Henry James and the Supernatural

Abstract

is best known for his psychological novels, in which characters spend at least as much time navigating their inner lives as their outer. His nuanced descriptions of Victorian manners, although they neglect to address broader social realities, are intricately beautiful portraits of a small subclass of people. These aesthetics notwithstanding, it would be a mistake to classify all of James's work as serious or philosophical. Along with criticism and travel sketches, stories were among his first published works, and several of these stories feature ghosts or ghostly occurrences. Eighteen of them have been collected by Leon Edel into a volume entitled Stories of the Supernatural. The anthology includes early examples written in the tradition of gothic romance. These are broad brushstrokes for a writer usually concerned with finer detail-at first such subjects don't seem to fit with the rest of James's output. How can an author to whom raw emotion is so antithetical write a convincing horror tale? This thesis will attempt to answer that question by focusing on Henry James's explorations into the ghostly, and on the stylistic traits which set his stories apart from other well-known pieces of American supernatural fiction. There are two halves to my thesis. First, I will show that experiences are recreated for the reader, passed on intact, unmediated, unsorted. Second, I will demonstrate that the supernatural is depicted in a positive light in many stories, and discovery is closely linked to desire. In the conclusion, the case is made that the majority of these stories embrace the supernatural rather than presenting it as something to be dreaded. This welcoming approach is what makes the stories truly unique.