The psychological ghost story is taken to new heights as it focuses not on external specters but on the perceiving consciousness. In James's fiction, Gothic elements are used in the service of realism and psychology to emphasize the impenetrable depths of human emotion and to highlight the strange and often frightening nature of the human mind.
Biographical Information
James was born in New York City, the second son of well-to-do, liberal parents. Because of his grandfather's enormous wealth, a fortune he divided equally among his children, James's father never had to work for his income. Henry James, Sr. was an intellectual man of his day: a devotee of the philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg and an occasional theorist on religion and philosophy. He sometimes had hallucinations that he regarded as religious experiences, and as he was growing up James witnessed his father's strange behavior during such episodes. James's mother had a more practical bent, a quality she was forced to develop in order to compensate for her husband's erratic conduct. James himself was a shy, bookish boy who assumed the role of a quiet observer beside his active elder brother William, who later became the founder of psychological study in America and the prominent philosopher of pragmatism.
This is a free page. This page contains 176 words. This
article contains 14,114 words (approx. 47 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Henry James - (1843 - 1916) Access Pass.
