EDMUND WILSON'S 1934 essay "The Ambiguity of Henry James" famously put forth a Freudian-steeped argument that the apparitions in James' "The Turn of the Screw" were not real ghosts but figments of the sexually repressed governess' imagination. No one but the governess sees the ghosts, after all, and James himself had remarked in a preface that the apparitions "are of the order of those involved in witchcraft cases rather than of those in cases of psychic research."
In the closing pages of Arthur Phillips' new novel, "Angelica," set in late Victorian London, the narrator, Angelica, describes a dinner party at which the host "challenged the assembled party to tell a ghost story.... I won, of course, with a tastefully done version of my mother's life." Angelica has been writing about her childhood and her mother's life -- "busywork" she terms it, although we experience it as the substrate of a novel -- and she begins with a ghost story, even though she worries "that the term arouses unreasonable expectations in you."
Recall that "The Turn of the Screw" opens with a group telling ghost stories, only to move on to a manuscript that chronicles one in great detail, and it is hard to believe that Phillips did not have that novella in mind when he decided to give this Jamesian terrain a few more dramatic twists.
Married life became a gallows, asphyxiating, for Angelica's parents, Constance and Joseph. Amid their suffering, specters appeared, and the exact nature of these are deeply ambiguous in hindsight. Was there incest? If so, did it occur in Angelica's childhood or Constance's, or both? Was there madness, the so-called female hysteria? Or was there an actual visitation by a sexually predatory spirit? Joseph disappeared, but was it flight or murder? And if it was murder so foul, at whose hands? Angelica is left to sort it out, which becomes clear only as the novel progresses. The "I" relating the story and the barbed asides to "you" gradually resolve into Angelica's "unsavory assignment" to write about her childhood for a doctor in a therapeutic context.
Angelica questions the psychoanalytic approach of her treatment more than once. Speaking of a spiritualist who invented stories of previous hauntings at the family's house, Angelica notes "that these may or may not have been precise actualities was neither fraudulent nor relevant.... You, sir, rely on similar methods, do you not?" Elsewhere, she rails at the attempt to clarify her past: "We are excavating muck without bedrock, laying our foundations on swamp mud, pestilent and boiling and bottomless, a Venice of a life and sinking fast. What can we build when we shall never, never reach the end of our backwards work?"
The issue of how to validate any perspective lies at the center of "Angelica," in which 19th century concepts of a male, scientific mode of knowledge (Joseph worked as a medical researcher, which to Constance meant he was a torturer of animals) and a female, intuitive mode (Constance, the spiritualist Anne Montague and Angelica) bitterly contend with each other. In one scene, Joseph rushes to extinguish a small fire that Constance had started with lamp oil around 4-year-old Angelica's bed (her effort to ward off an evil and highly sexualized spirit she associates with her husband), then questions her. Although he "knew in the main that she was lying, he could not see precisely when or why or what truth she was burying. Any fragment of her explanation was possible, but the totality of it was suspect."
We could say the same of the events as chronicled by Angelica, although she is forthright in admitting that. "All my knowledge consumes itself," she tells the doctor (and us). "What I witnessed, what I was told, what I wished for, what I dreamt: I do not claim there are no distinctions here, only that I cannot distinguish them."
Phillips has constructed his novel as a fugue, in which replayed scenes are filtered as if through the consciousness of various primary characters. But the limits of knowledge are cleverly shaped by an additional factor: All the characters are Angelica's reconstructions from her own experience. Angelica knew her mother best, and her characterization of Constance is the most fleshed out; with more limited exposure to her father, Angelica resorts to speculation, believing Joseph suffered "from that most modern disease infecting so many of our men: irresolution. He has abdicated his manhood."
