Abstract

Henry James wrote a number of ghost stories. ¹ 1

A good deal of work has been done on this; see, for instance, T.J. Lustig, Henry James and the Ghostly (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 3–4. See also Martha Banta, Henry James and the Occult: The Great Extension (Bloomington, 1972).

But he also produced what J. Hillis Miller has dubbed ‘quasi-ghost stories’ in which the ghostly is invoked figuratively. ² 2

J. Hillis Miller, Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (New York, 2005), p. 299.

This second kind of use of the ghostly has an important aesthetic dimension for James. Instead of representing actual ghosts or apparitions he uses ghostly metaphors to represent characters who behave as if they are ghosts. Terry Castle has brilliantly explored the way in which James represents Olive Chancellor in ghostly terms, but other examples of this might be given. ³ 3

Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian (New York, 1995).

Miller extends his analysis of the ghostliness of James’s work to make a further, more radical claim:

My double hypothesis about James’s ghost stories: (1) All James’s stories and novels are ghost stories; (2) The ghost stories ‘proper’ are really, obliquely, about the act of literature. They bring into the open the way all works of fiction that are ‘believed in’ by the reader work their magic by using language to ‘raise the ghosts’ of the characters. ⁴ 4

Ibid.