Theodora Bosanquet’s figure serves as a bridge between “Dictation” and The
Jolly Corner – protagonist of one and typist for the other, she is a permeable medium to
words, and, she thinks, to ghosts as well. According to Kittler, “A medium is a medium is a medium. As the sentence says, there is no difference between occult and
technological media.”385 The real Theodora Bosanquet was a medium in this double
sense. While Henry James lived, she sat between him and the Remington typewriter, and his words flowed through her receptive mind to be recorded on paper. After James died, Bosanquet believed she could make contact with his soul in the spirit realm, and that she took dictation from this ghost during sessions of automatic writing in a trance state. These sessions of automatic writing, like The Jolly Corner, can signify a closed system, the fantasy-fulfillment of one woman’s ego, or they can signify a real invasion of a
permeable, unstable subject. If Brydon’s apparition and Bosanquet’s automatic writing are each the fantasy of one mind then consciousness is distinct and individual; if the apparition is an external reality that has materialized from an alternative universe, and if Henry James dictated to Bosanquet from beyond the grave, then consciousness is variable, multiple or permeable. The second possibility raises a new quandary: in one view the medium’s consciousness must be extinguished to allow another voice to speak, but in another view she tests the limits of the human mind’s capacity, and thereby expands consciousness.
I have considered two possibilities raised by “Dictation”: first, that the sovereign author is in full control of his style and content, which reflect a unique inner voice; and second, that the author is shaped by powerful external forces such as technology,
pedagogy, national culture and family culture, and thus his text is not an invention but is simply what remains after discourse networks have eliminated other possibilities. “Dictation” foregrounds a third potential influence on style: the (occult) typist, whose ability to assimilate the voice of another places her in an ambiguous space in relation to the text.
What is at stake in this final section is whether the permeable amanuensis has any power over the text she types, and what the nature of that power might be. Is she a muse to inspire or even generate language, or is she a disempowered female worker whose service silences own inner voice? Friedrich Kittler argues James and Bosanquet are products of cultural pressures, but nevertheless struggles over power and sex play out in the dynamic between them:
In 1907 Theodora Bosanquet, an employee in a London typing service who was at the time busy typing the Report of the Royal Commission on
Coast Erosion, was ordered to report to James, who in the initial interview
appeared as a “benevolent Napoleon.” Thus began Bosanquet’s “job, as alarming as it was fascinating, of serving as medium between the spoken and machined word.” Alarming, because Bosanquet was of course only the will of the dictator’s will, who in his dreams again and again appeared as Napoleon.386
Kittler’s version of their dynamic stresses Bosanquet’s extreme disempowerment: though James is only a body, he can at least imagine himself a ruler, while the amanuensis is reduced to “the will of the dictator’s will.” Ozick is not so sure: Bosanquet is the locus of strange magic and though James is the unambiguous author of the text, the fictional typist wrests control of The Jolly Corner from him and reclaims some of the autonomy her position denies her. A focus on typists and mediums generates a third reading of The
Jolly Corner, which takes the implication of Bosanquet’s plot one step further by
suggesting that Alice Staverton is not, as most would have her, the blank page that receives a dream-transmission of Brydon’s double, but is in fact the author of the ghost.
The degree of control Theodora Bosanquet or Alice Staverton may claim is
defined by their positions within gendered power structures and feminine-coded roles: the psychic, the typist or the muse. Alice’s powers as a psychic medium align her with the typist – both of which are receptive instruments of the modern era – but her maternal influence over Brydon aligns her with Kittler’s ideal Mother of the Romantic era.387 For
Kittler, the internal voice was born in the 1800 discourse network thanks to a new pedagogy. Around this time the German mother took over the role of primary instructor and became responsible for teaching her child to read. Instead of adding up the discreet
letters that make a word, the mother taught her child to see the shapes on the page as so many “notes” that translate into the music of the spoken voice: “Her voice substituted sounds for letters... Only the mother’s pointing finger retained any relation to the optic form of the letter. And when later in life children picked up a book, they would not see letters but hear, with irrepressible longing, a voice between the lines.”388 This method
ensured not only that the child would hear the words even during silent reading – the change that inaugurated the inner subject, according to Kittler – but that the child’s interaction with language would always draw out a nostalgic longing for the mother. Kittler argues that in the Romantic era, “Nature… is The Woman. Her function consists in getting people – that is, men – to speak.”389 Kittler suggests that women must remain
trapped on either side of the moment of composition: they may be muses that inspire the (male) author or office workers who take his dictation.
Might Theodora Bosanquet have been both muse and medium, exerting some distinct but immeasurable influence over James’s style? When James inscribed a copy of
The Wings of the Dove for his then-amanuensis Mary Weld, he did not write “to my
collaborator,” which would have been significant enough, but “from her collaborator” (emphasis mine).390 James’s joke charms because it draws the typist into his creative
moment, involving her in a moment of play that gives her ownership over the words that James unambiguously wrote. Of course, James did have a muse he addressed in his Notebooks, which he called mon bon: the good angel of his writing. In the early twentieth century, at the height of the spiritualist craze, the ancient muse took on a new shape: she could be envisioned as a ghost and the author a medium; or she could be
imagined as a transmitting mind, and the author a receptive telepath. In 1884 Samuel Clemens wrote a letter to the Journal for the Society for Psychical Research, in which he explained his motivation to become a member: “Thought-transference, as you call it, or mental telegraphy as I have been in the habit of calling it, has been a very strong interest with me for the past nine or ten years. I have grown so accustomed to considering that all my powerful impulses come to me from somebody else, that I often feel like a mere amanuensis when I sit down to write a letter under the coercion of a strong impulse.”391
What was once an inspiration is now an occult invasion that turns author into
amanuensis. In 1912 and 1913, Henry James edited the content of his dead brother’s letters to include in his memoir Notes of a Son and Brother, justifying his alterations by suggesting that William spoke to him from beyond the grave. James imagines he is a materialist medium, writing “I seemed to feel [William] in the room and at my elbow asking for me as I worked and as he listened”; and he imagines himself a trance medium as he hears the voice of the dead William compel him to write, saying “You’re going to do the very best for me you can, aren’t you?” 392 If the author thinks of himself as a
receptor, what might that signify for the typist’s receptivity?
Pamela Thurschwell’s influential study of Theodora Bosanquet in Literature,
Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 argues that the female medium or office
worker often interpreted the “shared” language passing between her and her employer as intimacy, but romance was rendered un-erotic by economics: she was paid for her labor and the language attained value in various markets.393 Ozick is not particularly interested
Rather, “Dictation” is interested in economics and power, asking who gets credit for language and why. Twenty years after James edited his brother’s letters, the real Theodora Bosanquet would come to believe that her deceased employer was asking her to take dictation once again. First, Henry James takes dictation from the dead William James; later, Theodora Bosanquet takes dictation from the dead Henry James. Though both cases imagine a living psychic recording the words of the dead, the difference between them is striking, and it appears to rest on the question of gender. James thought of himself as medium, but his alterations of William’s letters empowered him and disempowered his absent brother. Clemens thought of himself as an amanuensis but signed letters with his own name. Bosanquet may claim no ownership over the ghostly voice she perceives or the writing she produces as a result. In her role as earthly amanuensis Bosanquet has no claim over James’s words, but in the realm of the occult, authorship is much harder to pin down.
In “Dictation,” James and Conrad both see their amanuenses as helpmates, though both women suggest a sinister threat. Conrad worries about the shift to dictation because he fears the amanuensis will break the “immemorial sacred solitude” of composition and replace his private god with a new external muse.394 Spiritual and cultural forces
combine in her figure. The fictional Bosanquet reaches, like the terrifying typewriter, into the technological future and into the pagan past. When the amanuenses meet, Bosanquet insists “the stars have favored us,” and James quips “Can you hear, my dear Conrad, as thunder on Olympus, the clash of the Remingtons?”395 Later, when the two
“peered through them as though each were a small upright stone pillar, and ground out a mocking phantom Druid liturgy made up of coarse guttural lunatic syllables.”396
Theodora’s gesture conjures the apparition of Spencer Brydon’s unlived life, obscuring his face with damaged fingers. Bosanquet and the American Brydon are both powerful figureheads of the modern, surrounded by the mysteries of the occult; both fade back into obscurity as their tales end. While both “turn the tables” and take some measure of control, the occult nature of the typist-medium is by no means unambiguously empowering. Telepathic or mediumistic talents may signify an expansion of
consciousness beyond even what James himself was capable of, but that does not mean that the medium can ever escape her position as transparent receptor.397
The real Theodora Bosanquet was interested in spiritualism during her time at Lamb House, and her diary records her reading spiritualist books, visiting psychics and mediums, and analyzing astrological charts. After James’s death her interest continued; she was editor of the American Society of Psychical Research’s journal, The Proceedings
of the Society for Psychic Research, during the 1930s. From 1935 to 1943 she worked as
literary editor for the journal Time and Tide, and contributed not only many articles on Henry James and his work, but also reviews of new psychic research publications. Bosanquet was eager to meet William James, a founding member of the American Society for Psychical Research, and finally got her chance on July 18, 1908, when he visited his brother in Rye while Henry was working, coincidentally, on The Jolly
Corner.398 On September 9th William lent Bosanquet an SPR report on automatic
Bradley tried automatic writing that night for the first time.399 It is unlikely that
Bosanquet had any inkling she was training for another form of dictation.
On February 15, 1933 Bosanquet visited a medium named Mrs. Hester Dowden, who claimed to use a Ouija board to contact the spirit realm through her control,
Johannes, a spirit that they believed served as a sort of middle-man between the living and the dead.400 The Ouija board spelled out Henry James’s name and correctly
answered questions about Lamb House. After a time, Bosanquet began to practice automatic writing on her own and write down communications from the James brothers, first using Mrs. Dowden’s control Johannes and later finding her own control, “O.”401
During the 1930s Bosanquet entered an automatic writing trance as often as three times a day, recording not only contact with her deceased employer but more open-ended
spiritual explorations.402
Bosanquet recorded a dialogue in which “O” explains to her the nature of the permeable consciousness during these trance sittings. He suggests that the sitter does lose herself, in a sense, but she finds something else that may be even more valuable:
T. Who is “I”?
O. In psychic trance “I” appears.
“I” is not to be confounded with I or i. “I” is single, is separate – is double, is fused.
“I” pursues its own purpose, speaking through the peeping fracture, Dream, vision, all that pertains to a state of
somnambulance belongs strictly speaking, to dis-continuous “I.”
T. What will happen?
O. You will be invaded.
T. By what?
O. Solitude consciousness expanded. Various Rites explained. The Book of Books underlined. Perfections approached.403
The dialogue addresses many of the same issues as “Dictation,” The Jolly Corner, and “Is There a Life After Death?” “I” is the voice of the other invading the medium during a psychic trance, and its single/separate, double/fused nature resembles indeterminate boundaries between figures in both novellas. The invader speaks through dreams and visions to pursue its own purpose, but the invaded benefits as well; not only does she learn spiritual secrets and gain more perfect knowledge, but she undergoes the great adventure of “consciousness expanded,” the highest purpose of human life, as James imagines it. “O” suggests that Bosanquet will be invaded and lose her agency, but that she will gain another power through its loss. The question, of course, is whether the psychic’s expanded understanding can ever translate into creative energy, or whether she can only hope to become an exceptional reader.
This, I suggest, is the central question surrounding the figure of Alice Staverton. Though Spencer Brydon’s adventure is more often figured as an analogy for self-
exploration than a literal brush with another realm, Alice Staverton’s dreams cannot be explained away: The Jolly Corner offers her as its one unambiguous instance of
supernatural power. Alice Staverton sees the double three times in her dreams, and her final dialogue with Brydon proves that her vision of the apparition is accurate and independent of his influence. If Spencer Brydon’s adventure is uncanny, trapped in his own mind, then Alice Staverton is telepathic and has peered into his consciousness. If Brydon’s adventure is marvelous and the apparition is real, then Alice Staverton has peered, like Brydon, into another realm of existence. In either case, she is a transgressive psychic figure. But does her powerful consciousness allow her to collaborate with
Brydon or to wrest the claim of authorship away from him, or must she remain, as Deborah Esch has argued, simply a model reader?
These is reason to believe that Alice Staverton is a response to James’s curiosity about spiritualism, and the real-life medium on whom she may have been based, Mrs. Leonora Piper, offers a cautionary tale proving that possessing an expansive
consciousness or becoming an exceptional reader comes at far too high a price. Henry James was not directly involved in psychical research and it is fair to say he was more skeptical than his brother, but he expresses his hope that his soul would continue beyond death in “Is There a Life After Death?,” the same essay in which he imagines the
radically powerful artistic consciousness.404 Leon Edel, in the final paragraph of his five-
volume biography of James, offers a reading of this essay that makes James sound a lot like the fictional version of his typist: “What lived beyond life was what the creative consciousness had found and made: and only if enshrined in enduring form. Like Proust he saw that art alone retains and holds the life – the consciousness – of man long after the finders and the makers are gone.”405 Edel is only partially right. James may have
treasured this hope for his fiction, but his essay does not argue that the afterlife “only” exists “in enduring form.” He imagines the afterlife as a case in which consciousness (which he also calls the “soul” and “personality”) might continue. In the first of the essay’s two sections James writes about the odds that the unmistakable individual consciousness can continue after physical death, and he notes some reasons for skepticism: parts of the personality fade and disappear even as we evolve during life, consciousness will have nothing to grasp onto after the brain dies, and the dead never
return to the living to confirm their personalities have continued. In the second section James turns to his own case and argues that his apprehension of the mind’s potential suggests this life is just the tip of the iceberg, and James hopes his own consciousness, and his artistic quest, will continue after his life ends.406 The conclusion of the essay is
pragmatic: though James does not believe in the afterlife he does desire it, and in the end there is no difference between the two: “I couldn’t do less if I desire, but I shouldn’t be able to do more if I believed.”407 The afterlife James desires is not a static textual
entombment but the continuation of an ever-expanding, ever-revising dynamic personality after the laboratory brain has died.
Henry James desired an afterlife, but he did not believe the dead could return to confirm it for the living, a failure he considered one of the strongest arguments against it. James writes of friends and loved ones who were so dynamic during life he feels certain that if anyone could return it would be them; yet they do not return.408 Many of James’s
contemporaries, including his brother William and sister-in-law Alice Howe Gibbens James, would counter that in fact the dead can and have returned through spiritualist mediums. Henry James adds a long parenthetical disclaimer about mediums, in which he refuses to take their displays as proof but admits he finds the phenomena fascinating:
I can only treat here as absolutely not established the value of those personal signs that ostensibly come to us through the trance medium. These often make, I grant, for attention and wonder and interest – but for