Introduction: “I See Ghosts Everywhere”

Abstract

Henry James’s statement that he sees ghosts everywhere, written in a tone of resigned self-awareness at the end of a letter in 1895,¹ might be said to encapsulate the main motive of this book’s editors and most of the essayists: in scrutinizing James’s oeuvre, one does indeed see ghosts everywhere. James may have written that “the supernatural story, the subject wrought in fantasy, is not the class of fiction I myself most cherish,” even going so far as to dismiss his most famous of ghost stories, The Turn of the Screw, as “a shameless pot-boiler”²; but the persistence of ghostly presences in his fiction proves otherwise. Yet this book will deal with the ghostly not only in terms of the supernatural but also as a narrative strategy that nuances James’s realistic-protomodernist technique, giving it the profound elusiveness it is celebrated for. As T. J. Lustig put it in his Henry James and the Ghostly (1994), “At a very general level a great deal of James’s fiction is ghostly in its enigmatic impalpability, its vague precision, its subtle allusiveness, its hovering uncertainty, its fascination with anxiety and awe, wonder and dread.”³