Positively Uncertain: The Refutation of Scientific Monism in Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” and Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla”

Raghavan, Krishnan

Positively Uncertain: The Refutation of Scientific Monism in Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” and Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla”

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Date

2011

Authors

Raghavan, Krishnan

Advisor

Burshatin, Israel
Schönherr, Ulrich

Department

Bi-College (Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges). Comparative Literature Program

Type

Thesis

Language

eng

Access Restrictions

Bi-College users only

Terms of Use

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

Abstract

During the latter half of the nineteenth‐century, scientific discourse came to dominate the sociopolitical climate of Western Europe as a result of the immense fertility of discovery in the natural sciences at the time. The scientific skepticism of the era shaped the supernatural narratives “Le Horla” by Guy de Maupassant and “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James in obliging these authors to craft a more liminal, “realistic” supernatural. Both author’s fantastic narratives remain ultimately ambiguous; however, this ambiguity subverts and critiques the forward progression mandated by positivist doctrine. Positivism is denigrated on a narrative level in both stories through the representation of techniques of positivist psychology as ultimately impotent. Maupassant and James’ aesthetic approaches towards this “new supernatural” ultimately champion a more pluralistic perspective than that of positivism.