American Gothic

An Anthology from Salem Witchcraft to H. P. Lovecraft

Charles L. Crow, Charles L. Crow

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118326022
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

American Gothic remains an enduringly fascinating genre, retaining its chilling hold on the imagination. This revised and expanded anthology brings together texts from the colonial era to the twentieth century including recently discovered material, canonical literary contributions from Poe and Wharton among many others, and literature from sub-genres such as feminist and 'wilderness' Gothic.

• Revised and expanded to incorporate suggestions from twelve years of use in many countries
• An important text for students of the expanding field of Gothic studies
• Strong representation of female Gothic, wilderness Gothic, the Gothic of race, and the legacy of Salem witchcraft
• Edited by a founding member of the International Gothic Association

---

Henry James (1843–1916)

Henry James was born into a distinguished and wealthy family. His grandfather was one of the richest men in the United States. His father was a well-liked, if seldom read, philosopher, and a friend of Emerson and other intellectual luminaries of his generation. Henry’s elder brother William became both his country’s leading psychologist and its greatest philosopher.

Henry James is known as the master craftsman of American fiction. No one before him made such claims for fiction as serious art, or thought so deeply about the technique of narrative. His novels and stories grew more complex through the decades, his style more challenging, until, near the end, he had lost most of his audience.

In his long and prolific career, James only had two popular “best sellers,” the novellas Daisy Miller (1879) and The Turn of the Screw (1898). The latter has become one of the most discussed works in the English language. The reader approaching this famously ambiguous text for the first time is probably well advised to avoid its weighty scholarly baggage and to approach it with a fresh eye, as James intended.

The Turn of the Screw is a frame story (a story within a story), a technique popularized by Washington Irving. Many American authors have found this form useful; James takes it and adds several layers of complication. The ultimate setting, once we reach it, is the country house familiar in English fiction. The action there concerns and is narrated by an unnamed governess. Everything depends on what she sees, understands, and tells to us about her students, Miles and Flora, and the history of this strange house.

Text: The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, The Liar, The Two Faces (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908). This is from the “New York Edition” of James’s collected works, and embodies the author’s final corrections.

---

The Turn of the Screw

THE story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as on Christmas Eve in an old house a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to note it as the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case, I may mention, was that of an apparition in just such an old house as had gathered us for the occasion – an appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to encounter also herself, before she had succeeded in doing so, the same sight that had shocked him. It was this observation that drew from Douglas – not immediately, but later in the evening – a reply that had the interesting consequence to which I call attention. Some one else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw he was not following. This I took for a sign that he had himself something to produce and that we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till two nights later; but that same evening, before we scattered, he brought out what was in his mind.

“I quite agree – in regard to Griffin’s ghost, or whatever it was – that its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular touch. But it’s not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have been concerned with a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children – ?”

“We say of course,” somebody exclaimed, “that two children give two turns! Also that we want to hear about them.”

I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had got up to present his back, looking down at this converser with his hands in his pockets. “Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard. It’s quite too horrible.” This was naturally declared by several voices to give the thing the utmost price, and our friend, with quiet art, prepared his triumph by turning his eyes over the rest of us and going on: “It’s beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it.”

“For sheer terror?” I remember asking.

He seemed to say it was n’t so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to ­qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing grimace. “For dreadful –dreadfulness!”

“Oh how delicious!” cried one of the women.

He took no notice of her; he looked at me, but as if, instead of me, he saw what he spoke of. “For general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain.”

“Well then,” I said, “just sit right down and begin.”

He turned round to the fire, gave a kick to a log, watched it an instant. Then as he faced us again: “I can’t begin. I shall have to send to town.” There was a unanimous groan at this, and much reproach; after which, in his preoccupied way, he explained.

“The story’s written. It’s in a locked drawer – it has not been out for years. I could write to my man and enclose the key; he could send down the packet as he finds it.” It was to me in particular that he appeared to propound this – appeared almost to appeal for aid not to hesitate. He had broken a thickness of ice, the formation of many a winter; had had his reasons for a long silence. The others resented postponement, but it was just his scruples that charmed me. I adjured him to write by the first post and to agree with us for an early hearing; then I asked him if the experience in question had been his own. To this his answer was prompt. “Oh thank God, no!”

“And is the record yours? You took the thing down!”

“Nothing but the impression. I took that here”– he tapped his heart. “I’ve never lost it.”

“Then your manuscript – ?”

“Is in old faded ink and in the most beautiful hand.” He hung fire again. “A woman’s. She has been dead these twenty years. She sent me the pages in question before she died.” They were all listening now, and of course there was somebody to be arch, or at any rate to draw the inference. But if he put the inference by without a smile it was also without irritation. “She was a most charming person, but she was ten years older than I. She was my sister’s governess,” he quietly said. “She was the most agreeable woman I’ve ever known in her position; she’d have been worthy of any whatever. It was long ago, and this episode was long before. I was at Trinity, and I found her at home on my coming down the second summer. I was much there that year – it was a beautiful one; and we had, in her off-hours, some strolls and talks in the garden – talks in which she struck me as awfully clever and nice. Oh yes; don’t grin: I liked her extremely and am glad to this day to think she liked me too. If she had n’t she would n’t have told me. She had never told anyone. It was n’t simply that she said so, but that I knew she had n’t. I was sure; I could see. You’ll easily judge why when you hear.”

“Because the thing had been such a scare?”

He continued to fix me. “You’ll easily judge,” he repeated: “you will.”

I fixed him too. “I see. She was in love.”

He laughed for the first time. “You are acute. Yes, she was in love. That is she had been. That came out – she could n’t tell her story without its coming out. I saw it, and she saw I saw it; but neither of us spoke of it. I remember the time and the place – the corner of the lawn, the shade of the great beeches and the long hot summer afternoon. It was n’t a scene for a shudder; but oh – !” He quitted the fire and dropped back into his chair.

“You’ll receive the packet Thursday morning?” I said.

“Probably not till the second post.”

“Well then; after dinner – ”

“You’ll all meet me here?” He looked us round again. “Is n’t anybody going?” It was almost the tone of hope.

“Everybody will stay!”

“I will – and I will!” cried the ladies whose departure had been fixed. Mrs. Griffin, however, expressed the need for a little more light. “Who was it she was in love with?”

“The story will tell,” I took upon myself to reply.

“Oh I can’t wait for the story!”

“The story won’t tell,” said Douglas; “not in any literal vulgar way.”

“More’s the pity then. That’s the only way I ever understand.”

‘Won’t you tell, Douglas?” somebody else enquired.

He sprang to his feet again. “Yes – to-morrow. Now I must go to bed. Good-night.” And, quickly catching up a candlestick, he left us slightly bewildered. From our end of the great brown hall we heard his step on the stair; whereupon Mrs. Griffin spoke. “Well, if I don’t know who she was in love with I know who he was.”

“She was ten years older,” said her husband.

“Raison de plus¹ – at that age! But it’s rather nice, his long reticence.”

“Forty years!” Griffin put in. “With this outbreak at last.”

“The outbreak,” I returned, “will make a tremendous occasion of Thursday night”; and every one so agreed with me that in the light of it we lost all attention for everything else. The last story, however incomplete and like the mere opening of a serial, had been told; we handshook and “candlestuck,” as somebody said, and went to bed.

I knew the next day that a letter containing the key had, by the first post, gone off to his London apartments; but in spite of – or perhaps just on account of – the eventual diffusion of this knowledge we quite let him alone till after dinner, till such an hour of the evening in fact as might best accord with the kind of emotion on which our hopes were fixed. Then he became as communicative as we could desire, and indeed gave us his best reason for being so. We had it from him again before the fire in the hall, as we had had our mild wonders of the previous night. It appeared that the narrative he had promised to read us really required for a proper intelligence a few words of prologue. Let me say here distinctly, to have done with it, that this narrative, from an exact transcript of my own made much later, is what I shall presently give. Poor Douglas, before his death – when it was in sight – committed to me the manuscript that reached him on the third of these days and that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he began to read to our hushed little circle on the night of the fourth. The departing ladies who had said they would stay did n’t, of course, thank heaven, stay: they departed, in consequence of arrangements made, in a rage of curiosity, as they professed, produced by the touches with which he had already worked us up. But that only made his little final auditory more compact and select, kept it, round the hearth, subject to a common thrill.

The first of these touches conveyed that the written statement took up the tale at a point after it had, in a manner, begun. The fact to be in possession of was therefore that his old friend, the youngest of several daughters of a poor country parson, had at the age of twenty, on taking service for the first time in the schoolroom, come up to London, in trepidation, to answer in person an advertisement that had already placed her in brief correspondence with the advertiser. This person proved, on her presenting herself for judgement at a house in Harley Street that impressed her as vast and imposing – this prospective patron proved a gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life, such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage. One could easily fix his type; it never, happily, dies out. He was handsome and bold and pleasant, off-hand and gay and kind. He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid, but what took her most of all and gave her the courage she afterwards showed was that he put the whole thing to her as a favour, an obligation he should gratefully incur. She figured him as rich, but as fearfully extravagant – saw him all in a glow of high fashion, of good looks, of expensive habits, of charming ways with women. He had for his town residence a big house filled with the spoils of travel and the trophies of the chase; but it was to his country home, an old family place in Essex, that he wished her immediately to proceed.

He had been left, by the death of his parents in India, guardian to a small nephew and a small niece, children of a younger, a military brother whom he had lost two years before. These children were, by the strangest of chances for a man in his position – a lone man without the right sort of experience or a grain of patience – very heavy on his hands. It had all been a great worry and, on his own part doubtless, a series of blunders, but he immensely pitied the poor chicks and had done all he could; had in particular sent them down to his other house, the proper place for them being of course the country, and kept them there from the first with the best people he could find to look after them, parting even with his own servants to wait on them and going down himself, whenever he might, to see how they were doing. The awkward thing was that they had practically no other relations and that his own affairs took up all his time. He had put them in possession of Bly, which was healthy and secure, and had placed at the head of their little establishment – but below stairs only – an excellent woman, Mrs. Grose, whom he was sure his visitor would like and who had formerly been maid to his mother. She was now housekeeper and was also acting for the time as superintendent to the little girl, of whom, without children of her own, she was by good luck extremely fond. There were plenty of people to help, but of course the young lady who should go down as governess would be in supreme authority. She would also have, in holidays, to look afte...