Dark shadows

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.”

Consequently, that is the way Joseph appears to us. Despite the fact that he is a war hero, he is gelded -- Constance repeatedly resists his advances, fearing another difficult pregnancy will kill her. It is in her daughter’s room that Constance encounters the demon, “floating inches above Angelica, its face the color of tongue and contorted just as Joseph’s had been. It was descending upon the sleeping girl, like an angel of death or ancient god of love, intent on breaking the tiny body to its desire.... It held its mannish form, wore Joseph’s face.... “

Joseph’s male rage and desires may have erupted in spirit form, which is what Constance believes, or in sexual abuse that produced the apparition as a figment of Constance’s mind (the strong suspicion of the spiritualist Anne). Summoning all the clarity she can muster, Angelica declares: “I have no recollection of his guilt; I have no doubt that it was possible.” We are left to interpret events that may or may not have included murder and incest, and the indeterminacy of “Angelica” is among its strongest points. One other thing bears mentioning: Angelica is an actress, so adopting roles is her metier.

Phillips’ novel reverberates, rather than proceeding in a standard sense, oscillating between male and female perspectives, the supernatural and the natural world, innocence and evil, and generations too. In Phillips’ world, the dance of the sexes is more of a death march than anything. Constance becomes convinced that Joseph is out to kill her by pregnancy. When Constance consents to sex, despite the doctors’ warnings, there is consequent fury: “Was ever murder disguised thus? How crafted by a demon mind to cloak hatred in love and dress death as birth! He had murdered her that night with her own sighing consent.”

For his part, Joseph watches his wife “vanish into motherhood.... She exerted no effort to please him, was openly indifferent to his comings and goings. She was deaf to his words, blind to his regard, insensate to his gentle touch. If anyone deserved the right to spin and wail in hysterics, it was he.”

When Joseph considers having his wife remanded to an institution and seeks the advice of a doctor schooled in disorders of the mind, he is reassured: “Medical science proves every day what has been wisdom since man’s Expulsion: they are all quite mad, to a greater or lesser degree, some of the time.”

Readers of Phillips’ “Prague” (expatriates in Budapest) and “The Egyptologist” (an archeological whodunit) will find “Angelica” to be a more seriously cast novel in which “truth” never materializes. Every attempt is made to erase closure and finality. The doctor whom Joseph visits tells him a story that twists upon itself until Joseph “lost all track of who had been guilty, mad, or worthy of his sympathies.”

So it is in “Angelica,” where potential explanations abound. Perhaps Constance truly saw spirits and “struck down the man who invited the ghost into our home.” There’s a dreamlike coital sequence between the demonic spirit and Constance that could represent either Joseph’s murder or her delusional mindset. Or, Angelica suggests, “my father was a seducer of children, and he was murdered to protect me.” Or perhaps Constance “knew her husband was acting evilly toward me and did not for a moment see ghosts, but was more than willing to pretend she did, so that Anne would rescue her from ‘them.’ ”

And the unseen doctor whom Angelica addresses? Perhaps he helped summon it all, Angelica accuses, because he “fingered my wounds, keeping them fresh.” Joseph once had an epiphany that was as frightful as any demon: That the mind could wander so that it “was stripped of all belief or character,” and that “the better self could evaporate in an instant, not even in a moment of crisis or temptation, but in the most prosaic life.” A ghost story indeed. *