Ambiguity and Gender Politics of Authorship in Henry James's <em>The Turn of the Screw</em> and “The Ghostly Rental”

Abstract

. James's relationship with the woman question has generated numerous debates in critical history, both for its centrality in Jamesian studies and for its ambivalence. Instead of attempting to resolve the relationship once for all, I believe that we can catch a glimpse of the various ways in which James engages with the question by bringing his less studied works to bear upon his much discussed canonical ones, and by combining different critical perspectives in a way that reveals his uses of aesthetic means for sociopolitical ends. More specifically, I bring James's The Turn of the Screw and “The Ghostly Rental” together in a comparative analysis, and argue that a prominent aesthetic feature in his stories, namely, ambiguity, functions to bring the stories into a dialogic relation with each other. Their dialogism, in turn, serves as a subtle authorial comment on the gender politics of professional authorship as it throws into relief the contrasting situations of literary men and women in the nineteenth century. Studying the stories vis-à-vis each other from a hybrid perspective casts new light on James's understanding of the gender divide on the literary market. It also raises critical awareness of his previously neglected “The Ghostly Rental,” and draws attention to its internal connections with the canonical The Turn of the Screw.