Element of Obsessive Neurotic Hallucination In Three of Henry James s Short Stories

At the time of giving final touches to the New York Edition of his works Henry James described some of his stories to his publishers as “a group of tales of the quasi-supernatural or gruesome order”.1 Actually these quasi-supernatural stories are stories of obsessive neurosis of haunted imagination, of a guile-laden conscience stalking stealthily behind the conscious part of the protagonists personality. May be these stories have at times the hallucinatory design of a ghost story, but they are, as Henry James believed, like a good ghost story, but they are, as Henry James believed, like a good ghost story “connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life”2. These stories of neurotic obsession are not the ghost stories in the conventional sense, because one does not find these ghosts walking in the tortuous corridors.