"A Merely Pictorial Subject": The Turn of the Screw

Abstract

The Turn of the Screw is a very mechanical matter, I honestly think--an inferior, a merely pictorial, subject and rather a shameless potboiler. --Henry James to Frederic W. H. Myers The visual artists whom critics have recently explored in connection with Henry James--painter John Singer Sargent, sculptor Hendrik Andersen, photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn---could not do what a hitherto neglected group of artists did for James's tales. Starting in the late 1860s and continuing for much of his career, commercial artists who worked for magazines supplied illustrations that appeared on the same pages that reproduced many of his short stories. (1) Their works ranged from crude pictures to elaborate engravings, from decorations that demurely occupied the margins to drawings that crowded the prose off of the page. Unlike the paintings, sculptures, and photographs that inspired the imaginations of James and his readers, these illustrations competed in an immediate way with James's work, occupying space on the periodicals' pages and potentially drawing a reader's attention away from his prose. Many of James's short works appeared with this visual dimension superimposed by editors and illustrators, and though we commonly read them as solely verbal texts, they still reflect their original, illustrated contexts. The Turn of the Screw, one of James's most widely interpreted but least visually descriptive tales, appeared in illustrated, serialized form in Collier's magazine from January to April, 1898. A lifelong friend of the novelist, John La Farge, painted a masthead that began nearly every weekly installment (figure 1). Another illustrator, Eric Pape, painted several dark and suggestive illustrations to accompany the tale. James reprinted the tale later that same year, 1898, without illustrations, as one of two stories in The Two Magics, as if he felt rushed to place it in an unillustrated context as soon as he could. He published it again in 1909, with Coburn's photographic frontispiece, in the New York edition. Most of the story's contemporary reviews, and nearly all of the subsequent interpretive controversies, take the unillustrated edition of the tale as the definitive text, neglect Collier's serialization, and ignore La Farge's and Pape's illustrations. (2) The story stands as one of James's most popular narratives, while La Farge's masthead and Pape's paintings rank among the rarest and least reproducible Jamesiana. Five of the illustrations I reproduce for this article have not reappeared in print since their initial 1898 publication. (3) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] But in fact, a tale that has become an endless interpretive riddle for James's readers first appeared in a surprisingly visual, pictorial venue, and much of what we now read as the tale's unresolvable ambiguities reflect the original incongruity between the tale's obscurities and the magazine's visual propensities. James knew as he wrote the tale that an editor of a popular periodical would take his turn serializing it, that commercial artists would take their turns illustrating it, and that readers, once it got to be their turn, might take the illustrations as authoritative interpretations. James conducts a subtle conversation with these illustrators, complicates and frustrates their efforts, and works to assure his authority as a writer over theirs as artists. (4) He demonstrates what he could accomplish with ellipses, double entendres, and metaphors that illustrators could not accomplish with ink, paintbrushes, and engravings. Finally resisting the illustrator's efforts, and vindicating the writer who had seen literary prose gradually disappearing from ever-more illustrated pages, the narrative in these respects disarms the editors, artists, and ultimately, critics, who meant to take their turns visualizing The Turn of the Screw. The Editor's Turn James had done little more than listen to the Archbishop of Canterbury's suggestion for a story and record the idea in his notebooks before a magazine editor began to influence the story's development. …