This tale is one of James’s ghost stories and, like many of these, including of course The turn of the screw, it is open to a Freudian reading by twentieth and twenty-first century readers. As described in my note on the text, the idea seems to have been with James for many years before he got round to writing the tale. Possibly the impetus to use it was a commission for a ghostly tale, as Sir Edmund Orme first appeared in the Christmas issue of the newly launched populist periodical Black and white. Ghost stoies were a regular and popular feature of such issues from the time of Dickens’s A Christmas carol (1843). Remember too that in the introductory section of The turn of the screw itself we are told of the fascination of these stories for a group assembled in a house-party over the ‘festive’ season. Interestingly, we have in the present tale, as in that later Christmas fiction, written some six years afterwards, a similar distancing of the first-person narrative which forms the bulk of the text, by use of an introductory section, quite short in comparison, which both accounts for and casts additional light on the manuscript which it claims to reproduce (with minor changes!). Although anachronistic in terms of understanding Sir Edmund, those of you who know The turn of the screw well should bear it in mind while reading this tale, and of course it is quite in order to look for new perspectives on The turn here.
Some rearrangement of the elements in this story between the notebook entry and the finished tale is apparent, in particular the deferral of the death until the end of the tale. This makes what we now see as the sexual resonances of the appearance of Sir Edmund much more tightly focussed on the the girl’s potential marriage (to anyone, although in the time-frame of the tale mainly to the narrator), and her mother’s reaction to it. What James has done, cleverly, is to balance the unfolding of the elements across the length of the story so as to build up to the final climax while intertwining his original ideas to tighten them. In particular his making the (main) narrator both see the ghost and become the girl’s suitor has widened the possible application of the sexual fear we might read into those who see Sir Edmund.
For details of the text sources and subsequent critical discussion see the bibliography. Details of a couple of textual problems I encountered while editing the source for its presentation here can be found on the note about the text to which I referred above, otherwise just start reading.
Adrian Dover
this introduction
© 2002
part of an etext edition of
Sir Edmund Orme
on
the Ladder : a Henry James website