HENRY JAMES
445
Tnis construction is, moreover, borne out by the fiction itself if the
father's death existing as a given fact when the story opens is taken as
corresponding to the death of the son at its close. The identity of their
fates may be regarded as symbolizing their psychological identifica–
tion. Paramount, however, is the other equivalence of Henry James's
blight and John Ford's death. For from this "death" came the ghost
which was to appear again and again in the later tales.
' Before turning to the subject of this specter, attention must be
paid to some intermediate stages of development.
As
if
to materialize
ti1e "death," James actually left America to take up residence in
England in
1875.
The fantasy had for a time been
adeq~ate
as a form
of adjustment, but in the end it yielded as a forecast to the actual
physical withdrawal. For this often discussed self-exile seems to have
represented an escape from a world disagreeable before and now no
longer tolerable. Most of J ames's tales and novels were written while
he was living abroad, and a great number of them, from
A Passionate
Piigrim
(1871)
to
The Ambassadors
(1903),
present the problems
of the expatriate and the allied contrast between Old and New
Worlds. He returned twice to his native land in the early eighties. His
mother died during the first visit, and his father's sudden and final
illness brought him back almost immediately. He then remained away
again for over twenty years. After a decade, however,-in the early
nineties-he began writing a series of supernatural tales to which al–
lusion has already been made. "Sir Edmund Orme" (
11 ),
which was
copyrighted in
1891
and appears to have been the first, concerns the
fate of a lover who as a prerequisite to his marriage must rid himself
or a ghost that represents an early jilted suitor of
his
prospective
mother-in-law. The uncanny relationship between the older woman
and young man, with the apparition of an unloved youth as in–
termediary, unmistakably revives the
s~tuation
in "The Story of a
Year." There, it will be recalled, the subordination of John Ford to
his
mother's judgment eventually coincided with
his
own presentiment
of death and made together for what could on the surface well be
taken for a jilting by his sweetheart. The supernatural tale, however,
records the triumph of the hero over the ghost and thus sounds the
keynote of James's new orientation. The same restorative tendency is
even more obviously at work in "Owen Wingrave" (9), which ap–
peared in
1893.
Owen has been preparing for a military career-the
traditional profession of
his
family-when at the eleventh hour he
decides to brave every misunderstanding, even that of cowardice, and
keep faith with his deepest convictions by giving up his plans. In the
