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Principles of Thematic and Technical Unity in Volume 12 of the Novels and Tales of Henry James (The New Yark Edition)

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Principles of Thematic and Technical Unity in Volume 12 of the Novels and Tales of Henry James (The New Yark Edition) THE NOVELS AND TALES OF HENRY JAMES VOLUME 12 PRINCIPLES OF THEMA TIC AND TECHNICAL UNITY IN VOLUME 12 OF THE NOVELS AND TALES OF HENRY JAMES (THE NEW YORK EDITION) By THOMAS G. CORBETT. B. A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the degree Master of Arts MCMaster University June 1975 MASTER OF ARTS (1975) McMASTER UNIVERSITY (English) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: Principles of Thematic and Technical Unity in Volume 12 of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (the New Yark Edition) AUTHOR: Thomas George Corbett, B. A. (Oxford University) SUPERVISOR: Professor James D. Brasch NUMBER OF PAGES: iv, 177 ii I'.'.. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Professor Richard Morton and Professor Maqbool Aziz for examining this thesis and for their helpful comments and suggestions. My particular thanks, however,· must be reserved for my supervisor, Professor James D. Brasch, not least for the patience with which he endured the long period during which this work was in progress. I am especially grateful for what James would have called, the many nutritive suggestions made by Professor Brasch which found their way into this study. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii: INTRODUCTION 1 l. HERO AND HISTORIAN: THE ASP ERN PAPERS 1. James on First-Person Narration 7 2. Inconsistency in the Anonymous Editor's Narrative 21 3. The Editor and the Romantic Quest 46 II. THE HEROINE'S OWN TALE: THE TURN OF THE SCREW 1. The Critical Controversy and James' Own Contribution 72 2. The Governess as Unreliable Narrator 83 3. The Governess as Gothic Heroine 100 III. THE RELA TIONSHIP OF THE FOUR TALES 1. Introductory Remarks 113 2. Common Themes in The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw 118 3. The Artis.t Lyon as liThe Liar" 132 4. "The Two Faces" of Mrs. Grantham 154 CONCLUSION 165 BIBLIOGRAPHY 173 iv. INTRODUCTION This thesis grew out of a chance remark made in a graduate course on the fiction of Henry James. The class was working on The Aspern Papers and concentrating particularly on the inconsistencies of the editorls narrative when I chanced the remark that the questions arising over the reliability of the editor's point of view reminded me of the situation of the governess in The Turn of the Screw. On the advice of the course instructor, Dr. James D. Brasch, I began to pursue a study of the similarities in the two tales as a possible thesis project. At that time I was aware of the existence of the critical controversy over The Turn of the Screw, but not of its proportions. Months later, having made a preliminary run at the mountain of critical work, I was firmly convinced that the answer to the controversy lay somewhere in the relationship of the two tales. This view seemed to be confirmed by two major critics in the field. Edmund Wils on could not claim to be the instigator of the 1 controversy. That credit must go really to Edna Kenton who, in 1924, proposed that the supernatural events of The Turn of the Screw lEdna Kenton, "Henry James to the Ruminant Reader: The Turn of the Screw, II The Arts, VI (November, 1924), 245-255. 1 2 are hallucinations of the nervous governess. What Wilson did was to try and show systematically that the gove.rness' hallucinations are the direct result of her repressed sexual drives. 2 This Freudian analysis really began a storm that has yet to subside. The storm caused Wils on to retract, restate and modify his position. One j important point which Wilson made has never been fully explored: in the New York edition of The Novels and Tales of Henry James, the tale is placed between The Aspern Papers and "The Liar". I believe this positioning to be significant. In a paper given to the M. L. A. conference in December 1950, Leon Edel reiterated this point. 3 His paper outlines a possible basis from which James may have collected the twenty-three volumes of the New York edition based on Balzac's twenty three volume collected works. Edel notes that James' Volume 17 is the only volume devoted to "ghost stories" or "stories of the supernatura1'~. but that his most well-known "ghost story", The Turn of the -Screw is missing. It is placed in Volume 12 between The Aspern Papers and "The Liar" with the short story liThe Two Faces ll making up the collection. Edel 2 Edmund Wils on, "The Ambiguity of Henry James ", Hound and Horn, VII (April-June, 1934), 385-406. 3Leon Edel, "The Architecture of James's 'New York Edition "', New England Quarterly, XXIV (June, 1951), 169-178. 3 designates the four tales as "tales of curiosity" reflecting the fact that all four point of view characters find them.selves in puzzling situations which they attem.pt to resolve . It is always surprising to find that in writers like Jam.es, to whom. a good deal of critical attention has been paid, whole fertile areas of investigation are left virtually untouched by the critics. This is true of the New York edition. Since Edel's brief, but im.portant} article, very little has appeared in print on the subject. In this thesis} then, I feel justified in m.aking a study of Volum.e 12, even at the cost of repeating m.uch that is well known about the first three tales, in order to bring out the inhe rent unity of the volum.e. There are three m.ain threads of unity in the volum.e. The first of these threads is in the characterisation of the central character in each tale. In all four cases an ironic portrait is drawn of them. and I will show that, although the operative irony becom.es clearer as we read from. the first tale to the last, it is no less, or m.ore im.portant) , in the portrait of the anonym.ous editor of The Aspern Papers than it is in the portrait of Mrs. Grantham. in "The Two Faces ". The second thread of unity m.ay be sum.m.ed up in the single word, "rom.ance". Elem.ents of rom.anticism., whether an integral part of the narrative technique, a system. of ironic references by use of plot analogues to well-known rom.antic works, an atm.osphere, or 4 simply overtones, are present in all four tales. Like the use of operative irony, the element of romance is used progressively in a clearer way through the four tales. The third thread of unity, the thematic correspondences of the four tales, follows naturally from the investigation of the first two and is, therefore, best left to the conclusion of this thesis. Being sensible of the greater weight which The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw hold in the James canon over the two short stories and acutely aware of the complexity of the controversy over the second tale, I have decided to pursue my arguments in a strictly linear fashion. Thus Chapter I is devoted to The Aspern Papers and Chapter II to The Turn of the Screw. With the exception of the first section of Chapter I. the two chapters are identical in process. First I detail the narrative techniques which are used to convey the ironic characterisation of the two narrators. Secondlyj I investigate the romantic qualities inherent in both narrativ"es. These arguments demonstrate quite conclusively the systematic irony at work in both tales. In the first half of Chapter III, I bring together these threads to show that there is a common theme in the two tales. In the second half of that chapter, I demonstrate that the two remaining short stories pick up those threads of ironies and romance and state the common themes in a simplified fashion. thus acting as sort of artistic 5 footnotes to the two major tales. I am aware of the charge that using one work of art to explain or clartiy another is held by many to be an unjusttiiable procedure. This is another reason why I have pursued my argument in a linear fashion from one tale to the next. Each of my readings of the four tales could stand alone. I have put them together not simply to prove my point, but because James brought them together and presented them to his reading public as one volume. We are accu,stomed. to poets collecting their works around thematic principles and are' prepared to treat them accordingly. Why should we not extend the process to writers of prose fiction when they ask us to do so? Another problem arises from treating of the New York edition. James revised and rewrote his tales, often extensively, for that project. It may be argued that, by dealing with that edition, I have written on a dtiferent tale from The Turn of the Screw that was written 4 in 1898. I think that the work of Cranfill and Clark has shown that James I revisions do not alter the tale, but emphasise a reading that 4 Thomas M. Cranfill and Robert L. Clark Jr., An Anatomy of The Turn of the Screw, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965). ----------. IIJames IS Revisions of The Turn of the Screw", Nineteenth-Century Fiction, XIX (March, 1965), 394-398. 6 was already there in the original. The same is true of the revisions to The Aspern Pape rs and "The Liar". One final note remains to be dealt with in this introduction. In the first part of Chapter I, I have used s orne of James I comments on narrative and point of view in The Art of the Novel, to demonstrate his views on first-person narration.
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