Although Owen Wingrave is often included among Henry James’s ghost stories, a close reading reveals very little of the ectoplasmic ancestor and a great deal of history, atmosphere and psychology in the Wingrave family (note the obvious resonance of that name, by the way).
This of course has given James’s biographers, starting with Leon Edel, ample opportunity to read the tale ‘biographically’. The more so in that, according to the initial notebook entry, the idea developed in James’s mind after reading the memoirs of one of Napoleon’s generals, Marcelin Marbot. Reading forwards, we recall that in his final illness James suffered delusions that he was Napoleon, and behold, a ready made key!
Naturally, nothing is ever that simple, but this rejection of generations of military tradition by the educated Owen, projected by James in the early 1890s, can still throw light on British aristocratic and upper-middle class attitudes to those unimaginable horrors then in the future: the Boer War (1899–1901) and the Great War (1914–1918). Again, we find Henry James less the aloof artist, carving small pieces of ivory for his own satisfaction, and more the far-seeing one, in touch with the big questions of his day, producing the art which “makes life, makes interest”.
Plot summary
Owen Wingrave, the second son of a military family is being coached for entry into Sandhurst and a career as a soldier. He is surrounded by relatives with a fierce loyalty to the traditions of duty, public sacrifice, and death in conflict. But he decides that war is ‘barbaric’ and refuses to join the army. His grandfather and maiden aunt are deeply shocked and threaten to disinherit him.
A group of people assemble at the old family home with a view to persuading him to change his mind. They include his private tutor, his aunt, and Kate Julian a young woman who expects to marry him.
The old house has a macabre history including a room in which a former Wingrave died after killing a young boy. Owen resists the pressure put on him, but when Kate Julian accuses him of cowardice, he offers to spend the night in the room. She locks him in, and the next morning he is found dead on the same spot as his ancestor.
