JAMES'S AIR OF EVIL
to
show, does so little justice to James's intention
in
writing the story
and so narrowly delimits the reader's appreciation of it, attracted
almost no attentio? when,
in
1924, it appeared in
Arts
accompanied
by an interesting set of illustrations by Charles Demuth. But ten
years later Mr. Edmund Wilson published
in
Hound and Horn
his
now famous essay. "The Ambiguity of Henry James" (included,
with some additions
in
The Triple Thinkers,
1938), in which he
popularized and expanded
this
theory. In his opinion
The Turn of
the Screw
is "simply a variation on one of James's familiar themes:
the frustrated Anglo-Saxon spinster." He professes to discover spe–
cific Freudian meanings in the facts that the male ghost first appears
on a tower, the female beside a lake; and that, on the occasion of
the latter visitation, the child Flora is carrying (I quote from the
story) "a small flat piece of wood, which happened to have in it
a little hole that had evidently suggested to her the idea of sticking
in
another fragment that might figure as a mast and make the thing
a boat."
Beyond pointing out such circumstances as these, Mr. Wilson
did not really add substantially to Miss Kenton's interpretation. The
Kenton-Wilson theory, at any rate, is now familiar to most Jame–
sians, and although it
has
elicited considerable random disapproval,
I have nowhere seen it attacked point by point. An exception is
Philip Rahv, but even he concedes, "Of course there is no doubt
that the story may be read that way."
II
Both Miss Kenton and Mr. Wilson have conveniently ignored
the letters, in which James made it perfectly clear that in
The Turn
of
the Screw
he was writing a tale of the
supernatural.
Its origin,
as
he declared
in
a letter to A.C. Benson (March 11, 1898) was a
"small
and gruesome
spectral
story" (italics mine) related to
him
by
Archbishop Benson, grandfather of the educator. A few months
later James wrote to Dr. Louis Waldstein that it was merely a "wan–
ton little Tale" unworthy of such praise as the doctor had appar–
ently given it. He added, however, that "the poet is always justified
when he is not a humbug; always grateful to the justifying com–
mentator," and continued: "My
bogey-tale
[italics mine] dealt with
177
