A Hauntological Approach to Inheritance and Proprietorship in the Turn of the Screw and The Portrait of a Lady

Date

2023-7

Author

Akın, Zeynep

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This thesis aims to explore inheritance, proprietorship, and authority as spectral themes in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1881) and The Portrait of a Lady (1898) through Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology and Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s theory of transgenerational haunting. This thesis argues that the protagonists are haunted by their inability to own and manage their own properties and economic means and that this inability is a specter/phantom. In line with this, this study positions three ghosts for the protagonists: the benefactor who bestows the economic means, the woman who is both a competitor and a figure who bequeaths a collective trauma, and houses which cannot be owned or abandoned. By inheriting the economic means (and/or authority) at the same time as inheriting the inability to become independent proprietors, the protagonists witness proprietorship purely as a haunting phenomenon. Therefore, the novels point out the spectral forces working in the lives of those who have been Others in terms of ownership. This study also emphasises the stylistic choices of these representations, arguing that although the texts differ in their formal qualities, the narratives’ positioning of inheritance and proprietorship as haunting concepts is constant. This study indicates the need to study ownership as a central theme in Henry James’s oeuvre and to explore spectrality in novels not commonly deemed supernatural.

Subject Keywords

Henry James, proprietorship, inheritance, hauntology, transgenerational haunting

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/104450

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis