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Psychical Phenomena and the Body in the Late Novels of Henry James

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Psychical Phenomena and the Body in the Late Novels of Henry James PSYCHICAL PHENOMENA AND THE BODY IN THE LATE NOVELS OF HENRY JAMES by PAUL MATTHEW AUSTIN HORN A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of English, Drama and American and Canadian Studies College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham April 2013 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This thesis focuses on the connections between fin de siècle accounts of psychical phenomena and the extraordinary bodily capabilities of the characters in Henry James’s late novels. In reaction to the scholarly commonplace that these characters are simply refined out of corporeal existence, I posit the alternative that their bodies are unconventionally constituted: hyperaesthetic like the Society for Psychical Research’s ‘sensitives’, or materially reconfigured like the ‘etheric bodies’ of the dead envisioned by Sir Oliver Lodge, and thus perfectly adapted for life in the phantasmagorical world of James’s ‘major-phase’ and beyond. Against the backdrop of recent scholarly work on the material world of James’s novels by Thomas Otten, Victoria Coulson and others, and theories of embodiment such as those of Didier Anzieu, I assert the importance of fin de siècle psychical research narratives of the hyperextension of human bodily capabilities and their historical collocates in art, literature, and occult philosophy to fully excavate the cultural work with which Henry James’s late novels are involved. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: TOUCH AND THE SENSITIVE 30 CHAPTER TWO: EXTRAORDINARY VISION 77 CHAPTER THREE: HEARING THINGS 107 CHAPTER FOUR: MATTER AND INTERCORPOREALITY 142 CHAPTER FIVE: THE BODY OF WORK 176 CONCLUSION 225 LIST OF WORKS CITED 246 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1: ‘Meaning of the Colours’ 106 1 INTRODUCTION On New Year’s Day, 1907, Henry James wrote a letter to his neighbour, Mary Frances Prothero, wife of the Cambridge academic Sir George Prothero, in which he recalled a performance by the London telepathists Julius and Agnes Zancig. The Zancigs’ show, entitled ‘Two Minds With but a Single Thought’, comprised a series of instances of Agnes apparently reading the mind of her husband. Their performances at music halls took the following form. They took the stage in front of a simple drop scene. In front of this, close to the footlights, in the middle of the stage, Madame Zancig took her position, holding a piece of chalk by the side of a slate. After a few words of introduction, Mr Zancig appealed to anyone in the audience to give him any article, name, or number as he ran hither and thither about the hall, and Madame Zancig instantly described it or wrote it upon the slate.1 In his letter, James writes: The Zanzig [sic] stuff in the newspaper strikes me as, in its cheap crudity, most unfortunately compromising to the theory of the reality of their performance (which it appeared to me, under that 1st impression, the only one to be held.) But I wish you & Mr George could go for a second impression – I wd. myself if I were remaining. Stuart Cumberland (the old conjurer & trickster) has written somewhere to declare it a trick – the result of a very wonderfully elaborated code of signalling them (& that he, – an arch-juggler – having seen them, judges this possible, is a little striking.) ‘Why does he always wear a white coat? Why 1 See W. T. Stead, ‘The Next Wonder of the World’, Review of Reviews, 34 (1906), 592– 597. 2 does she wear “telescopic eyeglasses” of great power?’ I confess the sense of her glasses, – watched through an opera-glass, – did a little worry me. Yet their communication by word is almost nil, & in fine, the operation of their code becomes a greater marvel than the idea of their thought transference. Also Stead – John Hare told me last night at the Lewis’s – had them at his own house, one upstairs & one down, & with an outsider making the signal (thump on the floor,) when he – the man, above, – had ‘taken’ the article, & another outsider recording in the room below the woman’s infallible naming of it. No ‘code’ there if Stead’s story be veracious. But I haven’t seen it! They had at any rate better, the couple, stop ‘writing.’ And so had I! Ever yours Henry James [emphases James’s]2 This letter is remarkable for two reasons in particular. Firstly, it shows James directly engaging with discourse on the psychical, a subject which other extant epistolary evidence shows he treated very cautiously.3 There is even, in James’s statement that he, too, had better ‘stop “writing”’, a tacit admission that his own textual performance is analogous to the Zancigs’. Secondly, it equates the psychical gift of telepathy with the 2 Letter, Henry James to Lady Mary Frances Prothero (1 Jan. 1907),Dear Munificent Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Four Women, ed. by Susan E. Gunter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 195-197 (p. 197). 3 See for example how James’s assent to reading his brother William’s paper on the spiritualist medium Mrs Piper at a meeting of the Society for Psychical Research is balanced by his writing to one of its leading members in advance of the date, and stating ‘my complete detachment from my brother’s labour and pursuits, my outsideness, as it were, to the S.P.R.’ (Letter, Henry James to Frederic W. H. Myers (7 Oct. 1890), Henry James Letters: 1883-1895, ed. by Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), III, p. 302.) 3 extension of bodily capability, specifically Agnes Zancig’s vision, enhanced by her ‘“telescopic eyeglasses” of great power’. In what follows, I will show that these emphases are of the utmost significance to our understanding of Henry James’s fin de siècle fiction. The centrality of the psychical to the aesthetic of James’s late works reveals their imbrication with discourses not complementary to their accepted status by conservative literary critics as ‘high art’.4 James’s invocation in his letter of the integrity of the opinion of the journalist and editor W. T. Stead is highly suggestive in this regard. James writes in his letter that the record of Stead’s tests would dispel any lingering doubts over the truth of the Zancigs’ abilities, were he to read it. Stead did indeed publish his own defence of the Zancigs, in an article for the December 1906 issue of the Review of Reviews, entitled ‘The Next Wonder of the World’. It covers in detail both the Zancigs’ performance at the Alhambra Music-hall, and, indeed, some tests carried out at Stead’s house, which seem likely to have been the subject of the gossip heard by James. Though no record survives of James’s response to this particular article, scholarship suggests that James’s wide reading of the periodical press would have included Stead’s writing on the occult.5 James’s letter therefore draws attention to a point of contact between two writers, whose authorial voices are ostensibly so distinct from each other. Whilst Stead was the pugnacious purveyor of a brand of New Journalism, hugely influential in shaping public opinion, James wrote 4 See, for example, the trends in modern James scholarship criticised in Leo Robson, ‘The Master’s Servants: On Henry James’, The Nation, 2012 <http://www.thenation.com/article/170785/masters-servants-henry-james#> [accessed 9 March 2013]. 5 Kate Campbell, ‘“Other Agencies at Work” in W T Stead: Journalism and the Occult’ (presented at the W. T. Stead: Centenary Conference for a Newspaper Revolutionary, British Library, 2012). 4 highbrow, complex, and ultimately poorly selling prose fiction. However, the correspondence between the two goes beyond the statement of a common interest. The way in which Stead imagines the phenomenon of telepathy correlates with James’s presentation of a strata of communication between characters in his late novels which is ‘practically without words’.6 In Stead’s article on the Zancigs, he draws attention to the physical reality of thought transference between the pair. Stead states that the Zancigs ‘had their respective mental batteries so perfectly adjusted, each to each, that the vibration of the thought-current of the man instantly registered itself upon the mind of the wife’. He goes on to describe the development of psychic capabilities as a perfection of the human organism in step with the most recent technological achievements, borrowing his vocabulary overtly from scientific discourse on wireless telegraphy, as developed by Gugliemo Marconi. He cites scientific research which confirms that ‘the human brain is based upon the same principle as the coherer and de-coherer of the Marconi instrument for receiving and transmitting messages’, proclaims thought to be electricity, and brain cells to be ‘storage batteries to store the electricity generated by the life processes’. Stead writes that telepathy ‘simply requires two minds very congenial thinking the same thought to the same metre – that is, whose electrical vibrations are the same as in the Marconi instruments – and then to generate a sufficient current to produce a conscious communication’. Two highly receptive minds, keyed to the same thought-vibration would be in conscious communication all the time.
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