Unsuspecting Narrative Doubles in Serial Publication: The Illustrated "Turn of the Screw" and Collier's U.S.S. Maine Coverage

Abstract

Unsuspecting Narrative Doubles in Serial Publication:The Illustrated "Turn of the Screw" and Collier's U.S.S. Maine Coverage Amanda Sigler When in 1898 Robert J. Collier assumed editorship of the journal founded by his father, he faced declining circulation numbers and a legacy of "hard times" (Mott 454). Two ground-breaking events occurred in the year he began editing Collier's Weekly: the journal secured rights to publish Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw," and the U.S.S. Maine exploded in Havana Harbor, providing rich possibilities for news coverage. As Frank Luther Mott records, Collier made two significant statements explaining the decisions he made during his first year at the journal: "I showed my judgment of the public taste by ordering a serial story by Henry James. . . . It was at that time . . . that the Maine blew up and Jimmy Hare [sent to Havana to cover the story] blew in" (455). Although Mott mentions these two events on the same page of his History of American Magazines, he fails to draw any further connection between them, and even scholars analyzing "The Turn of the Screw" as a serialized work have frequently bypassed the surrounding articles in favor of focusing on James's vexed relationship to the marketplace or on his general distrust of periodical illustrators. My project returns to the first publication of "The Turn of the Screw" in Collier's, examining not only how the journal's seldom-reprinted illustrations interact with the tale but also how "The Turn of the Screw" itself both anticipates and complicates its relationship to surrounding articles and visual images. Specifically, I shall discuss how Eric Pape's illustrations are far more complex than traditionally thought and how the coeval emergence of the Maine story at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War uncannily yet appropriately intersects with "The Turn of the Screw," reflecting and reifying anxieties common to the journal's late-nineteenth-century audience. [End Page 80] Whereas modern books strip "The Turn of the Screw" from its original position alongside these stories and images, Collier's uniquely surrounds James's text with striking visual art, other fictional works, and dramatic news coverage, forcing seemingly unrelated narratives to share space between the same journal covers. As Sean Latham and Robert Scholes write, periodicals are "rich, dialogic texts" that "create often surprising and even bewildering points of contact between disparate areas of human activity" (528). These competing and intersecting modes of representation, brought into dialogue by their proximity in periodical pages, give us new ways to approach the literature we typically encounter in different physical formats and in later historical eras. By examining these contexts—the physical positioning of James's story in Collier's and the historical moment in which the serialized tale was published—we can not only begin to more fully appreciate how the story's first readers would have encountered and responded to the tale but also find grounds for rethinking our own twenty-first century approaches to the text. In light of the large body of critical commentary that analyzes James's tale as a frame narrative, it seems important to resituate "The Turn of the Screw" within its original context as a serialized tale—especially since the outermost frame within the story gestures toward an audience of magazine readers. The narrator's comparison of the holiday gatherers' "last story" to "the mere opening of a serial" (TS1 3) gains even greater significance when we consider that this comment first appeared not between the covers of a book but between the covers of a periodical that had a tradition of publishing short stories, including ghost and sensation fiction. Thus when the narrator states that Douglas's story is told in the context of other tales, we may wish to think of it not only as adding "another turn of the screw" (1) to the Christmas Eve stories related within James's narrative but also as adding another turn of the screw to the stories published in Collier's. In 1897, the year leading up to the publication of "The Turn of the Screw," Collier's frequently serialized stories suggestive of horror and intrigue, including...