E. Nesbit, the Bastables, and The Red House: A Response

Autospectrography:On Henry James's The Turn of the Screw Kalliopi Nikolopoulou Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents and the reading of print and handwriting—on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. —Joseph Conrad1 And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. —Wallace Stevens2 If testimony [. . .] became proof, information, certainty, or archive, it would lose its function as testimony. In order to remain testimony, it must therefore allow itself to be haunted. —Jacques Derrida3 Writing about one's past, which is what autobiography is about, has to do with the summoning of specters. Still, if autobiography is haunted, it also haunts its readers and interpreters, who are enthralled but also burdened by the furtive glimpse they are allowed into the other's darkness. Like Douglas, one of Henry James's narrators in The Turn of the Screw, the literary scholar might well ask, If autobiography as ghost story gives the readerly effect another turn of the screw, what do you say an autobiography about ghosts themselves will do?4 Since I am concerned here with the relationship of autobiography to spectrality, I take James's celebrated ghost story as a case in point. [End Page 1] In her seminal essay "Turning the Screw of Interpretation," Shoshana Felman observes that The Turn of the Screw could be read "not only as a remarkable ghost story but also as a no less remarkable detective story," the story of "a singularly redoubtable crime: the murder of a child" (175, original italics).5 To these two forms then I add autobiography, particularly the autobiographical memoir, since the novella's main plot allegorizes the autobiographical process in the first-person chronicle of a young woman's experience as a governess in a haunted house. In terms of the tale's critical history, it is interesting to observe that attempts to liberate it from the traditional polemic between the apparitionists (those insisting on the reality of the ghosts) and the hallucinationists (those pathologizing the governess—notably, Edmund Wilson) have often involved a rethinking of its generic structure. Thus, several years before the 1977 publication of Felman's essay in Yale French Studies, which used Lacanian analysis to turn from the hitherto thematic interpretations of the tale to questions about its language structure, Susan Crowl's 1971 reading attempted to reconcile the opposed camps by focusing on the reliability of the governess's first-person narrative. For Crowl, this narrative reveals a truth that is not necessarily empirical, but whose lack of empirical verifiability is not transparently self-incriminating: insofar as the governess sees the ghosts, they are real, but her susceptibility—rather than equaling madness—can be viewed as a figure through which James links inner experience to the social expectations that are brought to bear on the character's construction. The governess's unreliability serves as a stylistic marker of James's psychological realism. Although Crowl's reading still operates within the boundaries of a form/content distinction, it does shift the ground of the discussion by acknowledging the confessional mode of the text. Crowl writes: I have tried to sketch some of the implications and applications of reading "The Turn of the Screw" as allegory—or, more precisely, as about allegory. We may read it, I propose, either as allegory about the way in which the intensities of experience felt as deeply private are also a social gesture, or as aesthetic allegory about another kind of publication of private vision. The governess is a figure both for social effects and for stylistic purposes. Bly and the events of the governess's stay there are turned into concrete and spatial metaphors in the process of the personal confession she undergoes. (114-115, my italics) Crowl's essay does not mention autobiography, but to the extent that she considers the governess's madness a symptom of a psycho-social gap, an "imbalance between the envisioning self and the environing world" (121...

Although first-person and singularly focalized third-person narration remain the most common narrative forms in young adult literature, novels featuring multivoiced narration have long played an important role in the genre. These novels--in which narrative responsibility is shared at least two narrators or focalizers--enact Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of polyphony explicitly demonstrating the mutual influence and interplay of multiple voices. Because one of the most common and important goals of polyphony is to portray the development of characters' identity and subjectivity, multivoiced narration is in many ways particularly applicable to young adult literature, a genre defined its protagonists' maturation, increasing awareness of their subjectivity, and expanding worldview. Multivoiced narration also highlights questions of power constructing complex networks of character relationships that demonstrate the challenges that adolescents face while navigating various institutional and social hierarchies. Although adolescent narrators are given narrative authority, it is immediately and frequently challenged the other voices that compete for influence and control; this distribution of narrative authority suggests, in turn, that the best way for adolescents to gain access to any degree of power is to understand and accept their roles in a system that represses them. Rob Thomas's 1997 novel Slave Day, which features eight first-person narrators and an explicit concern with the power structures at play in a small-town Texas high school, is a particularly useful example of the ways in which multivoiced narration can provide insight into adolescents' experiences of and access to power. As many critics (e.g. Schuhmann 314) have noted familiar, relatable first-person narration has become something of a hallmark of contemporary adolescent literature; while third-person narration occurs somewhat less frequently than first-person narration in adolescent literature, it remains a prevalent narrative form in this genre. Typically, third-person narratives employ one focalizer through whose eyes the events are presented and perceived. In both of these conventional narrative forms, the focus on a single consciousness allows for a comprehensive development of one character's growth and subjectivity. However, while narratives that feature only one perspective present a clear focus on identity, one of the most common criticisms of first-person narration or third-person narration focalized through the eyes of an adolescent is that the narration is overly simplistic or limited. Mike Cadden asserts that by employing an all-too-reliable young adult's consciousness, the YA novelist often intentionally communicates to the immature reader a single and limited awareness of the world that the novelist knows to be incomplete and insufficient (146). Cadden provides helpful insight into the particular effects of the most common type of narrative in young adult literature examining questions of power available to or possessed the author, the narrator, and the reader. Borrowing a term from Bakhtin, Cadden argues that young adult fiction is inherently double-voiced, as the perspectives or beliefs of both the adult author and the adolescent narrator may find expression in a given work: When an adult writer speaks through a young adult's consciousness to a young adult audience, he or she is involved in a top-down (or vertical) power relationship. It becomes important, then, that there be equal (or horizontal) power relationships between the major characters within the text so that the young adult reader has the power to see the at play. (146) While singly-voiced novels can of course portray the horizontal power relationships to which Cadden refers, multivoiced narration allows for a more thorough investigation of opposing ideologies and demonstrates the ways in which the various points of view influence and are influenced each other. …

310 The Henry James Review Paul G. Beidler. Frames in James: The Tragic Muse, The Turn of the Screw, What Maisie Knew, and The Ambassadors . English Literary Studies, No. 59. Victoria, British Columbia: U of Victoria P, 1993. 108 pp. $9.50. By Joseph R. Urgo, Bryant College Paul Beidler is working from two major premises, one familiar and the other quite innovative. The first is an exploration of what James called "the analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist." Beidler's goal in this instance is "a philosophical analysis of the Jamesian novel as painting" (13). So far, so good, historically speaking. It was a commonplace of late nineteenthcentury literary criticism to find aesthetic parallels in the arts, especially in sculpture and painting. Beidler's second premise distinguishes his argument. It is less common to locate the parallel between art and fiction "beside" the aesthetic subject; specifically, in the necessity of a frame to border, limit, and contextualize the work. For this second premise, Beidler draws on Derrida's essay "Parergon" (from The Truth in Painting), in which Derrida inverts the normative aesthetic hierarchy that places the painting in precedence over the frame. In "Parergon," "attention is focused on the frame rather than the painting, the preface rather than the book, and the marginal rather than the primary" (13-14). According to Beidler, "The importance of Derrida's theory of the parergon to literary criticism lies in the fact that the incapability of attaining true primacy (or complete presence) and the need to somehow overcome this handicap by juxtaposition with an 'other' are characteristics of both the work of art and the human spirit" (15). As a result, Beidler suggests, contemporary literary critics turn their attention to the function of frames, borders, and margins as contextualizing devices, identifying them as intellectual regions without which we would have no conception of focus, of structure, or of (to invoke James) the real thing. The insights into specific novels that emerge from this Derridian concept are rich enough to sustain the monograph with very few weaknesses. For example, on What Maisie Knew: "Maisie's own role...is that of a parergon: she is not an integral part of the family, but she frames it....Though Maisie is unwanted, she is necessary; the family would collapse without her... .Maisie, like the column that holds up a building, is both necessary and excluded from the goings-on inside....Without Maisie, her father and Miss Overmore would be exposed as adulterers. The lack that necessitates the frame, then, is simply the lack of decency. A presence is required to atone for this absence, and Maisie is that presence" (61). Or, concerning the Lambinet chapter in The Ambassadors: "if Strether is in the book but not in the story, where exactly is he? He is observing the world, looking at it as a detached and disinterested connoisseur because he is Book Reviews 311 in the frame of the story. Strether jumps, in fact, from his story to ours in the Lambinet chapter" (85). It is at this point in his argument, however; that Beidler rises above the level of one-more-reading of familiar texts, theory-in-hand. A question arises: Must the frame be outside the work of art? The Lambinet section occurs within the text of The Ambassadors, and yet functions as a preface. "The chapters can be called a preface because they disclose, in a completely different style and mode than the rest of the novel, a truth that cannot be expressed in the work but must be expressed of the work. This truth, like those truths that fill the prefaces in The Art of the Novel, can only exist in exclusion" (88). Critics have struggled throughout the second-half of the twentieth century to define this phenomenon. Readers will recall the discussion of "framing devices" in the 1950s, "meta-commentary" in the 1960s, or the "self-reflexive" modes of the 1970s. Indeed, at times Beidler's language is reminiscent of earlier critical generations: "Life becomes art and art becomes life, and the result of this art-within-life-within-art—all within the confines of a...

THE FIRST-PERSON NARRATORS OF HENRY JAMES W. R. Macnaughton* It may seem almost presumptuous to suggest that, given the wealth of perceptive criticism and scholarship,devoted to the life and work of Henry James, there is any area of the master's activity which has been given short shrift. It is evident, however, that this is the case with the majority of the fifty first-person tales that he published between 1865 and 1901.' Certain stories, of course, (and the novel, The Sacred Fount) have received their share—perhaps more than their share of critical attention, "The Turn of the Screw" being an obvious case in point.2 Yet, despite the work of critics like Wayne Booth, many readers persist in regarding such stories ("The Aspern Papers" is another example) as sports in the Jamesian canon, and conclude that almost all of his narrators are only functions of his narrative method or mouthpieces of their creator.3 The most unfortunate result of these attitudes is that a number of good stories written throughout James's career remain uncriticized and unread. The concept of the "disinterested" observer—a staple of Jamesian criticism4—can be particularly misleading when applied without real discrimination to the first-person fiction: James's narrators are rarely "disinterested" either in the sense of being emotionally uninvolved in the actions which they describe, or able to judge these actions with anything approaching total objectivity. They frequently possess subtle biases, a fact which demands that the reader criticize the stories which he overhears, or at least scrutinize them carefully to decide whether dimensions exist which the narrators have left unexplored. In their excellent theoretical work, The Nature of Narrative, Robert Scholes and Robert Kellog assert that the first-person narrative situation is "ineluctably ironical" since it creates a potential disparity between the perspectives of the narrator, the other characters, and the audience; for the author, therefore, the control of irony becomes the principal technical problem.5 For the reader of Henry James's first-person fiction, "Professor Macnaughton teaches at the University of Waterloo. He has published on Melville, Howells, James, and Hemingway and is currently at work on a book on Mark Twain. 146W. R. Macnaughton the awareness of and response to irony becomes the most important factor in appreciating the richness and complexity of even some of the apprentice works. On first consideration, however, such conclusions would seem to fly in the face of James's own comments on and implied attitudes toward first-person narration. Certainly James's statements about the firstperson in his Preface to The Golden Bowl must be considered by any critic interested in James's narrators. When he discusses his handling of the Prince in the novel, for example, James says that he is "very nearly" a first-person narrator in effect—that, in other words, he is the "reflector ... in the clear glass held up to so many of the 'short stories,' " the difference being that the Prince is very much embroiled in the action. Again, in the same Preface, James mentions how "often" his narrator has been "but an unnamed, unintroduced, and (save by right of intrinsic wit), unwarranted participant, the impersonal author's concrete deputy or delegate, a convenient substitute or apologant for the creative power otherwise so veiled and qualified." Finally, he refers to his past practice of viewing his subject through some "more or less detached, some not strictly involved, though thoroughly interested and intelligent, witness or reporter" who contributes "mainly ... [a] certain amount of criticism and interpretation of it."6 It seems legitimate to relate these comments to those which he makes about his ficelle figures in the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady—they belong properly only to the "treatment of the subject"7—and to decide that his first-person narrators are analogous in their general function to the ficelles. In the light of such statements, one might acknowledge the cogency of the following assertion: "It is easy sometimes, to think the author of a book is ironic toward his narrator when he is not."8 One might also conclude that careful discrimination and an awareness of the possibilities of irony would...

Reviewed by: Imagination and Desire in the Novels of Henry James, and: Henry James and the Art of Power, and: The Problematic Fictions of Poe, James and Hawthorne, and: Engel en afrond over "The Turn of the Screw" van Henry James Rosalie Hewitt Carren Kaston . Imagination and Desire in the Novels of Henry James. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1984. 202 pp. $22.50. Mark Seltzer . Henry James and the Art of Power. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984. 200 pp. $19.95. Judith L. Sutherland . The Problematic Fictions of Poe, James and Hawthorne. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1984. 133 pp. $19.00. Ernst Braches . Engel en afrond over "The Turn of the Screw" van Henry James. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1983. 184 pp. pb. No price given. These four books may in some unscientific way represent the continuing diversity of interest in the works of Henry James. Kaston's book, the most absorbing of the three English studies (Braches's book is in German, except for the Epilogue), covers a goodly number of James's novels, and a few short stories, from the perspective that former critics have not fully recognized how James has consciously contributed to his readers' doubts about the value of renunciation—too many have thought their inability to accept the saintliness of a Claire de Cintré or a Lambert Strether was because of a tension between James's values and their own. Kaston argues that many of James's characters, often his centers of consciousness, fail to be imaginers of their self, and it is in the "negative space" of the fiction, the shadow of the plot, the shape it might have taken, that the reader is led to question this failure of the imagination. Only in What Maisie Knew and The Golden Bowl are there centers who take on the dangers of self-authorship, and between Maisie and Maggie it is Maggie who is better able to fuse self with the external world. Although Kaston may herself be entering into some invention in her statements about the inadequacies of former readers of Henry James, she nevertheless constructs an analytical approach that offers a fresh recasting of the characters' dilemmas and their resolution of them. Kaston sees the desire for a self that is created in collaboration with others and in the world as the essence of feminism—the attempt to create a relationship where neither "domination" nor "surrender," neither "mastery" nor "victimization," is acceptable. Kaston uses James's own phase, "the predominant imagination," as the paradoxical descriptor for the person who, like Maggie Verver, desires and achieves the experience of mutuality. The chapter titled "The Melodrama of Helplessness" is chiefly interesting because of the connection Kaston makes between Alice James's invalidism and the desire of characters such as Catherine Sloper, Claire de Cintré, and Isabel Archer to create melodramatic rituals as a substitute for active involvement in the world. Further, their renunciations are primarily based on others' definitions of life, not their own. Like Alice James, they became self-victimizers through their acceptance of a design that conformed to another's vision of life, usually a parental figure. There are two imaginers of Isabel Archer's life—Ralph Touchett, an Emersonian idealist, and Gilbert Osmond, a collector of portraits. [End Page 252] In the next chapter on the ambassadorial consciousness, Kaston pursues James's resistance to the Emersonian theory of self. Fleda Vetch and Lambert Strether eventually advocate self-concepts that reflect a belief in a universal self that is not to be tarnished by too close an identity or involvement with the physical and the social. The heroine of "In the Cage" is, however, breaking down the enclosures that would isolate the self; she actively pursues experience, resisting the melodramatic ritual of renunciation. And it is with this heroine that the major figures of Kaston's last chapter, Maisie Farange and Maggie Verver, are most closely identified. Both Maisie and Maggie author their own fictions of self; and Maggie most completely can possess both "self and world." Kaston's most provocative analysis occurs in the section on The Golden Bowl where she unites the several threads of her argument—feminist theory, Emersonian idealism, and melodramatic rituals...

"But I was a little boy, and what could I do about it?":Contemplating Children as Narrators in the Short Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines Alexis M. Egan (bio) Must a narrative be realistic or true to life? Is it the author's responsibility to construct a believable narrative, complete with a realistic structure? These are among the many questions explored by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. The work is considered to be something of a landmark text in respect to narrative theory. To date, the text is best remembered for how it marks the first appearance of the now-familiar term "unreliable narrator" (211). In the decades since the work was first published, Booth's term has been vigorously applied to a wide range of texts spanning centuries, genres, and mediums. Scholars who use the term generally do so in order to defend or refute a theory regarding a narrator's trustworthiness or validity as a storyteller. Although the narrators in question vary as widely as the texts that they live in, it is important to note that few groups are seen as unreliable in their narration of a story's events as are child and teenage narrators. Teenage and child narrators who have borne the brunt of this stigma include such iconic figures as Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield, and myriad others centered in a field of debate and inquiry. Yet this article is not about Holden or Huck. Neither is it intended to weigh the merits of Booth's rhetoric nor those whose writings were influenced by his. Rather, the essay is centered on the short fiction of Ernest J. Gaines; I explore the response to the author's use of first-person child narrators in "A Long Day in November" and "My Uncle and the Fat Lady." The purpose? To consider them in the context of "unreliable narrators" and explore how and why select Gaines scholars and characters in the pieces identify his narrators as such. More precisely, I focus on the possibility that such claims, whether accidental or deliberate, illustrate a cultural bias rooted in an ageist ideology. Subsequently, I enter into brief discussions of a youth lens as a remedy and why Gaines's fiction is of significant use in this debate. Prior to doing so, it is worthwhile to open with a history of narrative unreliability. Booth situates the unreliable narrator and unreliability in general as a consequence of either deliberate irony—in some cases referring to it as [End Page 49] "deception"—or as a matter of "inconscience" on a narrator's part. He attributes the latter term to Henry James, describing how it refers to a "narrator [who] is mistaken, or [who] believes himself to have qualities which the author denies him" (159). Booth further insists that the author is the person who determines how a narrator is perceived by an audience. He goes on to stipulate that readers are often in "collusion" with the author, complicit and eager in their shared judgment of a narrator. Together, author and readers critique a narrator by "agreeing upon the standard by which he is found wanting," especially "when the narrator shows ignorance of matters of fact" (304). The eagerness readers experience arises from the agreed-upon judgment, in turn eliciting a "pride in [their] own knowledge" and the opportunity to simultaneously exclude and "ridicule" the subject in question (304). Author and audience thereby exert a prejudice and superiority over fictional narrators of various backgrounds and narrative techniques. For first-person narrators, especially those of a younger age, this pattern is doubly damning as it already has a cultural system of ageism and a corresponding language to rely upon. Few scholars make this as apparent as does William Riggan, author of Pícaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns. Unlike Booth, the scholar discusses specific categories of first-person narrators—referenced in the work's title—and why they are particularly suspect. Initially, he indicates that, barring "any obvious errors of fact," the first person features an intrinsic realism which complies with readers' "natural tendency" to believe in a narrator and what the narrator conveys to an audience (19). Riggan attributes this to...

He's nobody.... He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and pale face, long in shape, straight good features and little rather queer whiskers that are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are somehow darker; they look particularly arched and as if they might move good deal. His eyes are sharp, strange--awfully; but I only know clearly that they're rather small and very fixed. His mouth's wide, and his lips are thin, except for his little whiskers he's quite clean-shaven. He gives me sort of sense of looking an actor. actor! ... I've never seen one, but so I suppose them. (1) Thus the governess in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) describes man she has seen, later identified as Peter Quint. Why should he call to mind an actor? The strongly marked features and bold eyes suggest it, perhaps, as might the somehow showy contrast of fiery hair and whitish skin. There are his clothes, which appear to her costume: certainly, though indefinably, not his own. Yet it is also more than this. The sighting of Quint on the tower lasts only one unspeakable minute; nonetheless, his image leaps out at her, sharply defined as a picture in frame (16). An actor out of context, he has somehow too much presence, is too intense, too able to fix her his eye. But for all this force he lacks substance, since he is like Nobody she has ever met, for sure--but the words hint that nobody is what he is like. He is surface without center, impact without weight behind it. He fascinates yet repels, commands the gaze but alienates; an actor, he deceives. In the first part of this essay, I examine the theatricality of The Turn of the Screw, considering the presence of performance as metaphor within the tale, and the ways in which James's fascination the contemporary stage pervades the text. In this period of his career, James wrote several works that made self-conscious attempts to embody or scenic principles. What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Awkward Age (1899) are perhaps his most fully realized examples of the play-as-novel, to use Peter Brooks's phrase (2): each case, central situation is explored through series of presented episodes with no going behind, no telling about the figures save by their own appearance and action. (3) The Turn of the Screw belongs to this period, but my concern is less to examine its dramatic structure--an ambition that has been realized already by other critics (4)--than to draw attention to more elusive qualities of theatricality: to ideas of acting and role-play that produce, for reader as well as protagonist, conflicted sense of what is real; to qualities of shadow and stillness that heighten anticipation and create focus for action and speech that is shockingly compelling; to the way in which the theater auditorium itself--a space marked literally and figuratively the traces of past performance--becomes powerful and unsettling metaphor through which we can read the haunted scene of Bly. This story achieves its effect as much by suggestion and the deliberate withholding of information as by direct revelation. Famously, James claimed his intention was to make the reader the evil, make him think it for himself. (5) The second part of my discussion considers how reception is altered when the tale comes ready equipped visuals: here, in the form of theatrical adaptation. I examine William Archibald's 1950 stage play The Innocents, dramatization of The Turn of the Screw that later became the basis for Jack Clayton's better-known film. I argue that The Innocents is more than the fairly straightforward dramatic reconstruction Val Wilson terms it; (6) rather, Archibald's play undermines its own apparatus of realism, drawing on uniquely theatrical qualities to provoke sense of profound disquiet in its spectators. My second example is more recent. Jeffrey Hatcher's The Turn of the Screw (first produced in 1996) aims to stay true to the essence of James's story and themes, yet rejects virtually all the resources conventionally used to make the stage world resemble fictional one. …

Studies examining the dialogicity of fictional consciousness within novels have tended to predominantly focus on third-person narratives or free indirect style. Fewer studies have engaged with the first-person mode, for such narratives are often considered to be confined to one viewpoint. Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark is predominantly related through the protagonist’s, Anna Morgan’s, first-person narration; however, Rhys interweaves a multitude of other voices within this mode, creating a dialogic tension with the external viewpoints expressed. Through the representation of differing perspectives in conversation with one another, Rhys demonstrates how individual consciousness is not isolated but shaped and constructed through interaction with the ideological viewpoints of others. The cacophony of voices engaging in dialogic discourse within the protagonist’s consciousness destabilises the boundaries between self and other, between public and private discourses. While Voyage in the Dark is a first-person autodiegetic narrative, through a detailed analysis of linguistic mechanisms, this study highlights the strategies of dialogisation (repetition and echoes, the blurring between private and public discourse, double-voicing, and enacting external viewpoints) employed within Anna’s first-person narration to create a sense of divided consciousness. By investigating how Rhys has employed linguistic devices and effectively utilised modes of consciousness (particularly the interior monologue) to present differing worldviews through one consciousness, this study also exemplifies the relevance of Bakhtin’s concept of dialogicity to first-person narratives.

The problems entailed by first-person narration and the novel of the 'unreliable narrator' are well known. A first-person narration will give the reader a fuller experience of a particular subjective view of the world, which is a desirable end, while at the same time it will make it impossible for the reader to see how this subjective point of view is meant to square with the world as experienced by others. What value are we supposed, or ought we, to give to any one point of view in the search for truth? The first-person narration poses an implicit question of evaluation: how important is this evidence? If the subjective point of view is also untrustworthy, that is, if we cannot take everything reported as being made up of true or sincere reports, then we have a problem of validity as well as one of evaluation. In Joyce Cary's trilogy we find three first-person narrations which are apparently the tales of 'unreliable narrators'. It is perhaps not surprising then that Robert Bloom concludes his study of Cary's second trilogy with the belief that the reader's attempt to extract a coherent vision from the three novels is hopeless, frustrating, impossible: But his inclusiveness is a liability as well as a strength, for it impedes his ordering of his own energies and the energies of his characters. He fails to provide us with a reliable means of concluding from the novels themselves something more than that the world is senselessly divided and sustained by a compelling, frequently disastrous, vitality.1

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is an excellent writer with a great diversity of works including poems, short fictions, and literary theories in the 19th century. His stories are usually connected with the supernatural events shrouded in a weird and bleak atmosphere, which also provide penetrating insight into the mental state, especially psychological problem of the unreliable first-person narrators. One of his short story, William Wilson, is a mixture of surrealism and Gothic sentiment, in which the narrator tells the story of a schizophrenic who commits suicide from the first-person narrative situation. The author adopted the unreliability of the narrator as a rhetorical strategy. Based on the leading figure of Narratology, James Phelan’s theories about unreliable narration, this paper interpreted the unreliable narration in William Wilson from three axes including the facts, the ethics and the perception, which purports to grasp the connotation of the narrator and the complex plurality of the narrator's identity construction at the textual level as a whole.

The proposed model foregrounds the category PERSON by following E. Benveniste as to the fundamental disparity between the first and second grammatical persons, on the one hand, and the third person, on the other. My argument runs as follows: A statement about reality is in the first person, that is, made by its author. Third-person narrative fiction is a legitimate notion, given the displacement it enacts between the author and a narrating agency that does not share its realm of existence with the narrated characters (F. Stanzel). Third — and firstperson narrative can be structurally differentiated as to qualitative scope ([un-]reliability) and quantitative reach. Basically, both narrative types show the same interplay of the registers of enunciation and illusion: the narrating agency dissolves in evoking a world and emerges by commenting on it (a "narrator" does not narrate, but, in H. Weinrich's sense of the term, comments). Comment (which is general in subject matter and abstract in manner), report (particular and abstract), scene (particular and concrete), and metaphor (general and concrete) demarcate a frame of reference for narrative discourse that subsumes description. With third-person narrative, this frame of reference has a tendency to transcend itself toward the sphere of reality statements via comment (authorial "I"/"you") and toward first-person narrative via scene, given that, in third-person narrative, the speech of a character about his/her reality is a first-person narrative in nuce. The transposition principle at work between third — and first-person narrative and all further embedded narratives consists in the fact that narrative subject/object structure (K. Hamburger) vanishes in one frame of reference only by reemerging in another. The modes of conveying character thought and speech in fiction can be conceived in terms of complete or partial transposition of narrative discourse to a subordinate frame of reference. Regarding free indirect discourse, G. Genette's distinction between focalization and (narratorial) voice must be challenged as contradicted by our reading experience. Second-person narrative, whose special affinity for the depiction of consciousness is explicable from the angle of "natural" narratology (M. Fludernik), can be basically modeled on first-person narrative

In Unreliability and Point of View in Filmic Narration, Emar Maier makes a distinction between reliable and unreliable narrators. The latter, Maier claims, must be a first-person narrator, as an impersonal, third-person narrator lacks an individual perspective that can be unreliable (with some exceptions he sets aside). He concludes that most film adaptations of unreliably narrated novels are not themselves unreliably narrated, for they feature third person perspectives (not through the novel’s narrator’s eyes). I take Maier’s major claims to be (1) that there is a strict distinction between reliable and unreliable narration; and (2) that film shots displaying both a character and that character's hallucinations are not unreliable narration. I will challenge both.

We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction

N A R R A T IV E F O R M IN T H E B L I T H E D A L E R O M A N C E * DOUGLAS HILL Erindale College, University of Toronto Conspicuous among the elements of American experience that nurture the rich literary harvest of the early 1850s is an increasing and unprecedented reliance upon first-person experiential narrative to record the journeys of the metaphysical or fictional imagination. Emerson’s Nature, the travel-books of Dana, Parkman, Margaret Fuller and Thoreau, Cooper’s last six novels, Melville’s first five — each of these is an exploration of the form that triumphs in Moby-Dick, Walden, and Song of Myself. The diverse reasons for this concentration of energies include the intangible — the European Renaissance ideal of self and the American Puritan habit of spiritual intro­ spection — as well as the concrete — the extension of national boundaries to the west, north, and south, and the avalanche of factual and quasi-factual narratives of exploration and discovery accompanying it. Although any full investigation of a particular literary mode’s influence at a particular time is beyond the scope of a short paper, a study of what happens when an estab­ lished writer decides to turn his hand to a first-person novel can lead to insights into the effects of the chosen form both upon the surfaces and mean­ ings of that novel itself, and upon the author’s career as a whole.1 The Blithedale Romance, published in 1852, is unique among Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels in its direct dependence upon the inspiration of personal experience. In his preface, Hawthorne describes that sojourn at Brook Farm some ten years earlier as “certainly, the most romantic episode of his own life — essentially a daydream, and yet a fact — and thus offering an avail­ able foothold betewen fiction and reality.”2 The foothold he speaks of might be said to lie between the familiar landscape of the romance-novel and the unexplored territory of the realistic novel, between his accustomed ease in the omniscient, third-person narrative and the peculiar pressures of the firstperson form that his interest in the Brook Farm adventure led him to employ. His attempts to find and keep this foothold mark The Blithedale Romance as the crisis-point in the evolution of his narrative art. Neither his scrapping of Fanshawe (1828) in favour of the short story nor his turning from that medium twenty years later to the longer romance of The Scarlet En g l ish Studies in C anada, vii, 4, December 1981 Letter and The House of the Seven Gables is as significant. For when Haw­ thorne takes up a challenge now, he is unable, for the first time, to master it. Not only does his failure with first-person narrative cause severe problems in The Blithedale Romance. More important, it unfits him for a return to his solid ground of romance, a disability that the torpor of The Marble Faun (i860) and the agonizing efforts to breathe fictional life into his final frag­ ments show all too clearly. Most of Hawthorne’s difficulties in The Blithedale Romance are those of integration. He simply cannot make Brook Farm work conceptually for him in the way that the scarlet “A” or the Pyncheon curse had worked before. They infuse their respective books with symbolic power, the source of which is in Hawthorne’s artistic imagination and only peripherally touched by the circumstances of his personal life. This is not at all to suggest that an author’s actual experiences cannot explicitly inform a novel, but that Haw­ thorne seems to have been unable to find the key that could unlock the potential efficacy of his own for him. At the same time — a misfortune as far as his career was concerned — he seems to have committed himself com­ pletely and irretrievably to the search for that key. His struggles with firstperson narrative are the visible evidence of his search. Hawthorne’s choice of form seems at first glance, especially if one looks at the beginning of the book, to have been both natural and wise. His time...

When James, after the failure of Guy Domville in 1895, withdrew from his attempt to conquer the London stage, he felt he had been brought face to face with some very ugly aspects of English life. The audience, for example, had made more of a spectacle of itself than the cast. The popular element in the theatre had, with 'malice prepense', openly sided with the villain of the piece, Lord Devenish, and had failed to appreciate Guy, the last of the Domvilles, James's renunciatory hero. When he took his author's curtain-call, James found himself at the centre of a storm of derision and applause which was more than just critical, but moral. 'All the forces of civilization in the house', he wrote to his brother, 'waged a battle of the most gallant, prolonged and sustained applause with the hoots and jeers and catcalls of the roughs, whose roars (like those of a cage of beasts at some infernal "zoo") were only exacerbated (as it were!) by the conflict.'105