This article was downloaded by: [University of Warwick]On: 22 October 2013, At: 08:30Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales RegisteredNumber: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Textual PracticePublication details, includinginstructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpr20

The haunted closet:Henry James's queerspectralityJohn FletcherPublished online: 05 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: John Fletcher (2000) The haunted closet:Henry James's queer spectrality, Textual Practice, 14:1, 53-80, DOI:10.1080/095023600363346

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/095023600363346

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracyof all the information (the “Content”) contained in thepublications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations orwarranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions andviews of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsedby Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should notbe relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shallnot be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly

in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use ofthe Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and privatestudy purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction,redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematicsupply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expresslyforbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can befound at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

John�Fletcher

The�haunted�closet:�Henry�James’s�queer�spectrality

The work of Henry James is one of the places where contemporary gay or ‘queer’ criticism has elaborated a distinctive way of reading. This is areading that is attentive to both the historical formation of modern sexualnorms and identities as well as the unorthodox play of identiécations anddesires that transgress or elude those norms and identities in the verymoment of their formation. The exemplary instance is Eve Sedgwick’sreadings of James’s novella The Beast in the Jungle (1903) and the latemasterpiece contemporary with it, The Wings of the Dove (1902), in thecontext of her theoretical and historical accounts of male homosocialityand the enforcements of the modern homosexual ‘closet’ with its regime of the open secret.1 The work of Michael Moon and John R. Bradley’srecent collection of essays consolidate the gay critical intervention withinJamesian studies.2 One might mention as well Kaja Silverman’s analysis of a Jamesian psychic economy as part of her accounts of marginal malesubjectivities that resist or deviate from the Oedipal norms of the modernapparatus of sexuality, and Terry Castle’s reading of The Bostonians whichlocates its spectral lesbianism in relation to the French novel and especiallythe work of Zola.3

Despite the extensive secondary literature on James’s The Turn of the Screw, James’s ghost stories and his spectral interests have not receivedmuch attention in this extraordinary contemporary explosion of gay/queercriticism. However, it has been Terry Castle’s work in The ApparitionalLesbian that has been most productive in formulating a connectionbetween the discourses of the ghostly, the supernatural and what I will call the topos of spectralization on the one hand, and the concerns oflesbian and gay critics and historians on the other. Castle’s polemical edgeis directed against an emergent doxa inèuential in much of lesbian and gaystudies that is based rather uncritically on Michel Foucault’s History ofSexuality and its particular explanatory narrative of the social construction

Textual Practice 14(1), 2000, 53–80

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltdhttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/tf/0950236X.html

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

of homosexuality by the dominant discourses of law, medicine andsexology in the mid-nineteenth century. We are all by now familiar with, if not a little weary of, the famous paragraph from Volume 1 of The Historyof Sexuality that contrasts sodomy, as an ancient legal and theologicalcategory of unnatural acts that anyone in a moment of sin might commit –the sodomite was no more than the juridical subject of those acts – with themodern homosexual as a type of person with an inverted inner naturewhich betrays itself in behaviour and expresses itself as an identity:

Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it wastransposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interiorandrogyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been atemporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.4

Gay historians such as Jeffrey Weeks, David Halperin and Alan Bray havesupported something like this picture of a sharp break between a pre-modern history of anonymous same-sex acts without identities as against across-gendered or gender-inverted identity, an identity produced by themodern elaboration of an apparatus of sexuality with its taxonomies ofdifferent sexual types for purposes of invigilation and social and hygieniccontrol. Foucault marks the birth of homosexuality as a category inWestphal’s article on contrary sexual sensations in 1870, and he goes on toposit as the other side of this strategy of social control the formation ofwhat he calls a ‘reverse discourse’: ‘homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or “naturality” be acknowledged,often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it wasmedically disqualié ed’ (p. 101). Foucault thus accords a historical andvirtually ontological priority to the state-sponsored discourses of psychiatryand jurisprudence in the formation of homosexuality as both a discursiveobject and a é eld of discursive and desiring subjects.

Foucault’s account of the origination of key terms and categories by the medical and legal discourses of ‘knowledge-power’ has increasinglybeen challenged by gay and lesbian historians such as Martha Vicinus,Rictor Norton, Randolph Trumbach, Frederic Silverstolpe among others.5

Silverstolpe, a Swedish historian, in an essay called ‘Benkert was not adoctor: the non-medical origins of the homosexual category’,6 has demon-strated that the term ‘homosexuality’ was produced by the HungarianBenkert von Kertbeny, and that the categories of the Uranian (i.e. the subject of same-sex love named after the goddess Urania from Plato’sSymposium) and the accompanying hetero/homosexual polarity were in factelaborated by the German Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in a series of pamphlets in1864–65. Ulrichs’ pamphlets of the mid-1860s and Benkert’s open letter to the Prussian Minister of Justice in 1869 were acts of self-naming and self-deénition within what was a discourse of civil rights and not a medical

Textual�Practice

54

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

or sexological discourse. Benkert and Ulrichs were making claims for recognition and legal entitlement on behalf of what they conceived of as adistinct and naturally occurring minority population of which they werethemselves members. ‘I am an insurgent. I rebel against what is estab-lished . . . I demand the recognition of Uranian love’, Ulrichs wrote in hispamphlet Vindicta of 1865.7 It was only later, in response to these é rst public acts of self-deénition within the bourgeois public sphere of civilsociety in Germany, by the é rst self-declared ‘Uranians’ or ‘homosexualists’,that the medical and sexological models of Westphal, Krafft-Ebing andothers came to redeéne a habitual same-sex libidinal preference under the rubric of gender inversion as a constitutional illness, a degeneration or instinctual perversion, an ‘unnatural nature’. Silverstolpe points out that Westphal’s supposedly foundational text actually cites Ulrich’s ‘thirdsex’ theory of homosexuality at some length, as does Krafft-Ebing in his later papers. The sexologists took their terms and categories from the emergent and polemical self-consciousness of apologists for same-sex lovein the mid-nineteenth century, while attempting to subsume them under apathologizing medical model. Silverstolpe demonstrates the uneasy tacticalalliances that the homosexual apologist John Addington Symonds madewith liberal sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and their medical models of homosexuality, in the hope of effecting legislative change. The reverse discourse here is clearly that of the sexologists which actually depended on the self-descriptions and theorizations of an already self-constitutedhomosexual discourse with a prior political project of self-emancipation ofits own.

Increasingly, lesbian and gay literary critics and historians of earlymodern literature and culture have also challenged Foucault’s notion ofidentity-less anonymous acts, outlining the repertoires of literary tropes,motifs, symbolic and generic conventions whereby same-sex feelings andcommitments were represented and circulated, as well as the often fugitiveand shadowy coteries, networks and subcultures that gradually allowedsome space, however marginal, for same-sex afé liations and practices. Theeighteenth-century historian Randolph Trumbach has demonstrated thepresence of popular sexual typologies of the sodomite, the rake, the molly,and the shifts that are traceable within their terms, well before theformulation of ofécial medical and sexological discourses in the nineteenthcentury, with their drastically simplifying and homogenizing grid ofcategories.

John�Fletcher The�haunted�closet

55

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

Homospectrality

It is in this context of a challenge to the simplié cations of an uncriticallyFoucauldian account that Terry Castle’s formulation of the égure of theapparitional lesbian locates a key motif by which, in ages without beneé t ofpsychiatry and sexology, sexual and emotional intensities between womencould be registered but drained of carnal presence and pressure:

The literary history of lesbianism . . . is é rst of all a history ofderealisation . . . in nearly all the art of the 18th and 19th centuries,lesbianism or its possibility, can only be represented to the degree that it is simultaneously ‘derealised’, through a blanching authorialinfusion of spectral metaphors. . . . One woman or the other must be a ghost or on the way to becoming one. Passion is excited only tobe obscured, disembodied, decarnalised. The vision is inevitablywaved off. Panic seems to underwrite these obsessional spectralizinggestures: a panic over love, female pleasure, and the possibility ofwomen breaking free – together – from their male sexual overseers.8

Castle compiles an anthology of these spectralizing moments and theyshow an astonishing consistency over two hundred-odd years, right downto the uncannily repeated dismissive gesture of waving off that so oftenaccompanies the lesbian apparition. She goes on to suggest that a process of recognition by negation along Freudian lines can be seen to be at work.For Freud, the negative ‘not’ allows the repressed material to emerge andachieve formulation in the very statement that denies it. So the whiting outthat the spectral metaphor enacts nevertheless allows a provisional éguringof the possibility that is being denied. As Castle points out, the ghostdoesn’t just make something vanish into thin air, it isn’t just the vaporizingof the carnal, but is of its very nature a revenant, it returns, its business is to haunt. This lays it open to the revisionary uses of a lesbian writing thatseeks to retrieve and embrace the spectral, to undo the processes ofdisavowal and repression. Indeed, one might say that the whole project ofCastle’s book is to re-embody the lesbian spectre, to reveal the apparitionalas carnal, this-worldly and worldly-wise.

While Castle’s account begins by locating the apparitional lesbian incertain eighteenth-century texts of Defoe and Diderot, as well as sketchingsomething of a pre-sexological popular sexual slang that registered lesbianpossibilities – tribade, fricatrice, sapphist, roaring girl, tommy, etc.,together with a signiécant recurrence of the word ‘odd’ and its derivatives– she doesn’t, however, locate any historical changes in the apparitionaltrope itself in response to the pressure of the public consolidation of a morereadily available lesbian category. One would expect, for example, that theégure of the apparitional lesbian would operate differently after the trial of

Textual�Practice

56

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in 1928 from the way it did before it.The history of the public consolidation of deployable sterotypes of the oddwoman, as Castle insists, is radically different from that of the queer man;it receives its consolidation more slowly and at a later moment, and so itsmetaphorical or symbolic registrations and disavowals will operate with adifferent historical proé le.

Developing Castle’s argument, I want to sketch out some possibleconnections between the queer, the uncanny and the closet and the operationof the motif of the spectral in some of Henry James’s late ghost tales. As LeonEdel noted é fty years ago in his edition of The Ghostly Tales of Henry James,apart from four early tales in the late 1860s up to the mid-1870s, James’sdozen or so mature spectral narratives are all concentrated in the 1890s orlater.9 The majority of these follow the three trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895.In Britain it is the Wilde trials, as Alan Siné eld has persuasively argued in The Wilde Century, rather than any sexological formulation in learnedtreatises by Westphal, or even polemical pamphlets by Benkert or Ulrichs in German, that coordinated a range of diverse elements – effeminacy,aestheticism, dandyism – into a recognizable and deployable stereotype of the male invert as the habitual subject o f same-sex desire. As Sinfieldargues, the images o f seventeenth- and eighteenth-century male sexual types, the rake who fucked anything that moved, catamites, whores or hisperfumed goat, or the molly who was not a real man at all, or the image ofthe aristocratic, free-thinking libertine, or the effeminate leisure-class manwhose same-sex practices were an aspect o f a traditional upper-classdisso luteness, all these had made it difficult to cohere an image of ‘the’unitary homosexual, whereas ‘the Wildean model produced an image evenmore speciéc than that: the queer – dandié ed, aesthetic, effeminate. And, inthe same move, the object of his attentions came into view: the lower classmasculine youth.’10 Wilde notoriously called this predilection for rough trade‘feasting with panthers’. Sinfield argues that the queer stereotype thatcrystallized out from the trials, and the excited work of public representationthat put it into circulation, was a composite of both Wilde and Lord AlfredDouglas united in their cross-class sexual interests. Aristocratically inbred or at least with leisure-class airs and habits, aesthetically intense if not decadent, unmanly and sexually déclassé but with social and culturalpretensions, any element of this expanding ensemble might be read to implymetonymically the others even in their actual absence. The formation of thecloset is the other side of this process of consolidation, specification andimplication. The result is that the traditionally ominous but vague crimen nonnominandum inter christianos – the abomination not to be named amongChristians – becomes recognizable: ‘I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort’, as E.M. Forster’s Maurice blurts out to his family doctor, despitebeing a rugger-playing public school hearty. Unspeakability had gained a

John�Fletcher The�haunted�closet

57

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

paradoxical speciécation. The unnameable and the unspeakable had beengiven a local habitation and a name, and that name was Oscar Wilde.

Maurice of course is neither effeminate nor aesthetically given, and at this point in Forster’s novel his only male object has been the upper-classClive, not a street-wise working-class lad – no feasting with panthers forMaurice. Nevertheless, he misrecognizes himself in the Oscar Wilde imagebecause of his same-sex desires. Indeed, Forster’s novel might be read as an attempt to undo the effects of the Wilde trials, and to reconnect same-sex desires with the ideals of manliness and the Whitmanesque love ofcomrades. If Forster had had the nerve to publish his novel, it might wellhave had something of that effect.11 The paralysing connection betweeninner feelings and wishes and an external, stigmatized image comes then toconstitute the closet as an intensié ed regime of self-policing and speciécsecrecies. Edward Carpenter commented: ‘The Wilde trial has done itswork, and silence must henceforth reign on sex-subjects.’ But it was, asSiné eld remarks, ‘a Wilde-shaped silence’ (p. 124). The relative indetermi-nacy of the signiéers of possible same-sex desire in pre-trial sexual culture – such as an aesthetic cult of the queer, the intense or the excessive, theClassicizing cult of ‘Greek love’ – undergoes a more loaded codiécationafter the trials. The Wilde trials were of course only the end-point of a larger process of crystallizat ion that had been punctuated by similarscandals: the 1871 trial of the transvestite male prostitutes Parker andBoulton, the Cleveland Street brothel trials of 1889 that implicated LordArthur Somerset, the Earl of Euston and the Prince of Wales’ son and heirto the throne, the notorious Prince Eddy.12 This process bore very heavilyon certain more traditional social types and life-styles, such as the égure of the leisure class, coné rmed bachelor, often an artist or writer, orcharacterized by predominantly literary or aesthetic interests, such indeedas Henry James himself, who might now come under new and potentiallydangerous scrutiny and suspicion.13

The�uncanny:�a�closet�effect

In his essay ‘The uncanny’,14 Freud elaborates a set of shifting relationsbetween the pair of German terms – the heimlich and the unheimlich – thatturn on an earlier, obsolete root meaning of heimlich or canny as belongingto the household or home (heim ). What is heimlich is what is known,comfortable, cosy, familiar, domesticated – ‘arousing a sense of agreeablerestfulness and security as in one within the four walls of his house’ (p. 342). The unheimlich/uncanny in the é rst sense of the term is simply itsopposite: what is unfamiliar, alien, strange, sinister; to which one could addin English the odd or queer, the latter meaning, according to the OED ,

Textual�Practice

58

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

cross, oblique, perverse, squint, strange, eccentric, suspicious. W hat Freudlocates in German is a semantic shift in the meaning and connotations of the heimlich. This second usage of heimlich signiées what is concealed,kept from sight, private, secret, shameful, sinister, withheld from the sightor knowledge of others. The genitals are the heimlich parts in this sense, thetoilet the heimlich chamber. One of Freud’s dictionaries summarizes theshift: ‘From the idea of “homelike”, “belonging to the house”, the furtheridea is developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of strangers,something concealed, secret’ (p. 346). This is the result, one might infer, of large-scale historical changes by which the older extended family orhousehold – originally including servants, slaves, apprentices, dependants,wards, etc. – gives way to the enclosed world of the modern, ‘nuclear’,Oedipalized family of immediate blood relations. With this secondmeaning we get the speciécally modern sense of privacy as an internal orwithdrawn space or enclave that can be negatively inè ected as shameful,sinister or taboo. Freud summarizes the paradox that results from thissemantic drift: ‘Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops inthe direction of ambivalence, until it é nally coincides with its opposite,unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich’(p. 347).

This paradox that the uncanny/unheimlich is an internal possibility, asubspecies of the heimlich – the canny or homely – raises the question:What happens to unheimlich/uncanny when its opposite or anchoring termshifts, and indeed comes to meet it and to include it? Freud’s dictionariestell him that unheimlich is not used as the opposite of heimlich in the second sense, i.e. as signifying what is open and unconcealed, in thelight. However, Freud cites from Sanders’ Wörterbuch der Deutchen Sprach(1860) a deénition by the philosopher Schelling: ‘Unheimlich is the namefor everything that ought to have remained . . . secret and hidden [i.e.heimlich in the second sense] but has come to light’ (p. 345). Schelling’sdeénition of the unheimlich starts from the second, negative sense ofheimlich but includes the element of exposure, the moment of coming tolight or coming out. Furthermore, it includes an element of the imperativeand normative: something that ‘ought to have remained . . . secret andhidden’ has come improperly to light.

What we have here is not just a set of meanings in a dictionary, but a set of positions within a historically speciéc structure of experience whichdemarcates and regulates the shifting boundaries and interfaces betweenthe private and public spheres. If one asks what is the place of the subjectof the experience of the uncanny in its various moments, then we can saythat in the é rst moment of the binary opposition the subject of theuncanny is inside the house, feeling either comfortably at home oranxiously sensing the stranger, out of place and alien, from without. In the

John�Fletcher The�haunted�closet

59

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

second moment of the collapse of the opposition, the subject of theuncanny experience is outside the house, looking in at the withdrawn and opaque privacy, the sinister secrets (heimlichkeiten) of the other.15

But arguably there is a third moment where the subject of Schelling’suncanny is located inside the house once again but is no longer at homethere, because what ought to have remained hidden has come to light, astrangeness breaks out from within.

It is not surprising to realize that the meaning of the word ‘closet’ hasa history that shows similar though not identical shifts and mutations. Thisis clear from the selections from the OED entry that Eve Sedgwick appendsto the title chapter of Epistemology of the Closet. What is striking is that thesemantic é eld of the closet condenses in particular around the moment ofthe shift or the reversal of the heimlich into – so including – its opposite theunheimlich. Taking over from the middle-English ‘bower’, closet signiéesan inner chamber for retirement, especially for sleeping, private studies ordevotions, latterly closet of ease or water-closet. As a site of retirement anddomestic security, however, it comes to take on implications of secrecy and exclusion as ‘the most secret place in the house appropriate unto our own private studies’ (1586).16 As a site of secluded speculations it isoften opposed to knowledge of the world and to practical matters – closetspeculations. However, ‘closet-work’ like ‘backstairs-work’ in seventeenth-century English signiées conspiratorial, treacherous or secretive activity,something sinister, the space of Heimlichkeiten which is undecidably bothheimlich and unheimlich. As it specializes to the more modern usage to referto ‘a small side-room or recess for storing utensils and provisions’, we getthe phrase ‘skeleton in the closet (or cupboard)’ which is deéned as ‘aprivate or concealed trouble in one’s house or circumstances, ever present,and ever liable to come into view’ (p. 520). Here we have deé nitely reachedthe realm of Schelling’s uncanny: what ought to have remained secret andhidden but has come improperly to light, the subject who is in the housebut no longer at home there because the unheimlich is no longer outsidebut haunts from within. With reference to enclosures within enclosures wealso get ‘any small room, especially one belonging to or communicatingwith a larger’ (p. 520). With this the closet begins to materialize as thegeography of the homospectral such as James will stage it in his tale TheJolly Corner (1908), and which is the terrain of Wilde’s own The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and M r. Hyde (1886).

An intensié ed reserve of anxiety came to attach itself to both the sexualheimlich and the unheimlich, indeed to the very process of their splitting andcounterposition. What Eve Sedgwick has called ‘a chronic, now endemiccrisis of homo/heterosexual deénition’17 results from the conè ict betweentwo opposed deénitions of same-sex relations, between what she labels

Textual�Practice

60

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

minoritizing and universalizing deénitions of homosexuality. Whereminoritizing accounts concentrate same-sex intensities in a quarantinedminority of now increasingly recognizable post-Wilde ‘queers’ or ‘unspeak-ables’ on the one hand, universalizing accounts locate same-sex intensitiesin the homosocial ties that bind one to one’s gender on the other, homo-social ties and institutions that will come under increasing scrutiny andinvigilation. Taking her distance from the simplié ed Foucauldian coupurebetween anonymous acts and inverted identities and the replacement of theformer by the latter, Sedgwick criticizes the model of the unidirectionalGreat Paradigm Shift in its various forms and argues for the overlap andcoexistence of contradictory schemes.18 In particular the égures of themasculine homosexual and the feminine lesbian (not to mention all thepositions in between) discomfort and so tend to be erased by minoritizingmodels of gender inversion, while these same é gures appear to inviteuniversalizing models in which same-sex feelings coné rm and reinforcegender identity, if not gender separatism, providing a strong emotional/libidinal dynamic to homosocial relations.

In an illuminating study of what he calls after Sedgwick ‘epistemolo-gies of the early modern closet’, Alan Stewart argues that in the sixteenthand early seventeenth centuries ‘sexual activity between men appears tohave occurred within already existing social relationships, rather thanbetween strangers, and usually within the same household’.19 He associatesthe anxiety about sodomy with the stereotypical égures of ‘the beatingschoolmaster, the cloistered monk, the humanist bedfellow, the closetedsecretary’ (p. xlv). In particular the enclosed space of the early moderncloset, he argues, was not so much a private space of solitary withdrawal as ‘a secret non-public transactional space between two men behind alocked door’ (p. 171). The early modern closet, then, contained not justone but two men: the gentleman and his private secretary, the cohabitantof that space and the depository and keeper of his master’s secrets. This was a relationship counterposed to those of the household within which it waslocated, and in particular to the marital relation of the gentleman and hislady, who is traditionally excluded from her husband’s closet in treatises on household management, albeit accorded a lady’s closet or cabinet of her own. In an analysis of the institution of the secretary, an uneasycombination of servant and intimate who is represented as being to hispatron as a closet is to the house, Stewart demonstrates how the difécultiesof that relationship, the risk to the patron in depositing his secrets with a social inferior, are partially resolved through an appeal to homosocialemotional dynamics: ‘no one personage of estate, laieth choise upon such a one to serve so neer about him . . . but ere he long have used him, hebindeth unto him at least some good part of his affection’ (p. 175). Theexemplary Elizabethan secretary, Robert Cecil, declared of the relations

John�Fletcher The�haunted�closet

61

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

between Prince and Secretary: ‘those Councells are to be compared to ye mutuall affeccion of two lovers’ (p. 176). This account in locating same-sex feeling and intensities within a power-laden set of homosocial relationsseems to require a universalizing rather than minoritizing model.

By contrast the Gothic reéguration of the male closet, in a series ofparanoid narratives from Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and MaryShelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, Wilde’s DorianGray and James’s late ghost stories at the end of the nineteenth century,progressively transform the residual homosocial relation of secretaryshipbased on the sharing of secrets – being ‘closeted together’ – into a é ercelydefended, newly solitary space of libidinally charged male secrets, ofintrusion, doubling and paranoia. The move to the homospectral closetedspace of the 1890s is a move from a heimlich, homosocially demarcated andsanctioned space of regulated secrecy and male power to an unheimlichhaunted space of disavowed secrets, whose solitary inhabitant is in anuneasy relation, by turns erotic and persecutory, to an alter ego or double. Inthese texts the Gothic closet seems to perform a separation of its inhabitantfrom the public realm of homosocial relations and so to insinuate aminoritizing understanding and a persecutory invigilation of same-sexintensities. The traditional social relations of intimacy and service areviolently reégured in the drama of obsession with and exclusion from theMaster’s secrets, which is played out around the locked chest in the innerstudy, between Caleb Williams and Falkland in Godwin’s novel. They alsoleave their newly homospectralized trace in the é gure of Quint, the absentMaster’s ‘own man’ in The Turn of the Screw (1898), and in the adoringbiographer ensconced in ‘the great man’s vacant study’ and among thesecrets of the dead writer who returns to haunt him in The Real Right Thing(1899).20

To grasp some of the psychic effects of the Gothic closet I will proposea reformulation of the seventeenth-century term ‘closet-work’ along thelines of Freud’s concepts of the dream-work and the joke-work. Like thedream-work, the closet-work is characterized by the primary processes of condensation and displacement that operate on the other side of the bar of censorship and repression. The closet-work involves the spectralproduction of condensed and over-determined, composite égures, split off and disavowed alter egos as in dreams. Like Stevenson’s Hyde or DorianGray’s portrait or the spectral égures of James, they cannot be translatedunequivocally as ‘gay’ representations but are none the less the homo-erotically charged productions of the Gothic closet. They insist at theintersection between same-sex identiécation and same-sex desire. The‘queerness’ of such representations results from the mutual implication ofdesire and identié cation, the impossibility of cleanly distinguishing thestigmatized and newly emergent ‘homosexual’ from the retrospectively and

Textual�Practice

62

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

defensively consolidated ‘heterosexual’ (the second term appears only someyears after and in response to the formulation of its deviant twin).

One of the effects over a period of time of the new post-Wilde trialregime was the conversion of a diffuse sense, even for some an appreciation,of an indeterminate oddness or queerness into a vigilance in detecting thequeer, a congealing of the free-èoating adjective into the all too determinatenoun. Furthermore, the intensié ed regime of policing the boundaries of the private that the Wilde trials precipitate involves as its other side the self-policing, the closet-work that produces the various moments of the uncanny in the é eld of sexual self-deé nition. The homospectraluncanny is the effect of this newly reconstituted closet and its minoritizingassumptions and invigilation. The queer or merely odd, the hithertouninterrogated bachelor becomes a candidate for the suspicion of secrets,sinister heimlichkeiten, in the public gaze of others, but he also becomes the subject of a self-regulating self-division. In order not to be a queer forothers he becomes strange to himself, uncanny at home, spectralized by hisown closet-work. The subject of Schelling’s uncanny as I’ve previouslydeéned it – in the house but no longer at home, where what should haveremained secret and hidden threatens to come to light, the skeleton in thecloset – can serve as an apt égure for the haunted and self-disowning effectsof the modern regime of the closet.

Narratives�of�homospectral�panic

The late ghostly tales of Henry James return again and again to what onemight call the drama of spectralization, the drama of the production of spectres. However, it is important to insist that this drama in James’stexts is not so much about same-sex intensities in isolation, but attaches to the whole conè icted implication of same-sex and cross-sex relations anddesires. My concern will be mainly with The Real Right Thing (1899) andThe Jolly Corner (1908); however, a brief discussion of James’s best-knownghost story, The Turn of the Screw (1898), will establish a preliminaryframework.

While James is concerned to dramatize the process of spectralization,this always takes place within a web or as part of a circuit of inter-subjectiverelations. This is true even, or especially, in the The Turn of the Screw , wherenotoriously no one other than the governess/narrator ever sees the spectresof Quint the valet and Miss Jessel the former governess, as well as in theother two tales where other characters also see the apparitions. This processof spectralization is elaborated in the very detailed and nuanced descriptionof the é rst apparition to the unsuspecting governess on top of the tower atBly, of what only later turns out to have been Peter Quint, the deceased

John�Fletcher The�haunted�closet

63

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

valet of the young Master of the House. Signiécantly the governess’ é rstreaction is to take him to be an intrusive sightseer of country houses ratherthan a ghost.

A chain of thoughts and wishes on the governess’ part culminates inthis é rst appearance: she begins by reèecting that ‘I was giving pleasure – if he ever thought of it! – to the person to whose pressure I had yielded’.21

The person in question is of course the handsome young Master and uncleof the children whose care she has taken over on condition that she neverbother him or contact him, but make all the decisions and deal with all theproblems herself. The eroticized phrasing – she gives him pleasure byyielding to his pressure – hints at the nature of the feelings in play. Thisleads to her wish that she should suddenly meet someone, that he would‘appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile andapprove’, and she wishes to ‘see it and the kind light of it, in his handsomeface’ (p. 135). His face is present to her when the égure appears: ‘W hatarrested me on the spot . . . was the sense that my imagination had, in aèash, turned real. He did stand there’ (p. 135). This é rst surprise gives wayto her second surprise which was ‘the violent perception of the mistake ofmy é rst: the man who met my eyes was not the person I had precipitatelysupposed’ (p. 136). At é rst the apparent fulé lment of her wish, the égurethen takes shape as the violent negation of the égure that was wished for:érst him and then deénitely not him, ‘as little anyone else I knew as it wasthe image that had been in my mind’ (p. 136). The principle of the negatedwish is virtually stated as such in the strange apologia for her feelings thatthe governess produces: ‘An unknown man in a lonely place is a permittedobject of fear to a young woman privately bred’ (my italics). From thisstrange permission we can infer by reversing the negation that the knownman, the beautiful young Master she had previously wished for, would bethe opposite of the ‘unknown man’ who does materialize, i.e. rather than a‘permitted object of fear’ he is a forbidden object of desire. It is the violentnegation of the former, the forbidden object of desire, that produces thelatter, the permitted object of fear, the égure actually seen.

If this reading attributes the apparition entirely to the governess’forbidden desire and its repudiation, two things later complicate inretrospect the moment of spectral production. First, the description thegoverness gives to Mrs Grose the housekeeper of a red, curly-haired manwith long pale face and ‘queer’ whiskers, is instantly if reluctantly identié edby the housekeeper as the dead valet Peter Quint, of whom the governess at this point knows nothing. Second, on his next visitation, she realizes ashis hard, deep stare quits her and moves around the room ‘that it was notfor me he had come there. He had come for someone else’ (p. 142). Thesomeone else is of course little Miles, the Master’s beautiful young nephewand the object of as intense an erotic and emotional investment by the

Textual�Practice

64

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

governess as is his absent uncle. Little Miles stands in for his absent uncle.The Master as the forbidden object of the governess’ desire is replaced bytwo substitutes: the sublimatory égure of little Miles – who like a Cherub,the governess has previously told us, has no bottom, ‘had – morally at anyrate – nothing to whack’ (p.142) – and the haunting, predatory Quintwho, we are told, on both occasions is seen only ‘from the waist up’(p.142). It is between these two égures who do not exist below the waist,the censored, bisected replacements for the desired Master of the House in the governess’ fantasy life, that the unspeakable scenes occur that sopreoccupy her. So while the governess’ negated desire is heterosexual, andthe recent past that she uncovers at Bly is the scene of an affair between thevalet, Peter Quint and the previous governess, Miss Jessel, also now dead,the fear that drives her is that Quint returns, not as part of the sinfulcouple, but alone, either to corrupt little Miles or to continue his evilrelationship with him dating from their previous intimacy. Her displacedand negated desire for the Master feeds into the fantasy of a same-sex,pederastic scene between the valet and the boy, who we are told has beensent down from his prep school for unspecié ed misdemeanours and is justat the point of puberty. Something similar may be implied with Miss Jesseland her ‘hunger’, as it is called, for little Flora. Although the adults, Quintand Miss Jessel, have had a sexual relation that the children seem to havewitnessed and possibly covered up, once dead they return singly, nevertogether, to haunt the child of their own sex.

To invoke the terms of the debate between Eve Sedgwick and KajaSilverman over James’s psychic economy, is this a narrative of a past primalscene of heterosexual origins of the kind that Silverman sees as structuringso many Jamesian narratives, the source of the children’s precocious know-ledge – ‘what Miles and Flora (like Maisie) knew’ – the child’s knowingpresence at the scene of adult sexual relations? Or is it a spectral scene of‘queer tutelage’, in Sedgwick’s suggestive phrase from her analysis of James’slate novel, The Wings of the Dove ?22

The precondition for the events at Bly, both those of the past as wellas those of the narrative’s present, is one that The Turn of the Screw shareswith virtually all the classic narratives of the Gothic tradition, from Otrantoto Udolpho to Jane Eyre to The Woman in White; that is, a narrative void, anempty space, created by the default of the traditional paternal function: not so much the Law of the Father as the Flaw of the Father, due to theabsence, death or perverse irresponsibility of the Master of the House. It is the absence or withdrawal of the Master from Bly, his abdicat ion of responsibility, which creates the vacuum or spectral space in which theghosts appear, just as in his absence he had installed Quint in situ at Bly,literally dressed in the Master’s clothes – ‘our employer’s late clever good-looking “own” man; impudent, assured, spoiled, depraved’ (p.159) – with

John�Fletcher The�haunted�closet

65

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

authority over its inhabitants and a particular partiality for and familiaritywith little Miles:

‘It was Quint’s own fancy. To play with him, I mean – to spoil him. . . Quint was much too free’. . . .‘Too free with my boy?’‘Too free with everyone.’

(p. 150)

As the égure of a generalized perversity corrupting both Miss Jessel and her charges, Quint, the Master’s ‘own man’, is licensed by the Master’scomplicity and blindness, his will not to know. Similarly the governess’desire and its spectral effects are the result of her seduction by the beautifulyoung Master who interviews her for her post in Harley Street and thensends her off to Bly to take the place of both himself and her disgracedpredecessor, Miss Jessel:

‘I’m rather easily carried away. I was carried away in London . . . inHarley St.’‘Well, Miss, you’re not the é rst – and you won’t be the last.’

(p. 126)

At once seduced and excluded by the Master’s appeal to her – she is to deal with everything herself and never to contact him about anything – her consequent positioning within a skewed, decentred familial structuremakes her peculiarly vulnerable to the perverse circuit of desire that offersher the Master’s children – beautiful, ‘unpunishable . . . with nothing to whack’ – as a substitute for the Master himself. The spectral Quintappearing in the Master’s place, and coming not for her but for little Miles,repeats the same pattern of interpellation and exclusion, now refocused onthe children – ‘my boy’. While it is tempting to interpret the predatoryQuint as the dangerous, irreducible residue of the governess’ translation ofher desire for the Master into the sublimatory fantasy of his ‘children’ andtheir innocence, it is equally important to recognize that this is a circuit of desire that pre-exists her arrival, and in which she is caught up andimplicated in her very disavowal. She is structurally fated to become the siteof its repetition in the present and of a lethal panic against its homospectralintensities.

We can see this materialization of the homospectral in an inter-subjective circuit of cross-sex relations most obviously in The Real RightThing, published a year later. Here the estranged wife of the recently dead writer Ashton Doyne commissions Doyne’s young friend and acolyteGeorge Withermore, a budding journalist and writer, to produce a bio-graphy of her husband as a form of reparation to him, the ‘real right thing’of the tale’s title, and of vindication for herself before the critical eyes of the

Textual�Practice

66

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

world. To this end she installs the young devotee in her dead husband’sprivate study, assuring him that ‘You’re the one he liked most; oh, much !’and giving him access to all the dead writer’s personal papers, letters anddiaries.23 The story’s uncanny dimension begins with Withermore’s sense ofvirtual usurpation connected as this is with his expectation of the deadman’s imminent return:

it’s as if he might at any moment come in. That’s why I jumped justnow. The time is so short since he really used to – it only wasyesterday. I sit in his chair, I turn his books, I use his pens, I stir hisé re, exactly as if . . . I had come up here to wait. It’s delightful but it’sstrange.

(p. 476)

As with Godwin’s novel the traditional secretarial relation of closeted intimacy, which is the young biographer’s organizing fantasy, coexistsuneasily with the gradually increasing suggestion of intrusion. The homo-spectral intensities that circulate between the dead writer and his adoringbiographer, however, are enclosed within and énally negated by the men’srelationship with the é gure of the estranged wife. Indeed, the originalsuggestion that the dead writer might actually be a ghostly personal presenceat the writing of his own biography is é rst introduced, signiécantly, by hiswife – ‘He is with us’ – who is herself experienced as a ghostly presence bythe young biographer:

he felt her, through a supersubtle sixth sense that the wholeconnection had brought into play, hover, in the still hours, at the topof landings and the other side of doors, gathered from the soundlessbrush of her skirts the hint of her watchings and waitings.

(p. 476)

A égure of ‘unappeasible anxiety’, she is herself curiously spectralized in her exclusion from the scene of male writing and intimacy that she hasinitiated.

Taking up the wife’s suggestion of her dead husband’s personalpresence, the young man cherishes the fancy so much that he looks forwardto each evening’s work in Doyne’s study ‘very much as one of a pair oflovers might wait for the hour of their appointment’ (p. 477). ‘Dippingdeep’ into Doyne’s secrets, he comes to feel ‘that it was particularly pleasantto be able to hold that Doyne desired him, as it were, to know them’ (p. 478). W hile echoing the description of the early modern closeting oftwo men as ‘lovers’, in Cecil’s phrase, in which the patron uses the secretaryas the depository of his secrets that are bound or sealed by ‘affeccion’,James’s homospectral narrative reégures the male closet as a site of bothsolitude and intrusive intimacy in a language that is as sexualized as it is

John�Fletcher The�haunted�closet

67

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

knowingly allusive. For the homoerotic language in which Withermore’sresearches are described has him drawing curtains, forcing doors and, in thefavourite metaphor that James habitually used of himself to describe hisown authorial dealings with his characters: ‘going, in general, as they said,behind almost everything’ (p. 478). In his prefaces James talks continuallyof his going behind his characters, i.e. going behind the scenes, behindtheir social facade, their appearance and self-presentation to the publicsphere, into an interior space of consciousness and the secrets it conceals.This leads to the elaboration of a fantasy of an intimate encounter with thedead man, of ‘an intimacy so rich . . . the possibility of an intercoursecloser than that of life’ (p. 475), in a language charged with the latentmetaphor of anal penetration:

It was at an occasional sharp turn of some of the duskier of thesewanderings ‘behind’ that he really, of a sudden, most felt himself, in the intimate sensible way, face to face with his friend; so that hecould scarcely have told, for the instant, if their meeting occurred in the narrow passage and tight squeeze of the past, or at the hour andthe place that actually held him. Was it ’67, or was it the other side of the table?

(p. 478)

The ambiguity of position here – in wandering ‘behind’ he ends up nevertheless ‘face to face’ – is aligned with a confusion of past and presentand a consequent ambiguity about different forms of knowledge; forWithermore’s penetrations from behind are located in ‘the narrow passageand tight squeeze of the past’ while its results are a potential ‘intimate, sensible . . . face to face with his friend . . . at the hour and the place that actually held him’. However, the ‘face to face’ is surrounded by acertain hesitation, even anxiety, and is continually postponed. For whileWithermore rejoices in ‘the great fact of the way Doyne was “coming out”’with all its suggestions of appearance, materialization, biographical trans-parency, by contrast ‘the special state of his own consciousness . . . wasn’t athing to talk about – it was only a thing to feel’ (p. 478). What he does feel,we are told, is that ‘there were moments, for instance, when, as he bent overhis papers, the light breath of his dead host was as distinctly in his hair ashis own elbows were on the table before him’ (p. 478). At this point thenarrative’s manifest terms involve a resumption and reversal of the égure ofthe secretary, with the dead author himself being é gured as ‘a hushed,discreet librarian, doing the particular things, rendering the quiet aid, likedby men of letters’ (pp. 478–9). This latter activity involves the gentleshifting and stirring of documents on the table behind him, the pushinginto view of some mislaid letter, the opening of an old journal at therelevant date. However, the narrative’s subtext of allusion, insinuation and

Textual�Practice

68

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

fantasy seems to suggest a different relationship betwen the two men. Theprecise notation of posture and position here, while it leads to the meta-phor of a spectral librarian service, locates the dead master eerily ‘behind’his devotee. Similarly the young man’s inability – ‘ruled by deep delicaciesand éne timidities, the fear of too sudden or too rude an advance’ – actuallyto encounter his dead host ‘face to face’, to look up at him ‘on the other side of the table’, leads to the chapter’s énal enigmatic contrast between the égure of ‘the mystic assistant’ helpfully drawing his attention to special boxes and drawers and his conviction of a very different andunconfrontable é gure:

could one have really looked, one would have seen somebody standingbefore the é re a trièe detached and over-erect – somebody éxing onethe least bit harder than in life.

(p. 479)

The story ends with the suspension of the ghostly, homospectral inter-course between the two men and its replacement by a resistance comingfrom the dead man to what is now interpreted as a form of violation. Thisdisturbance of the men’s rapport is coné rmed by the wife who has been outof sight but not out of contact with the spectral intimacies between them.Finally the dead writer Doyne materializes – ‘immense. But dim. Dark.Dreadful’ (p. 485) – barring his study door to both the young man and hiswife. Withermore interprets it:

He strains forward out of his darkness; he reaches toward us out of hismystery; he makes us dim signs of his horror . . . at what we’re doing.

(p. 484)

The young man’s hopes of intimacy, for the traditional ‘secretarial’ sharingof the dead writer’s secrets, are disappointed, for in the spectral space of theGothic closet such wishes are experienced by its inhabitant as an intrusionamounting to violation and the occasion for horror.

The Real Right Thing repeats the scenario so common in the run of tales which James wrote on the literary life where an artist is besieged andoften destroyed by the intrusion, into his private life and withdrawn worldof aesthetic detachment, of égures that represent the destructive values ofmodern ‘publicity’, the hunger for personal anecdote as a substitute for anappreciation of the work itself, the lionizing of the writer by the world ofsalons and hostesses and the subtler temptations of the idolizing enthusiastavid for the secret of the writer’s creativity, the égure in his carpet.Although himself the author of a biography of the American sculptorWilliam Whetmore Storey, the literary biographer for James condensedmany of these dangers. Withermore, for all his desire for intimacy with hisdead hero, is an agent of publicity, not the keeper of his master’s secrets but

John�Fletcher The�haunted�closet

69

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

the potential exhibitor of them. This he comes to realize as his spectralhoneymoon reverses into a Gothic nightmare: ‘he’s there as a protest . . . asa warning . . . as a curse’ (p. 484). The homoerotic subtext of the story andits mise-en-scène of the haunted closet, in making the dead writer himselfthe subject of homospectral panic and horror, seems to be written out ofJames’s own anxieties about the danger of exposure and publicity, a dangerrepresented for him both by the égure of Wilde himself in his èamboyantrisk-taking and courting of publicity, and the subsequent trials andpublicity that consolidated the stereotype of the homosexual and with itthe modern closet as a solitary site of embattled secrets. Withermore’s self-criticism – ‘We lay him bare. We serve him up. . . . We give him to theworld. . . . There are natures, there are lives, that shrink’ (p. 483) – mightbe read as alluding to just such a prototypical homosexual drama. In thelight of the story’s Gothic peripeteia, Withermore’s previous, unreèectingdelight in Ashton Doyne’s ‘coming out’ takes on the coercive if unwittingair of an early form of ‘outing’.

The Jolly Corner of 1908 belongs to and clearly resonates with anumber of homoerotically charged narratives of the 1880s and 1890s suchas Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and M r. Hyde (1886), Wilde’s The Picture of DorianGray (1891) as well as James’s own unénished novel The Sense of the Past(1917), whose protagonists confront threatening or seductive alter egos inlocked, closeted rooms at the tops and backs of houses. It also has distinctif puzzling afénities with the non-spectral text of 1903 The Beast in theJungle which has gained a certain notoriety in recent years through EveSedgwick’s brilliant if problematic reading of it as a narrative of what shecalls ‘homosexual panic’. The Jolly Corner is the story of an American,Spencer Brydon, who has spent most of his adult life in Europe and hasreturned home to New York after an absence of thirty-three years. Hereturns partly to see the new America, but most importantly to visit theproperty he has inherited as the last of his family and on the rents fromwhich he has been living a life of cultivated leisure in Europe. The propertyconsists of two large New York mansions, his family home on a corner – thejolly corner – of 5th Avenue and a second house, less prestigious and grand,that he is converting into a block of apartments that will return him aconsiderable amount of money. Brydon rediscovers and enters into anintimate friendship with Alice Staverton, a woman from the old New Yorkof his past. Discovering a hidden talent for and a pleasure in his propertydevelopments, he becomes obsessed with the idea of what he would havebeen like if had stayed behind in New York as his father had wanted himto, and become a capitalist entrepreneur and property developer, a builderof skyscrapers, instead of spending most of his life as an aesthete andEurophile. To this end he returns to his now empty and unfurnished familymansion and spends hours every night prowling its rooms, especially its

Textual�Practice

70

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

back-staircase and the warren of upper rooms, hunting down the spectralégure of his alter ego, the self he might have been if he had made a differentset of choices and decisions in his youth.

Just as the previous story was, at its manifest level, concerned with thewriter’s life and the rights and wrongs of biographical intrusion, a themethat was dramatized through a spectral, homoerotic fantasy, so The JollyCorner is concerned with certain life choices: the choice of a life devoted tothe arts and aesthetic concerns signiéed by a decision to live in Europe, asagainst a choice to devote oneself to business, to the American ideal of the entrepreneur, and the intensiécation of what Brydon calls ‘the rankmoney passion’,24 all of which are representatives and agents in the story ofthe new urban modernity. New York with its vanishing family mansionsand thrusting skyscrapers is the crucible of the future. These manifestconcerns are also refracted through a fantasmatic, homoerotically chargedsubtext.

In one of his notebooks James had jotted down the idea for a story he never énally wrote that was the precise structural reverse of The JollyCorner. It was to be about a man who gives up his artistic vocation for acommercial life which spells his spiritual death. His repudiated and for-feited artistic potentialities are however represented by a woman, the onehe doesn’t marry. She is, James says, his dead self.25 In a curious reverse of this scenario The Jolly Corner produces the égure of Alice Staverton,who, we are told, lived apart from the awful modern crush with a delicatelyfrugal economy, with one maid and herself, and who dusted her relics andtrimmed her lamp, and who is thereby é gured in the story as one of theseven wise virgins of the gospel parable, who sat up late but prepared,awaiting the coming, delayed thirty-three years one is led to infer, of thebridegroom. It is Alice who é rst formulates the idea that is to becomeSpencer Brydon’s obsession, just as it is Ashton Doyne’s widow whoprompts the young biographer with the suggestion of a spectral intimacywith her dead husband. Alice says to Spencer Brydon, ironically, that ‘if hehad but stayed at home he would have anticipated the inventor of theskyscraper’ and ended up with a gold-mine. To Alice’s provocativesuggestion of what he might have been had he stayed in America, heresponds:

it met him there . . . very much as he might have been met by somestrange égure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dimpassages of an empty house. The quaint analogy quite hauntinglyremained with him, when he didn’t rather improve it by a stillintenser form: that of his opening a door behind which he wouldhave made sure of énding nothing, a door into a room shuttered andvoid, and yet so coming with a great suppressed start, on some quite

John�Fletcher The�haunted�closet

71

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle of theplace and facing him through the dusk.

(p. 198)

What begins as an irony and a quaint analogy rapidly escalates into thespectral geography of the closet – opening a door on to a room shutteredand void only to encounter some erect confronting presence, a presence hethen obsessively hunts down, he says, like some fanged and antlered beast,through the rear and upper portions of his family house.

The obvious critical temptation is to read the égure in the shutteredroom, as Sedgwick reads the beast in John Marcher’s jungle, in the non-spectral tale of that name, i.e. as a forclosed – a forecloseted – homosexualpossibility; a homosexual possibility that interrupts, paralyses or perhaps,paradoxically, is invoked and called forth by the alternative possibility of a relationship with the woman companion who waits for him.26 It is truethat Brydon’s hunting of his alter ego is erotically invested along similarlines to the young biographer’s relationship to the dead author in The RealRight Thing. However, the choices Brydon describes himself as havingmade in his youth prevent us from reading this as an otherwise heterosexualman haunted by his homosexual possibilities, i.e. as a variant on Sedgwick’s‘homosexual panic’ thesis.

Brydon wonders what he would have been if he had not chosen hisrentier aesthete’s existence in Europe, living, it is implied, on unearnedfamily income:

Not to have followed my perverse young course – and almost in the teeth of my father’s curse, as I may say . . . not to have loved it, so much, loved it, no doubt with such an abysmal conceit of my own preference. . . . I’ve not been edifying – I believe I’m thought ina hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I’ve followed strangepaths and worshipped strange gods . . . I was leading at any timethese thirty years, a selé sh, frivolous, scandalous life.

(p. 204)

Brydon’s description of what he is and has been is knowing, insinuating butunspecié c. His ‘perverse young course’, his ‘strange paths and . . . strangegods’, not to mention his father’s curse, all hint at what one might call‘biblical ’ irregularities. The name ‘Sodom’ hovers in the air but is nevermentioned. In stark contrast to this is the idea of his alter ego as Alice andhe develop it between them as a joint spectral production:

‘It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep downsomewhere within me, as the full-blown èower is in the small tightbud and I just took the course . . . that blighted him for once and forever.’

Textual�Practice

72

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

To this Alice Staverton ventures:

‘I believe in the èower, I feel it would have been quite splendid, quitehuge and monstrous.’

To which Brydon adds:

‘Monstrous above all! . . . quite hideous and offensive.’

To this Alice replies:

‘What you feel – and what I feel for you – is that you’d have hadpower.’‘You’d have liked me that way?’‘How should I not have liked you?’‘I see you’d have liked me, have preferred me, a billionaire.’

(pp. 204–5)

It becomes clear that ‘the rank money passion’ of the billionaire comes tostand in for a rank passion of a different kind. This erect confronting é gureor huge monstrous èower, it turns out, is something that Alice herselfdreams of. ‘I’ve seen him’ she informs Brydon, ‘in a dream . . . twice over’;but she keeps the details to herself. One can be sure that the passion inquestion, the one dreamed of and clearly desired by Alice, is in contrast tothe strange paths and strange gods Brydon had previously and scandalouslyfollowed in Europe.

Brydon hunts this strange égure of a passion that he feels is so totallyother than himself in the image of a fanged and antlered beast at bay, whilefeeling himself at points to be ‘like some monstrous stealthy cat . . . withlarge shining yellow eyes’, and he wonders with sadistic relish ‘what itmightn’t verily be, for the poor hard-pressed alter ego, to be confronted withsuch a type’ (p. 211). He is the excited predator, the beast in somebodyelse’s jungle, and he glories in his imagined ability to terrify his prey. ‘Peopleenough, é rst and last, had been in terror of apparitions, but who had everbefore so turned the tables and become himself, in the apparitional world,an incalculable terror?’ (p. 315). The logic of reversal, the motif of thetables turned, is crucial and is repeated again in the story. For in the largemain rooms ‘at the wide front and prolonged side’ of the house, precisely atits ‘jolly corner’, with the ‘sense of the hard silver of the autumn starsthrough the window panes’ and ‘the white electric lustre’ of the street lamps(p. 211), Brydon feels supported in his predatory prowess, in his felineability ‘to penetrate the dusk of distances and the darkness of corners’, tode-mystify and to resolve ‘the treacheries of uncertain light, the evil lookingforms taken in the gloom by mere shadows, by accidents of the air, byshifting effects of perspective’ (p. 211). By contrast with these conédentexperiences at the front of the house, he comes to feel that ‘it failed him

John�Fletcher The�haunted�closet

73

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

considerably in the central shades and the parts at the back’ for ‘the rear of the house affected him as the very jungle of his prey’ (p. 211). It is in the rear extension with its multiplied ‘nooks and corners . . . closets andpassages’ (p. 212) and especially in its upper rooms that his initial reversalof expectation in terrifying the apparitions is itself reversed. He developsthe feeling, that ‘énally quite broke him up’, ‘of his being followed, trackedat a distance carefully taken . . . he was kept in sight while remaininghimself – sightless’ (p. 212), and that while cunningly avoiding him, hisinvisible alter ego is keeping him in sight and from behind. Brydon keepsmaking ‘abrupt turns and rapid recoveries of ground’ (p. 212) to catch theégure at his own rear. Finally in the last of a series of upper rooms openingon to each other, ‘a room without other approach or egress’ (p. 216), i.e.with no independent exit or escape to a corridor (as in the OED deénitionof closet cited above), he corners his alter ego behind a now closed door thathe had previously left open.

The two opposed projections of himself, as James calls them, are saidto be ‘in presence’, but on either side of a closed door, the blank face ofwhich challenges his courage: ‘Show us how much you have!’ (p. 218). Atthis point, however, Brydon’s hunt is overtaken by a crisis of failed nerve.Confronted with his alter ego ‘shut up there, at bay, deéant’, he is overcomeby an admonition to ‘Discretion’ and renounces his quest. Stationinghimself outside the now closed door in a posture of renunciation – ‘his eyesbent and his hands held off in a mere intensity of stillness’ (p. 219) – hisattitude, we are told, constitutes a silent message to his alter ego on theother side of the thin partition:

‘If you won’t then – good: I spare you and I give up. . . . You convinceme that for reasons rigid and sublime . . . we both of us should havesuffered . . . I retire, I renounce – never on my honour to try again.So rest forever – and let me.’

(p. 219)

What I have called the spectral geography of the closet has never been more vividly mapped. Unlike the previous narratives discussed, there are no residual homosocial forms of secretaryship here. Although seeking a relation with a possible, alternative self, Brydon patrols a haunted solitudein his family house, as much haunter as haunted. His narrative swingsbetween the second moment of the uncanny where the subject is on theoutside looking in at the closeted secrecy of the other, and the thirdmoment described by Schelling where, although inside the house, he is nolonger at home there, the closet contains a skeleton.

Brydon then retreats in something of a controlled panic, èoor by èoordown the successive layers of the house, only to discover as he reaches thevestibule, with its black and white marble squares from his childhood, that

Textual�Practice

74

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

the hunted égure now turned hunter has materialized between him and thefront door, blocking off his escape from the house. Here in an enigmaticscene of confrontation between Brydon and his alternative self the samedrama of reversal, of the worm turned and the hunter hunted, is replayedyet again.

His alter ego materializes in a posture of fear and shame, dressed inwhat he calls ‘the queer actuality of evening dress’, the fashionable classuniform of the rich, but covering his face with his spread out hands, one ofwhich has two éngers reduced to stumps as if shot away. Brydon confrontshim and interprets the anguish of his spectral double hubristically, as proofthat he, Spencer Brydon, ‘standing there for the achieved, the enjoyed, the triumphant life, couldn’t be faced in his triumph’ (p. 225). Graduallyhe comes to feel, however, that the very insistence of his own gaze, theimpunity of his own attitude, produces a change in the apparition whoraises his head, drops his hands and confronts Brydon in turn. Brydon’sreaction is a spasm of horror and disavowal: ‘Such an identity é tted his at no point . . . the face was the face of a stranger . . . evil, odious, blatant,vulgar’ who advances on him aggressively. The tables are turned once again.Brydon falls back ‘under the hot breath and roused passion of a life largerthan his own, a rage of personality before which his own collapsed’ (p. 226). He loses consciousness and faints away. The enigmatic climax of this scene is the convergence point for a whole intertextual networkwhich I can only partly gesture towards, in which the conjunctural aspectsof the 1890s, the formation of the post-Wildean regime of the closet andthe associated crisis of deénitional categories are over-determined by thedramas of James’s personal and family history.

James’s memoir, written some éve years later, A Small Boy and Others(1913), presents a striking analogy with The Jolly Corner that indicates ashared fantasy scenario. In Chapter xxv James recalls a nightmare whichreworks the memories of his own é rst initiation into the world of Europeanhigh art, his earliest exposures to the Louvre and the Luxembourg Museumsin Paris as a small boy, and in particular to the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollonwhich provides him with the dream scene of his nightmare. These visits‘somehow held the secret of our future’, just as the paintings described in the memoir offered ‘a foretaste . . . of all the fun . . . that one was goingto have, and the kind of life, always of the queer so-called inward sort . . .that one was going to lead’.27 The whole chapter, which deserves a moreextended commentary, dramatizes the making of a life choice, a commit-ment to the aesthetic ideals of high art, to a future whose queerness signiéesthe aesthetic intensié cation of life and implicitly, as Michael Moon haspersuasively demonstrated, the male–male eros codié ed in the paintingswhich James remembers.28 James’s aesthetic vocation is mediated by and inthe shadow of his adored elder brother William, already a budding artist

John�Fletcher The�haunted�closet

75

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

and shaper of Henry’s taste in painting. Written at the end of Henry’s lifeand three years after William’s death, the memoir engages in a quiet butpersistent argument with his brother who had gone on to reject Europe andthe aesthetic life and to return to America and a commitment to scienceand philosophy.29

These life choices of the young Henry James and his brother are analogous to the one which Spencer Brydon in The Jolly Corner has describedhimself as having made in his youth, and his pursuit of his spectral alter egois an attempt to ‘go behind’ that choice, having lived it out for thirty-odd notto say ‘queer’ years in Europe, to reverse it in imagination and to come toterms with the repudiated, the rejected possibility. The great interest of James’s nightmare is that it gives us a glimpse of those choices be ing made and the desperate psychic struggles they entailed. What is striking isthat such struggles are dramatized, in both memoir and novella, as spectralrivalries that are violent, even lethal. Both nightmare and novella are markedby the logic of reversal played out around closed doors and closeted spaces,and in a relation both intimate and antagonistic to an alter ego. W hat is atstake here are both vocational and erotic outcomes that are to structure awhole life. James doesn’t date his nightmare for us. We don’t know when itoccurred. We might infer that it dates from the years of his young adulthoodwhen he was trying to establish himself as a writer. All we know is that hewrites about it only after his brother William’s death in 1910 between TheJolly Corner in 1908 and the autobiography in 1913.30

Both narratives rework the same fantasy scenario from differentpositions. James the dreamer is in the reverse position to that of SpencerBrydon. Besieged behind a locked door by ‘some awful agent or presence’,he feels that in his appalled state he was more appalling than the nightmareégure who is trying to break through the door of his bedroom and attackhim in his bed. Reversing the situation, James bursts through the door and routs the intruder, driving him over ‘the far-gleaming èoor’ of a‘tremendous glorious hall’ – to the èash of thunder and lightning throughthe high windows. The hall is revealed as the great Parisian Temple of Art,‘that bridge over to Style constituted by the wondrous Galerie d’Apollon’(p. 196) at the Louvre:

the wondrous place and my young imaginative life in it of longbefore, the sense of which deep within me, had kept it whole,preserved it to this thrilling use.

(p. 197)

The nightmare enacts a triumph: James bursting out of his closet tovanquish his spectral antagonist and to take possession of what he calls the Palace of Life and the Temple of Art, the combined ‘scene of glory’ (the Louvre in the period of James’s childhood visits was both the seat of

Textual�Practice

76

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

Napoleon III’s government and a great national gallery). Given William’srole, é rst as aesthetic mentor – ‘already beforehand with me, already seatedat his task’ (p. 7)’ – and later as American returnee and artist-turned-scientist in the memoir’s youthful setting, and then as posthumousaddressee of the memoir’s defensive celebration of Europe as the scene ofaesthetic education against William’s denigrations, he is plausibly one at least of the component elements that went into the dream-work’s production of the spectral antagonist whose overcoming allows the dreamerpossession of the world of art of his childhood.

The Jolly Corner, however, seems to reverse this youthful triumph asSpencer Brydon succumbs to the closeted spectre’s greater ‘force of life andrage of personality’. Brydon wakes in the énal coda to the story with hishead in the lap of Alice Staverton, ‘an ample and perfect cushion’ with its‘mantle of soft stuff lined with grey fur’ (pp. 226–7), who has found himlaid out by the front door of his family home on the black and whitemarble tiles of his childhood. The signiécantly named Alice (James’s sister’sname) claims him ‘with the cool charity and virtue of her lips’ (p. 228) fora kind of regressed and infantile relation to the woman, in which he is inBrydon’s own words ‘gratefully and abysmally passive’ (p. 227), purged of‘all the hunger of his prime need’ (p. 218) played out in his fevered night-time pursuits:

‘And now I keep you,’ she said.‘Oh keep me, keep me!’, he pleaded while her face still hung overhim.

(p. 228)

The spectral égure is not however simply his own production or‘projection’. For Alice has also dreamed again of Brydon’s alter ego even asBrydon has been è eeing or confronting him in the family house. She takesthe dream as a message, even a summons, whose Gothic prototype isRochester’s cry in his extremity to Jane Eyre. Faced with Brydon’s refusal toacknowledge his double as in any way his, Alice tells him: ‘because yousomehow wanted me. He seemed to tell me that. So why shouldn’t I likehim? . . . And to me he was no horror. I had accepted him’ (p. 231).

Indeed, the echoes of the blinded Rochester with his mutilated right hand resound in her pity for ‘his poor ruined sight. And his poor right hand’ (p. 232), those signiéers of the castratory rigours of a manhoodthat submits to the law, a law that Brydon has evaded in his è ight from his father’s curse to the strange paths and strange gods of Europe. Thespectral égure seems then a joint production of Alice and Brydon, butmore than that, materializing as he does from the family house, he is acomposite é gure, a displaced and condensed product of the locked doorsand closetings, the closet-work of which the family and its house is the

John�Fletcher The�haunted�closet

77

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

mise-en-scène. In the phrase of T.S. Eliot, another American expatriate inEurope, he is a ‘familiar compound ghost both intimate and unidenti-éable’:31 a collective male phantasm of the James family romance. In him we can identify his brother William James, Henry’s primary love object andfraternal antagonist, it has been argued,32 his ‘covering cherub’ in HaroldBloom’s phrase; but especially his grandfather William James of Albany, the successful capitalist entrepreneur who founded the James familyfortunes and whose wealth they had been living off and running down for two generations. It is the originary William James senior who embodieseverything that the young Henry chose not to be, while providing thefamily funds for him to begin at least to do so. Written a few years afterHenry’s own return to his native land, after an absence of decades, toconfront both his familial and national legacies, The Jolly Corner dramatizesa reprise of those earlier life-decisions, of that aesthetic commitment thatbore coded within it a powerful homoeroticism, and which had shaped hisentire adulthood. This éctional reprise, however, is marked by the newlyintensié ed polarizations, exclusions and closetings of its historical moment,of the decades immediately after the Wilde trials, and by the psychicviolence and disavowals they engendered.

Acknowledgements

This essay is an extended version of a paper é rst given at a conference on‘Homospectrality’, co-organized with Dr Kate Chedgzoy at the EuropeanHumanities Research Centre at the University of Warwick, in May 1996.

Notes

1 ‘The beast in the closet: James and the writing of homosexual panic’, inEpistemology of the Closet (London and New York: Harvester W heatsheaf,1991); ‘Is the rectum straight? Identié cation and identity in The Wings of theDove’, in Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).

2 Michael Moon, A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiati on in AmericanCulture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Durham and London: DukeUniversity Press, 1998); John R. Bradley (ed.), Henry James and Homo-EroticDesire (London: Macmillan, 1998) .

3 Kaja Silverman, ‘Too early/too late: male subjectivity and the primal scene’,in Male Subjectivity at the M argins (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) ;Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and M odernCulture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) .

4 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality,Vol. I: An Introduction (New York:Vintage Books, 1980), p. 43.

5 Martha Vicinus, ‘Lesbian history: all theory and no facts or all facts and notheory?’, Radical History Review , 60 (1994), pp. 57–75; ‘Lesbian perversity

Textual�Practice

78

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

and Victorian marriage: the 1864 Codrington Divorce Trial’, Journal ofBritish Studies, 36, 1, pp. 70–98; Rictor Norton, The Myth of the M odernHomosexual (London and W ashington, DC: Cassell, 1997); RandolphTrumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, Vol. 1: Heterosexuality and theThird Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago, IL : Chicago UniversityPress, 1998).

6 Fredric Silverstolpe, ‘Benkert was not a doctor: on the non-medical origin ofthe homosexual category in the nineteenth century’, in Conference Papersfrom Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality? (Amsterdam, 1987), Vol. 1,History, pp. 206–20.

7 Ibid., p. 211.8 Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian, p. 34.9 Leon Edel, The Ghostly Tales of Henry James (New Brunswick: Rutgers

University Press, 1948), p. xiv.10 Alan Siné eld, The Wilde Century (London: Cassell), p. 122.11 For a reading of Forster ’s novel in relation to the problems of manliness, see

John Fletcher, ‘Forster ’s self-erasure: M aurice and the scene of masculinelove’, in Second Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, ed.Joseph Bristow (London: Routledge, 1992).

12 Theo Aronson, Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld (London: JohnMurray, 1994) .

13 James’s own hostile attitude to W ilde indicates that, unlike some of W ilde’sheterosexual friends and supporters such as the wordly Frank Harris who hadto be informed by W ilde himself of the truth of the Marquis of Queensbury’saccusations, James read the homosexual subtext of W ilde’s public performancesand felt profoundly threatened by it. Coinciding in W ashington with W ilde athis most èamboyant and exhibitionist, James denounced him to his old friendMrs Henry Adams as ‘an unclean beast’. As Richard Ellmann astutely remarks:‘James saw in W ilde a threat. For the tolerance of deviation, or ignorance of it,were alike in jeopardy because of W ilde’s èouting and èaunting. . . . It was asif James, foreseeing scandal, separated himself from this menace in motley’(Oscar Wilde (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 171).

14 Sigmund Freud, ‘The uncanny’ (1919), trans. James Strachey, reprinted in Artand Literature, Penguin Freud Library, ed. Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth:Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 335–76.

15 Freud gives an extremely interesting literary example of this reversal of theterm into its opposite that turns precisely on the uncanny space of thefamilial: ‘The Zecks [a family name] are all “heimlich”.’ (In sense II)‘“Heimlich”? . . . W hat do you mean by “heimlich”?’ ‘W ell . . . they are like aburied spring or a dried-up pond. One cannot walk over it without alwayshaving the feeling that water might come up there again.’ ‘Oh, we call it“unheim lich”; you call it “heimlich”. W ell, what makes you think that there issomething secret and untrustworthy about this family?’ (Freud, ‘Theuncanny’, pp. 343–4).

16 A New English Dictionary on Historical Principle s, ed. James A.H. Murray(Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1893), Vol. II, p. 520.

17 Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Hemel Hempstead: HarvesterW heatsheaf, 1991), p. 1.

18 Ibid., pp. 44–8.19 Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. xvi.

John�Fletcher The�haunted�closet

79

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3

20 The Complete Tales of Henry James: 1898–9, Vol. 10, ed. Leon Edel (London:Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964), p. 473.

21 Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and other Stories, ed. T.J. Lustig (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 135.

22 Eve Sedgwick, Tendenci es, esp. pp. 78–80.23 The Complete Tales of Henry James: 1898–9, Vol. 10, p. 473.24 The Jolly Corner, in The Complete Tales of Henry James: 1903–1910, ed. Leon

Edel, Vol. 12, p. 204.25 9 January 1894; 5 February 1895, The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F.O.

Mathiessen and B. Murdock (Oxford and New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1961), pp. 143–4.

26 For a reading along these lines, see Hugh Stevens, ‘Homoeroticism, identityand agency in James’s late tales’, in Enacting History in Henry James, ed. GertBuelens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

27 Henry James, Autobiography, ed. F.W . Dupee (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1983), p. 198.

28 Michael Moon, A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiati on in AmericanCulture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 31–66.

29 Only a few days before his death, W illiam responded aggressively to Henry’sdisparagement of the barren Canadian landscape through which they had justtravelled, on their landing from Europe: ‘Better than anything in Europe,Henry – better than anything in England’ (Leon Edel, The Life of HenryJames, Vol. V, The Master: 1901–1916 (New York: Avon Books, 1978), p. 446.

30 Leon Edel speculates on the identity of James’s Louvre nightmare with thejournal entry of 21 July 1910 that records an awakening with great momentaryrelief from his depression associated with W illiam’s é nal illness. However, asJames gives no account of that moment, Edel’s dating of the nightmare can onlybe speculation. In my view the sense of future promise in the realm of art andglory at the close of the nightmare would indicate a turning point early on inJames’s writing life. Edel, The M aster, pp. 444–5.

31 T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Four Quartets.32 Richard Hall, ‘An obscure hurt: the sexuality of Henry James’, The New

Republic, 28 April and 5 May 1979 .

Textual�Practice

80

Dow

nloa

ded

by [U

nive

rsity

of W

arw

ick]

at 0

8:30

22

Oct

ober

201

3