Textual Practice 14(1) , 2000, 5380

John Fletcher The haunted closet: Henry Jamess queer spectrality

The work of Henry James is one of the places where contemporary gay or queer criticism has elaborated a distinctive way of reading. This is a reading that is attentive to both the historical formation of modern sexual norms and identities as well as the unorthodox play of identi cations and desires that transgress or elude those norms and identities in the very moment of their formation. The exemplary instance is Eve Sedgwicks readings of Jamess novella The Beast in the Jungle (1903) and the late masterpiece contemporary with it, The Wings of the Dove (1902), in the context of her theoretical and historical accounts of male homosociality and the enforcements of the modern homosexual closet with its regime of the open secret. 1 The work of Michael Moon and John R. Bradleys recent collection of essays consolidate the gay critical intervention within Jamesian studies.2 O ne might mention as well Kaja Silvermans analysis of a Jam esian psychic economy as part of her accounts of marginal male subjectivities that resist or deviate from the Oedipal norms of the modern apparatus of sexuality, and Terry Castles reading of The Bostonians which locates its spectral lesbianism in relation to the French novel and especially the work of Zola. 3 Despite the extensive secondary literature on Jamess The Turn of the Screw, Jamess ghost stories and his spectral interests have not received much attention in this extraordinary contemporary explosion of gay/queer criticism. However, it has been Terry Castles work in The Apparitional Lesbian that has been most productive in formulating a connection between the discourses of the ghostly, the supernatural and what I will call the topos of spectralization on the one hand, and the concerns of lesbian and gay critics and historians on the other. Castles polemical edge is directed against an emergent doxa in uential in much of lesbian and gay studies that is based rather uncritically on Michel Foucaults History of Sexuality and its particular explanatory narrative of the social construction
Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tan df.co.uk/journals/tf/0950236X.html

Textual Practice

of homosexuality by the dominant discourses of law, medicine and sexology in the mid-nineteenth century. We are all by now familiar with, if not a little weary of, the famous paragraph from Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality that contrasts sodomy, as an ancient legal and theological category of unnatural acts that anyone in a moment of sin might commit the sodomite was no more than the juridical subject of those acts with the modern homosexual as a type of person with an inverted inner nature which betrays itself in behaviour and expresses itself as an identity: Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. 4 Gay historians such as Jeffrey Weeks, David Halperin and Alan Bray have supported som ething like this picture of a sharp break between a premodern history of anonymous same-sex acts without identities as against a cross-gendered or gender-inverted identity, an identity produced by the modern elaboration of an apparatus of sexuality with its taxonomies of different sexual types for purposes of invigilation and social and hygienic control. Foucault marks the birth of homosexuality as a category in Westphals article on contrary sexual sensations in 1870, and he goes on to posit as the other side of this strategy of social control the formation of what he calls a reverse discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or naturality be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disquali ed (p. 101). Foucault thus accords a historical and virtually ontological priority to the state-sponsored discourses of psychiatry and jurisprudence in the formation of homosexuality as both a discursive object and a eld of discursive and desiring subjects. Foucaults account of the origination of key terms and categories by the medical and legal discourses of knowledge-power has increasingly been challenged by gay and lesbian historians such as Martha Vicinus, Rictor Norton, Randolph Trumbach, Frederic Silverstolpe among others. 5 Silverstolpe, a Swedish historian, in an essay called Benkert was not a doctor: the non-medical origins of the homosexual category, 6 has demonstrated that the term homosexuality was produced by the Hungarian Benkert von Kertbeny, and that the categories of the Uranian (i.e. the subject of same-sex love named after the goddess Urania from Platos Symposium) and the accompanying hetero/homosexual polarity were in fact elaborated by the German Karl Heinrich U lrichs in a series of pam phlets in 1864 65. U lrichs pamphlets of the mid-1860s and Benkerts open letter to the Prussian Minister of Justice in 1869 were acts of self-naming and self-de nition within what was a discourse of civil rights and not a medical

54

John Fletcher The haunted closet

or sexological discourse. Benkert and U lrichs were making claims for recognition and legal entitlement on behalf of what they conceived of as a distinct and naturally occurring minority population of which they were themselves members. I am an insurgent. I rebel against what is established . . . I demand the recognition of Uranian love, U lrichs wrote in his pamphlet Vindicta of 1865. 7 It was only later, in response to these rst public acts of self-de nition within the bourgeois public sphere of civil society in Germany, by the rst self-declared Uranians or homosexualists, that the medical and sexological models of Westphal, Krafft-Ebing and others came to rede ne a habitual same-sex libidinal preference under the rubric of gender inversion as a constitutional illness, a degeneration or instinctual perversion, an unnatural nature. Silverstolpe points out that Westphals supposedly foundational text actually cites Ulrichs third sex theory of homosexuality at some length, as does Krafft-Ebing in his later papers. The sexologists took their terms and categories from the emergent and polemical self-consciousness of apologists for same-sex love in the mid-nineteenth century, while attempting to subsume them under a pathologizing medical model. Silverstolpe demonstrates the uneasy tactical alliances that the homosexual apologist John Addington Symonds made with liberal sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and their medical models of homosexuality, in the hope of effecting legislative change. The reverse discourse here is clearly that of the sexologists which actually depended on the self-descriptions and theorizations of an already self-constituted homosexual discourse with a prior political project of self-emancipation of its own. Increasingly, lesbian and gay literary critics and historians of early modern literature and culture have also challenged Foucaults notion of identity-less anonymous acts, outlining the repertoires of literary tropes, motifs, symbolic and generic conventions whereby sam e-sex feelings and commitments were represented and circulated, as well as the often fugitive and shadowy coteries, networks and subcultures that gradually allowed some space, however marginal, for same-sex af liations and practices. The eighteenth-century historian Randolph Trumbach has demonstrated the presence of popular sexual typologies of the sodomite, the rake, the molly, and the shifts that are traceable within their terms, well before the formulation of of cial medical and sexological discourses in the nineteenth century, with their drastically simplifying and homogenizing grid of categories.

55

Textual Practice

Homospectrality

It is in this context of a challenge to the simpli cations of an uncritically Foucauldian account that Terry Castles formulation of the gure of the apparitional lesbian locates a key motif by which, in ages without bene t of psychiatry and sexology, sexual and emotional intensities between women could be registered but drained of carnal presence and pressure: The literary history of lesbianism . . . is rst of all a history of derealisation . . . in nearly all the art of the 18th and 19th centuries, lesbianism or its possibility, can only be represented to the degree that it is simultaneously derealised, through a blanching authorial infusion of spectral metaphors. . . . One woman or the other must be a ghost or on the way to becoming one. Passion is excited only to be obscured, disembodied, decarnalised. The vision is inevitably waved off. Panic seems to underwrite these obsessional spectralizing gestures: a panic over love, female pleasure, and the possibility of women breaking free together from their male sexual overseers. 8 Castle compiles an anthology of these spectralizing moments and they show an astonishing consistency over two hundred-odd years, right down to the uncannily repeated dism issive gesture of waving off that so often accompanies the lesbian apparition. She goes on to suggest that a process of recognition by negation along Freudian lines can be seen to be at work. For Freud, the negative not allows the repressed material to emerge and achieve formulation in the very statement that denies it. So the whiting out that the spectral metaphor enacts nevertheless allows a provisional guring of the possibility that is being denied. As Castle points out, the ghost doesnt just make something vanish into thin air, it isnt just the vaporizing of the carnal, but is of its very nature a revenant, it returns, its business is to haunt. This lays it open to the revisionary uses of a lesbian writing that seeks to retrieve and embrace the spectral, to undo the processes of disavowal and repression. Indeed, one might say that the whole project of Castles book is to re-embody the lesbian spectre, to reveal the apparitional as carnal, this-worldly and worldly-wise. W hile Castles account begins by locating the apparitional lesbian in certain eighteenth-century texts of Defoe and Diderot, as well as sketching something of a pre-sexological popular sexual slang that registered lesbian possibilities tribade, fricatrice, sapphist, roaring girl, tommy, etc., together with a signi cant recurrence of the word odd and its derivatives she doesnt, however, locate any historical changes in the apparitional trope itself in response to the pressure of the public consolidation of a more readily available lesbian category. One would expect, for example, that the gure of the apparitional lesbian would operate differently after the trial of

56

John Fletcher The haunted closet

Radclyffe Halls The Well of Loneliness in 1928 from the way it did before it. The history of the public consolidation of deployable sterotypes of the odd woman, as Castle insists, is radically different from that of the queer man; it receives its consolidation more slowly and at a later moment, and so its metaphorical or symbolic registrations and disavowals will operate with a different historical pro le. Developing Castles argum ent, I want to sketch out so me possible connections between the queer, the uncanny and the closet and the operation of the motif of the spectral in some of Henry Jamess late ghost tales. As Leon Edel noted fty years ago in his edition of The Ghostly Tales of Henry James, apart from four early tales in the late 1860s up to the mid-1870s, Jamess dozen or so mature spectral narratives are all concentrated in the 1890s or later. 9 The majority of these follow the three trials of Oscar W ilde in 1895 . In Britain it is the Wilde trials, as Alan Sin eld has persuasively argued in The Wilde Century, rather than any sexological formulation in learned treatises by Westphal, or even polemical pamphlets by Benkert or Ulrichs in German, that coordinated a range of diverse elements effem inacy, aestheticism , dandyism into a recognizable and deployable stereotype of the male invert as the habitual subject o f same-sex desire. As Sinfield argues, the images o f seventeenth- and eighteenth-centur y male sexual types, the rake who fucked anything that moved, catamites, whores or his perfumed goat, or the molly who was not a real man at all, or the image of the aristocratic, free-thinking libertine, or the effeminate leisure-class man whose same-sex practices were an aspect o f a traditional upper-class disso luteness, all these had made it difficult to cohere an image of the unitary homosexual, whereas the Wildean model produced an image even more speci c than that: the queer dandi ed, aesthetic, effeminate. And, in the same move, the object of his attentions came into view: the lower class masculine youth.10 Wilde notoriously called this predilection for rough trade feasting with panthers. Sinfield argues that the queer stereotype that crystallized out from the trials, and the excited work of public representation that put it into circulation, was a composite of both W ilde and Lord Alfred Douglas united in their cross-class sexual interests. Aristocratically inbred or at least with leisure-class airs and habits, aesthetically intense if not decadent, unm anly and sexually dclass but with social and cultural pretensions, any element of this expanding ensemble might be read to imply metonymically the others even in their actual absence. The formation of the closet is the other side o f this process of consolidation, specification and implication. The result is that the traditionally ominous but vague crimen non nominandum inter christianos the abomination not to be named among Christians becom es recognizable: I am an unspeakable of the O scar Wilde sort, as E.M . Forsters Maurice blurts out to his family doctor, despite being a rugger-playing public school hearty. Unspeakability had gained a

57

Textual Practice

paradoxical speci cation. The unnameable and the unspeakable had been given a local habitation and a name, and that name was Oscar Wilde. Maurice of course is neither effeminate nor aesthetically given, and at this point in Forsters novel his only male object has been the upper-class Clive, not a street-wise working-class lad no feasting with panthers for Maurice. Nevertheless, he misrecognizes himself in the Oscar Wilde image because of his same-sex desires. Indeed, Forsters novel might be read as an attempt to undo the effects of the Wilde trials, and to reconnect samesex desires with the ideals of manliness and the W hitmanesque love of comrades. If Forster had had the nerve to publish his novel, it might well have had som ething of that effect. 11 The paralysing connection between inner feelings and wishes and an external, stigmatized image comes then to constitute the closet as an intensi ed regime of self-policing and speci c secrecies. Edward Carpenter commented: The Wilde trial has done its work, and silence must henceforth reign on sex-subjects. But it was, as Sin eld remarks, a W ilde-shaped silence (p. 124). The relative indeterminacy of the signi ers of possible same-sex desire in pre-trial sexual culture such as an aesthetic cult of the queer, the intense or the excessive, the Classicizing cult of Greek love undergoes a more loaded codi cation after the trials. The W ilde trials were of course only the end-point of a larger process of crystallizat ion that had been punctuated by similar scandals: the 1871 trial of the transvestite male prostitutes Parker and Boulton, the Cleveland Street brothel trials of 1889 that implicated Lord Arthur Somerset, the Earl of Euston and the Prince of Wales son and heir to the throne, the notorious Prince Eddy. 12 This process bore very heavily on certain more traditional social types and life-styles, such as the gure of the leisure class, con rmed bachelor, often an artist or writer, or characterized by predominantly literary or aesthetic interests, such indeed as Henry James himself, who might now come under new and potentially dangerous scrutiny and suspicion.13

The uncanny: a closet effect

In his essay The uncanny, 14 Freud elaborates a set of shifting relations between the pair of German terms the heimlich and the unheimlich that turn on an earlier, obsolete root meaning of heimlich or canny as belonging to the household or home (heim). W hat is heimlich is what is known, comfortable, cosy, familiar, domesticated arousing a sense of agreeable restfulness and security as in one within the four walls of his house (p. 342). The unheimlich/uncanny in the rst sense of the term is simply its opposite: what is unfamiliar, alien, strange, sinister; to which one could add in English the odd or queer, the latter meaning, according to the OED ,

58

John Fletcher The haunted closet

cross, oblique, perverse, squint, strange, eccentric, suspicious. W hat Freud locates in German is a semantic shift in the meaning and connotations of the heimlich. This second usage of heimlich signi es what is concealed, kept from sight, private, secret, shameful, sinister, withheld from the sight or knowledge of others. The genitals are the heimlich parts in this sense, the toilet the heimlich chamber. One of Freuds dictionaries summarizes the shift: From the idea of homelike, belonging to the house, the further idea is developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of strangers, something concealed, secret (p. 346). This is the result, one might infer, of large-scale historical changes by which the older extended family or household originally including servants, slaves, apprentices, dependants, wards, etc. gives way to the enclosed world of the modern, nuclear, Oedipalized family of immediate blood relations. With this second meaning we get the speci cally modern sense of privacy as an internal or withdrawn space or enclave that can be negatively in ected as shameful, sinister or taboo. Freud sum marizes the paradox that results from this semantic drift: Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it nally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich (p. 347). This paradox that the uncanny/unheimlich is an internal possibility, a subspecies of the heimlich the canny or homely raises the question: W hat happens to unheimlich/uncanny when its opposite or anchoring term shifts, and indeed comes to meet it and to include it? Freuds dictionaries tell him that unheim lich is not used as the opposite of heimlich in the second sense, i.e. as signifying what is open and unconcealed, in the light. However, Freud cites from Sanders W rterbuch der D eutchen Sprach (1860) a de nition by the philosopher Schelling: Unheim lich is the name for everything that ought to have remained . . . secret and hidden [i.e. heimlich in the second sense] but has come to light (p. 345). Schellings de nition of the unheimlich starts from the second, negative sense of heimlich but includes the element of exposure, the moment of coming to light or coming out. Furthermore, it includes an element of the imperative and normative: something that ought to have remained . . . secret and hidden has come improperly to light. W hat we have here is not just a set of meanings in a dictionary, but a set of positions within a historically speci c structure of experience which demarcates and regulates the shifting boundaries and interfaces between the private and public spheres. If one asks what is the place of the subject of the experience of the uncanny in its various moments, then we can say that in the rst moment of the binary opposition the subject of the uncanny is inside the house, feeling either comfortably at home or anxiously sensing the stranger, out of place and alien, from without. In the

59

Textual Practice

second moment of the collapse of the opposition, the subject of the uncanny experience is outside the house, looking in at the withdrawn and opaque privacy, the sinister secrets (heimlichkeiten) of the other. 15 But arguably there is a third moment where the subject of Schellings uncanny is located inside the house once again but is no longer at home there, because what ought to have remained hidden has com e to light, a strangeness breaks out from within. It is not surprising to realize that the meaning of the word closet has a history that shows similar though not identical shifts and mutations. This is clear from the selections from the OED entry that Eve Sedgwick appends to the title chapter of Epistemology of the Closet. W hat is striking is that the semantic eld of the closet condenses in particular around the moment of the shift or the reversal of the heimlich into so including its opposite the unheimlich. Taking over from the middle-English bower, closet signi es an inner chamber for retirement, especially for sleeping, private studies or devotions, latterly closet of ease or water-closet. As a site of retirement and domestic security, however, it comes to take on implications of secrecy and exclusion as the most secret place in the house appropriate unto our own private studies (1586). 16 As a site of secluded speculations it is often opposed to knowledge of the world and to practical matters closet speculations. However, closet-work like backstairs-work in seventeenthcentury English signi es conspiratorial, treacherous or secretive activity, something sinister, the space of Heimlichkeiten which is undecidably both heimlich and unheimlich. As it specializes to the more modern usage to refer to a small side-room or recess for storing utensils and provisions, we get the phrase skeleton in the closet (or cupboard) which is de ned as a private or concealed trouble in ones house or circumstances, ever present, and ever liable to come into view (p. 520). Here we have de nitely reached the realm of Schellings uncanny: what ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come improperly to light, the subject who is in the house but no longer at home there because the unheimlich is no longer outside but haunts from within. With reference to enclosures within enclosures we also get any small room, especially one belonging to or communicating with a larger (p. 520). W ith this the closet begins to materialize as the geography of the homospectral such as James will stage it in his tale The Jolly Corner (1908), and which is the terrain of W ildes own The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Robert Louis Stevensons The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and M r. Hyde (1886). An intensi ed reserve of anxiety came to attach itself to both the sexual heimlich and the unheim lich, indeed to the very process of their splitting and counterposition. W hat Eve Sedgwick has called a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual de nition17 results from the con ict between two opposed de nitions of same-sex relations, between what she labels

60

John Fletcher The haunted closet

minoritizing and universalizing de nitions of homosexuality. W here minoritizing accounts concentrate same-sex intensities in a quarantined minority of now increasingly recognizable post-W ilde queers or unspeakables on the one hand, universalizing accounts locate same-sex intensities in the homosocial ties that bind one to ones gender on the other, homosocial ties and institutions that will come under increasing scrutiny and invigilation. Taking her distance from the simpli ed Foucauldian coupure between anonymous acts and inverted identities and the replacement of the former by the latter, Sedgwick criticizes the model of the unidirectional Great Paradigm Shift in its various forms and argues for the overlap and coexistence of contradictory schemes. 18 In particular the gures of the masculine homosexual and the feminine lesbian (not to mention all the positions in between) discomfort and so tend to be erased by minoritizing models of gender inversion, while these same gures appear to invite universalizing models in which same-sex feelings con rm and reinforce gender identity, if not gender separatism, providing a strong emotional/ libidinal dynamic to homosocial relations. In an illuminating study of what he calls after Sedgwick epistemologies of the early modern closet, Alan Stewart argues that in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries sexual activity between men appears to have occurred within already existing social relationships, rather than between strangers, and usually within the same household. 19 He associates the anxiety about sodomy with the stereotypical gures of the beating schoolmaster, the cloistered monk, the humanist bedfellow, the closeted secretary (p. xlv). In particular the enclosed space of the early modern closet, he argues, was not so much a private space of solitary withdrawal as a secret non-public transactional space between two men behind a locked door (p. 171). The early modern closet, then, contained not just one but two men: the gentleman and his private secretary, the cohabitant of that space and the depository and keeper of his masters secrets. This was a relationship counterposed to those of the household within which it was located, and in particular to the marital relation of the gentleman and his lady, who is traditionally excluded from her husbands closet in treatises on household management, albeit accorded a ladys closet or cabinet of her own. In an analysis of the institution of the secretary, an uneasy combination of servant and intimate who is represented as being to his patron as a closet is to the house, Stewart demonstrates how the dif culties of that relationship, the risk to the patron in depositing his secrets with a social inferior, are partially resolved through an appeal to homosocial emotional dynamics: no one personage of estate, laieth choise upon such a one to serve so neer about him . . . but ere he long have used him , he bindeth unto him at least some good part of his affection (p. 175). The exemplary Elizabethan secretary, Robert Cecil, declared of the relations

61

Textual Practice

between Prince and Secretary: those Councells are to be compared to y e mutuall affeccion of two lovers (p. 176). This account in locating samesex feeling and intensities within a power-laden set of homosocial relations seems to require a universalizing rather than minoritizing model. By contrast the Gothic re guration of the male closet, in a series of paranoid narratives from Godwins Caleb Williams (1794) and Mary Shelleys Frankenstein (1818) to Stevensons Jekyll and Hyde, Wildes Dorian Gray and Jamess late ghost stories at the end of the nineteenth century, progressively transform the residual homosocial relation of secretaryship based on the sharing of secrets being closeted together into a ercely defended, newly solitary space of libidinally charged male secrets, of intrusion, doubling and paranoia. The move to the homospectral closeted space of the 1890s is a move from a heimlich, homosocially demarcated and sanctioned space of regulated secrecy and male power to an unheimlich haunted space of disavowed secrets, whose solitary inhabitant is in an uneasy relation, by turns erotic and persecutory, to an alter ego or double. In these texts the Gothic closet seems to perform a separation of its inhabitant from the public realm of homosocial relations and so to insinuate a minoritizing understanding and a persecutory invigilation of same-sex intensities. The traditional social relations of intimacy and service are violently re gured in the drama of obsession with and exclusion from the Masters secrets, which is played out around the locked chest in the inner study, between Caleb Williams and Falkland in Godwins novel. They also leave their newly homospectralized trace in the gure of Quint, the absent Masters own man in The Turn of the Screw (1898), and in the adoring biographer ensconced in the great mans vacant study and among the secrets of the dead writer who returns to haunt him in The Real Right Thing (1899).20 To grasp some of the psychic effects of the Gothic closet I will propose a reformulation of the seventeenth-century term closet-work along the lines of Freuds concepts of the dream-work and the joke-work. Like the dream-work, the closet-work is characterized by the primary processes of condensation and displacement that operate on the other side of the bar of censorship and repression. The closet-work involves the spectral production of condensed and over-determined, composite gures, split off and disavowed alter egos as in dreams. Like Stevensons Hyde or Dorian Grays portrait or the spectral gures of James, they cannot be translated unequivocally as gay representations but are none the less the homoerotically charged productions of the Gothic closet. They insist at the intersection between same-sex identi cation and same-sex desire. The queerness of such representations results from the mutual implication of desire and identi cation, the impossibility of cleanly distinguishing the stigm atized and newly emergent homosexual from the retrospectively and

62

John Fletcher The haunted closet

defensively consolidated heterosexual (the second term appears only some years after and in response to the formulation of its deviant twin). One of the effects over a period of time of the new post-W ilde trial regime was the conversion of a diffuse sense, even for some an appreciation, of an indeterminate oddness or queerness into a vigilance in detecting the queer, a congealing of the free- oating adjective into the all too determinate noun. Furthermore, the intensi ed regime of policing the boundaries of the private that the Wilde trials precipitate involves as its other side the self-policing, the closet-work that produces the various moments of the uncanny in the eld of sexual self-de nition. The homospectral uncanny is the effect of this newly reconstituted closet and its minoritizing assumptions and invigilation. The queer or merely odd, the hitherto uninterrogated bachelor becomes a candidate for the suspicion of secrets, sinister heimlichkeiten, in the public gaze of others, but he also becomes the subject of a self-regulating self-division. In order not to be a queer for others he becomes strange to himself, uncanny at home, spectralized by his own closet-work. The subject of Schellings uncanny as Ive previously de ned it in the house but no longer at home, where what should have remained secret and hidden threatens to come to light, the skeleton in the closet can serve as an apt gure for the haunted and self-disowning effects of the modern regime of the closet.

Narratives of homospectral panic

The late ghostly tales of Henry James return again and again to what one might call the drama of spectralization, the drama of the production of spectres. However, it is important to insist that this drama in Jamess texts is not so much about same-sex intensities in isolation, but attaches to the whole con icted implication of same-sex and cross-sex relations and desires. My concern will be mainly with The Real Right Thing (1899) and The Jolly Corner (1908); however, a brief discussion of Jamess best-known ghost story, The Turn of the Screw (1898), will establish a preliminary framework. W hile James is concerned to dramatize the process of spectralization, this always takes place within a web or as part of a circuit of inter-subjective relations. This is true even, or especially, in the The Turn of the Screw, where notoriously no one other than the governess/narrator ever sees the spectres of Quint the valet and Miss Jessel the former governess, as well as in the other two tales where other characters also see the apparitions. This process of spectralization is elaborated in the very detailed and nuanced description of the rst apparition to the unsuspecting governess on top of the tower at Bly, of what only later turns out to have been Peter Quint, the deceased

63

Textual Practice

valet of the young Master of the House. Signi cantly the governess rst reaction is to take him to be an intrusive sightseer of country houses rather than a ghost. A chain of thoughts and wishes on the governess part culminates in this rst appearance: she begins by re ecting that I was giving pleasure if he ever thought of it! to the person to whose pressure I had yielded. 21 The person in question is of course the handsome young Master and uncle of the children whose care she has taken over on condition that she never bother him or contact him, but make all the decisions and deal with all the problems herself. The eroticized phrasing she gives him pleasure by yielding to his pressure hints at the nature of the feelings in play. This leads to her wish that she should suddenly meet someone, that he would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve, and she wishes to see it and the kind light of it, in his handsome face (p. 135). His face is present to her when the gure appears: W hat arrested me on the spot . . . was the sense that my imagination had, in a ash, turned real. He did stand there (p. 135). This rst surprise gives way to her second surprise which was the violent perception of the mistake of my rst: the man who met my eyes was not the person I had precipitately supposed (p. 136). At rst the apparent ful lment of her wish, the gure then takes shape as the violent negation of the gure that was wished for: rst him and then de nitely not him, as little anyone else I knew as it was the image that had been in my mind (p. 136). The principle of the negated wish is virtually stated as such in the strange apologia for her feelings that the governess produces: An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred (my italics). From this strange permission we can infer by reversing the negation that the known man, the beautiful young Master she had previously wished for, would be the opposite of the unknown man who does materialize, i.e. rather than a permitted object of fear he is a forbidden object of desire. It is the violent negation of the former, the forbidden object of desire, that produces the latter, the permitted object of fear, the gure actually seen. If this reading attributes the apparition entirely to the governess forbidden desire and its repudiation, two things later complicate in retrospect the moment of spectral production. First, the description the governess gives to Mrs Grose the housekeeper of a red, curly-haired man with long pale face and queer whiskers, is instantly if reluctantly identi ed by the housekeeper as the dead valet Peter Quint, of whom the governess at this point knows nothing. Second, on his next visitation, she realizes as his hard, deep stare quits her and moves around the room that it was not for me he had come there. He had come for someone else (p. 142). The someone else is of course little Miles, the Masters beautiful young nephew and the object of as intense an erotic and emotional investment by the

64

John Fletcher The haunted closet

governess as is his absent uncle. Little Miles stands in for his absent uncle. The Master as the forbidden object of the governess desire is replaced by two substitutes: the sublimatory gure of little Miles who like a Cherub, the governess has previously told us, has no bottom, had morally at any rate nothing to whack (p.142) and the haunting, predatory Quint who, we are told, on both occasions is seen only from the waist up (p.142). It is between these two gures who do not exist below the waist, the censored, bisected replacements for the desired Master of the House in the governess fantasy life, that the unspeakable scenes occur that so preoccupy her. So while the governess negated desire is heterosexual, and the recent past that she uncovers at Bly is the scene of an affair between the valet, Peter Quint and the previous governess, Miss Jessel, also now dead, the fear that drives her is that Quint returns, not as part of the sinful couple, but alone, either to corrupt little Miles or to continue his evil relationship with him dating from their previous intimacy. Her displaced and negated desire for the Master feeds into the fantasy of a same-sex, pederastic scene between the valet and the boy, who we are told has been sent down from his prep school for unspeci ed misdemeanours and is just at the point of puberty. Som ething similar may be implied with Miss Jessel and her hunger, as it is called, for little Flora. Although the adults, Quint and Miss Jessel, have had a sexual relation that the children seem to have witnessed and possibly covered up, once dead they return singly, never together, to haunt the child of their own sex. To invoke the terms of the debate between Eve Sedgwick and Kaja Silverman over Jamess psychic economy, is this a narrative of a past primal scene of heterosexual origins of the kind that Silverman sees as structuring so many Jamesian narratives, the source of the childrens precocious knowledge what Miles and Flora (like Maisie) knew the childs knowing presence at the scene of adult sexual relations? Or is it a spectral scene of queer tutelage, in Sedgwicks suggestive phrase from her analysis of Jamess late novel, The Wings of the D ove ? 22 The precondition for the events at Bly, both those of the past as well as those of the narratives present, is one that The Turn of the Screw shares with virtually all the classic narratives of the Gothic tradition, from Otranto to Udolpho to Jane Eyre to The Woman in White; that is, a narrative void, an empty space, created by the default of the traditional paternal function: not so much the Law of the Father as the Flaw of the Father, due to the absence, death or perverse irresponsibility of the Master of the House. It is the absence or withdrawal of the Master from Bly, his abdication of responsibility, which creates the vacuum or spectral space in which the ghosts appear, just as in his absence he had installed Quint in situ at Bly, literally dressed in the Masters clothes our employers late clever goodlooking own m an; im pudent, assured, spoiled, depraved (p.159) with

65

Textual Practice

authority over its inhabitants and a particular partiality for and familiarity with little Miles: It was Quints own fancy. To play with him, I mean to spoil him . . . Q uint was much too free. . . . Too free with my boy? Too free with everyone. (p. 150) As the gure of a generalized perversity corrupting both Miss Jessel and her charges, Quint, the Masters own man, is licensed by the Masters complicity and blindness, his will not to know. Similarly the governess desire and its spectral effects are the result of her seduction by the beautiful young Master who interviews her for her post in Harley Street and then sends her off to Bly to take the place of both himself and her disgraced predecessor, Miss Jessel: Im rather easily carried away. I was carried away in London . . . in Harley St. Well, Miss, youre not the rst and you wont be the last. (p. 126) At once seduced and excluded by the Masters appeal to her she is to deal with everything herself and never to contact him about anything her consequent positioning within a skewed, decentred familial structure makes her peculiarly vulnerable to the perverse circuit of desire that offers her the Masters children beautiful, unpunishable . . . with nothing to whack as a substitute for the Master himself. The spectral Quint appearing in the Masters place, and coming not for her but for little Miles, repeats the same pattern of interpellation and exclusion, now refocused on the children my boy. W hile it is tempting to interpret the predatory Quint as the dangerous, irreducible residue of the governess translation of her desire for the Master into the sublimatory fantasy of his children and their innocence, it is equally important to recognize that this is a circuit of desire that pre-exists her arrival, and in which she is caught up and implicated in her very disavowal. She is structurally fated to become the site of its repetition in the present and of a lethal panic against its homospectral intensities. We can see this materialization of the homospectral in an intersubjective circuit of cross-sex relations most obviously in The Real Right Thing, published a year later. Here the estranged wife of the recently dead writer Ashton Doyne commissions Doynes young friend and acolyte George Withermore, a budding journalist and writer, to produce a biography of her husband as a form of reparation to him, the real right thing of the tales title, and of vindication for herself before the critical eyes of the

66

John Fletcher The haunted closet

world. To this end she installs the young devotee in her dead husbands private study, assuring him that Youre the one he liked most; oh, much ! and giving him access to all the dead writers personal papers, letters and diaries.23 The storys uncanny dimension begins with W ithermores sense of virtual usurpation connected as this is with his expectation of the dead mans imminent return: its as if he might at any moment come in. Thats why I jumped just now. The time is so short since he really used to it only was yesterday. I sit in his chair, I turn his books, I use his pens, I stir his re, exactly as if . . . I had come up here to wait. Its delightful but its strange. (p. 476) As with Godwins novel the traditional secretarial relation of closeted intimacy, which is the young biographers organizing fantasy, coexists uneasily with the gradually increasing suggestion of intrusion. The homospectral intensities that circulate between the dead writer and his adoring biographer, however, are enclosed within and nally negated by the mens relationship with the gure of the estranged wife. Indeed, the original suggestion that the dead writer might actually be a ghostly personal presence at the writing of his own biography is rst introduced, signi cantly, by his wife He is with us who is herself experienced as a ghostly presence by the young biographer: he felt her, through a supersubtle sixth sense that the whole connection had brought into play, hover, in the still hours, at the top of landings and the other side of doors, gathered from the soundless brush of her skirts the hint of her watchings and waitings. (p. 476) A gure of unappeasible anxiety, she is herself curiously spectralized in her exclusion from the scene of male writing and intimacy that she has initiated. Taking up the wifes suggestion of her dead husbands personal presence, the young man cherishes the fancy so much that he looks forward to each evenings work in Doynes study very much as one of a pair of lovers might wait for the hour of their appointment (p. 477). Dipping deep into Doynes secrets, he comes to feel that it was particularly pleasant to be able to hold that Doyne desired him, as it were, to know them (p. 478). W hile echoing the description of the early modern closeting of two men as lovers, in Cecils phrase, in which the patron uses the secretary as the depository of his secrets that are bound or sealed by affeccion, Jamess homospectral narrative re gures the male closet as a site of both solitude and intrusive intimacy in a language that is as sexualized as it is

67

Textual Practice

knowingly allusive. For the homoerotic language in which W ithermores researches are described has him drawing curtains, forcing doors and, in the favourite metaphor that James habitually used of himself to describe his own authorial dealings with his characters: going, in general, as they said, behind almost everything (p. 478). In his prefaces James talks continually of his going behind his characters, i.e. going behind the scenes, behind their social facade, their appearance and self-presentation to the public sphere, into an interior space of consciousness and the secrets it conceals. This leads to the elaboration of a fantasy of an intimate encounter with the dead man, of an intimacy so rich . . . the possibility of an intercourse closer than that of life (p. 475), in a language charged with the latent metaphor of anal penetration: It was at an occasional sharp turn of some of the duskier of these wanderings behind that he really, of a sudden, most felt himself, in the intimate sensible way, face to face with his friend; so that he could scarcely have told, for the instant, if their meeting occurred in the narrow passage and tight squeeze of the past, or at the hour and the place that actually held him . Was it 67, or was it the other side of the table? (p. 478) The ambiguity of position here in wandering behind he ends up nevertheless face to face is aligned with a confusion of past and present and a consequent ambiguity about different forms of knowledge; for Withermores penetrations from behind are located in the narrow passage and tight squeeze of the past while its results are a potential intimate, sensible . . . face to face with his friend . . . at the hour and the place that actually held him. However, the face to face is surrounded by a certain hesitation, even anxiety, and is continually postponed. For while Withermore rejoices in the great fact of the way Doyne was coming out with all its suggestions of appearance, materialization, biographical transparency, by contrast the special state of his own consciousness . . . wasnt a thing to talk about it was only a thing to feel (p. 478). W hat he does feel, we are told, is that there were moments, for instance, when, as he bent over his papers, the light breath of his dead host was as distinctly in his hair as his own elbows were on the table before him (p. 478). At this point the narratives manifest terms involve a resumption and reversal of the gure of the secretary, with the dead author himself being gured as a hushed, discreet librarian, doing the particular things, rendering the quiet aid, liked by men of letters (pp. 4789). This latter activity involves the gentle shifting and stirring of documents on the table behind him, the pushing into view of some mislaid letter, the opening of an old journal at the relevant date. However, the narratives subtext of allusion, insinuation and

68

John Fletcher The haunted closet

fantasy seems to suggest a different relationship betwen the two men. The precise notation of posture and position here, while it leads to the metaphor of a spectral librarian service, locates the dead master eerily behind his devotee. Similarly the young mans inability ruled by deep delicacies and ne timidities, the fear of too sudden or too rude an advance actually to encounter his dead host face to face, to look up at him on the other side of the table, leads to the chapters nal enigmatic contrast between the gure of the mystic assistant helpfully drawing his attention to special boxes and drawers and his conviction of a very different and unconfrontable gure: could one have really looked, one would have seen somebody standing before the re a tri e detached and over-erect somebody xing one the least bit harder than in life. (p. 479) The story ends with the suspension of the ghostly, homospectral intercourse between the two men and its replacement by a resistance coming from the dead man to what is now interpreted as a form of violation. This disturbance of the mens rapport is con rmed by the wife who has been out of sight but not out of contact with the spectral intimacies between them. Finally the dead writer Doyne materializes immense. But dim. Dark. Dreadful (p. 485) barring his study door to both the young man and his wife. Withermore interprets it: He strains forward out of his darkness; he reaches toward us out of his mystery; he makes us dim signs of his horror . . . at what were doing. (p. 484) The young mans hopes of intim acy, for the traditional secretarial sharing of the dead writers secrets, are disappointed, for in the spectral space of the Gothic closet such wishes are experienced by its inhabitant as an intrusion amounting to violation and the occasion for horror. The Real Right Thing repeats the scenario so common in the run of tales which James wrote on the literary life where an artist is besieged and often destroyed by the intrusion, into his private life and withdrawn world of aesthetic detachment, of gures that represent the destructive values of modern publicity, the hunger for personal anecdote as a substitute for an appreciation of the work itself, the lionizing of the writer by the world of salons and hostesses and the subtler temptations of the idolizing enthusiast avid for the secret of the writers creativity, the gure in his carpet. Although himself the author of a biography of the American sculptor William W hetmore Storey, the literary biographer for James condensed many of these dangers. W ithermore, for all his desire for intimacy with his dead hero, is an agent of publicity, not the keeper of his masters secrets but

69

Textual Practice

the potential exhibitor of them. This he comes to realize as his spectral honeymoon reverses into a Gothic nightmare: hes there as a protest . . . as a warning . . . as a curse (p. 484). The homoerotic subtext of the story and its mise-en-scne of the haunted closet, in making the dead writer himself the subject of homospectral panic and horror, seems to be written out of Jamess own anxieties about the danger of exposure and publicity, a danger represented for him both by the gure of W ilde himself in his amboyant risk-taking and courting of publicity, and the subsequent trials and publicity that consolidated the stereotype of the homosexual and with it the modern closet as a solitary site of embattled secrets. W ithermores self-criticism We lay him bare. We serve him up. . . . We give him to the world. . . . There are natures, there are lives, that shrink (p. 483) might be read as alluding to just such a prototypical homosexual drama. In the light of the storys Gothic peripeteia, W ithermores previous, unre ecting delight in Ashton Doynes coming out takes on the coercive if unwitting air of an early form of outing. The Jolly Corner of 1908 belongs to and clearly resonates with a number of homoerotically charged narratives of the 1880s and 1890s such as Stevensons Dr. Jekyll and M r. Hyde (1886), Wildes The Picture of D orian Gray (1891) as well as Jamess own un nished novel The Sense of the Past (1917), whose protagonists confront threatening or seductive alter egos in locked, closeted rooms at the tops and backs of houses. It also has distinct if puzzling af nities with the non-spectral text of 1903 The Beast in the Jungle which has gained a certain notoriety in recent years through Eve Sedgwicks brilliant if problematic reading of it as a narrative of what she calls homosexual panic. The Jolly Corner is the story of an American, Spencer Brydon, who has spent most of his adult life in Europe and has returned home to New York after an absence of thirty-three years. He returns partly to see the new America, but most importantly to visit the property he has inherited as the last of his fam ily and on the rents from which he has been living a life of cultivated leisure in Europe. The property consists of two large New York mansions, his family home on a corner the jolly corner of 5th Avenue and a second house, less prestigious and grand, that he is converting into a block of apartments that will return him a considerable amount of money. Brydon rediscovers and enters into an intimate friendship with Alice Staverton, a woman from the old New York of his past. Discovering a hidden talent for and a pleasure in his property developments, he becomes obsessed with the idea of what he would have been like if had stayed behind in New York as his father had wanted him to, and become a capitalist entrepreneur and property developer, a builder of skyscrap ers, instead of spending most of his life as an aesthete and Europhile. To this end he returns to his now empty and unfurnished family mansion and spends hours every night prowling its rooms, especially its

70

John Fletcher The haunted closet

back-staircase and the warren of upper rooms, hunting down the spectral gure of his alter ego, the self he might have been if he had made a different set of choices and decisions in his youth. Just as the previous story was, at its manifest level, concerned with the writers life and the rights and wrongs of biographical intrusion, a theme that was dramatized through a spectral, homoerotic fantasy, so The Jolly Corner is concerned with certain life choices: the choice of a life devoted to the arts and aesthetic concerns signi ed by a decision to live in Europe, as against a choice to devote oneself to business, to the American ideal of the entrepreneur, and the intensi cation of what Brydon calls the rank money passion, 24 all of which are representatives and agents in the story of the new urban modernity. New York with its vanishing family mansions and thrusting skyscrap ers is the crucible of the future. These manifest concerns are also refracted through a fantasmatic, homoerotically charged subtext. In one of his notebooks James had jotted down the idea for a story he never nally wrote that was the precise structural reverse of The Jolly Corner. It was to be about a man who gives up his artistic vocation for a commercial life which spells his spiritual death. His repudiated and forfeited artistic potentialities are however represented by a woman, the one he doesnt marry. She is, James says, his dead self.25 In a curious reverse of this scenario The Jolly Corner produces the gure of Alice Staverton, who, we are told, lived apart from the awful modern crush with a delicately frugal economy, with one maid and herself, and who dusted her relics and trimmed her lamp, and who is thereby gured in the story as one of the seven wise virgins of the gospel parable, who sat up late but prepared, awaiting the coming, delayed thirty-three years one is led to infer, of the bridegroom. It is Alice who rst formulates the idea that is to become Spencer Brydons obsession, just as it is Ashton Doynes widow who prompts the young biographer with the suggestion of a spectral intimacy with her dead husband. Alice says to Spencer Brydon, ironically, that if he had but stayed at home he would have anticipated the inventor of the skyscraper and ended up with a gold-mine. To Alices provocative suggestion of what he might have been had he stayed in America, he responds: it met him there . . . very m uch as he might have been met by some strange gure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house. The quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained with him, when he didnt rather improve it by a still intenser form: that of his opening a door behind which he would have made sure of nding nothing, a door into a room shuttered and void, and yet so coming with a great suppressed start, on some quite

71

Textual Practice

erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk. (p. 198) W hat begins as an irony and a quaint analogy rapidly escalates into the spectral geography of the closet opening a door on to a room shuttered and void only to encounter some erect confronting presence, a presence he then obsessively hunts down, he says, like some fanged and antlered beast, through the rear and upper portions of his family house. The obvious critical temptation is to read the gure in the shuttered room, as Sedgwick reads the beast in John Marchers jungle, in the nonspectral tale of that name, i.e. as a forclosed a forecloseted homosexual possibility; a homosexual possibility that interrupts, paralyses or perhaps, paradoxically, is invoked and called forth by the alternative possibility of a relationship with the woman companion who waits for him. 26 It is true that Brydons hunting of his alter ego is erotically invested along similar lines to the young biographers relationship to the dead author in The Real Right Thing. However, the choices Brydon describes himself as having made in his youth prevent us from reading this as an otherwise heterosexual man haunted by his homosexual possibilities, i.e. as a variant on Sedgwicks homosexual panic thesis. Brydon wonders what he would have been if he had not chosen his rentier aesthetes existence in Europe, living, it is implied, on unearned family income: Not to have followed my perverse young course and almost in the teeth of my fathers curse, as I may say . . . not to have loved it, so much, loved it, no doubt with such an abysmal conceit of my own preference. . . . Ive not been edifying I believe Im thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. Ive followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods . . . I was leading at any time these thirty years, a sel sh, frivolous, scandalous life. (p. 204) Brydons description of what he is and has been is knowing, insinuating but unspeci c. His perverse young course, his strange paths and . . . strange gods, not to mention his fathers curse, all hint at what one might call biblical irregularities. The name Sodom hovers in the air but is never mentioned. In stark contrast to this is the idea of his alter ego as Alice and he develop it between them as a joint spectral production: It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere within me, as the full-blown ower is in the small tight bud and I just took the course . . . that blighted him for once and for ever.

72

John Fletcher The haunted closet

To this Alice Staverton ventures: I believe in the ower, I feel it would have been quite splendid, quite huge and monstrous. To which Brydon adds: Monstrous above all! . . . quite hideous and offensive. To this Alice replies: W hat you feel and what I feel for you is that youd have had power. Youd have liked me that way? How should I not have liked you? I see youd have liked me, have preferred me, a billionaire. (pp. 2045) It becomes clear that the rank money passion of the billionaire comes to stand in for a rank passion of a different kind. This erect confronting gure or huge monstrous ower, it turns out, is something that Alice herself dreams of. Ive seen him she informs Brydon, in a dream . . . twice over; but she keeps the details to herself. One can be sure that the passion in question, the one dreamed of and clearly desired by Alice, is in contrast to the strange paths and strange gods Brydon had previously and scandalously followed in Europe. Brydon hunts this strange gure of a passion that he feels is so totally other than himself in the image of a fanged and antlered beast at bay, while feeling himself at points to be like some monstrous stealthy cat . . . with large shining yellow eyes, and he wonders with sadistic relish what it mightnt verily be, for the poor hard-pressed alter ego, to be confronted with such a type (p. 211). He is the excited predator, the beast in somebody elses jungle, and he glories in his imagined ability to terrify his prey. People enough, rst and last, had been in terror of apparitions, but who had ever before so turned the tables and become himself, in the apparitional world, an incalculabl e terror? (p. 315). The logic of reversal, the motif of the tables turned, is crucial and is repeated again in the story. For in the large main rooms at the wide front and prolonged side of the house, precisely at its jolly corner, with the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars through the window panes and the white electric lustre of the street lamps (p. 211), Brydon feels supported in his predatory prowess, in his feline ability to penetrate the dusk of distances and the darkness of corners, to de-mystify and to resolve the treacheries of uncertain light, the evil looking forms taken in the gloom by mere shadows, by accidents of the air, by shifting effects of perspective (p. 211). By contrast with these con dent experiences at the front of the house, he comes to feel that it failed him

73

Textual Practice

considerably in the central shades and the parts at the back for the rear of the house affected him as the very jungle of his prey (p. 211). It is in the rear extension with its multiplied nooks and corners . . . closets and passages (p. 212) and especially in its upper rooms that his initial reversal of expectation in terrifying the apparitions is itself reversed. He develops the feeling, that nally quite broke him up, of his being followed, tracked at a distance carefully taken . . . he was kept in sight while remaining himself sightless (p. 212), and that while cunningly avoiding him, his invisible alter ego is keeping him in sight and from behind. Brydon keeps making abrupt turns and rapid recoveries of ground (p. 212) to catch the gure at his own rear. Finally in the last of a series of upper rooms opening on to each other, a room without other approach or egress (p. 216), i.e. with no independent exit or escape to a corridor (as in the OED de nition of closet cited above), he corners his alter ego behind a now closed door that he had previously left open. The two opposed projections of himself, as James calls them, are said to be in presence, but on either side of a closed door, the blank face of which challenges his courage: Show us how much you have! (p. 218). At this point, however, Brydons hunt is overtaken by a crisis of failed nerve. Confronted with his alter ego shut up there, at bay, de ant, he is overcome by an admonition to Discretion and renounces his quest. Stationing himself outside the now closed door in a posture of renunciation his eyes bent and his hands held off in a mere intensity of stillness (p. 219) his attitude, we are told, constitutes a silent message to his alter ego on the other side of the thin partition: If you wont then good: I spare you and I give up. . . . You convince me that for reasons rigid and sublime . . . we both of us should have suffered . . . I retire, I renounce never on my honour to try again. So rest forever and let me. (p. 219) W hat I have called the spectral geography of the closet has never been more vividly mapped. Unlike the previous narratives discussed, there are no residual homosocial forms of secretaryship here. Although seeking a relation with a possible, alternative self, Brydon patrols a haunted solitude in his family house, as much haunter as haunted. His narrative swings between the second moment of the uncanny where the subject is on the outside looking in at the closeted secrecy of the other, and the third moment described by Schelling where, although inside the house, he is no longer at home there, the closet contains a skeleton. Brydon then retreats in something of a controlled panic, oor by oor down the successive layers of the house, only to discover as he reaches the vestibule, with its black and white marble squares from his childhood, that

74

John Fletcher The haunted closet

the hunted gure now turned hunter has materialized between him and the front door, blocking off his escape from the house. Here in an enigmatic scene of confrontation between Brydon and his alternative self the same drama of reversal, of the worm turned and the hunter hunted, is replayed yet again. His alter ego materializes in a posture of fear and shame, dressed in what he calls the queer actuality of evening dress, the fashionable class uniform of the rich, but covering his face with his spread out hands, one of which has two ngers reduced to stumps as if shot away. Brydon confronts him and interprets the anguish of his spectral double hubristically, as proof that he, Spencer Brydon, standing there for the achieved, the enjoyed, the triumphant life, couldnt be faced in his triumph (p. 225). Gradually he comes to feel, however, that the very insistence of his own gaze, the impunity of his own attitude, produces a change in the apparition who raises his head, drops his hands and confronts Brydon in turn. Brydons reaction is a spasm of horror and disavowal: Such an identity tted his at no point . . . the face was the face of a stranger . . . evil, odious, blatant, vulgar who advances on him aggressively. The tables are turned once again. Brydon falls back under the hot breath and roused passion of a life larger than his own, a rage of personality before which his own collapsed (p. 226). He loses consciousness and faints away. The enigmatic climax of this scene is the convergence point for a whole intertextual network which I can only partly gesture towards, in which the conjunctural aspects of the 1890s, the formation of the post-W ildean regime of the closet and the associated crisis of de nitional categories are over-determined by the dramas of Jamess personal and family history. Jamess memoir, written some ve years later, A Small Boy and Others (1913), presents a striking analogy with The Jolly Corner that indicates a shared fantasy scenario. In Chapter xxv James recalls a nightmare which reworks the memories of his own rst initiation into the world of European high art, his earliest exposures to the Louvre and the Luxembourg Museums in Paris as a small boy, and in particular to the Louvres Galerie dApollon which provides him with the dream scene of his nightm are. These visits somehow held the secret of our future, just as the paintings described in the memoir offered a foretaste . . . of all the fun . . . that one was going to have, and the kind of life, always of the queer so-called inward sort . . . that one was going to lead. 27 The whole chapter, which deserves a more extended commentary, dramatizes the making of a life choice, a commitment to the aesthetic ideals of high art, to a future whose queerness signi es the aesthetic intensi cation of life and implicitly, as Michael Moon has persuasively demonstrated, the malemale eros codi ed in the paintings which James remembers. 28 Jam ess aesthetic vocation is mediated by and in the shadow of his adored elder brother W illiam, already a budding artist

75

Textual Practice

and shaper of Henrys taste in painting. Written at the end of Henrys life and three years after W illiams death, the memoir engages in a quiet but persistent argument with his brother who had gone on to reject Europe and the aesthetic life and to return to America and a commitment to science and philosophy. 29 These life choices of the young Henry James and his brother are analogous to the one which Spencer Brydon in The Jolly Corner has described himself as having made in his youth, and his pursuit of his spectral alter ego is an attempt to go behind that choice, having lived it out for thirty-odd not to say queer years in Europe, to reverse it in imagination and to come to term s with the repudiated, the rejected possibility. The great interest of Jamess nightm are is that it gives us a glimpse o f those cho ices be ing made and the desperate psychic struggles they entailed. W hat is striking is that such struggles are dramatized, in both memoir and novella, as spectral rivalries that are violent, even lethal. Both nightmare and novella are marked by the logic of reversal played out around closed doors and closeted spaces, and in a relation both intimate and antagonistic to an alter ego. W hat is at stake here are both vocational and erotic outcomes that are to structure a whole life. James doesnt date his nightmare for us. We dont know when it occurred. We might infer that it dates from the years of his young adulthood when he was trying to establish him self as a writer. All we know is that he writes about it only after his brother W illiams death in 1910 between The Jolly Corner in 1908 and the autobiography in 1913 . 30 Both narratives rework the same fantasy scenario from different positions. James the dreamer is in the reverse position to that of Spencer Brydon. Besieged behind a locked door by some awful agent or presence, he feels that in his appalled state he was more appalling than the nightmare gure who is trying to break through the door of his bedroom and attack him in his bed. Reversing the situation, James bursts through the door and routs the intruder, driving him over the far-gleaming oor of a tremendous glorious hall to the ash of thunder and lightning through the high windows. The hall is revealed as the great Parisian Temple of Art, that bridge over to Style constituted by the wondrous Galerie dApollon (p. 196) at the Louvre: the wondrous place and my young imaginative life in it of long before, the sense of which deep within me, had kept it whole, preserved it to this thrilling use. (p. 197) The nightmare enacts a triumph: James bursting out of his closet to vanquish his spectral antagonist and to take possession of what he calls the Palace of Life and the Temple of Art, the combined scene of glory (the Louvre in the period of Jamess childhood visits was both the seat of

76

John Fletcher The haunted closet

Napoleon IIIs government and a great national gallery). Given Williams role, rst as aesthetic mentor already beforehand with me, already seated at his task (p. 7) and later as American returnee and artist-turnedscientist in the memoirs youthful setting, and then as posthumous addressee of the memoirs defensive celebration of Europe as the scene of aesthetic education against W illiams denigrations, he is plausibly one at least of the component elements that went into the dream-works production of the spectral antagonist whose overcoming allows the dreamer possession of the world of art of his childhood. The Jolly Corner, however, seems to reverse this youthful triumph as Spencer Brydon succumbs to the closeted spectres greater force of life and rage of personality. Brydon wakes in the nal coda to the story with his head in the lap of Alice Staverton, an ample and perfect cushion with its mantle of soft stuff lined with grey fur (pp. 2267), who has found him laid out by the front door of his family home on the black and white marble tiles of his childhood. The signi cantly named Alice (Jamess sisters name) claim s him with the cool charity and virtue of her lips (p. 228) for a kind of regressed and infantile relation to the woman, in which he is in Brydons own words gratefully and abysm ally passive (p. 227), purged of all the hunger of his prime need (p. 218) played out in his fevered nighttim e pursuits: And now I keep you, she said. Oh keep me, keep me!, he pleaded while her face still hung over him . (p. 228) The spectral gure is not however simply his own production or projection. For Alice has also dreamed again of Brydons alter ego even as Brydon has been eeing or confronting him in the fam ily house. She takes the dream as a message, even a summ ons, whose Gothic prototype is Rochesters cry in his extremity to Jane Eyre. Faced with Brydons refusal to acknowledge his double as in any way his, Alice tells him: because you somehow wanted me. He seemed to tell me that. So why shouldnt I like him ? . . . And to me he was no horror. I had accepted him (p. 231). Indeed, the echoes of the blinded Rochester with his mutilated right hand resound in her pity for his poor ruined sight. And his poor right hand (p. 232), those signi ers of the castratory rigours of a manhood that submits to the law, a law that Brydon has evaded in his ight from his fathers curse to the strange paths and strange gods of Europe. The spectral gure seems then a joint production of Alice and Brydon, but more than that, materializing as he does from the family house, he is a composite gure, a displaced and condensed product of the locked doors and closetings, the closet-work of which the family and its house is the

77

Textual Practice

mise-en-scne. In the phrase of T.S. Eliot, another American expatriate in Europe, he is a familiar compound ghost both intimate and unidentiable: 31 a collective male phantasm of the James family romance. In him we can identify his brother William James, Henrys primary love object and fraternal antagonist, it has been argued, 32 his covering cherub in H arold Blooms phrase; but especially his grandfather William James of Albany, the successful capitalist entrepreneur who founded the James family fortunes and whose wealth they had been living off and running down for two generations. It is the originary William James senior who embodies everything that the young Henry chose not to be, while providing the family funds for him to begin at least to do so. Written a few years after Henrys own return to his native land, after an absence of decades, to confront both his familial and national legacies, The Jolly Corner dramatizes a reprise of those earlier life-decisions, of that aesthetic commitment that bore coded within it a powerful homoeroticism, and which had shaped his entire adulthood. This ctional reprise, however, is marked by the newly intensi ed polarizations, exclusions and closetings of its historical moment, of the decades immediately after the W ilde trials, and by the psychic violence and disavowals they engendered.
Acknowledgements

This essay is an extended version of a paper rst given at a conference on Homospectrality, co-organized with Dr Kate Chedgzoy at the European Humanities Research Centre at the University of Warwick, in May 1996 .
Notes
1 The beast in the closet: James and the writing of homosexual panic, in Epistemology of the Closet (London and N ew York: H arvester W heatsheaf, 1991); Is the rectum straight? Identi cation and identity in The Wings of the Dove, in Tendencies (D urham: D uke U niversity Press, 1993). 2 Michael Moon, A Small B oy and Others: Im itation and Initiati on in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998); John R. Bradley (ed.), Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire (London: Macmillan, 1998) . 3 Kaja Silverman, Too early/too late: male subjectivity and the primal scene, in Male Subjectivity at the M argins (London and N ew York: Routledge, 1992) ; Terry Castle, The Apparitio nal Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and M odern Culture (New York: C olumbia U niversity Press, 1993) . 4 M ichel Foucault, History of Sexuality,V ol. I: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 43. 5 Martha Vicinus, Lesbian history: all theory and no facts or all facts and no theory?, Radical History Review, 60 (1994), pp. 5775; Lesbian perversity

78

John Fletcher The haunted closet

and Victorian marriage: the 1864 Codrington Divorce Trial, Journal of British Studies, 36, 1, pp. 7098; Rictor N orton, The Myth of the M odern Homosexual (London and W ashington, D C: Cassell, 1997); Randolph Trum bach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, Vol. 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlighten ment London (Chicago, IL : Chicago University Press, 1998). Fredric Silverstolpe, Benkert was not a doctor: on the non-medical origin of the homosexual category in the nineteenth century, in Conference Papers from Homosexuality, W hich Homosexuality? (Amsterdam, 1987), Vol. 1, History, pp. 206 20. Ibid., p. 211. Castle, The Apparitio nal Lesbian, p. 34. Leon Edel, The Ghostly Tales of Henry James (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1948), p. xiv. Alan Sin eld, The Wilde Century (London: Cassell), p. 122 . For a reading of Forsters novel in relation to the problems of manliness, see John Fletcher, Forsters self-erasure: M aurice and the scene of masculine love, in Second Sameness: Textual D ifferences in Lesbian and Gay W riting, ed. Joseph Bristow (London: Routledge, 1992). Theo Aronson, Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld (London: John M urray, 1994) . Jamess own hostile attitude to W ilde indicates that, unlike some of W ildes heterosexual friends and supporters such as the wordly Frank H arris who had to be inform ed by W ilde himself of the truth of the M arquis of Queensburys accusations, James read the homosexual subtext of W ildes public performances and felt profoundly threatened by it. C oinciding in W ashington with W ilde at his most amboyant and exhibitionist, James denounced him to his old friend M rs H enry Adams as an unclean beast. As Richard E llmann astutely remarks: James saw in W ilde a threat. For the tolerance of deviation, or ignorance of it, were alike in jeopardy because of W ildes outing and aunting. . . . It was as if James, foreseeing scandal, separated himself from this menace in motley (Oscar Wilde (H armondsworth: P enguin Books, 1988), p. 171). Sigmund Freud, The uncanny (1919), trans. James Strachey, reprinted in Art and Literature, P enguin Freud Library, ed. Albert D ickson (H armondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 335 76. Freud gives an extremely interesting literary example of this reversal of the term into its opposite that turns precisely on the uncanny space of the familial: The Z ecks [a family name] are all heimlich. (In sense II) Heimlich? . . . W hat do you mean by heim lich? W ell . . . they are like a buried spring or a dried-up pond. One cannot walk over it without always having the feeling that water might come up there again. Oh, we call it unheim lich; you call it heim lich. W ell, what makes you think that there is something secret and untrustworthy about this family? (Freud, The uncanny, pp. 343 4). A N ew English D ictionary on Historical Principle s, ed. James A.H . M urray (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1893), Vol. II, p. 520 . Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (H emel H empstead: H arvester W heatsheaf, 1991), p. 1. Ibid., pp. 448. Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern Englan d (Princeton, N J: Princeton U niversity Press, 1997), p. xvi.

7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14 15

16 17 18 19

79

Textual Practice
20 The Complete Tales of Henry James: 1898 9, Vol. 10, ed. Leon Edel (London: Rupert H art-D avis, 1964), p. 473 . 21 H enry James, The Turn of the Screw and other Stories, ed. T.J. Lustig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 135 . 22 Eve Sedgwick, Tendenci es, esp. pp. 7880. 23 The Complete Tales of Henry James: 1898 9, Vol. 10, p. 473. 24 The Jolly Corner, in The Complete Tales of Henry James: 1903 191 0, ed. Leon Edel, Vol. 12, p. 204 . 25 9 January 1894; 5 February 1895, The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F.O . M athiessen and B. Murdock (Oxford and N ew York: Oxford U niversity Press, 1961), pp. 143 4. 26 For a reading along these lines, see H ugh Stevens, Homoeroticism, identity and agency in Jamess late tales, in Enacting History in Henry James, ed. Gert Buelens (Cambridge: Cambridge U niversity Press, 1997). 27 H enry James, Autobiography, ed. F.W . D upee (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 198. 28 Michael Moon, A Small B oy and Others: Im itation and Initiati on in American Culture (Durham and London: D uke University P ress, 1998), pp. 3166. 29 Only a few days before his death, W illiam responded aggressively to H enrys disparagement of the barren Canadian landscape through which they had just travelled, on their landing from Europe: Better than anything in E urope, H enry better than anything in England (Leon E del, The Life of Henry Jam es, Vol. V, The Master: 1901 191 6 (New York: Avon Books, 1978), p. 446. 30 Leon Edel speculates on the identity of Jamess Louvre nightmare with the journal entry of 21 July 1910 that records an awakening with great momentary relief from his depression associated with W illiams nal illness. H owever, as James gives no account of that moment, Edels dating of the nightmare can only be speculation. In my view the sense of future promise in the realm of art and glory at the close of the nightmare would indicate a turning point early on in Jamess writing life. E del, The M aster, pp. 444 5. 31 T.S. Eliot, Little G idding, Four Quartets. 32 Richard H all, An obscure hurt: the sexuality of H enry James, The N ew Republic, 28 April and 5 M ay 1979 .

80