I need to get a draft paper for my class on The Turn of the Screw. See attached instructions, and outline for my paper. YOU MUST USE THE 6 ARTICLES I ATTACHED ON PDF.

(90 ) These appearances of “literally” give the reader pause, though not for the same reason in each case. In several instances (“literally to catch them at a purpose in it,” “seemed literally to be running a race,” “having Mrs. Grose literally in hand”), the governess says “literally” when she means “figuratively.” In others, the categories of literal and figurative have no clear application to the idiom in question, which is neither overtly figurative in character nor contains a dead metaphor that could be activated. What would it mean “literally” to find a joy—or “figura - tively” to find a joy, for that matter? It is uncertain what the force of the term “literally” here is meant to be. So too, the assertion that Miles “literally bloomed” raises the question of the semantic priority of the horticultural and abstract senses of “bloom”: which is literal, and which figurative? The OED gives priority to the horticultural meaning, citing an Old Norse word for flower as the root. If the horticultural sense of “bloom” is the etymon “bl¯om,” then the governess’s abstract use of the word is a troping on the original meaning, and is therefore strictly figura - tive in character; her “literally” is an awkward catachresis. In her recol - lection of running a race, the first “literally” is obviously figurative, the second less clearly so; the governess may physically have bound forward in response to Miles’s candid outburst, as if in literalizing activation of the first “literally,” but because we cannot be sure of this, her bounding is undecidably poised between the literal and figurative. And finally, the governess’s query to Mrs. Grose about Miles’s “literal” badness is laced with ironizing qualifications. Here “literally” appears to mean “in fact,” but the scare quotes surrounding “bad” place it under ironic erasure, as if she means to challenge accepted notions of what constitutes bad behavior in boys. A similar disavowal marks “ever,” which is first under - lined for emphasis and then undercut by ironizing scare quotes. The governess’s invocations of the literal in these passages create a semantic and rhetorical jamming that, like catachresis, a figure for which there is no literal term (leg of a table, face of a mountain), confounds the distinction between literal and figurative. 1 The collective appearances of “literally”—fifteen times in some one hundred pages—suggest a sus - tained interrogation on James’s part of the category of the literal as it pertains to the governess’s acts of interpretation, especially in a text whose title foregrounds the turnings of trope itself, and in which the The Literal Turn 65 dozens of appearances of “turn” and its variants suggest a concern with the nature and status of trope per se. The second appearance of “literally” in The Turn of the Screw intro - duces a thematics of reading that will condition the governess’s herme - neutic scrutiny of the children: I had supposed the ugly signs of [weeping] brushed away; but I could literally—for the time at all events—rejoice, under this fathomless charity, that they had not entirely disappeared. To gaze into the depths of blue of the child’s eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgement and, so far as might be, my agitation. ( 60 ) It is ironic that the governess invokes the category of the literal here because her reading of Flora’s physiognomy is structurally meta - phorical: Flora’s lovely blue eyes function as signifiers of her innocence and virtue. To be sure, the governess’s assumption of the moral import of Flora’s beauty here is undercut by the negative construction that rejects any qualifying suspicion that her “placid heavenly eyes” ( 31 ) may be a “trick” signifying cunning rather than innocence. More, the metaphor of depths is suggestive of equivocal meanings lurking beneath deceptive surfaces, as when the governess elsewhere suspects “depths, depths!” or “a deep design” on the part of Flora and of the ghosts respectively ( 57 , 77 ). Although the governess repeatedly oscillates between the belief that Flora’s beauty reveals her angelic nature and the symmetrical sus - picion that it masks a cunning or corrupt interior, both interpretive operations assume that appearances are figurative in the sense of bear - ing an assigned and non-intrinsic meaning. The governess’s initial conviction of the ethical meaning of Flora’s “angelic beauty” ( 30 ) is underwritten by a Neoplatonic tradition that finds influential articulation in Kant’s Critique of Judgment , notably in chapter 59 , “Of Beauty As the Symbol of Morality.” There, Kant argues for an essential relation between the beautiful and the moral: Now I say the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good, and that it is only in this respect (a reference which is natural to every man and which every man postulates in others as a duty) that it gives pleasure with a claim for the agreement of every - 66 Sheila Teahan one else. By this the mind is made conscious of a certain enno - blement and elevation above the mere sensibility to pleasure received through sense.” ( 198–99 ) As Vance Bell explains, the relation of beauty to morality is for Kant structurally analogous, which is to say that it is metaphorical: “the relationship is one of analogy in which the two concepts ‘beauty’ and ‘morality’ are found to function according to similar formal principle . . .

it is through a process akin to metaphor that beautiful form is found to represent morality” ( 2). In his authoritative explication of Kantian aesthetics, Rodolphe Gasché demonstrates that the lynchpin of Kant’s theory of the relation between the beautiful and the moral is provided by the notion of hypotyposis, the “sensible showing forth of pure con - cepts” without which “there would be no cognition whatsoever” ( 209 ). The genealogy of hypotyposis—at once a concept, a trope, and what is sometimes called a “rhetorical figure”—has classical origins in Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintillian, and significant Renaissance loci in Du Marsais and Fontanier. I will not rehearse here the details of that genealogy as traced by Rodolphe Gasché, but wish to highlight the key features of hypotyposis that make it germane to a consideration of the rhetorical status of James’s ghosts and of the governess’s narrative constructions more generally, which—as Ned Lukacher has noted—have tended not to receive the analytic scrutiny they merit. 2 In defining hypotyposis as a mode of visual presentation, Kant fol - lows Cicero’s recommendation of subjectio sub adspectum (“throwing under the eyes”) as an effective rhetorical device. Quintillian similarly advocates hypotyposis as an “appeal to the eye” that “thrusts itself upon our notice.” Gasché observes: “as a rhetorical notion, hypotyposis means an illustration in which the vividly represented is endowed with such detail that it seems to be present, and to present itself ” ( 207 ). In the Renaissance, hypotyposis becomes associated with vivid pictorial repre - sentation. Fontanier speaks of its ability to create “an image, a tableau, or even a living scene” (Gasché 208 ); for Morier, hypotyposes “vividly depict, as in paint” ( 207 ) such phenomena as natural catastrophes and civic ceremonies. This conceptualization of hypotyposis is rich in impli - cations for The Turn of the Screw . For what are the governess’s visions of the ghosts if not hypotyposes in the sense of tableaux or vivid presen - tations? Several of her key sightings of the ghosts of Quint and Jessel The Literal Turn 67 are hypotyposes in the Renaissance sense of rhetorical set pieces whose contents are overdetermined in their literary antecedents and cultural associations. Lukacher observes that the image of the ghost of Jessel seated at a desk embodies “the very epitome of Gothic melodrama” as culled from the governess’s reading of such novels as The Mysteries of Udolpho , Jane Eyre , and Armadale (123 ), and Stanley Renner contends that her physical description of Quint (red hair, whiskers, beady eyes) draws upon a widely circulated cliché of the Victorian sexual preda - tor. The governess’s visions of the ghosts are hypotypotic in their detail and vivid presentation. They are further hypotypotic in their narra - tive potential. To say that hypotyposis translates an image into a living scene, as does Fontanier, is to say that it narrativizes a figure. J. Hillis Miller observes that the “necessity of narrative in any discourse about ethics” is analogous to the “necessity of using analogies or figures of speech in place of an unavailable literal or conceptual language”: “Nar - rative, like analogy, is inserted into that blank place where the presumed purely conceptual language of philosophy fails or is missing” ( Ethics of Reading 24 ). The ghosts are figures, in the full sense, of the governess’s imagination. They are sensible showings forth of phenomena otherwise unavailable to the senses, images with the potential to quicken into life and motion, if such can be said of ghosts, as when Quint, after appear - ing to the governess as a static pictorial image “as definite as a picture in a frame” ( 40 ), begins to move and “slowly changed his place—passed, looking at me hard all the while, to the opposite corner of the platform” (41 ).

As T. J. Lustig demonstrates in his fine book on James and the ghostly, there exists a longstanding association between ghosts and writing, and especially between ghosts and figurative language. The ghost undoes the distinctions between present and absent, present and past, and literal and figurative, which is also to say that it disrupts the temporal and ontological categories constitutive of the sign. Numer - ous philosophers have aligned ghosts specifically with the seductive and disruptive power of metaphor. In Leviathan , Hobbes associates “phan - tasms of the brain” with “dead men’s ghosts,” and condemns “conjura - tion, through which “by . . . words, the nature or quality of the thing itself, is . . . changed,” as an abusive literalization of figure: “Hobbes’s assault on the ghosts went hand in hand with his attempt to confine, purge and exorcize language, particularly in its figurative dimension” 68 Sheila Teahan (Lustig 10–11 ). In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , Locke famously advances Hobbes’s attack on figure, associating the “artificial and figurative applications of Words Eloquence hath invented” (Lustig 13 ) in particular with the problem of the threshold and of separating “the monstrous figure from the ordered body of philosophical discourse” (14 ). In Lustig’s account, this longstanding mutual imbrication of the ghostly and the metaphoric culminates in the Todorovian category of the fantastic, in which “‘rhetorical figures’ precede and make possible devils, vampires and other manifestations of the supernatural” ( 21 ). In keeping with this traditional alignment of figure with thresholding, the ghosts are insistently associated with liminal temporal points (dawn, dusk, twilight) and liminal spaces: as the governess explains, “They’re seen only across, as it were, and beyond—in strange places and on high places, the top of towers, the roof of houses, the outside of windows, the further edge of pools” ( 77 )—a sequence that reads like an abbreviated plot summary of the ghosts’ principal appearances (Quint on the tower and at the window, Jessel by the pool). Kant’s conceptualization of hypotyposis helps us to specify further the interrogation of figure that James’s novella both thematizes, as in the governess’s labored readings of Miles and Flora for signs of corrup - tion, and dramatizes, as in the hypotypotic manifestations of the ghosts of Quint and Jessel. Kant famously distinguishes between schematic and symbolic hypotyposis. In schematic hypotyposis, “direct or demonstra - tive presentations of concepts [are] comprehended by the understanding by means of a prior corresponding intuitions—the schemata.” Symbolic hypotyposis, on the other hand, involves “indirect presentations of concepts of reason (whose objective reality cannot be demonstrated”) (Gasché 211 ). Kant asserts that cognition through symbols is figura - tive in character, and when Gasché speaks of symbolic hypotyposis as entailing “recourse to a rhetorical figure” ( 209 ) such that the “concept loses its emptiness and acquires a specific figurality” ( 213 ), he comes close to a definition of catachresis. In his essay on Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals , Miller makes this same connection in com - menting on Kant’s necessary recourse to analogy in his discussion of the necessarily indirect character of access to a universal or transcendental moral law: “Respect for the law is said to be analogous to just those two feelings which it has been said not to be: inclination and fear. The name for this procedure of naming by figures of speech what be named literally The Literal Turn 69 because it cannot be faced directly is catachresis or, as Kant calls it in paragraph fifty-nine of the Critique of Judgment, ‘hypotyposis’” ( Ethics of Reading 20 –21 ). The ghosts are symbolic hypotyposes, catachrestic constructions produced by the hesitation between literal and figurative marked by the governess’s recurring “literally,” which appears especially at moments when the reality of the ghosts is in doubt and which sig - nals her attempt to clarify the rhetorical and ontological status of elu - sive “figures,” as the ghosts as Quint and Jessel are repeatedly termed:

“There were times of our being together when I would have been ready to swear that, literally , in my presence, but with my direct sense of it closed , [Flora and Miles] had visitors who were known and were welcome” ( 80 , emphasis added). Gasché’s comment that Kantian hypotyposis pro - duces “the reality of our concepts” ( 210 ) such that “the mind becomes affected by its own spectacle” ( 211 ) indeed resembles a plot summary of The Turn of the Screw . Because symbolic hypotyposis has to do with the threshold of perception, bringing into view that which is otherwise unavailable to the senses, there is indeed a sense in which the ghosts are brought into “being” by the sheer pressure of the governess’s effort to perceive them. 3 The catachrestic status of the ghosts is foregrounded by the governess’s insistent foregrounding of her struggle to find lan - guage to represent phenomena that “no words can translate” ( 95 ): she can “express no otherwise,” ( 42 ) “can use no other phrase,” ( 104 ) and tries out metaphors to convey the ineffable: “I chattered more than ever, going on volubly enough till one of our prodigious palpable hushes occurred—I can call them nothing else—the strange dizzy lift or swim (I try for terms!) into a stillness” ( 81 ). The etymology of the term hypotyposis is uncannily suggestive for a reading of the ghosts as hypotypotic constructions. From hypo (under, below, beneath) and typosis , a figure made by molding or modeling, hypotyposis is a sketch or outline. Aristotle’s hypotypoun , meaning that which shapes or forms an essence, is traditionally translated as “pre - senting tentatively, in a rough, schematic outline” (Gasché 206–7 ). Hypotyposis is the presentation of types, “that is, as impressions (in a seal), hollow molds, or engravings that provide the general outline, the prescribed form, the model for any particular (cognitive and practi - cal) realization” (Gasché 215 ). In recounting her hermeneutic efforts to ascertain the ghosts’ reality and the nature of their relation to the children, the governess repeatedly uses explicit or implicit metaphors 70 Sheila Teahan of tracing and sketching: “He has no hat.” Then seeing in her face that she already, in this, with a deeper dismay, found a touch of picture , I quickly added stroke to stroke . (48 , emphasis added) . . . as I trace over what we went through I see how much common ground we must have found in the one idea that, by good fortune, could steady us . . .We had gone over and over every feature of what I had seen. ( 50 ) The very act of bringing it out [her suspicion that the children’s “more than earthly beauty” is “a policy and a fraud”] really helped me to trace it—follow it all up and piece it all together.

(76 ) . . . it was absolutely traceable that they were aware of my pre - dicament . . . . ( 78 ) The governess also foregrounds the difficulty of producing a coher - ent mental picture of her situation: “How can I retrace to-day the strange steps of my obsession?” ( 80 ); “. . . we had altogether failed to trace [Flora]” ( 97 ); “There was no trace of Flora, on that nearer side of the bank where my observation of her had been most startling. . .” ( 99 ). Her activity of tracing produces the hypotypotic tableaux constitutive of the ghosts, an activity whose status as writing is made explicit when the governess saw Quint “as I see the letters I form on this page” ( 41 ). Although she fears that the ghosts will present to the children a cor - rupting “vivid image” ( 81 ), it is the governess herself whose interpretive scrutiny seeks to bring the ghosts within her threshold of perception and so conjures them forth in the mode of Hobbesian “conjuration.” Her surveillance is a peculiar species of performative that acquires the tautological structure of a hermeneutic vicious circle: to know that the ghosts are in the vicinity is to see them, and to see them is to know that they are present. If her epistemological efforts are devoted to conjur - ing an appearance, what appears is—at once redundantly and Gothi - cally—precisely an apparition, an etymological appearance (from the Latin apparere ). The governess’s hypotypotic activity itself doubles, or is doubled by, a representational practice specified in James’s retrospective preface. In his creation of the “pair of abnormal agents,” James explains, he sought The Literal Turn 71 to avoid the “comparative vulgarity” that would have followed from specifying the nature of the ghosts’ actions. He therefore shuns repre - sentation of “the offered example, the imputed vice, the cited act, the limited deplorable presentable instance.” The key to avoiding the vul - garity of “weak specifications” is what James terms a “process of adum - bration ” ( Art 175–76 ). Eric Savoy observes: Like much of James’s critical lexicon, “adumbration” comes from the language of painterly practice; according to the OED , “to adumbrate” means “to shade (a picture), to represent the shadow of (anything), to give a faint indication of.” Adumbra - tion, by extension, denotes “shading in painting, representation . . . of a shadowy figure” and, most tellingly, “overshadowing, shade, obscuration.” ( 250 ) James’s trope of adumbration invokes the shadowy figuration of hypo - typosis. For what are the ghosts of Quint and Jessel if not “shadowy fig - ures”? To sketch, outline, or shade in the picture is to produce, precisely, shades . And if James’s representational strategy is that of adumbration, so too is that of the anecdote he identifies as the germ of The Turn of the Screw , the “mere vague, undetailed, faint sketch” ( Complete 109 ) that been offered to James as a narrative germ by Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The anecdote about children corrupted by “wicked and depraved” servants and subsequently haunted by their ghosts, itself “one of the scantest of fragments,” a multiply occluded “shadow of a shadow”—Benson’s source for the story had herself “lost the thread of ” the particulars—is a mise-en-abyme of the self-effacing rhetorical operation of adumbration ( 109 ; Art 169 , 170 ). The germ of James’s novella is an oxymoronic “withheld glimpse,” a play of conceal - ment and exposure akin to that of hypotyposis itself ( 170 ). As a figure that renders shadowy and indeterminate that which it represents in the very act of representation, adumbration partakes of the same structural gap between the “original” and its catachrestic stand-in as does hypoty - posis. Savoy notes that in “the visual arts, adumbration procures a cer - tain depth, a richness of tone, and an extension of perspective, but to envelop the represented object in shadow is not to obliterate the object itself ” ( 250 ). I would add that the mode of adumbration in question in The Turn of the Screw is such as to blur the distinction between the fore - 72 Sheila Teahan grounding shadow and the object that ostensibly precedes it temporally and ontologically. As the governess discovers, it is ultimately impos - sible to distinguish between metaphorical and literal, figure and ground (“There was a figure in the grounds—a figure prowling for a sight” [ 71 ]). This undecidable hesitation between figure and ground, the oscillation that produces the governess’s preemptive “literally,” is the exemplary Jamesian hesitation of hanging fire, an idiom from the history of fire - arms referring to the “delay between the ignition of the powder and the actual firing of the ball” (Lukacher 131 ). To hang fire is to “‘ to hesi - tate,’ ‘to withdraw, or step back, in the very act of seemingly stepping forward to say something’. . . ‘to keep something hidden in the very act of apparently revealing something’” (ibid.). The trope of hanging fire is itself a catachresis, a figure of suspensive hesitation not quite adequately translated by the abstraction “hesitation,” and Lukacher’s formulation recalls hypotyposis and catachresis alike as signs that cannot coincide with the concept they both manifest and occlude. 4 The governess’s narrativization of shadowy figures is most elabo - rately dramatized in the episode in chapter vi in which she observes Flora at the lake. Having resolved to let “it be seen” that she will succeed in saving the children where “many another girl might have failed,” she proposes a strategy according to which “I was a screen—I was to stand before them. The more I saw the less they would” ( 53 ). Her positing of a zero sum economy of things to be seen in which the governess can pre - vent the children from seeing too much by seeing more herself is not fully compatible with her metaphor of herself as a screen that might block the children’s vision, and the differential economy of seeing predicated here is later contradicted—indeed reversed—altogether (“What it was least possible to get rid of was the cruel idea that, whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora saw more ” [ 81 ]). Nonetheless, the governess proceeds with her project of surveillance (“My attention to them all really went to seeing them amuse themselves”), and she and Flora stroll towards the lake “seeking the shade” in a punning prolepsis of the ghostly tele - ology of the scene. The governess’s vigilance promptly identifies “an interested spectator” who is assumed to be watching the children with malevolent intent: ironically, the scene is organized around a sustained act of seeing that doubles rather than counteracts the putatively sinister gaze of the ghostly spectator. The Literal Turn 73 I had sat down with a piece of work—for I was something or other that could sit—on the old stone bench which overlooked the pond; and in this position I began to take in with certi - tude and yet without direct vision the presence, a good way off, of a third person . . . . There was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever at least in the conviction I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I should see straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of raising my eyes. They were attached at this juncture to the stitching in which I was engaged, and I can feel once more the spasm of my effort not to move them till I should so have steadied myself as to be able to make up my mind what to do. There was an alien object in view—a figure whose right of presence I instantly and passionately questioned. ( 54 ) This scene is organized around metaphor: in the didactic play in which Flora is engaged, “the lake was the Sea of Azof,” and the govern - ess has been assigned a metaphorical identity by her pupil, one that she cannot recall (“I forget what I was on the present occasion; I only remember that I was something very important and very quiet and that Flora was playing very hard” [ 54 ]).5 That she has forgotten her role in the game is characteristic, for despite her assertion that she is merely on object of the children’s imaginative activity (“I walked in a world of their invention—they had no occasion whatever to draw upon mine” [ 54 ]), the governess in fact authors what follows. The sewing with which she occupies herself is an overt figure for narrative itself; indeed her “piece of work” resonates with the later reference to the “pieces [Miles and Flora] had secretly got by heart and could interminably recite,” and in the same paragraph she figures her narrative as a “pensive embroidery” ( 65 ), making explicit the trope of piecework as narrative. 6 Her apprehension of the ghost is indirect (“without direct vision”), and her “stitching” figures her narrativization of what she finds herself “forming as to what I should see.” The indirection of her apprehension is the indirection of hypotyposis, which imposes a form on that which is otherwise unavail - able to the senses. The object of her apprehension is formed before the governess raises her eyes—she effortfully keeps her eyes on her needle - work until she “make[s] up” her mind—and in what is perhaps the most ironic line in the entire text, there “was no ambiguity in anything.” In 74 Sheila Teahan her statement that there “was an alien object in view,” “in view” is a species of catachresis, for even as she contemplates “the character and the attitude of our visitor,” she does so “still even without looking” ( 55 ). The governess never does see the figure who is implied in this passage to be male (“nothing was more natural for instance than the appearance of one of the men about the place, or even of a messenger, a postman or a tradesman’s boy” [ 54–55 ]), contrary to her revelation in the follow - ing chapter that the ghost is Jessel’s. When at last she shifts her glance from her needlework and “transfer[s her] eyes straight to little Flora,” she finds Flora engaged in a metaphorical transfer of her own as she uses a piece of wood to fashion something that “might figure as a mast and make the thing a boat” ( 55 )—a prolepsis of the scene in which the real boat’s disappearance confirms for the governess that Flora has taken it to meet Jessel (“Our not seeing it is the strongest of proofs” [ 99 ]). In contrast to the presence and immediacy suggested by the chap - ter’s ironic final words—”I faced what I had to face”—the governess does not see Jessel’s “dreadful face” ( 70 ) in this scene, and her vision of Jessel is unrepresented, elided altogether. 7 It occurs, if at all, in the blank space between chapters vi and vii . Her identification of a “figure of quite as unmistakeable horror and evil: a woman in black, pale and dreadful” ( 56 ) is a hypotypotic construction produced in her subsequent exchange with Mrs. Grose: The more I go over it the more I see in it, and the more I see in it the more I fear. ( 57 , emphasis added) . . . I had only to ask her how, if I had “made it up,” I came to be able to give, of each of the persons appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail, their special marks —a portrait on the exhibition of which she had instantly recognized and named them. ( 59–60 , emphasis added) Like the “sinister figure” of Quint whose presence is inferred from events that had not occurred at the time of the inference (“by the time the morrow’s sun was high I had restlessly read into the facts before us almost all the meaning they were to receive from subsequent and more cruel occurrences” [ 52 ]), the governess’s perception of the ghost of Jessel is a metaleptic construction available only in retrospect. As Julian Wolfreys comments of Daniel Defoe’s ghost narrative “A True The Literal Turn 75 Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal”: “What is uncanny is the act of telling, the narrative act of bringing the ghost back in a tempo - rally disjunctive manner, which destabilizes the cognition of temporal order as a perceived sequence of events” ( 5). In contrast to Lukacher’s avowed intention to “determine what primal scene or fabula lies behind the sjuzet that is her narrative” ( 116 ), which assumes that a fabula that exists prior to its discursive realization in the governess’s text, I would suggest that the apparition of Jessel is produced by the rhetorical exer - cise of hypotyposis. Jessel’s “return” is necessarily marked by deferral and displacement, and the temporal displacement of her description from chapter vi to chapter vii ironizes the governess’s confident align - ment of seeing and knowing—“They know . . . Flora saw !”; “I saw with my own eyes” ( 55–56 ). But in chapter vi she “sees” only Flora playing with the wood pieces, and we see only the governess seeing Flora. The ghost is produced by the very gap between seeing and knowing that this scene both reveals and covers over. 8 Unless we are to adopt the governess’s subsequent theory that not seeing is the strongest of proofs, it is impossible to confirm that she has seen anything at all. The appearance of Jessel elided in chapter vi is displaced to chapter xx , where it coincides with the dramatic exposure of Flora’s incriminat - ing ability to see her. The governess registers this second appearance of Jessel by the lake as a repetition—“Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she had stood the other time” ( 101 )—albeit a repetition without an original. 9 This repetition produces its own miss - ing original, and so confirms after the fact the governess’s hermeneutic perspicacity (“She was there, so I was justified; she was there, so I was neither cruel nor mad” [ 101 ]). But her complacency is shattered by an ironic reversal by which Flora not only refuses to look in Jessel’s direc - tion but, for the first time, turns an accusatory gaze on the governess herself: To see her, without a convulsion of her small pink face, not even feign to glance in the direction of the prodigy I announced, but only, instead of that, turn at me an expression of hard still grav - ity, an expression absolutely new and unprecedented and that appeared to read and accuse and judge me—this was a stroke that somehow converted the girl herself into a figure porten - tous. I gaped at her coolness even though my certitude of her 76 Sheila Teahan thoroughly seeing was never greater than at that instant. . . .

(102 ) The “certitude of her thoroughly seeing” has an ironic double mean - ing unavailable to the governess: she refers to her belief that Flora can see Jessel, but what Flora principally sees is the governess herself as an object of hermeneutic scrutiny, in a reversal of the dominant specular dynamic to this point. If Flora’s face is still readable as an outward sign of inward innocence, it is predictable that the “dreadful turn” ( 102 ) signified by Jessel’s apparent invisibility to Flora and Mrs. Grose will effect a transformation of Flora’s blameless “small pink face” to a “small mask of disaffection,” a dissimulating surface indicative of unspeak - able depths of knowledge: “she was literally, she was hideously hard” (103 ). “Literally” is aligned here with vulgarity (“after this deliverance, which might have been that of a vulgarly pert little girl in the street, she hugged Mrs. Grose” [ 103 ]) in a manner that conspicuously recalls the open-ended frame that introduces the governess’s narrative. There, Douglas predicts to his listeners that the story “won’t tell . . .not in any literal vulgar way” ( 25 ). What is at stake in this alignment of lit - erality and vulgarity? Flora’s play, which echoes and perhaps parodies the governess’s own activity with the needlework (“piece of work,” “piece of wood”), performs—in its witty and allusive troping on James’s title and on the sexual thematics hidden in plain sight throughout the text—considerably more sophisticated tropological work than does her teacher’s simple equation of the lake with the Sea of Azof. As Shoshana Felman has taught us, the almost hyperbolic phallic imagery conjured by Flora’s play sets a trap for the naive and sophisticated reader alike:

“To say that the mast is in reality a phallus is no more illuminating than to say that the phallus is in reality a mast. The question arises not of what the mast ‘really is’ but of what a phallus— or a mast—might be, if they can thus be so readily interchangeable, i.e., signify what they are not” ( 214 ).10 Insofar as the mast and phallus are figures for each other but cannot be said to signify anything beyond their undecidable mutual reference—which is the figure and which the ground?—one might say that each is a catachresis of the other. If Flora literalizes the title of The Turn of the Screw in what Douglas might characterize as a literal, vulgar mode of “telling,” little wonder that the governess perceives her, in an impossible catachresis, as “literally . . . hard.” The Literal Turn 77 Contradicting her earlier theory, the governess entertains the hypothesis that the ghosts are least visible to her when they are most visible to Flora and Miles: “What I had then had an ugly glimpse of was that my eyes might be sealed just while theirs were most opened” (80 ). Here, the ironic catachresis of “glimpse” highlights the undecid - able mutual imbrication of literal and figurative, of blindness and sight.

The governess’s glimpse of her own sealed vision, like the oxymoronic “withheld glimpse” of the novella’s germ, recalls the play of exposure and concealment that constitutes hypotyposis. That the specific con - tent of what the governess sees is available only indirectly and after the fact should come as no surprise, for as Wolfreys asserts, not only is “the question of the spectre, the ghost, the phantom, the uncanny. . .

intimately enfolded with” issues of seeing, but conversely, perception itself is “caught up in, traced by phantom effects” ( 21 ). In his reading of Freud’s essay on the uncanny, Neil Hertz proposes that the uncanny is a function of the dynamic of the repetition compulsion rather than of any particular content: “The feeling of the uncanny would seem to be generated by being reminded of the repetition compulsion, not by being reminded of whatever it is that is being repeated”; one gets “glimpses . . . felt as disturbing and strange” of “the invisible energies . . .

of the repetition compulsion” ( 101 ).11 On this view, what the governess glimpses is the “invisible figure which despite its invisibility is nonethe - less momentarily glimpsed” (Wolfreys 17 ). It is the very non-specificity of what returns in the uncanny that enables the governess to “read. . .

more or less fantastic figures” into the “blanks” of James’s deliberately unspecified horrors ( Art 177 ). In a recurring thematics of the blank page, she implicitly figures Miles’s face as a sheet of paper (“His clear listening face, framed in its smooth whiteness” [ 92 ]), and the lake is figured as a “sheet of water,” another readable text ( 98 ). In contrast to Quint’s already read status as the type of the Victorian sexual predator whose familiarity is uncanny in its effect (“its was as if I had been look - ing at him for years and had known him always” [ 44 ]), Miles appears utterly blank and without antecedent: “[he] struck me as beginning anew each day . . . I could reconstitute nothing at all, and he was there - fore an angel” ( 43 ). As with Flora, the governess reads Miles in terms of metaphorical categories of inside and outside (“I had seen him on the instant, without and within, in the great glow of freshness, the same positive fragrance of purity, in which I had from the first moment seen 78 Sheila Teahan his little sister” [ 36–37 ])—categories that are notoriously unstable and readily reversible: hence the abrupt slippage from the positively charged images of the children as tabulae rasae to the antithetical, if visually indistinguishable, image of Miles’s incriminating “white face of damna - tion” ( 116, 119 ).12 When Mrs. Grose asks the governess to explain her conviction that Jessel is “a horror of horrors,” she responds by gesturing toward a relay of vision that circulates among Jessel, Flora, and the governess herself: “Know? By seeing her! By the way she looked . . . She only fixed the child. . . . Ah with such awful eyes!” ( 57 ). The double meaning of “looked”—as appeared and as gazed—underlines the asymmetry of the gaze in The Turn of the Screw . What is “awful” about Jessel is not her countenance, which exists purely as a hypotypotic projection, but the noxious power of her gaze. And if the ghosts are brought into view by the rhetorical work of catachresis, they are brought into view by their very resistance to being seen. Wolfreys proposes that the “efficacity of haunting is in its resistance to being represented whole or undifferenti - ated, or being ‘seen’ as itself rather than being uncannily intimated” (6). As we have seen, the operation of hypotyposis is by its nature indi - rect and displaced. If the ghost of Quint embodies the déjà vu of a rec - ollected unconscious fantasy on the governess’s part, it is also the case that, as Nicholas Royle writes, to experience déjà vu “is to be oneself already seen , watched (over)” ( 183 ). To see the ghost of Quint is thus to see mirrored back one’s own interrogative gaze: “[he] seemed to fix me, from his position, with just the question, just the scrutiny through the fading light, that his own provoked” ( 40 ). The ghosts in The Turn of the Screw come into view precisely as viewers whose putatively malevolent surveillance of the children is finally indistinguishable from the gov - erness’s putatively salvific watch over her charges. Recall that Quint’s first appearance is produced by the governess’ fantasy that the master observing and admiring her actions (“Some one would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve” [39 ]), a fantasy that soon modulates into the paranoid “suspicion of being watched from under cover” ( 79 ). As when Flora turns an accusing gaze back on the governess in the climactic scene at the lake, the gaze always threatens to redound from the object to the gazer; thus Miles’s carefully scrutinized face can become a perverse mirror reflecting back The Literal Turn 79 to the governess an unflattering image (“I seemed to see in the beautiful face with which he watched me how ugly and queer I looked” [ 84 ]). Of the “visor effect” exemplified by the visored face of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the asymmetrical dynamic in which one sees oneself being watched by a watcher whose own countenance remains invis - ible, Derrida writes: “we do not see who looks at us . . . This spectral someone other looks at us , we feel ourselves being looked at, outside of any synchrony . . . To feel ourselves being seen by a look which it will always be impossible to cross, that is the visor effect ” ( 7).13 Like Hamlet, we cannot come face to face with a ghost—indeed, the face is a cata - chresis for that which cannot be “faced” directly. To speak of a ghost as having a face is to employ prosopopoeia, the “figure most closely akin to hypotyposis” and the trope that in “its most inclusive, and also its etymological sense. . .designates the very process of figuration as giving face to what is devoid of it” (de Man, Aesthetic Ideology 46 ). That the rhetorical hypotyposes linked to the governess’s catachrestic “literally” should prove susceptible to gothic narrativization productive of “shad - owy figures” who haunt Bly should come as no surprise to readers of de Man, for whom “something monstrous lurks in the most innocent of catachreses: when one speaks of the legs of a table or the face of a moun - tain, catachresis is already turning into prosopopeia [ sic], and one begins to perceive a world of potential ghosts and monsters” ( Aesthetic Ideology 42 ).14 More, prosopopoeia is the figure that threatens to redound with disfiguring effect on the subject who projects the face or prosopon on the absent or dead other by striking the subject dumb or dead. 15 This destabilization of the self is twice registered by the governess; her third encounter with the “hideous” specter of Quint is “so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to make me doubt if even I were in life” ( 68 ), and in her vision of Jessel at the writing desk, “I had the extraordinary chill of a feeling that it was I who was the intruder” ( 88 ). As the governess discovers at the novella’s conclusion, where her recur - ring metaphors of grasping, seizing, and catching are fatally realized by the apparent death of Miles in her arms, the literalization of trope can have deadly effects. 16 But like the governess, we all inhabit the no- man’s-land of catachresis, where the literal and figurative have a way of changing places as readily as the living and the spectral, or the insider and the intruder. If facing down a ghost—as James’s governess appears 80 Sheila Teahan determined to do—is unwise, we may have no choice in the matter.

Like Miles, James has us “indeed, and in a cleft stick” ( 74 ), caught in an impossible double bind of which we have only a glimpse. Michigan State University n o t e s 1. Compare the opening sentence of Joyce’s “The Dead”: “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet” ( 175 ). The “literally” here is impossible, since Lily is on her feet rushing to admit the Misses Morkans’ guests. My thanks to Patrick O’Donnell for pointing out this post-Jamesian parallel. 2. As Lukacher observes: “What neither Felman nor any other critic of The Turn of the Screw has analyzed is the specificity of the governess’s visions/hallucina - tions. Numerous details and many of the most extraordinary scenes in the story have gone unnoticed, or at least unexplained, because the critical focus has been on the governess’s state of mind rather than on the particularity of the vision in question” ( 115 ). 3. Savoy similarly observes that “the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are a turning outward, a return to visibility, of the recesses of the governess’s speech acts” ( 261 ). 4. On aposiopesis, the trope of suspensive hesitation that creates a syntactical or rhetorical hanging fire, see Savoy. 5. Lustig makes the suggestive observation that, given the social and ideologi - cal instability of the figure of the governess in the nineteenth century, the figure of the governess “was like the strange term in metaphor, an alien who made herself uncannily at home within literality” ( 150 ). 6. Lustig also notes that the governess’s “literal acts of sewing and knitting are always closely connected to the appearance of ghosts” ( 132 ). 7. The phrase “face to face” recurs, again ironically, in chapter x: “She was face to face with the apparition we had met at the lake,” although Jessel’s face is not rep - resented as appearing to Flora or the governess ( 71). So too, her assertion that the “face” of the first apparition sighted “was exactly present to me—by which I mean the face was” is undercut by the displacement of the face she expects to see—that of the uncle—by that of Quint (“the man who met my eyes was not the person I had precipitately supposed” [ 39]). The face she encounters is not the uncle’s “handsome face” ( 39). 8. Savoy observes: “If suspicion is generated by the gap between seeing and knowing, then James’s gothic visual economy—its reiterated turns from connota - tion to prosopopoeia—constitutes the ghosts as the stubbornly irrepressible ‘real,’ the historical trauma that compels the governess’ recourse to symbolic condensa - tion yet resists the reach of the symbolic” ( 247 ).

The Literal Turn 81 9. Although Hertz does not make a direct connection either to catachresis or to hypotyposis, such connections are implicit in his observation that Freud “sees his figurative language as a means of lending color to what is otherwise imperceptible” (101 ).

10. As Felman notes, “the governess is suspicious of the ambiguity of signs and of their rhetorical reversibility; like Wilson, she thus proceeds to read the world around her, to interpret it, not by looking at it but by seeing through it, by demystify - ing and reversing the values of its outward signs” ( 230 ). Lustig similarly observes that “Miles’s beauty no longer testifies against the original hypothesis of his evil but actually confirms it” ( 172 ). 11. Quint’s appearances are similarly registered as repetitions: “The person looking straight in was the person who had already appeared to me; he was the same, and seen, this time, as he had been seen before” ( 44); “[the apparition] stopped short and fixed me exactly as it had fixed me from the tower and from the garden” ( 67). As with Jessel, these are repetitions without an origin, due to the displacement that structures the “first” appearance of Quint: her exclamatory “He did stand there!” is a misprision, since the identity of the figure who appears to her is revealed only in the following paragraph. 12. For Felman, the governess is engaged in “a quest for the definitive, literal or proper meaning of words and of events” ( 197 ). But the desire to eliminate ambi - guity, which Felman also imputes to the governess ( 198–99 ), is not identical to a quest for literal meaning. My contention is that the category of the literal is itself the source of considerable ambiguity in The Turn of the Screw . 13. On the implications of the visor effect for a range of James texts and\ espe - cially for A Small Boy and Others , see my “Specters of the Self.” 14. Cf. Savoy, for whom “the ghosts are connotation writ large . . . they accrue in rather circular fashion as a sustained act of prosopopoeia that is the essential gothic story of The Turn of the Screw ” (261 ). 15. On this topic, see “Autobiography as De-Facement” (in The Rhetoric of Romanticism ) and Miller, Versions of Pygmalion . 16. See Felman 205–7 , and my “‘I caught him, yes, I held him.’” w o r k s c i t e d Beidler, Peter G., ed. The Turn of the Screw . By Henry James. 2nd ed. Boston and New York: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2004 . Bell, Vance. “Falling into Time: The Historicity of the Symbol.” Other Voices: The (e)journal Of Cultural Criticism 1.1. (1997 ). . de Man, Paul. Aesthetic Ideology . Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996 . ———. The Rhetoric of Romanticism . New York: Columbia University Press, 1984 . 82 Sheila Teahan Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx . Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge, 1994 . Felman, Shoshana. Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985 . Gasché, Rodolphe. The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics . Stanford: Stan - ford University Press, 2003 . Hertz, Neil. The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime . New York: Columbia University Press, 1985 . James, Henry. The Art of the Novel . 1934 . Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984 . ———. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James . Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 . ———. The Turn of the Screw . Ed. Peter G. Beidler. 2nd ed. Boston and New York: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2004 . Joyce, James. Dubliners . Ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. 1976 . Middlesex, England and New York: Penguin, 1985 . Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment . Trans. J. H. Bernard. New York and London: Collier Macmillan, 1951 . Lukacher, Ned. Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis . Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986 . Lustig, T. J. Henry James and the Ghostly . Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994 . Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading . New York: Columbia University Press, 1987 . ———. Versions of Pygmalion . Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1990 . Renner, Stanley. “‘Red hair, very red, close-curling’: Sexual Hysteria, Physiognomi - cal Bogeymen, and the ‘Ghosts’ in The Turn of the Screw .” Beidler 271–89 . Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny . Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003 . Savoy, Eric. “Theory a Tergo in The Turn of the Screw .” Curioser: On the Queerness of Children . Ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 245–75 . Teahan, Sheila. “‘I caught him, yes, I held him’: The Ghostly Effects of Reading (in) The Turn of the Screw .” Beidler 349–63 . ———. “Specters of the Self in A Small Boy and Others .” Igitur (2003): 111–27 . Wolfreys, Julian. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature . London and New York: Palgrave, 2002 .