Secrets, Consciousness, and Sentence Structure in The Figure in the Carpet, The Turn of the Screw, and The Jolly Corner Sara Manlowe College

The words of critics Todorov, Harvey, and Short gesture to various narrative aspects in Henry James’s short stories, including the existence of an essential secret, a dramatized consciousness, and a length and complexity of sentences. These aspects are present in all of James’s work, but can be traced especially through The Figure in the Carpet, The Turn of the Screw, and The Jolly Corner, which exemplify these aspects but also some of the larger themes present across James’s work. These themes include a creeping kind of dread in which it is difficult to pinpoint its exact source, as well as the relationship between a work, its author, and its readers. The three aspects mentioned by the critics – a secret, a dramatized consciousness, and a complexity of sentences – feed into one another. Sentences that are long and complex would seem as though they would reveal a great deal of information, yet the fact that these sentences are couched by narration in the form of a dramatized consciousness tends to obscure the occasional moments of seeming clarity by the very fact of its dramatization. Employing a narrator with a flair for the dramatic, such as the governess in Turn of the Screw, also works both to create and conceal Todorov’s ‘...