PARTISAN REVIEW
the capture of the merely witless being ever but small), the jaded,
the disillusioned, the fastidious." Miss Kenton focuses on the first
part of this sentence-very shrewdly for her purpose, for the adjec–
tives "jaded," "disillusioned," and "fastidious" support a context
she has deliberately chosen not to recognize. James has been speak–
ing of the many difficulties which beset the writer of the fantastic,
of how unsuccessful, in this age of sophistication, modern ghost sto–
ries have been in their attempt to "rouse the dear old sacred terror."
The meaning of the sentence is simply that in
The Turn of the Screw.
J ames believed he had hit upon the perfect formula for rousing
this
type of terror-rousing it, moreover, in those the least susceptible,
"the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious." What this formula
is
we shall see in a moment.
Mr. Wilson is guilty of much the same sort of thing. He inter–
prets James's statement in the preface, that "She [the governess]
has 'authority,' which is a good deal to have given her," as meaning
that the governess, by reason of her "neurosis," was a dubious per–
son to exert authority over children. But James is not using "author–
ity" in this sense at all; he does not mean that the governess has
authority where the
children
are concerned, but where the
reader
is, as will be obvious when one views the statement in its context.
James has been defending himself against the accusation that the
governess is insufficiently characterized (H.G. Wells, as we have
noted, made the same charge) and concludes : "It constitutes no
little of a character indeed, in such conditions, for a young person,
as she says, 'privately bred,' that she is able to make her particular
credible
[sic]
statement of such strange matters. She has 'authority,'
which is a good deal to have given her, and I couldn't have arrived
at so much had I clumsily tried for more." This last sentence, which
we have seen the nonapparitionists quote (without benefit of con–
text) to their own purpose, really offers the most convincing proof
that they are mistaken; in it James is simply saying that we are to
accept
as
authoritative the governess's account of what happens in
The Turn of the Screw.
J ames goes on to tell exactly what his motives were in writing
his "bogey-tale": "Good ghosts, speaking by book, make poor sub–
jects, and it was clear that from the first my hovering prowling
blighting presences, my pair of abnormal agents, would have to
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