"Almost a Sense of Property": Henry James's <i>The Turn of the Screw</i>, Modernism, and Commodity Culture

Abstract

Metaphorical, if not literal, homelessness has seemed to many to be a defining condition of the life and work of Henry James. His friend Edmund Gosse, for instance, wrote that James was a “homeless man in a peculiar sense,” one who was never truly settled either in England, his adopted country, or the United States, his country of origin. 1 More recently, John Carlos Rowe has related James’s deracination to cosmopolitanism, outlining how the concerns of his fiction foreshadow recent efforts within the humanities to renovate the cosmopolitan ideal of respect for international and intranational differences. 2 And John Landau has argued that James’s complex late style both highlights and attempts to compensate for a general sense of cultural “homelessness”—that is, the increasingly unstable “grounds” of belief and knowledge in late-Victorian and Edwardian culture. 3 In this essay I relate James’s experience of metaphorical homelessness to his novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), the longest and most terrifying of his several ghost stories. I proceed from the contention that homelessness is this text’s founding narrative and semantic condition. Homelessness here refers to the textual instability in late James that other critics have characterized as groundlessness or fluidity, and I go on to consider the interpretative potential of these alternative descriptors. Considering the text in relation to homelessness, however, makes possible an understanding of how the text’s treatment of property is connected to the interrelated phenomena of sociocultural modernity and literary modernism. As a haunted house story, The Turn is concerned with claims to property: its sense of homelessness is paradoxically, uncannily contained within the home. The text’s representations of house, home, and homelessness, I suggest, enable an exploration of cultural uncertainties concerning the relations between property and identity at a historical moment in which the established model of such relations—masculine possessive individualism—was in conflict with the