Henry James' “The Jolly Corner”: A Study in Integration

From a philosophical standpoint, Henry James's “The Jolly Corner “is a story of self-discovery. From a literary standpoint it has, like The Turn of the Screw, many of the features of a Gothic horror tale. But also like The Turn of the Screw, it is a penetrating psychological study. Indeed, the very terms of the metaphor suggest psychological symbol—the most obvious feature being the duality in both the psychology and the imagery. Everything in it is divided into two's. This duality in imagery corresponds to Spencer Brydon's own psychological ambivalence, leading to a final symbol of ambivalence, the two finger stumps on the apparition at the end, and a uniting of ambivalence in the final scene with Alice, when the horror of his vision is largely alleviated by what he discovers about himself, and when at the same time his psychological problem is resolved.

The story is about a man who returns to America at the age of 56 after 33 years in Europe, having come home to examine and renovate his New York property. This property consists of two houses; one is the old family mansion on “the jolly corner,” as he calls it affectionately, the other, already in the course of reconstruction, is a “tall mass of flats,” obviously contemporary in design, from which he obtains an income. The old house, which stands empty, has a curious fascination for him. He shows it to Alice Staverton, a friend whom he knew before he left New York, and she seems to understand his overanxious interest in it completely. He reveals to her that he wishes to encounter there his own “alter ego “—his latent self, the self he might have been had he not left New York. That self must have been “monstrous,” yet somehow superior to the self he became. The suspense of the story consists in his lonely search through the house, culminating in a shocking view of what he finds. The story is developed with such skill that the