The American novelist Henry James (1843-1916) spent most of his life in Europe. Just before he died, he became a British citizen. He reformed the characteristic method of English fiction by always narrating from a specific point of view. Inevitably this introduced to the novel an element of mystery, for no individual narrator can know everything involved in a narrative, even about him or herself.
James was a master of the novella – the kind of tale that is shorter than a novel but longer than a short story – and many of his major themes are developed in such tales. This course will focus on his two most famous novellas, each of which deals with a characteristically Jamesian subject. The Aspern Papers (1888) and The Turn of the Screw (1898) have one obvious thing in common: they are both narrated by their protagonists. In either case, moreover, we are denied some important knowledge of the protagonist. In neither story, for instance, are we told the narrator’s name.
The Aspern Papers is a treatment of what James called ‘the international theme’: that is to say, the exposure of American characters to European culture. It is set in Venice, a city charged with associations and enveloped in mystery, and it deals with what was then a young profession: that of the literary academic. The protagonist of The Aspern Papers is an editor in quest of the love letters of a famous Romantic poet, who is now dead. Conflicts between life and art and between innocence and experience are brought into focus and, with them, rather surprisingly, what is for James the primary form of evil: an attempt by one human being to use or to take possession of another.
That is also the central theme of The Turn of the Screw, which is the most disturbing of ghost stories. An inexperienced young woman becomes the governess in sole charge of two children who live in an isolated country house, far away from any other community. The only other resident is the middle-aged housekeeper. The children are extraordinarily charming, but the governess soon comes to believe that their innocence had been corrupted: that, in short, they have been possessed by the forces of evil. This is of course mysterious and it begins to seem that the reader is being invited to discover where exactly that evil is located.
In both cases, the anonymous narrator is in some sense ‘unreliable’. It is not so much that that they intend to mislead us but that their own limitations and unconscious needs inhibit communication of the truth, and it becomes the responsibility of the reader to interpret and judge the events as they unfold.
What our students say
"I really appreciated Clive Wilmer's fantastic way of involving the students in the discussion and making them think about the many issues of the novels analysed."
