PARTISAN REVIEW
things so hideous that I felt that to save it at all I needed some in–
fusion of beauty or prettiness, and the beauty of the pathetic was
the only attainable-was indeed inevitable. But ah, the exposure
indeed, the helpless plasticity of childhood that isn't dear or sacred
to
somebody!
That
was
my little tragedy!" That was, indeed, the
tragedy: the corruption of the two children by the living servants,
and the possession (in the supernatural sense) of them afterwards
by the ghosts of those same servants. In the light of this avowal,
what happens to the "tragedy" if we think of the story simply as a
careful trap, or as a mere case history of a governess subject to hal–
lucinations?
In a letter to H. G. Wells (December 9, 1898), who had ap–
parently objected that the governess's character did not receive suf–
ficient delineation, James defended himself as follows:
Of course I had, about my young woman, to take a very sharp line.
The grotesque business I had to make her trace and present were, for me
at least, a very difficult job, in which absolute lucidity and logic, a single–
ness of effect, were imperative. Therefore I had to rule out subjective com–
plications of her own-play of tone, etc., and keep her impersonal save
for the most obvious and indispensable little note of neatness, firmness
and courage-without which she wouldn't have had her data.
Witness the phrase, "I had to rule out subjective complications of her
own," and observe how incompatible it is with the notion that she is
merely exposing her private neurosis in the story. Witness, too, how lit–
Ie this picture of the governess coincides with Wilson's conception of
her as a pronounced hysteric.
Writing to F.W.H. Myers (December 19, 1898) he is even
more specific:
The thing that, as I recall it, I most wanted not to fail of do–
ing, under penalty of extreme platitude, was to give the impression
of the communication to the children of the most infernal imagin–
able evil and danger-the condition, on their part, of being as
exppsed
as we can humanly conceive children to be. This was my artistic knot
to untie, to put any sense or logic into the thing, and if I had known
any way of producing
more
the image of their contact and condition
I should have been proportionately eager to resort to it.
Here James specifically states his conscious ambition, and I hope I do
not need to point out that without the apparitions there is no evil, no
danger, and no
exposure.
Finally there is the letter to his French trans-
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