Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 13 Number 3, December 2012
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The Freudian Model of the Psyche in Two of Henry James’s Short Stories
By
University of Alberta
James’s “The Jolly Corner” (1909) and “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) introduce a character-triangle that corresponds to Freud’s three aspects of the psyche. Brydon, Alice and the apparition in “The Jolly Corner” and Marcher, May and the Beast in “The Beast in the Jungle” are respectively associated with the Ego, Super ego and Id. These two stories are about the Ego in search of the other composites of the mind. The principal character seems to perceive that these composites, once encountered and assimilated, would restore stability to the pursuer’s personality by resolving an existing anxiety. In effect, this essay argues that James anticipates the Freudian model by introducing this triangular character relationship. The two short stories, therefore, foresee and fictionalize Freud’s conception of the psyche.
Freud understands consciousness in terms of the tripartite division of the Id, ego, and super-ego which are the three parts of the psychic apparatus defined in Freud’s structural model of the psyche. In psychoanalysis, they are the three theoretical constructs that describe a person’s mental life or activity. However, before proceeding any further, there is the methodological aspect of why psychoanalysis and why the Freudian approach in particular that needs to be addressed. Bernard J. Paris (1997), in his Imagined Human Beings: A Psychological Approach to Character and Conflict in Literature, points out to the widely used psychoanalytic approach in the study of literature: “psychoanalysis deals with human beings in conflict with themselves and each other […] What is confusing is that there are so many psychoanalytic theories, each with its claims and proponents. It clearly makes sense to use psychoanalysis in literary study, but which theory should we employ?” (Paris, 1997, 3). In response to this controversial issue, Elizabeth Wright (1998), in her Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal, shows “in what way Freudian theory has been and still is part of an ongoing debate” (1998, 3). While she acknowledges “certain endemic issues” that pertain to psychoanalysis such as “social integration,” or “the division of the subject in language,” she insists on revering the Freudian originating, aesthetic force: “To concentrate on mechanisms without taking account of the energies with which they are charged is to ignore Freud’s most radical discoveries: it is precisely the shifts of energies brought about by the unconscious desire that allow new meanings to emerge” (Wright, 1998, 3-4). Moreover, in Literature, Psychoanalysis and the new Sciences of Mind, Leonard Jackson argues against the death of Freudian theory, as it is quite foundational and generative, at least in relation to literature: “Literary people probably find it hard to see the force of this argument [the argument that dismisses Freudian theory as highly paradoxical] than scientists, because they love paradoxes like these, which come over as powerful metaphors, suggest great profundity, and remind them of modernist art” (2000, 27). In this paper, however, my argument is not to ensure that psychoanalysis can be favourably the right approach to elicit meaning out of James’s two short stories, neither is it in favour of proving that Freudian theory is still alive and applicable; indeed, what I attempt here is to explore the profundity of James’s insights into the human nature that can be equally fascinating and very similar to Freud’s conceptualizations of the human psyche.
Sharon Cameron (1989) calls attention to the fact that James had already speculated about consciousness in 1897 as he “implicitly poses questions about consciousness as a double phenomenon, one that is ‘in’ persons and that is also ‘between’ them” (Cameron, 1989, 33). To James, the externalization of consciousness in terms of location is crucial, whether “it is supposed to be within the mind, or as in awareness, or between selves, as exemplified by the idiom of the exchange of minds through conversation” (Cameron, 1989, 34). This perception of consciousness “between selves” unfolds itself in these two short stories “through conversation” between two characters mainly over the imminent emergence of a third entity that will decide their upcoming life. Although James’s externalized reading of consciousness as being partly “between” individuals seems to differ from Freud’s model of internalized consciousness, the triangular relationship and their attributes are significantly similar.
It is important to note here that although most English-speaking psychologists were unaware of Freud’s ideas until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, there was a rare exception, “F. W. H. Meyers, whose writings on ‘subliminal consciousness’ were immediately cited by William James in his 1896 essay ‘What Psychical Research Has Accomplished.’ Henry James therefore did have some access to early Freud, but that very access was indirectly by way of his brother William James” (Hocks, 1990, 80). Cameron explains further that there was a trend in the late nineteenth century to investigate the unknown aspects of the mind to which the works of William James with other authors had been instrumental to Freud’s revision and classification of the psyche (Cameron, 1989, 34). In this sense, James offers a positive contribution, in terms of the investigation of consciousness, which suggests an analogy between his dealings with consciousness in “The Jolly Corner” and “The Beast on the Jungle” and the Freudian conceptual frame of the three aspects of the psyche.
According to Freud, the Ego acts according to the reality principle, that is, it seeks to please the Id’s drive (the pleasure seeker) in realistic ways that will bring benefit in the long term rather than bring grief. The Ego comprises that organised part of the personality structure that includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions. Conscious awareness resides in the Ego. According to Freud, the Ego determines our sense of reality and helps to organise our thoughts in the world around:
The ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world ... The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions ... in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse. (Freud, 1989, 636)
Spencer Brydon in “The Jolly Corner” represents the Ego as he feels alienated, cut off from his past and his own identity and therefore feels the urge for belongingness. He, therefore, holds the “superior strength of the horse” which is to him that of what he missed: “what he would have been sure of finding … which placed him under the charm” (James, 1909, 604). He is the Ego because he is conscious of his surroundings as “he had yielded to the humour of seeing again his house on the jolly corner” (James, 1909, 604). Brydon is also conscious of his need to anticipate or see into what he could have been, had he stayed in New York.
Like Brydon, John Marcher in “The Beast in the Jungle” feels a sense of alienation as the story begins at Weatherend with “the feeling of an occasion missed” and a sense that “all the communities were wanting” (James, 1903, 551). He holds a conviction that he is destined to experience some type of event with consequences that will shake the very foundations of his being. Freud asserts that the Ego “is not largely separated from the id” (Freud, 1989, 635) and in this sense, Marcher anticipates the encounter with this beast which is the manifestation of his Id drives as will be explained later. His egotism, however, coexists with “a naivete that almost makes it seem innocent” (Wagenknecht, 1984, 145). When May praises his attitude toward his ordeal, he asks, “It’s heroic?” and again, “I am then a man of courage?” (James, 1903, 551). Both Brydon and Marcher represent the Ego in conflict because to Freud “the Ego is the seat of anxiety and that the development of anxiety is an ego process” (Healy, 1945, 112). Both live a life of separation from and attachment with the Id. Paradoxically, this self-inflicted or destined attachment to a monstrous Id and at the same time the living fear of any encounter with it forces both into the life of an outsider, egotistically self-absorbed, but anxiously waiting for this encounter with the id to occur.
The Id, on the other hand, acts according to the pleasure principle, seeking to avoid pain aroused by increases in instinctual tension. In Freud’s formulation, the Id is unconscious by definition:
It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality … and most of this is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We all approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations … It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts … a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle. (Freud, 1965, 91)
Accordingly, the Id transforms instinctual needs into psychological tension. Thus, the Id shapes itself in different unknown forms that the ego cannot readily recognize because the Id’s only resource is to form mental images that will provide satisfaction and therefore the Id itself is animalistic or predatory. Shalyn Claggett (2005) explains how Brydon stumbles into an unrecognizable form of himself, “The specter he encounters…strikes him as completely incompatible with his own self image” (Claggett, 2005, 189). After the encounter with the ghost, Brydon regrets his inability to find the ghost he envisioned. He remarks to his friend Alice Staverton, “I was to have known myself” (James, 1909, 760). Brydon’s endeavour to encounter the ghost is an external representation of the Freudian internalized notion of Ego in search of the Id. Also significant is how Brydon calls the house a “jolly corner” where he consciously or unconsciously chooses it to be the place for his encounter with the Id which seeks every “jolly” good sense in life.
Lynda Zwinger (2008) remarks that the language used in relation to the house and what happens there is directed towards desire:
The language of desire, captured and installed here within the frame Brydon has carefully constructed, the house, the endless repeating circular loop of the present of the nights he steals from his ostensible “social” existence, the many doors in the corridors of his pasts, the … “tight bud”, “stifled perversity”, and “play of a moist finger” have no object that we can see. There is nothing there to see in fact, until Brydon conjures it up out of the garden of forking paths of his subjectivity. (Zwinger, 2008, 6)
Although the ghastly images indicate that there is “nothing there to see,” the language tries to penetrate into the threshold of the psyche, where the Id abides, which is the Freudian “dark, inaccessible part of our personality” (Freud, 1965, 91). The ghost is therefore not described but rather implicated.
The encounter between the Ego and the Id here dramatizes the subject as it strives towards a single, unified identity as a condition for survival. James depicts the encounter with the ghost as a process of gradual awareness. Brydon steps into a haunting place, a threshold into the dark side of the psyche, of opened doors, empty rooms, passages, presence, dusk, and shock: “that of his opening a door behind which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk” (James, 1909, 633). This is an oblique summary of what is to come since the path strikes us as a metaphor of a journey into the “shuttered and void” world of the id, of some “presence.” Brydon wanders through the jolly corner house in search of what he names the alter ego which is a figure that “he thinks of as active, forceful, money-making, yet terrible and beast like” (Rogers, 1956, 428).
The Id is basically the unconscious that Brydon seeks to unravel by bringing it to the level of his consciousness. The ghost to Brydon is the man he could have been had he stayed in America and lived a different sort of life. Like the Id to Freud, the ghost to Brydon is a very tempting but unrealized potential. The Id is responsible for our basic drives and impulses. It is amoral and selfish, ruled by the pleasure/pain principle; it is without a sense of time, completely illogical and primarily sexual. In view of that, Brydon associates the ghost with animalistic attributes: “I’ve hunted him till he has ‘turned’: that, up there, is what has happened - he’s the fanged or the antlered animal brought at last to bay” (James, 1909, 623).
The ghost shows up to be dark and dim which is characteristic of the Freudian Id: “what made the face dim was the pair of raised hands that covered it … one of these hands had lost two fingers” (James, 1909, 634). According to Freud, the Id remains hidden and does not reveal itself explicitly to the conscious level because it is “guided by the pleasure principle,” which reigns supreme in it and “guards itself against tension and pain” (Healy, 1945, 36). The hiding of the face at first glance is, therefore, significant as the ghost does not want to be exposed. The missing two fingers here could implicitly mean the other missing constituents of the mind which are the ego and the super-ego. Metaphorically, the ghost, as an embodiment of the Id, needs these two other parts to form a complete personality.
The encounter with the ghost resonates with an image similar to that of the leaping beast that Marcher dreads which signifies that both beast and ghost are manifestations of the Id: “Horror, with the sight, had leaped into Brydon’s throat, gasping there in a sound he couldn’t utter” (James, 1909, 634). But why is it that the ghost’s face is so hideous that he or it does not look like Spencer Brydon? In other words, James’s emphasis on the unknown physicality of the ghost is clearly stated:
The face, that face, Spencer Brydon’s?…It was unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility! He had been “sold,” he inwardly moaned, stalking such game as this: the presence before him was a presence, the horror within him a horror…Such an identity fitted his at no point, made its alternative monstrous…the face was the face of a stranger…for the stranger, whoever he might be, evil, odious, blatant, vulgar, had advanced as for aggression, and he knew himself give ground. (James, 1909, 635)
Expecting a mirror image, Brydon sees something entirely different. Freud regards the Id as the reservoir of the libido or instinctive drive to create and therefore the ghost is monstrous as it represents that kind of reservoir of instincts whether sexual or materialistic. After the encounter, Brydon insists, “I was to have known myself,” and this sentence indicates his amazement at realizing that mistakenly he thought he knew himself well. The realization speaks to the idea that the ghost is the unknown and therefore is the unconscious side of the personality which is hidden from the Ego. Brydon could not recognize himself because the Id is the exact opposite of the Ego and therefore hardly recognizable, “The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions” (Freud, 1989, 636).
Like Brydon, Marcher’s worries and fears strike us to be associated with an animal anxiety as the Id to Freud is the personality component made up of unconscious psychic energy that works to satisfy basic urges, needs, and desires. The Id urges Marcher to foresee a coming event that is life changing and not necessarily catastrophic, but it is the urge towards change, towards the unexpected, which Marcher dreads: “It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonored, pilloried, hanged. It was a failure not to be anything” (James, 1903, 551). He is helpless and worried about what crash, what monstrosity he might be subjected to. Since the Id is that part of the personality which is entirely unconscious, Marcher calls it “fate” and calls encountering its life changing urges or drives “the beast.” He believes that there is a peculiar fate in store for him: “It isn’t a matter as to which I can choose, I can decide for a change. It isn’t one as to which there can be a change. It’s in the lap of the gods. One’s in the hands of one’s law _ there one is. As to the form the law will take, the way it will operate, that’s its own affair” (James, 1903, 566). Therefore, like Spencer Brydon, he believes that he is destined to meet that fate or that beast because it is just one aspect of his personality that he does not fully recognize.
Marcher creates an Id monster which is the basic instincts that one is not consciously aware of. For instance, when May tells him that he confessed to her of something he is to suffer, he describes this Id monster that will take over his ego “consciousness.” He responds, “Well, say to wait for, to have to meet, to face, to see suddenly break out in my life; possibly destroying all further consciousness, possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all my world and leaving me to the consequences, however, they shape themselves” (James, 1903, 556). The beast, therefore, represents part of Marcher’s fractured psyche as he believes himself to be destined to such an atrocious encounter that will possibly annihilate him. He is driven by this self-inflicted “have to meet, to face” force which can be identified as the Id: “The beast, in a sense, is the emergence of those alarms to the level of awareness … Concealed as long as Marcher is not ready to see him, the beast represents … the massed power of those primal energies Marcher had repressed in his offence against the spirit of May and time” (Gargano, 1986, 367). As a result, like the Id which is disruptive and socially unacceptable, the beast is removed from the boundaries of society as it exists only in Marcher’s mind and as a shared secret with May.
Marcher’s apprehension continues as he suspects that the catastrophe is likely to happen to May rather than to him. This is an intuition, rather than a merely neurotic feeling, because May falls ill and dies. The ‘It’ that he is so afraid of happens to May and Marcher suffers tremendous agony, which is an assertion that the three subjects are integrally related. A similar assertion can be made in “The Jolly Corner” as Alice dreams of the ghost that Brydon expects to see, which also connects the three subjects psychologically together as the dream experience becomes a visualized apparition encountered by Brydon.
Both women, in James’s two short stories, may represent the Super-ego, the third aspect of Freud’s structural theory of the psyche and closely linked to the Ego and Id. The Super-ego aims for perfection. It comprises that organised part of the personality structure that includes the individual’s Ego ideals, spiritual goals, and the psychic agency that criticises and prohibits drives, fantasies, feelings, and actions: “The Super-ego can be thought of as a type of conscience that punishes misbehavior with feelings of guilt. For example: having extra-marital affairs” (Reber, 1985, 89). “The Jolly Corner” offers hope that Spencer Brydon will achieve a sense of psychic wholeness “through [this] woman’s unselfish, all comprehending love” (Reising, 1992, 52). It views Alice as Brydon’s conscience, that is as “the integrating spirit, the principle of divine love which makes selfhood possible in the fullest sense,” as a “prize” for Brydon, as an “all-forgiving, all accepting mother figure.” She, therefore, embodies the “redemptive power of love,” (by virtue of her understanding the complex figurative reality of Brydon’s vision), and as a “frame character,” whose “most important function is to be sensitively aware of those muffled vibrations” of Brydon (Reising, 1992, 52). Also as a representation of conscience, May Bartram “achieves the near miracle of knowing Marcher thoroughly, loving him, and yet viewing him almost objectively; at the same time she protects him by trying to help him ‘to pass for a man like another’” (Wagenknecht, 1984, 146). In this sense, May functions as the protective parent for Marcher the way the Super-ego functions as conscience.
May is constantly defined as serious, caring and motherly, which is characteristic of the Super-ego. Marcher thinks of May’s “mercy, sympathy, seriousness, her consent not to regard him as the funniest of the funny,” which is “an idealized description of motherly care and indulgence…motherly understanding, motherly protection of the helpless child against the rigors of the world” (Rogers, 1956, 432). May is his “kind, wise keeper…The rest of the world of course thought him queer, but she, only she, knew how” (James 1903: 559). Rogers also draws our attention to Marcher’s significant comment on May’s house: in it “every object was as familiar to him as the things of his own house” (James, 1903, 560), which shows how intricately the two persons are related even in terms of the external world.
Marcher depends upon May for validation, for sharing his ultimate revelation, and when she grows ill, he begins to fear that she may die without witnessing it at his side, and that perhaps it is already “Too Late” for his event. He thinks that it is her death, and the solitude it means for him, that is the promised disaster. But in their last talk she tells him that disaster has already struck, though he asks, in bewilderment, “How can the thing I’ve never felt at all be the thing I was marked out to feel?” (Bell, 1991, 266). May realizes that her death is the real ordeal because it will usher the release of the beast now that he is left alone. Living without her becomes living without protection and conscience.
The Ego will be quite vulnerable to the whims of the Id without the presence of the Super-ego to filter unacceptable drives. In a sense, Marcher without May will be vulnerable to the beast. Only after she dies and after he fully realizes her necessary presence in his life does the beast leap at him: “The super-ego retains the character of the father, the absence of which renders the ego vulnerable to “an unconscious sense of guilt” (Freud, 1989, 642). So Marcher deplores his outcast state, his banishment to the jungle that has grown more “spacious,” stilled, and vacant. His visit to May’s grave does change his condition: it is as if the woman who offered him a link with life at Weatherend has broken all connection with him as “her two names [on the tombstone] became a pair of eyes that didn’t know him” (James, 1903, 594).
At that moment, revelation does arrive at last at his dead friend’s graveside, where the face of another mourner, unknown to him, is “the image of scarred passion.” He realizes through this external reminder that “he had seen outside of his life, not learned it within, the way a woman was mourned when she had been loved for herself” (James, 1903, 596). Marcher’s realization that losing May stands for missing the opportunity of enjoying his personal life. Being so obsessed by this coming event caused a fissure between his internal (love towards May) and external life (obsession with a coming event), which represents the Freudian understanding of the relationship between the Ego and the Super-ego: “Whereas the ego is essentially the representative of the external world, of reality, the super-ego stands in contrast to it as the representative of the internal world…Conflicts between the ego and the ideal will…ultimately reflect the contrast between what is real and what is psychical, between the external world and the internal world” (Freud, 1989, 643). Marcher realizes that she had offered him an escape from the Beast: “the escape would have been to love her” (James, 1903, 597), and to love her, to listen to her is to trust his conscience.
Furthermore, James complicates Marcher’s psychological state by showing him as a man torn by his own insecurities. May, as a representation of the Super-ego, tries to protect him from his Id through reconciliation: “Marcher cannot quite grasp the idea that May embodies the primal creativity operating with inevitability in nature but capable of being rejected by narcissistic man” (Gargano, 1986, 360). In this sense, May becomes a representation of a repressed entity barely recognized as valid or as operative towards reconciliation. To Freud, the repressed is “only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id” (Freud, 1989, 635). On another instance, on one of her birthdays, they discuss the Beast and he suspects that she is keeping something from him; and in one moment, when her face loses its mask, he sees in her “the very eyes of the Beast” (James, 1903, 573). She reassures him that he is a man of courage; he protests that a man of courage knows what he is afraid of. He suspects that she knows the true identity of the Beast. The fact that she becomes a repressed entity connects her more readily to the id as another repressed aspect of the psyche. Marcher accuses May of knowing something and deliberately keeping it from him. He tells her that her expression shows that she is afraid that he is going to find out the truth. She, however, tells him that he will never find out because to May “to find out the truth” is to be no longer vulnerable to the beast. He should have realized that her presence is the protection he needs or that the love they can share is the answer to his ordeal because it will guard him against any psychological discord. With the idea of losing May, therefore, Marcher has the image of being left alone in the jungle of life and having to face the beast alone. He is certain that he cannot, on his own, protect himself from the beast.
To Freud, the Super-ego “represents an energetic reaction-formation against those choices. Its relation to the ego is not exhausted by the precepts; ‘You ought to be like this’…it also comprises the prohibition: ‘You may not be like this’” (Freud, 1989, 643). Freud addresses the double aspect of the super-ego which allows the ego to choose its own ideal aspect or model and simultaneously continue to be supportive. In “The Jolly Corner,” Alice intentionally intimates that, though “quite huge and monstrous,” Brydon’s other self would not have been entirely contemptible. Alice presents herself here as the Super-ego trying to convince Brydon of who he really is, that is of his true self: “You don’t believe that…if you did you wouldn’t wonder. You’d know, and that would be enough for you. What you feel _ and what I feel for you _ is that you’d have had the power” (James, 1909, 614). Brydon asks, “You’d have liked me that way?” to which she gently responds, “How should I not have liked you?” Entirely missing the implied reconciliation as well as the imaginative strength in Alice’s answer, Brydon wrongly concludes, “I see. You’d have liked me, have preferred me, a billionaire!” Alice immediately counters, “How should I not have liked you?” (James, 1909, 616) but the point is lost on Brydon. He is incapable of comprehending the discourse that Alice lays bare, which is that of being on his side no matter in what shape or state he is, will be or could have been.
Such dialogues between Alice and Brydon are really significant because Freud explains that the Super-ego “holds a special position between the Ego and the Id. It belongs to the Ego, shares its high psychological organization, but stands in an especially intimate connection with the Id. It is, actually, the precipitate of the Ego’s first attachments to objects” (Fodor and Gaynor, 1958, 149). Alice’s connection with the apparition is very clear as she dreams of it and actually makes Brydon aware of the presence or possibility of another self lurking to be realized:
She had afterwards said to him that…if he had but stayed at home he would have anticipated the inventor of the sky-scraper. If he had but stayed at home he would have discovered his genius…and this was the image under which he himself judged the matter…very much as he might have been met by some strange figure, some unexpected occupant…The quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained with him. (James, 1909, 607)
Alice, however, continues to watch over Brydon; she is as obsessed as he is with what he might have been: “my mind, my imagination, had worked so over what you might, what you mightn’t have been - to show you, you see, how I’ve thought of you” (James, 1909, 612). This relationship is significant for a healthy psychical life: “it is just as important for the Ego to live in concord with the Super-ego as with the id. Discord between Ego and Super-ego have great significance for psychical life” (Fodor and Gaynor, 1958, 149). Therefore, May’s death in “The Beast in the Jungle” triggers this discord whereas Alice’s presence keeps things in balance as an equalizer because the Super-ego shares a similar trait with the Id: “In spite of their fundamental difference, the id and the super-ego have one thing in common; they both represent the influences of the past (the id the influence of heredity, the super-ego essentially the influence of what is taken over from other people)” (Fodor and Gaynor, 1958, 150).
Considering the Super-ego’s relation to other people and therefore society itself, it is expected of the super-ego to be the “vehicle for the phenomenon we call ‘conscience’” (Fodor and Gaynor, 1958, 149). Freud’s theory implies that the Super-ego is a symbolic internalisation of the father figure and cultural regulations because it tends to stand in opposition to the desires of the Id as they conflict objectives, and become aggressive towards the Ego. It acts as the conscience, maintaining our sense of morality and proscription from taboos in order to maintain balance and order in society. In this sense, the super-ego is some kind of perfectionist. Hence, James characterizes Alice as “[listening] to everything” and as “a woman who answered intimately but who utterly didn’t chatter. She scattered abroad therefore no cloud of words; she could assent, she could agree, above all she could encourage” (James, 1909, 614). Later, the narrator characterizes her in an idealistic, one-dimensional fashion as “you’re a person whom nothing can have altered. You were born to be what you are, anywhere, anyway: you’ve the perfection nothing else could have blighted” (James, 1909, 615).
Also noteworthy is how Freud defines the relation between the Ego and the Super-ego in terms of child and parent: “the individual’s super-ego in the course of its development takes over contributions from later successors and substitutes of his parents, such as teachers, admired figures in public life, or high social ideals” (Fodor and Gaynor, 1958, 150). Significantly, it is Alice Staverton, not Brydon, who dominates that final scene, both physically and verbally. The barely conscious Brydon is aware, as he comes to, of his head “pillowed in extraordinary softness and faintly refreshing fragrance…and he finally knew that Alice Staverton had made her lap an ample and perfect cushion to him” (James, 1909, 635). She is there to bring him back to the level of consciousness and restores his sense of reality.
The haven that May and Alice provide to their protagonists is similar to that provided to Kate and Densher in The Wings of the Dove who “agree that Milly’s “wings” have reached out to “cover” them both. “Milly’s wings on this reading would simply be her money” (Kurnick, 2007, 219) whereas those of May and Alice would be their caring companionship whose loss disturbs the mental health and unleashes a deep sense of guilt. In both stories the women play an integral role in identifying the fear. Alice says that she has dreamt of this alter ego and urges therefore Brydon even more to meet him. Similarly, May reminds Marcher of his confession to her a long time ago about his imminent encounter with the beast.
James’s two stories deal with the “abnormal psychology of obsession” (Hocks, 1990, 78) and the two women’s roles are to help alleviate that mania, the way the Super-ego alleviates the intrusion of the Id on the Ego. The beast, therefore, springs as Marcher sees what he has missed and what he has denied this special woman. The story closes with the devastated and defeated Marcher sprawled on the grave of the woman that he should have loved. He has become the prey of the Beast; the ego is overwhelmed by the Id in the absence of the Super-ego whereas in “The Jolly Corner,” Brydon awaits “a creature…more formidable, than any beast of the forest” (James, 1909, 624). James frames the final scene to ensure the presence of a final touch from Alice as a human embodiment of the Super-ego and therefore the encounter becomes essentially therapeutic. James constructs the two stories basically on losing and maintaining communication between three aspects which are the internal projections of one mind and therefore he anticipates Freud’s structural theory of the three divisions of the mind.
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