Rowling, Freud, And the Work of Henry James...
Dark Academia and the Gothic Novel…
Millennials and Zoomers who grew up on Harry Potter are now coming into their own in various ways. For the millennials, this means setting up houses of their own or starting careers. For Zoomers, this means exiting college and starting to sort out what this whole life thing really is all about. There is no denying that social media is having a deep impact on what all of these things will look like for both generations. Indeed, Millennials and Zoomers are influenced by the constant barrage of media available at their fingertips in a way that previous generations weren’t. This means that the books, art, fashion, and home décor that these generations choose all depend on what is trending. One trend that cropped up a few years ago and has refused to go away is that of Dark Academia.
It's Getting Dark In Here...
The Dark Academia trend started in 2015 on Tumblr but really took off at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Appealing to 14-25-year-olds initially, this trend gained a wider audience as many young people found themselves trapped inside for long periods of time. This isolation caused many of them to make the spaces that they occupied feel more comfortable. Since many Millennials and Zoomers grew up in and out of the world of Harry Potter it is no wonder that attempts to somewhat recreate that world cropped up. Things like fountain pens and old typewriters became all the rage. So did tweed and cable knit sweaters, and let’s not forget dark-colored bookshelves and dusty old books. This is where the Gothic Novel comes in.
What is a Gothic Novel?
The Gothic style of literature finds its roots in 1764 when Horace Walpole is credited with having published the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. You can read it online for free by clicking the link. While The Castle of Otranto would certainly make for an interesting blog post that I might someday get to, today I want to spend some time with another Gothic author: Henry James. What makes his work Gothic? Well, it has within it many of the elements that academics and critics agree upon when defining the genre. These elements include having a damsel in distress, being set someplace haunted, having within the work an air of mystery or suspense, heavy use of dreams or nightmares, terrible weather, and definite melodrama. When looking at these elements, the work of Henry James and J.K. Rowling do not seem so far apart from each other.
Life Imitates Art…
Anyone who has read the work of Henry James before knows that there is no way to get around the use of psychoanalytic literary theory for understanding them. For instance, his famous novella The Beast in the Jungle includes elements from all four of the Freudian concepts. These concepts are the uncanny, narcissism, the ego, and the mirror stage. In this work, the protagonist, Marcher, is a narcissist and could be viewed as James’s id or Superego. Likewise, the uncanny…or plainly put… the idea that something that has occurred in your previous life can come back to haunt you later, is also present in this work.
Like The Beast in the Jungle, the four Freudian elements of the uncanny, narcissism, the ego, and the mirror stage are also present in his 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw. This is especially true when the reader looks at the character Miles. At first, Miles seems innocent enough, but he turns out to be quite the little narcissistic, ego-driven brat as the story unfolds. If you know anything about James, then you know that he too could prove to be a bit ego driven and narcissistic at times as well. According to Freud, these traits could be connected to the mirror stage.
Constance or Conscience?
Examining James’s work using the mirror stage as a base for in-depth analysis would definitely prove interesting, but the most obvious Freudian concept found in both The Turn of the Screw and The Beast in the Jungle. The use of the uncanny in both pieces could be owing to the death of his dear friend Constance Fennimore Woolson in 1894. Woolson’s death left a lasting scar on James, and his later works reflect that.
Although it was claimed that she accidentally fell out of a window while living in Venice, James always believed that it was suicide. The question is, what would make him so convinced of this that four years after her death he would have himself rowed out to the middle of a Venetian lagoon in the dead of night to drown her dresses? Are The Turn of the Screw and The Beast in the Jungle attempts made by James to make amends for something he might have done to her? Could it be his review of her work in Harper’s coupled with private criticisms that drove Woolson to take her life? Or was it really just an accident that left James with extreme guilt for the rest of his life?
Its Tradition…
Moving away from Freud, the story found in The Turn of the Screw is still quite compelling. It begins with a Christmas party and ghost stories being told around a fire in the parlor. This was typical for Victorian households who did not reserve ghost stories for late October, but instead wove them into their Christmas traditions. This tradition really began in earnest with Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol which was published in 1843. Incidentally, this is the same year that James was born.
James thus grew up in the shadow of Dickens, and this is reflected in his writing, which comes across as forced with a lack of clarity on occasion for the modern-day reader. The way that James plays with the reader’s sense of time is also indicative of how Dickens played with time and space in A Christmas Carol. This can be seen most clearly in the first few pages of The Turn of the Screw which gives the reader the same sense that one might experience when watching Leonardo DiCaprio’s films Inception or Shutter Island.
The Cast of Characters…
A good story is nothing without good characters, and The Turn of the Screw has quite a few. (Pardon the alliteration.) The typical character list for The Turn of the Screw is as follows:
Douglas who is in possession of a written form of the story
An Uncle whom we meet briefly in the beginning.
The protagonist, The Governess who is never given a proper name
Miles and Flora are the charges of the Governess
Mr. Quint and Ms. Jessel who are ghosts of the previous valet and governess at Bly Manor
Mrs. Grose who is the housekeeper
And Luke who is a manservant there
All of these characters serve a purpose, and James uses them carefully to keep both the pace and the plot of his work moving forward at a steady clip. There is one more character though that often gets overlooked. The house itself.
The Walls Have Ears, and the Paintings Have Eyes…
Many readers do not consider the house itself to be a character, but overlooking Bly Manor as a character in and of itself would be a mistake. In fact, Dickens and many other Victorian-era authors often made the spaces that their characters occupied central to understanding the story as a whole. One has only to look at Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights to see how spaces such as the Heights and the Grange imply things about their inhabitants.
When looking at Bly Manor the new governess admits that at first, she saw it as a place of romance inhabited by a sprite. The governess declares that looking back this view is contracted, faded, and washed of color. This is a hint that the experiences that she lived through there would dim the light she once saw in the house and its inhabitants because the house is haunted, but James’s use of words here implies that a house holds only what its inhabitants bring to it and therefore it reflects back their pain, joy, love, lust, and agony. The house is therefore alive, and it absorbs the emotions and experiences of the people who occupy its spaces.
Insanity and Easter Eggs…
When Bly Manor is considered as a character the possibility is raised that it is meant to stand for the work that was undertaken by Nellie Bly who was an investigative journalist in New York in the late 1800s. She actually had herself committed to Blackwell Asylum in New York in 1887 as part of her investigative journalist work. Since it was not unusual for some Victorian authors to visit asylums as part of their research it is entirely possible that James would have been aware of the expose that Nellie Bly (aka Elizabeth Jane Cochran) published in the New York World regarding her discoveries at Blackwell. This exposé laid bare the horrific conditions in the New York City asylum and would eventually force changes therein.
Cochran actually took her pen name from a Stephen Foster song that was popular at the time. This could mean that James simply took the name for his manor house from the same song or it could mean that he took the name for his manor house as a way of secretly expressing the madness that could be found within Bly Manor that mirrors the madness that Bly found at Blackwell Asylum.
One last possibility for a hidden easter egg can be found if we return to the psychoanalytic lens. Through this lens, it is entirely possible that Miles is meant to stand for James himself and the governess could be Woolston since there was a small age gap between them and one seemed to worship the other as Miles adores the governess. Just food for thought. There is so much more to unpack in The Turn of the Screw though so let’s press on.
Unraveling the Mystery…
So now let’s pull back and just look at the story. At the beginning of the novella, a minor character named Douglas is recounting the events taken down by the governess who will become the protagonist as the narrative unfolds. As the governess takes over the telling of the story we discover that the uncle has been left as the provider for the children when he inherited the estate, and he makes it clear that he is not to be bothered by the governess when it comes to the care and upbringing of Miles and Flora. This presents a problem immediately for the unnamed governess when she arrives at Bly and is confronted with a letter from the headmaster of Miles’s school informing her that Miles has been ejected from the institution for being “an injury to others”. What the injury is that he causes is revealed in the final pages of the novella, and it seems to bring the issues of sexuality that have been brewing under the surface to the head.
Victorian Sexual Sensibilities…
It has been suggested that the two ghosts represent the repressed sexuality of the characters of the governess and Miles in The Turn of the Screw. As most people know, it wasn’t that the Victorians weren’t having sex or even kinky sex at that. It is more to the point to say that only publicly was sexuality being repressed. In fact, many of the sexual orientations and expressions of sexuality that we have no problem with today would have made you a pariah in Victorian times if you so much as whispered such things to the wrong person.
Given the way that Victorians felt publicly about sex and sexuality then it makes perfect sense that the governess refers to Ms. Jessel as her “vile predecessor” and Quint is understood to be of the same continence by all that ever knew him. In fact, Mrs. Grose makes it clear to the new governess that Quint took liberties with anyone and everyone at his leisure. For this reason, no one in the household, and even the reader does not feel bad when they find out that Quint was found dead by a laborer after seemingly having gotten drunk and taken a fall. This was merely seen as his comeuppance. Did Quint fall, or was he pushed? The same could be asked when speaking of Woolson’s death. Here again, the uncanny seems to be pushing its way through James’s work.
The Easy Analysis?
So where does that leave us? Given that Quint was left to his own devices with the children when their uncle left Bly, the assumption has been made by many critics that Quint molested the two children and pulled Ms. Jessel into his indulgences along the way. This seems too simple to me. In fact, I read it a different way altogether. My reading suggested that the new governess was struggling with her own identity and sexuality, as any 20-year-old would, and that Ms. Jessel represented the sexual side of her that she was trying to repress. Reading it this way then it is easy to make the connection between Miles and Quint in a similar vein.
When Miles dies in the arms of the governess at the end of the book after confessing that he said things to his fellow classmates that he thought they would like it appears that Miles has confessed to being a homosexual. Miles’s death could thus be understood as the death of childlike innocence as he admits that he is a sexual being, or it could be a literal death which Victorian readers would have interpreted as punishment for sexual deviance. Keep in mind that the new governess has warded off the advances of Ms. Jessel, and she has been able to ignore the presence of Quint in the room at the end.
The new governess has also sent Flora away as if to prevent any temptation that the child might represent. The sending away of Flora might also be an attempt by the governess to protect Flora from the deviant influence of Miles and the governess herself who are struggling with their own sexuality. These actions thus seem to signify that the governess has fought her own “homosexual demons” and won.
Everything in Context…
While the governess’s overwhelming need to protect the children throughout the novella could be explained as her own struggle with her sexuality. The death of Miles could also be seen as just punishment for homosexual tendencies it does not mean that James was homophobic. In fact, it is too simple to understand him in modern terms like that. Instead, it is best to leave Victorian literature in its own time and understand it through its culture. This means accepting that homosexuality would have been viewed both as sexual deviance and as a mental illness. These understandings are reflected in the treatment of the governess who sees specters that no one else can see, and in how she and Miles come unraveled as a result of them.
PLOT HOLE!!
No matter how you read this novella though there is a HUGE plot hole! That plot hole is the fact that Douglas, the character from the beginning of the story claims that the unnamed governess was governess to his sister after her work at Bly Manor. Ask yourself, if a governess came into your home, seemed to lose her mind, withheld vital information concerning the oldest child’s education, sent the youngest child to you in the dead of night, and had the eldest die in her charge, would you give her a good reference? Governesses of the age relied on good references to move from one family to the next. Without a reference, it is HIGHLY unlikely that the governess would have found a new situation after having a child die while in her care. This seems to indicate that the original narrator is actually Miles who is going by another name (aka changing the names to protect the innocent). More food for thought.
Friendship, Duality, and Murder…
I hope you enjoyed my peek into the lives of the people at Bly Manor and the world of Henry James. I am currently working on a blog that takes on the work of Robert Louis Stevenson since he and James were actually friends, and they corresponded often. Stevenson even felt so confident in their friendship that he took James to task regarding the contents of The Portrait of a Lady. Examining Stevenson’s work will also have me discussing the Ripper Case and the Burke and Hare Murders so you definitely don’t want to miss that. I am also working on my next list of great books that people claimed to have read but never really did. The easiest way not to miss out on anything is to subscribe. You can also visit Grace Slick and me on Instagram by clicking any of the pictures in this blog post. If you are interested in reading any of the works I have mentioned in this post just click the link attached to its title, and as always, here’s wishing you a wonderful week, and remember to always seek joy!
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