusedly present to me that I ought to place myself where he had stood. I
did so; I applied my face to the pane and looked, as he had looked, into the
room" (21). She gives a similarreportof her actions after her solitary return
from church: "Tormented,in the hall, with difficulties and obstacles, I re-
membersinking down at the foot of the staircase-suddenly collapsing there
on the lowest step and then, with a revulsion, recalling that it was exactly
where, more than a monthbefore, in the darknessof night andjust so bowed
with evil things, I had seen the spectre of the most horribleof women" (58-
59). E. DuncanAswell has rightlyarguedthat "the governess not only creates
the activities of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel out of her imagination;it is she
herself who is the intrudingghost at Bly, carryingout the functions and duties
she ascribedto her supposed enemies."29
In the closing scene of the novel, the governess capturesher experience of
Quint's final appearanceby saying that she was distractedby "somethingthat
I can describeonly as a fierce split of my attention"(84). For William James,
that "fierce split" of the governess's attentionwould have conveyed clinical
meaning. Only twice does she actuallyentera fugue-like state:when she loses
track of the time after first encounteringQuint on the tower, and more dra-
matically, when she falls into a fit after confrontingFlora at the lake. None-
 WILLIAMJAMES AND THE TURN OF THE SCREW 481

theless, the governess periodicallyreleases from her subliminalconsciousness

alternatepersonalities that give vent to her darkerimpulses: if not her love
for heremployer,which she has openly confessed, thenher lust for him (which
assumes the form of the infamous affair between the former governess and
the master's "own man") (24); or, alternatively,her even more illicit passion
for her young charge, Miles (which is objectifiedin the hints that Quint and
Jessel preyed sexually on the childrenwhile alive and long to "possess" them
now that the servantsare dead)."o
Within the abnormalpsychology of William James, Henry James's gov-
ernessmay be a normalsubjectof twilightdreams,or she may be a pathological
case of multiple personality.Neither of these approachesto her mental con-
dition, however, can explain how she describesPeter Quint with such precise
and accuratedetail after his first appearanceon the tower. For this incident-
the bugbearof Freudiancritics-William James's "ExceptionalMentalStates"
offers a third possible interpretation:she is a medium who commands su-
pernormalpowers of cognition. James regardedmediumistic possession as
the fourth,nonpathologicalformof alternatingpersonality,which could appear
"in persons who have no other obvious nervous anomaly" (88). In medium-
ship, the subject's primarypersonalityis periodicallyreplacedby a secondary
state. While the invasion lasts, the medium speaks with an alteredvoice and
manner,assumes a differentname, and refers to the primaryself in the third
person; and if the secondary personality is sufficiently well-developed, the
subjecthas no memory of the attackonce it has passed. In the historicalpast,
James said, the foreign personalitywas usually believed to be a demon; now,
the "control" generally claimed to be the spirit of a dead person who might
or might not be known to those present. As an example of mediumship, he
cited the case of one Laurancy Venuum, an adolescent girl who became
possessed by the spirit of a neighborgirl named Mary Roff, who had died in
an insane asylum many years earlier. The new "Mary" moved in with the
Roff family where she recognized everyone the dead child had known and
rememberedmany incidentsthathad occurredup to twenty-fiveyears earlier.
After several months, the mediumistic experience ceased, and the newly
restoredLaurancyresumed her normal life at home (89-91).
ForWilliam James, the centralquestionraisedby mediumshipwas whether
the secondarystate of the medium consisted of a split-off fragmentfrom the
subject's waking state, or emerged from an autonomouspsychic region with
a life and laws of its own. Bernheim and Janet had argued that the contents
of the subconscious were inferior fragments of the conscious self that had
been cast into the subconscious. But for James this view could not explain
some mediums' supernormalpowers of telepathy and clairvoyance. "I my-
self," he announced, "am convinced of supernormal cognition . . . " James
found FrederickMyers's view of the subliminalself as psychic spectrummost
482 AMERICANQUARTERLY

useful for understandinga case such as that of LaurancyVenuum. At the

inferior end of the spectrum, the subliminal self retains certain rudimentary
processes, once supraliminal,now performed automaticallywithout super-
vision. But at the superiorend, it includes impressions, such as telepathic
andclairvoyantinformation,which the mind receives not throughthose senses
commanded by the supraliminalself, but through the peculiar and hidden
operationsof the subliminalself (42-43). ThoughJamesleft open this question
of the ultimateautonomyof the subliminal,he was inclined to accept Myers's
notion of an independentlyoperating,intelligent subconscious, whose hidden
operationsmight have a transcendentdimension.
Myers's view of the subliminal self thus suggested that supernormalcog-
nition draws knowledge from the realm of the supernatural.On this point,
WilliamJameswas reluctantto commithimself: "I am at the portalof Psychical
Research," he told his audience, "onto which I said I would not enter" (91).
Tentatively, he continued, "I myself have no question that the formulae of
dissociatedpersonalitywill accountfor the phenomenaI have broughtbefore
you"; in Janet's phrase, "Not by demons [is the hysteric obsessed] but by a
fixed idea of the person that has dropt down" (91). Once again, however,
James was unwilling to accept Janet's approachas definitive: "to say that
[Janet's theory of dissociated personality]is one thing and to deny all other
meanings of the phenomena is another" (91). At this critical point in his
discussion, Jamesrefusedto rule out the possibility of a supernaturalpresence.
In cases of alternatepersonality, "The tendency for the self to breakup may,
if therebe spiritinfluences, yield them theiropportunity.Thus we might have
hysteric mediums and if there were real demons they might possess only
hysterics" (92). Jamesreturnedto this formulain the conclusion of his lecture
on demonicpossession: "if therearedevils," he said, "if therearesupernormal
powers, it is throughthe cracked and fragmentedself that they enter" (110).
The governess in The Turnof the Screw might well have been recognizable
to William James as a case of mediumistic possession. Her alternatingper-
sonalities do assume the form of two dead persons known to the household
at Bly. Quint and Miss Jessel are actually activatedby her presence; as she
says when searchingfor Quint on the lawn, "He was there or not there: not
there if I didn't see him" (21). (Indeed, Quint and Miss Jessel even combine
William James's two alternativesfor the spirit control inasmuch as they are
referredto as demons as well as spirits of the dead.) In sighting these ap-
paritions, the governess displays the acute spiritualsensitivity of the seance
medium, what she calls her "dreadfulliability to impressionsof the order so
vividly exemplified"; she occasionally expresses herself like a medium- "I
seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darkerobscure" (87); and, like
a medium, her power to "see" comes and goes: her eyes are opened, sealed,
then unsealed by turn. She retains-it is true-a memory of the foreign
 WILLIAMJAMES AND THE TURN OF THE SCREW 483

personalities, but Quint and Miss Jessel remain relatively undeveloped in

William James's terms: they do not speak (the governess's claim that Miss
Jessel addressedher in the schoolroom is demonstrablyfalse), and thus they
do not name themselves. This last point is important,since William James
recognized that the naming of the secondary personality contributedto its
strength. In the Principles, he had quoted Janet's observation that "once
baptised, the subconscious personage grows more definitely outlined and
displays better her psychological characters"(86). In a clinical setting, the
therapistmight thus contributeto the full emergence of a subpersonalityby
insisting, as Janet once did, that it have a name; by a similar process, Mrs.
Grose may have helped crystallizethe personalityof PeterQuintby providing
a name for the governess's first apparition.In any case, the governess does
displaythe supernormalcognitive powers of a mediumin accuratelydescribing
Quint's personal appearance.
But William James in 1896 was no more willing to be definitive about the
relationshipbetween the supernormaland the supernaturalthan Henry James
was to be in 1897. FromWilliam's perspective, it is impossible to say whether
the governess is a psychological medium, a subject of multiple personality,
in whom Peter Quint and Miss Jessel reside as alternate selves; or a true
psychic, in whom supernaturaldemons find the "medium" they require to
make their appearancesat Bly and work their evil influence over the souls of
two once-innocent children. To paraphraseWilliam James in the context of
his brother'snovel: If PeterQuintandMiss Jessel aredemons hoveringaround
Bly, then it is throughthe cracked and fragmentedself of the governess that
they enter this world.
William James's Lowell lectures do not present a simple key to Henry
James's The Turnof the Screw. Whatthey do offer is a subtlerangeof possible
interpretationsof the governess's state: she may be a normal subject of hyp-
nagogic hallucinations,a hysteric or psychopathiccase of alternatingperson-
ality, or a nonpathologicalcase of mediumship. One of the strengthsof the
Jamesian perspective on the tale lies in William's assertion, "We make a
common distinctionbetween healthy and morbid, but the true fact is that we
cannot make it sharp.... A life healthy on the whole must have some morbid
elements" (15).3' Other strengthsof this approachinclude William James's
intense interestin hallucination,its preconditionsand characteristics;and his
careful attentionto the phenomenonof multiple personality, which is more
directlyrelevantto The Turnof the Screw than hysteriaper se.32 But the most
importantcontributionmadeby ExceptionalMentalStates to an understanding
of The Turnof the Screw lies in its scientific approachto the centralambiguity
of the tale. William James's refusal to draw a clear boundarybetween the
supernormalpowers of mediumship and the realm of the supernaturalex-
pressed in formal psychological terms the same ambiguity that his brother
484 AMERICANQUARTERLY

Henry capturedin his art. In the Lowell lectures, this carefully considered
ambiguity rested on William's use of Frederic Myers's concept of the sub-
liminal self. While the Freudiansubconscious functions as a receptacle for
repressedmemories and unacknowledgedwishes, Myers's subliminalself is,
in his own words, not just a "rubbishheap" but a "treasurehouse," which
acts autonomouslyand creatively, performingsupernaturalfeats of cognition,
andperhapstappinginto a greaterconsciousnessof cosmic dimension. Despite
William James's early admirationof Freud, his depth psychology anticipated
Carl Jung more than Sigmund Freud.33
Though critics have been unable to agree upon Henry James's awareness
of Sigmund Freud's early work, he must have had some familiarity with
William's approachto unusual psychic phenomena. Because Henry resided
in Londonat the time of his brother'sLowell lectures, which went unpublished,
he did not hear and probablydid not readExceptionalMental States. But two
importantpoints of contact between the brotherssuggest that they exchanged
views on the subjectof abnormalpsychology. The firstwas a common concern
for their sister Alice, who was subjectto "violent turnsof hysteria."34Alice's
firstacutebreakdownoccurredin 1867 or 1868, when she was not yet twenty;
her most severe attackcame a decade later, in "thathideous summerof '78,
when I went down to the deep sea, its darkwater closed over me and I knew
neither hope nor peace ...."35 With her facial neuralgias, stomach pains,
fainting spells, heart "attacks," and leg paralysis, Alice exhibited some of
the classic complaintsthat were being explored duringthe last decade of her
life by Breuer and Freud. In 1890, she looked back upon the period imme-
diatelyfollowing her firstbreakdown,anddescribedherexperienceas follows:

As I used to sit immovable reading in the librarywith waves of violent inclination

suddenlyinvadingmy muscles takingsome one of theirmyriadforms such as throwing
myself out of the window, or knocking off the head of the benignantpater as he sat
with his silver locks, writingat his table, it used to seem to me thatthe only difference
between me and the insane was that I had not only all the horrorsand sufferings of
insanity but the duties of doctor, nurse, and strait-jacketimposed upon me, too. 36

With her terriblesense that she was simultaneouslythe insane patientand the
doctor/nurse/strait-jacket, Alice presented a case study in double conscious-
ness. Indeed, when William published an article in 1890 describing several
cases of alternatingpersonality, Alice wrote approvingly, "William uses an
excellent expression when he says in his paper on the 'Hidden Self' that the
nervous victim 'abandons'certainportionsof his consciousness."37In short,
Alice James provided both her brotherswith an intimate, distressing look at
hysteria which undoubtedlyinfluenced William's clinical discussion of the
illness as well as Henry's treatmentof the governess in The Turnof the Screw.
Since hypochondriacalWilliam constantly discussed illness with everyone
 WILLIAMJAMES AND THE TURN OF THE SCREW 485

aroundhim, and since he recommendedthat Alice be treatedwith hypnosis

the year before her death (when she lived near Henry in England), it is likely
that Henry was familiarwith William's theories about Alice's illness in par-
ticular and about "exceptionalmental states" in general.38
The second arena within which the two brothersprobablydiscussed some
of the matters addressed in Exceptional Mental States was the Society for
Psychical Research (SPR). Foundedin 1882 by a distinguishedset of Cam-
bridge-educatedEnglishmen, the SPR set out to investigate scientifically the
whole rangeof phenomenaassociatedwith mediumisticdisplays. The Society
soon caught the attention of William James, who became a corresponding
member in 1884, helped found an American branchin 1885, and, after the
AmericanSociety's absorptioninto the parentSPR in 1890, remainedactive
in the combined organization from 1890 until his death in 1910. William
James's most importantpsychical researchwas his lengthy investigationof a
Boston medium, Mrs. LeonoraPiper, whose mentalpowers in the trancestate
convinced him of supernormalcognition. In 1890, he wrote a paper on Mrs.
Piper for the London meeting of the SPR, and the Society invited Henry to
deliver it on his brother'sbehalf. (On this occasion, the two brothersjokingly
correspondedabout their planned telepathic communication at the hour of
Henry's presentation.) During William's periodic visits to England, Henry
met a numberof the Society's members, including FredericMyers himself,
who wrote to William in 1897 that he had recently found Henry less distant
than on previous occasions. Henry did profess, in his preface to the New
Yorkedition of The Turnof the Screw, his contemptfor the "modernghosts"
of the type recordedin the Proceedings of the Societyfor Psychical Research:
"The new type indeed, the mere modem 'psychical' case, washed clean of
all queerness as by the exposure to a flowing laboratorytap, and equipped
with credentialsvouching for this-the new type clearly promised little, for
the more it was respectably certified the less it seemed of a natureto rouse
the dear old sacred terror."39It seems nevertheless that Henry drew on the
Proceedings in his representationsof Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, who re-
semble the ghosts of psychical researchin their silence, their ability to appear
by day as well as by night, their habit of appearing at windows and on
staircases, and of presentingthemselves with their back to the percipientor
from the waist up only, and their attire in ordinaryclothing ratherthan the
white shroudof the traditionalghost.'
As MarthaBanta has argued, however, Henry James's treatmentof the
supernaturaldoes not address divine or demonic powers, but those "hidden
powers of the humanmind that go sufficientlybeyond the 'ordinary'to grant
it that metaphoricstatureof the 'exceptional' that Henry James often sought
for his privileged characters.""41In other words, his interest in psychical
researchwas in its contributionsto an understandingof humanconsciousness.
486 AMERICANQUARTERLY

Over the years of his contact with the SPR, the Society's interests moved
closer to his own, as its main concern shifted from physical phenomena,such
as spirit-materialization,to purely psychical phenomena, such as telepathic
communication,clairvoyance, mediumistictrances, hypnotic states, and hys-
terical dissociation.42Psychical research thus played an importantrole in
underminingthe physicalist assumptionsof mid-nineteenth-centurypsychol-
ogy, makingway for the new theories aboutthe unconsciousor subconscious
thatwere circulatingin Europeand the United States in the 1890s. For a time,
psychical researcherswith their interestin the supernormaland psychologists
with their interest in the abnormalcooperated with one another:Janet, for
example, joined the SPR to gain access to its case studies of mediums and
clairvoyants for his own study of hysteria, and even Freud himself was a
correspondingmember. And in the United States, a number of important
psychologists in the 1890s appreciatedthe contributionsof psychical research
to their understandingof the unconscious.43
For psychotherapistssuch as Janet and Freud, psychical experimentation
with trance mediums helped clarify how autosuggestioncan lead to the hys-
terical division of consciousness; for a skeptical psychical researchersuch as
FrankPodmore, such experimentationdemonstratedthe possibility of thought
transference between living persons; for the psychical enthusiast such as
FredericMyers, psychicalresearchprovedthe survivalof the personalityafter
death." But William James, the pre-eminentAmericanpsychologist and psy-
chical researcher,refused to commit himself fully to either the natural, the
supernormal,or the supernaturalposition. In a letter to Alice James in 1891,
he wrote that "the inscrutable and mysterious character"of her "nervous
weakness"was not to be explainedby "so-calledscience": "These inhibitions,
these split-up selves . . . these enlargements of the self in trance, etc., are
bringingme to turnfor light in the directionof all sortsof despised spiritualistic
and unscientific ideas." What is at work in neurotic cases such as hers, he
went on to say, was "some infernality of the body" that "prevents really
existing parts of the mind from coming to their effective rights ...."45
Exactly what he meantby "infernality,"he characteristicallydeclined to say.
But to a friend James wrote, "I am not as positive as you are in the belief
thatthe obsessing agency [in cases of 'demonicpossession'] is really demonic
individuals.... the lower stages of mereautomatismshadeoff so continuously
into the highest supernormalmanifestations, through the intermediaryones
of imitative hysteria and 'suggestibility,' that I feel as if no general theory
as yet would cover all the facts."46 Thus, in discussing hysteria,Jamesturned
to a notion of "infernality,"but in trying to explain "demonic possession,"
he resortedto the term "hysteria." In ExceptionalMental States, the line he
drew between the two was thin indeed: "if there are devils, if there are
supernormalpowers, it is throughthe cracked and fragmentedself that they
 WILLIAMJAMES AND THE TURN OF THE SCREW 487

enter." William James never stepped off the fence between demonic super-
naturalismand depthpsychology. As he confessed in "The Final Impressions
of a Psychical Researcher," written in 1909 shortly before his death, "I
personally am as yet neither a convinced believer in parasiticdemons, nor a
spiritist, nor a scientist, but still remain a psychical researcherwaiting for
more facts before concluding."47
A very similar ambiguityis at work in The Turnof the Screw. But finally,
there is a vast difference between William James's earnest lifelong effort to
understandthe relationship between depth psychology and demonic super-
naturalismand Henry James's ironic playfulness in working with the same
material. The artistbrothertook apparentdelight, not in the Victorian effort
to find Truth somewhere on the middle ground between the naturaland the
supernatural,but in the modernist crafting of two perfectly acceptable and
mutually exclusive readings of the same story. The James family is well-
known for its members' incorrigible habit of teasing one another.48Insofar
as Henry's TheTurnof the Screwwas shapedby William's views of exceptional
mentalstates, the novel shouldperhapsbe readas the artisticyoungerbrother's
playful responseto the scientific older brother'sintellectualquest. Throughout
their very differentcareers, William had often respondedto Henry's writings
with lengthy criticism, not unmixed with a condescension that expressed his
sense of himself as a one-time artist, as well as his position of superiorityas
the older brother.49In The Turnof the Screw, Henry venturedon to William's
domain, capturingin precise literary form an ambiguity which the scientist
despaired of explaining. It may not be too far-fetched to consider Henry's
story as an assertionof the superiorityof the literaryimaginationover scientific
thoughtin exploring the disturbedmind. Henry James called The Turnof the
Screw "a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation, an
amusette to catch those not easily caught."50Perhaps the reader he most
wanted to catch was William James.

NOTES

1. William Lyon Phelps, "The 'Iron Scot' Stenographer,"in Henry James, The Turnof the
Screw, ed. Robert Kimbrough(New York, 1966), 178, (hereaftercited as Norton edition).
2. EdmundWilson, "The Ambiguity of Henry James," Hound & Horn 7 (Apr.-May 1934):
385. HaroldC. Goddardwas actuallythe firstcritic to set forwardsystematicallythe hallucination
theory, thoughnot within an explicitly Freudianframework.His paper, "A Pre-FreudianReading
of The Turnof the Screw," was written in the early 1920s but not published until 1957; for a
reprintof this work, see Norton edition, 181-209. His view was reinforced in 1924 by Edna
Kenton in "HenryJames to the RuminantReader:The Turnof the Screw," Norton edition, 209-
11.
488 AMERICANQUARTERLY

3. See Robert B. Heilman, "The Freudian Reading of The Turn of the Screw," Modern
LanguageNotes 62 (Nov. 1947): 433-45; CharlesG. Hoffmann, "Innocenceand Evil in James's
The Turnof the Screw," in A Casebookon Henry James's "The Turnojthe Screw" ed., Gerald
Willen (New York, 1969), 2d ed., 212-22 (hereaftercited as Casebook);E. A. Sheppard,Henry
James and "The Turn of the Screw" (Bungay and Suffolk, 1974), chap. 2; Glenn A. Reed,
"AnotherTurnon James's 'The Turnof the Screw,' " AmericanLiterature20 (Jan. 1949): 413-
23; A. J. A. Waldock, "Mr. EdmundWilson and The Turnof the Screw," Modern Language
Notes 62 (May 1947): 331-34; Elmer Edgar Stoll, "Symbolism in Coleridge," PMLA (Mar.
1948): 214-33; Oliver Evans, "James's Air of Evil: The Turnof the Screw," Partisan Review
16 (Feb. 1949): 175-87; Alexander E. Jones, "Point of View in The Turn of the Screw," in
Casebook, 298-318; James W. Gargano, "The Turnof the Screw," WesternHumanitiesReview
(Spring 1969): 173-79; KrishnaBaldev Vaid, Techniquein the Talesof HenryJames (Cambridge,
1964), chap. 4; NathanBryllionFagin, "AnotherReadingof TheTurnof the Screw," in Casebook,
154-59. For a Lacanianresponse to the entire controversy, see ShoshanaFelman, "Turningthe
Screw of Interpretation,"in Literatureand Psychoanalysis, The Questionof Reading: Otherwise
(Baltimoreand London, 1982), 94-207.
4. Leon Edel, The Psychological Novel: 1900-1950 (New York, 1955), 57.
5. Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge, 1962), 338;
Louis D. Rubin, Jr., "One More Turn of the Screw," in Casebook, 365. Other readings that
accept the fundamentalambiguityof the story include Leon Edel, PrefatoryNote to Goddard's
"A Pre-FreudianReading," in Norton edition, 183; Donald P. Costello, "The Structureof The
Turnof the Screw," ModernLanguageNotes 75 (Apr. 1960): 312-21; HansJoachim-Lang,"The
Turnsin The Turnof the Screw," Jahrbuchfur Amerikastudien9 (1964): 110-28; CharlesThomas
Samuels, "Introduction,"in The Ambiguityof Henry James (Urbana, 1971), Kevin Murphy,
"The Unfixable Text: Bewilderment of Vision in The Turn of the Screw," Texas Studies in
Literatureand Language 20 (Winter 1978): 538-51; David A. Cook and Timothy J. Corrigan,
"NarrativeStructurein The Turnof the Screw: A New Approachto Meaning," Studies in Short
Fiction 17 (Winter 1980): 55-65. One of the most intelligently subtle discussions of the story
to date is MarthaBanta's Henry James and the Occult: The Great Extension (Bloomington,
1972), 114-29.
6. TzvetanTodorov, The Fantastic:A StructuralApproachto a LiteraryGenre, trans. Richard
Howard (Ithaca, 1975), 43.
7. Todorov, The Fantastic, 160-62.
8. Michael G. Kenny, in The Passion of Ansel Bourne: Multiple Personality in American
Culture (Washington,D.C., 1986), argues persuasively that a careful attentionto "indigenous
psychologies" is essential to an historicist understandingof any unusual mental phenomenon
such as multiplepersonality,which he regardsas "a culturallyspecific metaphor,not a universally
distributedmental disorder" (13, 3). The nineteenth-centurycases of multiple personality he
examines "reflect a nineteenth-centuryequivocation about whether materialistic or spiritistic
interpretationsof strangepsychic phenomenashould be consideredthe more appropriate"(11).
It is worthnoting thatthis psychology of equivocationcoincided in time with Todorov's literature
of hesitation, the fantastic.
9. Eugene Taylor, WilliamJames on Exceptional Mental States: The 1896 Lowell Lectures
(Amherst, 1984). All futurereferencesto this text are to this edition.
10. See Francis X. Roellinger, Jr., "Psychical Research and 'The Turn of the Screw,'
American Literature 20 (Jan. 1949): 401-12; Sheppard, Henry James and "The Turn of the
Screw," chap. 8. A notable exception here is HowardKerr, Mediums, and Spirit-Rappers,and
RoaringRadicals: Spiritualismin AmericanLiterature,1850-1900 (Urbana,1972), which rightly
recognizes that the "hallucinatorypresences" documentedby the society for Psychical Research
"could be taken as either supernaturalor psychological, or ambiguouslyboth," and argues that
the governessin TheTurnof the Screwwas "a study, like VerenaTarrant,in alteredconsciousness"
(209). Joseph M. Backus has similarly stressed that the psychical influence on The Turnof the
Screw actually underscoredthe psychological ambiguity of the story; see his reviews of Kerr,
Mediums, and Spirit-Rappers,and Roaring Radicals and Banta, Henry James and the Occult
in Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 67 (Oct. 1973): 407-15; and of
Sheppard, Henry James and The Turn of the Screw in Journal of the American Society for
 WILLIAMJAMES AND THE TURN OF THE SCREW 489

Psychical Research 72 (Jan. 1978): 49-60. The psychological ambiguityembeddedin psychical

researchwas most evident in its view thatghosts were actuallyperceivedas hallucinatoryimages;
see Alan Gauld, Founders of Psychical Research (New York, 1968), 162-71.
11. Though Principles of Psychology discusses such abnormalpsychological phenomena as
insane delusions, alternatingselves, and cases of mediumshipor possession, it generally avoids
the subject of psychical research, presumablybecause James was reluctantto incur the charge
that his textbook was insufficiently scientific. His article on "The Hidden Self," published in
Scribner's Magazine 7 (Mar. 1890): 361-73, addresses more directly the connection between
abnormalpsychology and psychical research, suggesting that Janet's view of the secondaryself
as a split-off fragmentof the primaryself cannot explain the supernormalcognition of the trance
medium. But it was in his lectures on "Exceptional Mental States" that James undertookto
determinethe boundarybetween abnormalpsychology and psychical research, with intellectual
results that this article will set forth in some detail. For a succinct summaryof James's position
on this matter(which does not, however, discuss the lectures on "ExceptionalMental States"),
see GeraldE. Myers, WilliamJames: His Life and Thought(New Haven, 1986), 369-86.
12. Letter from William James to Alice James, July 29, 1889, quoted in Jean Strouse, Alice
James: A Biography (Boston, 1980), x.
13. The Turnof the Screw, Norton edition, 16, 17, 8, 41. All futurereferencesto the text are
to this Norton edition.
14. For a useful discussion of twilight as a causal factor in the governess's hallucinations,see
Fred L. Milne, "Atmosphereas TriggeringDevice in The Turnof the Screw," Studies in Short
Fiction 18 (Summer 1981): 293-99.
15. See William James, "The Final Impressionsof a Psychical Researcher,"in WilliamJames
on Psychical Research, eds. GardnerMurphyand Robert Ballou (New York, 1960), 324. For
a succinct summaryof James's views of the unconscious, see Nathan G. Hale, Jr., Freud and
the Americans:The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876-1917 (New York,
1971), 109-12.
16. Thomas M. Cranfill and Robert L. Clark, Jr., An Anatomyof "The Turnof the Screw"
(Austin, 1965), 18-20.
17. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, in The Standard Edition of the
CompletePsychological Worksof SigmundFreud, ed. James Strachey(London, 1955), 2:7.
18. Studies on Hysteria, 125-34.
19. See ErnestJones, TheLife and Workof SigmundFreud (New York, 1953), 1:283;Richard
Wollheim, SigmundFreud (New York, 1981), 27.
20. Studies on Hysteria, 48-105.
21. Ibid., 121, 122.
22. Ibid., 119.
23. This resemblancehas been most fully exploredin OscarCargill, "HenryJamesas Freudian
Pioneer," in Casebook, 223-38. It has been dismissed, for insufficient reasons, by C. Knight
Aldrich,M.D. ," AnotherTwist to TheTurnof the Screw," in Casebook,367-78; andby Sheppard,
Henry James and "The Turnof the Screw," 21.
24. Studies on Hysteria, 233, 24.
25. See Freud's "The Psychotherapyof Hysteria," in Studies on Hysteria, 255-305. For a
general discussion of pre-Freudianideas of neurosis, see George FrederickDrinka, The Birth of
Neurosis: Myth, Malady, and the Victorians(New York, 1984).
26. In this context, it is interesting to note Breuer's observation that dispositional hypnoid
states often grow out of daydreams"to which needleworkand similaroccupationsrenderwomen
especially prone"; see Studies on Hysteria, 13.
27. Juliet McMaster, " 'The Full Image of a Repetition' in The Turnof the Screw," Studies
in Short Fiction 6 (Summer 1969): 379. Also see M. Tierce, "The Governess's 'White Face of
Damnation,'" American Notes & Queries 21 (May-June 1983): 137. MarthaBanta has also
argued that Quint and Miss Jessel are externalizationsof the inner forces of the governess's
nature;see Henry James and the Occult, 121-22.
28. McMaster, " 'The Full Image,' " 377.
29. E. Duncan Aswell, "Reflectionsof a Governess:Image and Distortionin The Turnof the
Screw," NineteenthCenturyFiction 23 (June 1968): 49.
490 AMERICANQUARTERLY

30. For developments of this latter interpretation,see Rubin, Jr., "One More Turn of the
Screw"; and Oscar Cargill, "The Turnof the Screw and Alice James," PMLA78 (June 1963):
238-49.
31. Several critics have rightly taken issue with the extreme Freudianposition, argued by
HaroldGoddard,that the governess must be insane: see, for example, Banta, HenryJames and
the Occult, 119-120; and RobertB. Heilman, "The FreudianReadingof The Turnof the Screw,"
ModernLanguage Notes 62 (Nov. 1947): 433-45.
32. E. A. Sheppardhas observed that, in the Freudianhysteric, "while disordersof vision
are not uncommon,visual hallucinationsas elaborateas the governess's do not occur in insolation
(frequentlythey form the 'aura' or the sequel to a fit), and are never without a deeply significant
priorjustificationin the personal experience of the hysteric"; Henry James and "The Turnof
the Screw," 22. I disagree, however, with her contention that the governess does not evince
symptoms of what William James would have recognized as split personality;see 22.
33. Myers is quoted in R. LaurenceMoore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism,Para-
psychology, and American Culture (New York, 1977), 150. Moore observes that James owed
more to Myers's view of the subliminalself than to Freud's understandingof the unconscious,
and that a line of descent can be tracedfrom Myers to Jung. For a detaileddiscussion of Myers's
theory of the subliminalself, see Gauld, Founders of Psychical Research, chap. 12. Also see
Frank Miller Turner,Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in
Late VictorianEngland (New Haven, 1974), 122-33.
34. The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1982), 149 (Oct. 26, 1890).
35. Ibid., 230 (Feb. 2, 1892).
36. Ibid., 149 (Oct. 26, 1890).
37. Ibid., 148 (Oct. 26, 1890). The article, "The Hidden Self," was publishedin Scribner's
Magazine 7 (1890): 361-73.
38. For useful discussions of Alice James's illness, see Ruth BernardYeazell, "Introduction,"
The Death and Letters of Alice James (Berkeley, 1981), 1-45; Strouse, Alice James. Oscar
Cargill has explored the links between Alice James and the governess at Bly in "The Turnof
the Screw and Alice James."
39. Henry James, "The New York Preface," in Norton edition, 118.
40. On William James's involvement in psychical research, see Moore, In Search of White
Crows, chap. 5; WilliamJames on Psychical Research, eds. GardnerMurphyand RobertBallou
(New York, 1960); The Lettersof WilliamJames and TheodoreFlournoyed. RobertC. LeClair,
(Madison, 1966). ForHenryJames's relationshipto the SPR, see Roellinger, "PsychicalResearch
and "The Turnof the Screw"; Sheppard,Henry James and "The Turnof the Screw," chap. 8;
and Banta, Henry James and the Occult, chaps. 1 and 2.
41. Banta, Henry James and the Occult, 3.
42. Ibid. 26-27.
43. See Moore, In Search of White Crows, 137-38, 142, 151-56, 165-66; and Hale, Jr.,
Freud in America, 121.
44. Shepparddiscusses the debate between Podmore and Myers in Henry James and "The
Turnof the Screw," 174-78.
45. William James to Alice James, July 6, 1891, in WilliamJames on Psychical Research,
eds. Murphyand Ballou, 259-60.
46. Ibid., William James to Henry W. Rankin, Feb. 1, 1897, 261.
47. See William James, "The Final Impressionsof a Psychical Researcher,"in WilliamJames
on Psychical Research, eds. Murphyand Ballou, 323.
48. Strouse, Alice James, 51.
49. See Leon Edel, Henry James, the Untried Years:1843-1870 (New York, 1978), 59-68,
75-76, 245-46.
50. Henry James, "The New York Preface," in Norton edition, 120. Leon Edel, in Henry
James:A Life (New York, 1985), identifiesthe sourceof The Turnof the Screw as a story entitled
Temptation,serialized in Frank Leslie's New YorkJournal in 1855, when Henry was a boy.
Because Temptationwas a newspaperpotboiler(whose primevillain bears the name Peter Quin),
Edel argues, James never saw The Turnof the Screw as anything more than a hack job. The
problemwith this position lies in its suggestion that the limitationsof the potboiler-sourcewere
simply transferredto the later tale. In fact, the psychological complexity of The Turn of the
Screw continues to invite close attentiondespite Edel's discovery.