133 pages
Published 1898
Read from December 3 to December 4
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
I have a vague memory of attempting this one much too young, maybe 8 or 9 years old — young enough that, when our narrator gets a ride on “a commodious fly,” I pictured giant insects — and neither understanding nor liking it. I’m pretty sure I didn’t make it beyond the second chapter.
The opening certainly has its share of Victorian clutter. It drops us into a framing device full of unnamed interlocutors and half-spoken inferences, delaying the telling of the tale over several nights, a tale which was committed to paper twenty years before and relates events many decades prior. Presumably, to late Victorian tastes, this drew out the tension and increased the anticipation for its promised “uncanny ugliness and horror and pain,” but it hit my modern attention span like a speed bump. At least Dracula provided chicken recipes.
The ghosts of the sinister valet and the “almost shabby” ex-governess aren’t exactly on the same level as Count Dracula, and James’ prose often (in my opinion) trips over its own janky clauses, but it’s a fair sample of Victorian sensationalism, full of meanings either hinted at or actively concealed. Where we today might use horror to explore the loss of bodily autonomy or the violence of bigotry, the taste of James’ contemporaries seems to have dwelled on “corruption.” The threat of the ghosts seems rooted in the excess of their “familiarity” — the transgression of class distinctions, both with the children and with each other. It’s a sexualized caste anxiety, expressed with the same “Protect the Children!” hyperventilation that modern regressives deploy in defense of their own myriad bigotries, equating the transgression of social norms to predation, the willful corruption of the young.
The fact that James himself may have been homoromantic and potentially asexual adds further layers of repressed meaning. Some days you just wish Victorians would say what they mean.
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