Henry James and The Turn of the Screw

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Henry James and The Turn of the Screw
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Henry James

• I. The Importance of Henry James
• The main expression of nineteenth century
  consciousness is in proseHenry James was the
  first person to add anything to the art of the
  nineteenth century novel not already known to the
  French. - Ezra Pound,
• How to Read, 1929

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Henry JamesII. The Gothic Novel and English
Tradition The Gothic novel or Gothic romance is
a type of fiction inaugurated by Horace
Walpoles The Castle of Otranto A Gothic Story
(1764) -the subtitle refers to its setting in the
middle ages - and which flourished in the early
19th century. Following Walpoles example,
authors of such stories set their stories in the
medieval period, often in a gloomy castle replete
with dungeons, subterranean passages, and sliding
panels, and made bountiful use of ghosts,
mysterious disappearances, and other sensational
and supernatural occurrences
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Henry JamesII. The Gothic Novel and English
Tradition their principal aim was to evoke
chilling terror by exploiting mystery and a
variety of horrorsthe best of them opened up to
fiction the realm of the irrational and perverse
impulses and the nightmarish terrors that lie
beneath the orderly surface of the civilized
mind.- M. H. Abrams
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Henry James II. The Gothic Novel and English
Tradition

• Classic Gothic Novels
• Vathek
• William Beckford (1786)
• The Mysteries of Udolpho Ann Radcliffe
  (1794)
• The Monk
• Matthew Gregory Lewis (1797)

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Henry JamesII. The Gothic Novel and English
Tradition Later Novels with Gothic
ElementsThese novels do not necessarily have a
medieval setting, but do have an atmosphere of
gloom and terror, represent events which are
uncanny, macabre or melodramatically violent,
and/or deal with characters with aberrant
psychological states.
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Henry JamesII. The Gothic Novel and English
Tradition ExamplesCaleb Williams, William
Godwin (1794)Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
(1817)Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847)Bleak
House, Charles Dickens (1852)Great Expectations,
C. Dickens (1860)Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897)
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Henry James

• III. Sigmund Freud and the Unconscious1880s
  Studies hysteria in women1890s Develops the
  talking cure psychoanalysis

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Henry James

• III. Sigmund Freud and the Unconscious 1890s
  Traces many problems in his patientsto sexual
  abuse in childhood 1895 Publishes Studies in
  Hysteriain which he discusses his findings about
  childhood sexuality and connects hysteria to
  problems of sexual abuse in childhood Freuds
  theories are not well received by psychiatrists.

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Henry James

• III. Sigmund Freud and the Unconscious 1897
  Freud abandons his early theories and starts to
  develop the idea of the Oedipus Complex. It is
  well-received by other psychiatrists. He
  continues to develop this theory for the rest of
  his life.

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Henry James

• IV. William James Brother of Henry James,
  prominent psychologist, theologian and
  philosopher. Known for his theories of
  pragmatism, education, religion and mysticism.
  Professor at Harvard and important figure of his
  time.

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Henry James

• V. A Definition of Horror
• "Horror defines and redefines, clarifies and
  obscures the relationship between the human and
  the monstrous, the normal and the aberrant, the
  sane and the mad, the natural and the
  supernatural, the conscious and the unconscious,
  the daydream and the nightmare, the civilized and
  the primitive."
• - Gregory A. Waller, 1987

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Henry James

• VI. Reviews of The Turn of the Screw
• Mr. Jamess story is perhapsallegoricalbut
  the allegory is not so clear. We have called it
  horribly successful, and the phrase seems to
  still stand, on second thought, to express the
  awful, almost overpowering sense of evil that
  human nature is subject to derive from it by the
  sensitive reader.
• - New York Times Review, 1898

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Henry James

• VI. Reviews of The Turn of the Screw
• This story concerns itself with the problem of
  evil, from which men of Puritan ancestry seem
  never able to entirely detach themselves.
• - The Outlook, 1898

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Henry James

• VI. Reviews of The Turn of the Screw
• The Turn of the Screw is the most hopelessly
  evil story that we have ever read in any
  literature, ancient or modern.
• - The Independent, 1899

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Henry James

• VI. Reviews of The Turn of the Screw
• The Turn of the Screw is at once the most
  horrific and tender tale of the nineteenth
  century. There is no excellent beauty, said
  Lord Bacon, that hath not some strangeness in
  the proportion.
• - Oscar Cargill, 1963