Twentieth-Century Models of Development: Precocity in James and Freud

Laing, Roisín

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-41382-7_6

Roisín Laing³

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

7 Accesses

Abstract

This final chapter asks where the precocious child ‘goes’ at the end of the Victorian period. I analyse the model of individual development enacted in Sigmund Freud’s ‘Dora’ (1905) and compare it with that of Henry James’s A Small Boy and Others (1913) to suggest that the dialogic model of individual development both James and Freud explore is comparable with Eliot’s in The Mill on the Floss and likewise has a phylogenic counterpart in Darwin’s model of species development. Thus, the precocious child of Victorian culture endures in the emergent discipline of psychoanalysis and in an experimental work of twentieth-century autobiography and continues to undermine linearity, hierarchy, teleology, and finality in the relationship between adult (self) and child (self). However, James’s best-known and most lasting work is a study both of the enduring need for an idea that the adult has progressed beyond the child and of the pathological effects of this need on both adult and child. I end this chapter, therefore, arguing that in The Turn of the Screw (1898) and in an earlier short story, ‘The Author of Beltraffio’ (1884), a progressive model of individual development persists, intractable, despite its violence towards both child and adult.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Chapter: USD 29.95; Price excludes VAT (USA)

eBook: USD 99.00; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 129.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
Judith Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 63.
2.
Quoted in Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan: Or, The Impossibility of Children’s Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 38.
3.
As far back as 1977, Ralf Norrman ‘hesitate[d] to add to the already extraordinarily rich crop of criticism’ on The Turn of the Screw (Ralf Norrman, Techniques of Ambiguity in the Fiction of Henry James (Abo: Abo Ackademi, 1977), 152).
4.
Paul John Eakin, ‘Henry James’s “obscure hurt”: Can Autobiography Serve Biography?’, New Literary History, 19/3 (1988), 675–692 (690).
5.
James, ‘A Small Boy and Others’, in Autobiographies, ed. Philip Horne (New York: Library of America, 2016), 1–250 (23).
6.
Meghan Marie Hammond, ‘Henry James’s Autobiography and Early Psychology’, a/b: Auto/biography Studies, 27/2 (2012), 338–353 (343). Despite its initial statement of intent, ‘A Small Boy and Others’ offers very limited ‘particulars of the early life of William James’, to the extent that William James is not even the ostensible protagonist to which Hammond refers (James, ‘A Small Boy and Others’, in Autobiographies, ed. Philip Horne (New York: Library of America, 2016), 1–250 (5)).
7.
See Hammond, especially 341, on the connection between the form of empathy James thus claims to experience and contemporary psychology and aesthetic theory.
8.
Hammond, 343.
9.
Elizabeth W. Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 29.
10.
Hammond, 344.
11.
Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 43.
12.
Paul De Man, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 67–81 (78).
13.
Scott S. Derrick, ‘A Small Boy and the Ease of Others: The Structure of Masculinity and the Autobiography of Henry James’, Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 45/4 (1989), 25–56 (28).
14.
Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius: A Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1992), 554.
15.
Eakin, 683.
16.
H. Porter Abbott, ‘Autobiography, Autography, Fiction: Groundwork for a Taxonomy of Textual Categories’, New Literary History, 19/3 (1988), 597–615 (602).
17.
James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 65, emphasis added.
18.
De Man, 71.
19.
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The One I Knew the Best of All: A Memory of the Mind of a Child (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1893), 325. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979), 16.
20.
Andrew Taylor, Henry James and the Father Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 59.
21.
Taylor, 60.
22.
See Saul Rosenzweig, Freud, Jung, and Hall the King-Maker: The Historic Expedition to America (1909) (St. Louis: Rana House Press, 1992) for a full account of this visit.
23.
Eugene Taylor, ‘William James and Sigmund Freud: “The Future of Psychology Belongs to Your Work”’, Psychological Science, 10/6 (1999), 465–469 (469).
24.
Kaplan, 532.
25.
Kaplan, 532.
26.
See Adam Phillips, ‘General Introduction’, in The “Wolfman” and Other Cases, ed. Adam Phillips (London: Penguin, 2002), i, and James Strachey, ‘Sigmund Freud: His Life and Ideas’, in Sigmund Freud 8. Case Histories 1: “Dora” and “Little Hans”, ed. Angela Richards, trans. Alix and James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1990), 11–24 on Freud’s contributions to psychoanalysis.
27.
Maud Ellman, The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 10–11.
28.
Anthony Storr reads this as symptomatic of Freud’s ‘rigidity’ and of his tendency for ‘excessive generalisation’ (Anthony Storr, Freud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 7, 8, and 28). Freud, of course, considered art an expression of, or means to discharge, repressed sexuality.
29.
Jonathan Flatley, ‘Reading into Henry James’, Criticism, 46/1 (2004), 103–123 (106).
30.
Storr, 37. Storr notes that it ‘has now been extended to include patient’s total emotional attitude to the analyst’ (Storr, 37).
31.
Patrick J. Mahony, Freud’s Dora: A Psychoanalytic, Historical, and Textual Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 39. See Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 215–230, on the use of autobiography in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s pioneering contributions to psychiatry.
32.
Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Childhood, Severed Heads, and the Uncanny: Freudian Precursors’, Victorian Studies, 58/1 (2015), 84–110 (85 and 86).
33.
Freud, ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (“Dora”) (1905 [1901])’, in Sigmund Freud 8. Case Histories 1: “Dora” and “Little Hans”, 29–164 (107). Subsequent citations will be given in parentheses.
34.
James, ‘A Small Boy’, 55. See William Veeder, ‘The Feminine Orphan and the Emergent Master: Self-Realisation in Henry James’, Henry James Review, 12/1 (1991), 20–54 (45, for a Freudian analysis of the biographical, therapeutic function of the ‘autobiographical moment’ for James (Veeder, 45)).
35.
James, ‘A Small Boy’, 55.
36.
‘Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’, The Modernism Lab: Yale University (New Haven: Yale University, 2010) http://modernism.research.yale.edu, [last accessed 4 September 2016].
37.
I use the patient’s real name, Bauer, rather than Freud’s pseudonym, ‘Dora’, when referring to the patient, firstly to avoid confusion between the patient and the case history, and secondly because the difference between the subject of Freud’s analysis and Freud’s image of her is relevant to my discussion.
38.
Although abuse, like inheritance, and any other causes of precocity, is not directly under scrutiny in this monograph, children from John Stuart Mill to Jennette McCurdy make it clear that child abuse often produces precocity of one form or another. It is equally important to note, however, that precocity is neither evidence nor exclusively the result of abuse: children like Oswald Bastable and Daisy Ashford are precocious with no apparent (or important) cause at all.
39.
Bruss, 11.
40.
George J. Makari identifies that Freud developed a theory of transference, first with Josef Breuer in Studies in Hysteria (1895), and then in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). However, he argues that it is only with the publication of ‘Dora’ that the theory ‘could no longer be missed’, and that it is ‘Dora’ which made transference ‘an integral concept for any clinicians interested in psychoanalysis’ (George J. Makari, ‘Dora’s Hysteria and the Maturation of Sigmund Freud’s Transference Theory: A New Historical Interpretation’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 45/4 (1997), 1061–1096 (1061–1062)).
41.
Mahony points out that Freud repeatedly and mistakenly claims that Bauer was fourteen at the time of the assault (Mahony, 9).
42.
Mahony, 148–149. The abuse continues into this century: see, for example, Robert A. Paul’s claim that Bauer ‘transferred her powerful, mainly unconscious, and deeply conflicted sexual excitement about Mr K. onto Freud, and asked to be taken to his office where she could lie alone with him’ so that she could, a century later, ‘hijack the case history written by her doctor’ (Robert A. Paul, ‘Purloining Freud: Dora’s Letter to Posterity’, American Imago, 63/2 (2006), 159–182 (169 and 181).
43.
See Hannah S. Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900 (New York: Free Press, 1991), 199. As Philip Abbott observes, ‘even Freud’s sympathetic readers seem to agree on this point’ (Philip Abbott, ‘The Human Sciences and the Case of the Untrustworthy Narrator: Sigmund Freud’s “Dora” and Louis Hartz’s “The Liberal Tradition in America”’, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 84/3/4 (2001), 419–447 (444)).
44.
Recent criticism of ‘Dora’ suggests that Freud has ultimately failed to control the meaning of Bauer’s symptoms. However, this failure does not support, or excuse, Paul’s notion that the events described in, and the subsequent history of, ‘Dora’, reveal, by realising, Bauer’s intentions, and that Freud therefore ‘didn’t treat her badly at all’, but instead ‘did exactly what she wanted him to’ (Paul, 182).
45.
See Freud, ‘Twenty-Seventh Lecture: Transference’, in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, trans. G. Stanley Hall (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2012), 363–378, for an overview transference and its implications for therapy.
46.
Neil Hertz, ‘Dora’s Secrets, Freud’s Technique’, Diacritics, 13/1 (1983), 61–80 (67).
47.
Steven Marcus, ‘Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History’, in Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 247–310 (300, emphasis added, and 307).
48.
Marcus, 309.
49.
Hertz, 67.
50.
Peter Brooks, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 58.
51.
Brooks, Psychoanalysis, 58.
52.
Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Severed Heads’, 106.
53.
See Beth Newman, ‘Getting Fixed: Feminine Identity and Scopic Crisis in The Turn of the Screw’, in New Casebooks: The Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew, ed. Neil Cornwell and Maggie Malone (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 112–141, on self-construction through the eyes of others in The Turn of the Screw. See Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 87–93, on the exploration of James’s ‘own emotional life’ which The Turn of the Screw offers through its study of the role of ghosts in Freudian self-construction (Flatley, 92).
54.
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, ed. Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren (1966; 2^nd edn, New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). 7. Subsequent page numbers will be given in parentheses.
55.
T. J. Lustig makes a similar point through a comparison of The Turn of the Screw with Jane Eyre: although ‘the governess tries, fails and abandons the attempt to become the adult Jane’, Flora performs ‘a plausible and relatively undistorted version of the young Jane’s career’ by being locked up and eventually sent away (T. J. Lustig, Henry James and the Ghostly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 143). By thus becoming a version of the very image—of Jane Eyre—in which the governess attempts to construct her self-image, Flora becomes a reflection of her governess which threatens that self-image.
56.
See Shuttleworth, Mind, 219.
57.
Marius Bewley, The Complex Fate: Hawthorne, Henry James, and Some Other American Writers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952), 103.
58.
John Carlos Rowe, ‘The Use and Abuse of Uncertainty in The Turn of the Screw’, in Cornwell and Malone, 54–78 (57).
59.
Joseph J. Firebaugh, ‘Inadequacy in Eden: Knowledge and “The Turn of the Screw”’, Modern Fiction Studies, 3/1 (1957), 57–63 (60).
60.
Henry James, ‘Preface to the New York Edition’, in Esch and Warren, 123–129 (128).
61.
Anon., ‘The Most Hopelessly Evil Story’, in Esch and Warren, 156.
62.
Shoshana Felman, ‘Turning the Screw of Interpretation’, Yale French Studies, 55/56 (1977), 94–207 (97).
63.
James, ‘The Author of Beltraffio’, in Henry James: The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Penguin, 1986), 57–112 (64). Subsequent citations will be given in parentheses.
64.
James ‘The Art of Fiction (1884)’, in James, The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Roger Gard (London: Penguin, 1987), 186–206 (187).
65.
D. A. Miller, Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), x.
66.
Kevin Ohi, ‘“The Author of Beltraffio”: The Exquisite Boy and Henry James’s Equivocal Aestheticism’, ELH, 72/3 (2005), 747–767 (753).
67.
Ohi, ‘Beltraffio’, 756.
68.
See James, ‘The Future of the Novel (1899)’, in Gard, 335–345, especially 336, on James’s own comparable views of the effect, on the ‘poor’ novel, of ‘making readers of women and of the very young’ (James, ‘Future’, 336).
69.
This is remarkably similar to James’s ambition as described by Dorothea Krook. According to Krook, ‘the artist’s overriding task’ was, for James, ‘to exhibit in the concrete, with the greatest possible completeness and consistency, as well as vividness and intensity, the particular world of appearances accessible to a particular consciousness under the specific conditions created for it by the artist’ (Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1962), 399–400). See also James, ‘The Real Thing’ (1892), in Tales of Henry James, ed. Christof Wegelin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 239–259.
70.
Of course, this is the narrator’s account of Mark’s world-view, not necessarily Mark’s view itself. See José Antonio Álvarez Amorós, ‘On Mark Ambient’s Henpeckery in “The Author of Beltraffio,” or, How to Keep Up Narratorial Preconceptions’, Journal of Narrative Theory, 38/3 (2008), 317–341, on the presentation and significance of the narrator’s aesthetic theory. See Donald Reiman, ‘The Inevitable Imitation: The Narrator in “The Author of Beltraffio”’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 3/4 (1962), 503–509, on the activity of the narrator in promoting the purity of Mark’s Art, and therefore on the culpability of the narrator in Dolcino’s death.
71.
James Scoggins, ‘“The Author of Beltraffio’: A Reappportionment of Guilt”, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 5/2 (1963), 265–270 (269).
72.
Lawrence R. Schehr, ‘“The Author of Beltraffio” as Theory’, Modern Language Notes, 105/5 (1990), 992–1015 (1009). ‘Experience’ of course extends beyond Dolcino; Mark’s surroundings, sister, etc. are all ‘aestheticised’.
73.
Schehr, 1009.
74.
Schehr, 1009. Viola Hopkins Winner argues that Mark’s ‘artistic temperament’ leads him passively to condone infanticide (Viola Hopkins Winner, ‘The Artist and the Man in “The Author of Beltraffio”’, PMLA, 83/1 (1968), 102–108 (108)), but this lets Mark of quite lightly, since his artistic philosophy leads to an active, if conceptual, compulsion to sacrifice his child to Art. See also See Mary P. Freier, ‘The Story of “The Author of Beltraffio”’, Studies in Short Fiction, 24/3 (1987), 308–309 on the role of Dolcino’s aunt, Gwendolen Ambient, in apportioning responsibility for his death.
75.
Ohi, Innocence, 136.
76.
Edna Kenton, ‘Henry James to the Ruminant Reader: The Turn of the Screw’, in Esch and Warren, 169–170. This is the first of what are now called Freudian readings of The Turn of the Screw. Edmund Wilson’s ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’, in Esch and Warren, 170–173, is perhaps the best known of these readings. Robert Heilman is an early respondent on the side of the ghosts: in ‘The Freudian Reading of The Turn of The Screw’, Modern Language Notes, 62/7 (1947), 433–445, Heilman claims that Mrs Grose’s ability to recognise Peter Quint from the governess’s description is evidence that she has not hallucinated him. However, Stanley Renner uses the same episode to corroborate the Freudian thesis: Renner suggests that the governess’s description is merely that of the sexual predator as he was imagined at the time. This is an ‘eminently logical, quite unsupernatural’ explanation for what are, then, the governess’s hallucinations (Stanley Renner, ‘Sexual Hysteria, Physiognomical Bogeymen, and the “Ghosts” in The Turn of the Screw’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 43/2 (1988), 175–194 (176)).
77.
John H. Pearson, ‘Repetition and Subversion in The Turn of the Screw’, in Cornwell and Malone, 79–99 (83).
78.
See Lustig, p.112.
79.
Albaraq Mahbobah claims that Flora ‘suffers a fit of hysteria’ at the end of the text (Albaraq Mahbobah, ‘Hysteria, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Reversal in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw’, Henry James Review, 17/2 (1996), 149–161 (152)). His argument that the governess is a study of hysteria therefore supports the claim that Flora is a reflection of the governess.
80.
See also E. Duncan Aswell, ‘Reflections of a Governess: Image and Distortion in The Turn of the Screw’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 23/1 (1968), 49–63 (50); Lustig, 188–189; Adrian Poole, Henry James (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 142; and Lisa G. Chinitz, ‘Fairy Tale Turned Ghost Story: James’s The Turn of the Screw’, Henry James Review, 15/3 (1994), 264–285 (273–274).
81.
Shuttleworth, Mind, 219.
82.
Robert Weisbuch, ‘Henry James and the Idea of Evil’, in The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, ed. Jonathan Freedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 102–119 (108).
83.
Krook, 122.
84.
Gert Buelens and Celia Aijmer, ‘The Sense of the Past: History and Historical Criticism’, in Henry James Studies, ed. Peter Rawlings (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 192–211 (206). Felman’s influential work has situated the extensive debate about the status of the ghosts in this tale within an analysis of this central concern with reading, telling, and interpretation.
85.
Muriel West, ‘The Death of Miles in The Turn of the Screw’, PMLA, 79/3 (1964), 283–288 (288).
86.
Weisbuch, 111.
87.
Weisbuch, 111.
88.
Felman, 128.
89.
Felman, 128.
90.
See Kiyoon Jang, ‘Governess as Ghostwriter: Unauthorised Authority and Uncanny Authorship in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw’, Henry James Review, 28/1 (2007), 13–25, on the effect of the governess’s ghost on authority in the text.
91.
Freud, ‘Some Remarks on a Case of Obsessive-compulsive Neurosis [The “Ratman”]’, in Sigmund Freud, The ‘Wolfman’ and Other Cases, ed. Adam Phillips, trans. Louise Adey Huish (London: Penguin, 2002), 123–202 (142).
92.
Shuttleworth, ‘Uncanny’, 106.
93.
Shuttleworth, ‘Uncanny’, 106.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Durham, UK
Roisín Laing

Authors

Roisín Laing
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Roisín Laing .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Laing, R. (2024). Twentieth-Century Models of Development: Precocity in James and Freud. In: The Precocious Child in Victorian Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41382-7_6

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41382-7_6
Published: 07 May 2024
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-41381-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-41382-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics