Interiority and the Preternatural: Wilkie Collins, Henry James, and The Curse
In art and life alike, it is important not to confuse the supernatural with the preternatural.
The supernatural, what is super naturam, "above nature," refers, properly speaking, to the genuinely transcendent--that is, what it is distinguished from the natural not by a straightforward conflict or addition, but by totally superseding it, nullifying it, prefiguring it in its totality, and/or drawing it up whole into itself. The genuinely supernatural cannot be anticipated by the natural, or portrayed in terms of it: it can only, to a limited extent, be conveyed by its action on and through the natural. Hence the proper mode(s) of the Sacred Scriptures and other theological and mystical writings.
The preternatural, what is praeter naturam, "next to nature" or "outside" it, is not like this: most properly, it refers to those things that do not transcend the natural, but rather exist alongside it, adding something to it or in some way operating outside its normal bounds. It is the preternatural that is the more common purview of human art and literature.
Even here, one can distinguish two senses of the preternatural, one of which is more proper than the other. In the first place, the term preternatural is often used for entities that, while not properly supernatural, are nonetheless more spiritual or powerful or higher in some sense, and thus have greater power to act on and even against nature: demons and angels and ghosts and human persons.
In itself, though, there is nothing unnatural about these entities, which are in the most immediate sense simply one group of created natures among others. I have never seen a ghost, but I have had a few encounters with demons--and I can assure my readers that there is nothing particularly exciting or artistic about such experiences. The existence of an entity that is strong or difficult to detect or even very intelligent and who wishes to harm you may be frightening, but there is nothing intrinsically interesting about it, any more than about a cockroach or charging rhinoceros or human murderer.
Still, while these entities are not beyond nature in a strong sense, the reality is that if we examine the bulk of art about spiritual beings, indeed the bulk of art about even threatening human beings or animals, we find that it is layered with a great deal of strange, eerie "preternatural" effects. The reason for this, though, is found in the relationship between such entities and the preternatural in the proper sense.
Hence the central thesis of this essay, namely that the "preternatural" in human and artistic terms refers precisely to the interiority of human experience and action, and in particular to two troubling features of this interiority: (1) its frequent opacity, and (2) its susceptibility to being acted upon and affected.
A human person does not merely exist as an entity in the world, one object among other objects acting and being acted upon: they exist, rather, by receiving and interiorizing the world, and then communicating what they have received.
Hence the essential paradox of human life and personhood as such: every human being lives in the same objective world, yet every human being exists in a sense in their own world, which is not merely a "subjective" as opposed to "objective" world, or a false as opposed to a true world, but which is precisely the world as received and related to by themselves. As both Trinitarian theology and Christology in their several ways show, the person in its actual, particular existence and relationality is precisely what cannot be comprehended within nature, but exists "outside of" it, "alongside" it. As an intellectual entity, an entity that fundamentally is intellect--that is to say, a pure receptivity that is actualized and exists only in its receiving and relating to and even becoming what is other as other--every human being simply is the whole world received according to a particular relation.
In theory, there is nothing dangerous, nothing even false or non-objective, about this state of affairs. Each person receives the world according to their particular, truthful relation to it, characterizes that world comprehensively according to that relation, and then gives that world back as their own to other persons. In this giving and receiving of the content of the world and all things according to real and true relation, this essentially Trinitarian dynamic, is the whole glory and beauty of intellect and personhood and, in its most perfect and transcendent form, the very life of God himself.
Yet in the world as we find it, this reality of personhood can go very badly wrong. Each person lives in, lives as, a world: but these worlds are frequently constituted as much by falsehood, disconnection, privation, and malicious intention as by true and objective relation. When we encounter people, when we start to understand them, we get not so much a sense of their psychology or their identity in a straightforward sense: we get, rather, a glimpse of the world in which they exist, the world as which they exist. Without a doubt we have all had the experience of encountering someone (perhaps even ourselves) and getting a glimpse of the world in which they lived--and finding it a hellish, illusive wasteland.
At the same time, the worlds we construct or exist in are never merely our own creations, based merely on our own relations. As persons, starting from the time we are infants, we all form our senses of the world and our personalities through receiving from and relating to others. Without this, no true relationships among people are possible, and indeed we cannot really function as rational beings, cannot really live in the world or form our own sense of it. We are beings that by our very nature and inmost operation are aimed at receiving other peoples' worlds, other peoples' interiorities, and reconciling and uniting them to our own.
At its best, this process of communication is a constant ongoing process, a constant reception and correction and expansion and integration of our sense of the world that brings us deeper and deeper into relation with each other and the depths of being. At worst, though, this process of receiving our worlds from without can become the most brutal type of violence, a violence that threatens to efface our inmost selves. We have all almost certainly had the experience of being overwhelmed, deafened, deadened, perhaps even totally annihilated by someone else's hellish interiority, someone else's false sense of the world and their and our place in it.
It is here that the less proper sense of the preternatural relates directly to, and is only comprehensible in terms of, the proper sense of the term. In principle, everything in the world has some power over our interiority, some place in the worlds we form. The more something--a time, a place, an object, a melody, a work of art, a relationship--directly impacts our interiority, shapes and characterizes and constitutes it, the more we perceive that thing as somehow "beyond nature," strange, wonderful, luminous, eerie.
"Spirits" and human persons alike are not preternatural in any sense that transcends this--they are simply entities in the world with the capacity to impact our interior lives. Yet as intellectual beings with interior lives, thoughts and intentions and designs and worlds of their own, they are entities who have a great deal more power to shape and even dominate our interiorities than any other. In the final sense, indeed, only other persons, other intellectual entities, are or can be preternatural. Only they can give us our senses of the world, alter them, or destroy them.
Hence, it is quite true and even quite literal to say that for the saint the world is heaven, and that for the evil man one and the same world is hell. Indeed, the saint in a real sense is heaven; his whole existence and personality is found in the communication of the world as given and received and lived in beatitude; and as evil men grow more evil, they in a real sense become Hell, their existence consisting in little more than the communication of their own misery and damnation to others. It is this interplay and drama of personality, of the communication of whole cosmoses, that constitutes most of the actual substance of our lives in this world.
To illustrate the point, I will now turn to examining a few works of art that bear on this question, and show how they all reflect, to varying degrees, this fundamental reality of human life: and how their use of "preternatural" elements in the exterior sense is ultimately a mask and means for examining the ways in which people's interior lives are impacted, illuminated, deformed, or destroyed by the world and other persons. In these stories, ghosts and demons and other people alike are ghostly, not because they threaten us without, but because they threaten us within.
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins is in many ways a test case for how preternatural effects may be achieved without directly featuring spiritual entities at all. I confess I find Victorian literature in general extremely hit or miss--at its worst, it is merely the wretched literature of "realism," aiming at a comprehensive sense of objective reality that is at once shallow, unrealistic, and perverse. At its best, though, whether in Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, or the present author, it is extremely successful at showing the strangeness and horror and wonder lurking beneath the surface of an apparently staid and scientific society. After all, the Victorian era, for all its embrace of stolidity in dress and manners, was the era of Imperialism at its height, of Orientalism, of a loss of faith that was at the same time the return of an irrationalist pluralism through spiritualism and psychology and a hundred other channels.
Wilkie Collins belongs to the more direct and sensationalist genre of Victorian writings. For all its sensational exterior, though, The Woman in White is at heart a meditation on identity and character, its opacity and danger. The titular "woman in white" is an excellent example of an image that startles us as "preternatural" precisely in its opacity to us and its ultimate status as an expression of a hidden interiority. The woman in white dresses only in white, is in danger, is fleeing from unknown pursuers, is seemingly insane--and ultimately, in all these features is an expression of the impact other people and their moral characters and choices have had on her interior life and self. The woman wears white, we learn, because of a childhood encounter with a benefactor who dressed her in white, a benefactor who still impacts her profoundly and who she constantly appeals to beyond the grave. The woman in white is fleeing from danger, has been locked up and oppressed and falsely accused of insanity and to an extent even driven insane by the hidden moral perversity of another character, and because of her knowledge of the secret of his true identity. In all this, successive revelation does not remove the sense of eeriness (as if that eeriness was merely the result of lack of knowledge) but deepens and intensifies it.
The bulk of the eeriness of the first part of the novel, however, is taken up with the novel's villain, Sir Percival Glyde, and the question or mystery of his true character. The first revelation of his hidden evil comes in the form of a dream; and the characters spend much time questioning the veracity of this revelation, and testing it in every external way they can think of. All these external tests, however--of rank, of reputation, of behavior, of legality, of direct documentary evidence--are applied in turn: and all of them fail. At this point, with the failure of public, masculine objectivity, the struggle is taken up, in a more private fashion by a woman, Marian Halcombe, who has become aware of Percy's malice but must now struggle to understand it, plumb its depths, and counter it. The most interesting part of the novel is thus taken up with this direct conflict, a battle not only of wills and intellects but of sexes and social positions, in which she struggles with every means at her disposal to detect and thwart him and his hidden character and hidden intentions and hidden plans--and fails, and is defeated.
In this is the novel's more contextual horror within Victorian English society, a society dominated by an ideal of moral and social respectability in general and by a highly-colored image of the idealized wealthy oligarchical gentleman in particular. Sir Percy is precisely the kind of character who would in most Victorian art, especially popular art, appear as a hero beyond reproach; he is tested with all the obvious tests of such a society, the tests it used to not only arrange marriages but transfer wealth and convey rewards and give high office and power. He is thus, by the standards of this highly externalized society, indubitably a good man. And yet...he is in fact a moral monster, a definitionally "preternatural" entity in terms of this society's view of the world.
Hence the frightening, eerie quality of the story, and the doubts it would have raised in its audience. Sir Percy passes every external test that can be found, but is revealed in his true character only by dreams, by the declarations of a poor insane woman, by the private emotions of the (female) characters around him, and ultimately by his own actions and self-revelations within private, intimate familial relations.
If such a man can escape detection, if he can be good and evil simultaneously in different spheres, then perhaps something is terribly, terribly wrong about the society's whole approach to the world. Most fundamentally, perhaps it is precisely the objective, scientific, class-based, external-reality-based approach of this society to the world, to moral character and relationship, that is directly responsible for its inability to deal with moral evil. The interior realm, the realm of intentions and desires, had been banished from 'objective' reality by Cartesianism and industrialism and masculine science and public life and legality, reduced to the realm of the merely private and subject and familial and feminine and emotional, driven to take refuge in dreams and hunches and religion: and yet it is right.
In this basic disconnect, this hidden fear, multiplied in various other characters and situations, balanced against the more positive effect on interiority of friendship and a virtuous romance, lies the novel's eerie power.
Henry James, "Sir Edmund Orme" and "The Turn of the Screw"
If Wilkie Collins shows this preternatural sense of things without any spirits, Henry James' famous ghosts stories show us one literary function of such entities, the artistic ends to which they may be put, and the connection between their more obvious and exterior presence and the continuing fascination of interiority.
"Sir Edmund Orme" is almost a perfect encapsulation of my basic thesis in this essay. Apart from its sole ghost, the short story is almost a shadowplay, peopled by characters with little or no interiority and little or no knowledge of themselves or each other. Our hero, a young wealthy man, somewhat formally and unemotionally courts a young woman who never clearly reveals her own intentions, but who at several points in the narrative seems to reject or at least put off his attentions. He ultimately and somewhat abruptly succeeds in gaining her hand, however, thanks to the forceful (private) intervention of the young woman's mother.
The only clear glimpse we get into the interior lives of our characters comes through, and is embodied in, the story's rather mundane ghost. We never directly see our hero form any definite intention to court the young woman; but abruptly, after spending time in her company, he begins seeing the figure of an old-fashioned, silent young man, whom no one else, seemingly, can see. From this apparition, the woman's mother infers that he must be in love with her daughter and intend to marry her. The ghost, she informs the young man, is in fact the shade of her own former lover, whom she had been engaged to, but who she had abruptly rejected in favor of her daughter's (dead) father--after which her jilted suitor killed himself. Ever since, she has been haunted by his specter, always silent, but always passively reminding her of her own broken commitment and obligation. The only way to be rid of him, the mother decides, is to successfully marry off her daughter, preventing her from similarly breaking her obligations to her suitor, and thus in some way recapitulating and undoing her own alleged offense. In due time, then, the mother uses the suitor's fascination with the ghost to persuade him to broach marriage to her daughter, then persuades the daughter into marrying this somewhat equivocal suitor; upon which daughter and suitor see the specter one last time, and then he is never seen again.
Put simply, the ghost in this story precisely stands for the interiority of these characters, or in particular for the way in which one interiority, one obsession or unresolved wound or shame--that of the mother--ultimately intervenes in and determines the intentions and actions of the other characters. The mother is guilty and preoccupied with her own broken engagement and its consequences--so she first persuades an uncommitted young man to court her daughter seriously, and then persuades her daughter to accept him. In this, the "strangeness" and preternatural quality of the ghost represents precisely the otherness of the intentions he expresses to both young man and woman. The young man, at the beginning of the story, is somewhat casually infatuated with the young woman; the young woman, meanwhile, is engaged in casually flirting with the young man, as well as with many other young men. The mother's deadly serious, guilt-ridden intentions for them are quite literally a "ghost" from the past--the imprint of events that took place long before both were born, and yet that end up, thanks to the mother, having the most immediate and determinative effects on their own lives.
Even if there were no spirit in the story, then, even if it were as this-worldly in externals as The Woman in White, "Sir Edmund Orme" would remain a ghost story.
Similarly, but at a much higher pitch and degree of intensity, is James' more famous ghost story "The Turn of the Screw," a monumental work in Victorian literature that even G.K. Chesterton honored as a "repulsive little masterpiece."
The presentation of the preternatural and the interior is not, I think, fundamentally different than in "Sir Edmund Orme," but the pitch of emotion and horror is certainly much higher, thanks almost entirely to James' broaching of a topic rarely touched upon in contemporary literature: child abuse.
Once again, the ghosts of the story, as literally as they may exist within the novella's plot, function in literary terms as emblems of the lasting impact of dead people and events on the living. When our narrator, a naive and somewhat horny governess, arrives at a great estate to watch over two small children for the sake of their (hot) uncle, she is horrified to discover that before her arrival, a morally perverse manservant and her predecessor as governess had for an extended time "had their way with" the two children under their care, exposing them to and involving them in their own monstrous moral evil--and then both died suddenly and violently.
As the story unfolds, the governess begins seeing the two as ghosts on the estate, and gradually comes to believe that the two children, while outwardly innocent, are in fact in constant secret communication with the ghosts, continuing to act under their influence and do their bidding as before their deaths, and all the time deliberately lying to her about it. At this, the governess forms the unbending intention of exposing the children's deception and wresting them, by force if necessary, from the ghosts' influence: a path which ultimately leads to the forcible removal of one child from the estate and the death of the other.
Even from a literary perspective, the horror of this story comes not so much from the ghosts as from the children: and in particular from the basic portrayal of the opacity of the children's interiority and intentions. Victorian literature is full of child characters who seemingly have no interior lives at all, mere emblems of innocence and purity in a highly negative and nearly empty sense. The children in "The Turn of the Screw" initially appear to conform this model to an almost absurd degree, existing merely to smile sweetly and do whatever their governess suggests. The preternatural quality of the story comes from the gradual realization that the children do have interior lives--and they are marked by evil.
Even here, it is important to note that the children are not preternatural merely because they are connected to preternatural entities like ghosts--their eerie quality comes simply because of the fundamental disconnect between their blank exteriors and their true interiorities, which show the mark, not of spirits or demons, but of emphatically human evil. As in "Sir Edmund Orme," the story's ghosts are embodiments of the continuing impact of the past, of dead persons and acts and intentions, on the present. For the world, for most people, the manservant and governess are dead--but they are not dead for the children.
Of course, in this lies also the germ of the novella's troubling conclusion. The governess, for all her constant protestations of benevolence, is in the end quite a frightening character, a character whose own actions are increasingly out of step with her own stated intentions. While she declares that her actions all flow from love for the children, she herself admits that she took the job largely out of attraction to her employer: and as the story unfolds, her insistence on detecting the children's moral evil and vindicating her own correctness and "saving" them from corruption take on darker and darker valences.
For after all, for all the cliches of Victorian literature, for all the practical requirements of the governess' position, children do have interior lives and intentions--and should have them. If these children are in fact victims of abuse, then these interior lives may be damaged in various ways--but they can hardly be "saved" by the kind of subterfuge and domination the governess increasingly resorts to.
In the end, the governess emerges as far more an adversary of the children than their advocate, desperate to vindicate herself and detect them in deceptions and finally take possession of them from the ghost. From a witness, the governess gradually becomes a ghost herself, a grasping creature of hidden intentions intent on uncovering and dominating the children's interior selves by any means necessary. In the novella's last scene, she sees herself as engaged in a direct battle of wills with the ghost for her subject's soul--and wins, and drives away the ghost, and takes possession, and in so doing seemingly frightens her charge to death.
In the end, the novel's true horror comes merely from the realization of the reality of children's interior lives and selves--and the power of adults over them.
The Curse
From Victorian literature, I will now leap forward more than a hundred years to a piece of prestige television from the year 2023, that enacts, in a far different context, precisely the same basic concept of the preternatural.
The Curse, for the unaware, is a television series from the fertile and bizarre minds of Nathan Fielder and the Safdie Brothers. Nathan Fielder is a comedian known mostly for his off-putting, sardonic approach to sketch comedy, while the Safdie Brothers are filmmakers whose previous film Uncut Gems I reviewed in this space not too long ago. What these luminaries concocted together is perhaps the only work of relevant Millennial art I have ever seen, and one of the most topical pieces of art I have seen for many years.
Put simply, the show centers around a married couple trying to film and successfully sell a HGTV-style house-flipping show centered around their concept of mirrored cube-shaped eco-friendly "passive homes." The husband is an awkward, isolated, insecure, Jewish ex-casino-employee preoccupied with the couple's financial health and schemes; the wife is the beautiful, emotive, insecure child of wealthy slumlords desperate to prove her moral bona fides to the world. In the end, one of these characters dies.
A fair bit of The Curse is taken up with an effectively hyperreal parody of contemporary art and television culture, as the wife Whitney struggles to hold together her badly-thought-out gentrification project and gain the support of token Native Americans from the area and the husband Asher struggles to placate his demanding wife and come off as more approachable and funny to his audience and their bitter workaholic producer tries to gin up TV-ready drama between them both for his own amusement and to hopefully sell the show and keep working and stave off his own demons. Yet what makes the show brilliant is ultimately its highly dark and specific approach to characterization, and its use of preternatural elements to encapsulate its characters' fractured interior lives.
The show, after all, is titled The Curse; and in its first episode, Asher gives a hundred dollar bill to a young African girl in a parking lot for a B-roll camera shot, and then takes it back immediately after the cameras stop--upon which the girl curses him. For the rest of the show, Asher is preoccupied to the point of obsession with the idea that this curse is in fact responsible for all the bad and strange things happening to him, from the mundane (missing chicken in his pasta dinner) to the bizarre (chicken appearing in a bathroom sink) to the more directly personally catastrophic (such as his wife turning on him). This obsession leads ultimately to a kind of moral reevaluation of his whole life, as he tracks down the girl and her family and generously if awkwardly provides for them in every way he can while trying to secretly determine whether the girl has actual psychic powers. In between, he attends comedy classes and tries to craft a more "likeable" persona and demonstrate his commitment to his wife in increasingly awkward and stilted ways.
Whitney, though, is in truth the center of the television show The Curse, just as she is the center of the fictional show-within-a-show "Green Queen." The show's basic irony (highly reflective of Millennial gender relations and even many specific Millennial relationships I have observed) is that Asher is an obviously opaque and unemotional and unengaging and hence unattractive person--but he is for all that actually very straightforward and transparent in his actions and intentions, good and bad. Whitney, though, is much more media- and camera-ready, coming off on the surface as kind and empathetic and likeable and attractive and engaging--but in reality a complete mystery to herself and everyone around her and in her effects on others largely destructive. The basic dichotomy of the two, then, is that while both are in a basic sense isolated and insecure and unhappy and hence selfish people, the difference between them is simply that Asher is a very poor performer, and Whitney is a very good performer. The question the show eloquently poses is which state of affairs is actually and ultimate worse, for others and for oneself.
Asher is a failure in many obvious ways: an awkward, sociopathic nerd and pervert who was bullied as a kid and who lies and unsuccessfully connives to make money and prevent bad press and hide his bad actions from his wife. Whitney, meanwhile, repeatedly and spectacularly fails to do any genuine good for anyone, or form any genuine connection or friendship with anyone around her--but is nonetheless only ever seen as a moral success story. Her tragedy, then, is precisely the tragedy of media, of reflection, of the instant, circular loop of consciousness (from self to reflection and back to self again) described by Jean Baudrillard and exemplified in the mirrored exteriors of her houses. This instant, on-demand illusion of connection, of affirmation, of being seen, known, and loved, of interiority itself, is constantly available to Whitney (as to many others via the Internet), and in the end, it supersedes everything genuine in her life.
While the show is in theory about a (fictional) home-flipping show, its real drama centers around the relationship of its two leading characters. In the first episode, Dougie tries to get Asher to inject some media-ready drama into his relationship with his wife for the cameras, and is brusquely refused by an Asher always desperate to affirm his wife and gain her approval in any way possible. Halfway through the show, though, Dougie tries again with Whitney, and has considerably more success. Confronting her with the reality that their show so far is crushingly boring, without conflict, he begs her, for ratings' sake, to inject some conflict into her marriage with Asher. Over the next few episodes, then, Whitney develops a marital crisis in real time, through on-camera interviews and behind-the-scenes declarations and increasingly cruel interactions with her unaware husband: and then she plays back this entire drama for him in full, edited form, complete with inspirational music and schmaltzy self-voice-over proclaiming her complexity and independence and ability to go it on her own, presented in tandem with his sincere, artless admissions that she is a much better person than him and would have nothing if she left him.
It is here, though, in its penultimate episode, that the show achieves true greatness. After presenting her husband with this media-ized marital crisis--in effect divorcing him by pre-presenting the edited narrative of their divorce characterized as a triumphant journey of self-discovery before the event--Asher gets up and leaves the room: and then comes back, full of emotion, and insists that they put the scene in the show. She is completely right about him, he declares: he is a terrible person, a liar and money-grubber and loser who doesn't deserve her. The curse, all the bad things that have happened to him, aren't the result of cosmic fate: they are his fault. "I am the Curse," he declares. And now, he will live accordingly, submitting all his actions to her morally superior code, working even harder to placate her every whim, making even more sacrifices for her interests, altering himself totally to conform to her specifications--and if she ever ceases to want him, she won't even have to say anything: he will simply disappear. Whitney is genuinely taken aback by this unexpected commitment, her underlying insecurity assuaged: and she agrees to the bargain. And so their relationship (and more importantly, the television show) is saved.
Until, of course, the next episode, the brilliant season (and perhaps series) finale. Months later, their show has debuted, Whitney is pregnant, and Asher is, seemingly, a changed man. He now genuinely cares nothing about money, waving away her worries about the show's ratings and their own finances, happily giving a house away for free to the young African girl's family and treasuring Whitney's pregnancy and his prospective fatherhood with obvious devotion. Whitney, meanwhile, is apparently the same as ever, taken aback and somewhat pained by Asher's giving away of their money, annoyed by the tenants' lack of media-ready gratitude for their action, and silent and pensive in response to Asher's gushing.
Then, the next morning, Whitney goes into labor, is rushed to the hospital, and gives birth; and simultaneously Asher abruptly has his personal gravity reversed, first being stuck on the ceiling and then clinging to a tree that is sawed away from him while their producer films and ultimately perishing in the upper atmosphere after falling upwards for hundreds of miles. As the show concludes, Whitney has seemingly forgotten entirely about Asher's plight in the aftermath of her birth, smiling in inscrutable satisfaction as her child is taken from her by the medical staff; Asher freezes to death in outer space; Dougie weeps inconsolably; and we end on the mirrored, passive home of Whitney's dreams.
The preternatural elements of this show, as much as of Collins' or James' works, act to magnify and exemplify the character's fractured interiorities and their effects on the world. Asher's sense of being cursed is in essence a representation of his own nagging sense of insecurity, guilt, and shame, his profound sense of something being wrong, of his not being a good or worthy person, of people around him not respecting him, not liking him or caring about him. Whitney, meanwhile, is totally opaque to herself, and seemingly capable of processing herself and her world and relationships only through mass media and accompanying narratives: and so experiences no sense of the preternatural at all.
Asher's conclusion that he himself is the curse represents the choice to totally efface his own intentions and desires, his total submission of his whole interiority to Whitney's. His death in the finale is the logical conclusion and expression of this state of affairs, just as it is the literal fulfillment of his stated intention to simply disappear as soon as she no longer wants him.
By doing this, it should be said, by submitting to what he believes is within Whitney, what he thinks she wants and values based on his idealized image of her as a pure, self-less person who genuinely and deeply wills the good, Asher has seemingly become a much better person, gained some genuine interiority and good intentions of his own that are in no way dependent on money and mass media, and hence as the finale episode dawns seems poised to be a decent and doting father.
In The Curse's climax, though, as in Collins and James, the hidden truth of human interiority reasserts itself precisely as the preternatural, what is outside of and seemingly contrary to nature. Asher's actions in the finale and before reflect his (false) vision of who Whitney is "inside"; and his sudden and grisly death in the upper atmosphere reflects her true interiority and intentions. Whitney is not someone who genuinely cares about morality, or helping others, or about him: she is someone who needs a certain amount of practical support and otherwise desires nothing but the abstract reflection and adulation and affirmation of all those around her, exemplified and fulfilled in the immediate, mirror-like circuit and reflection of mass-media. As with Sir Percy, Whitney's true self is ultimately revealed in her effects on those close to her.
As in literature, so it is in life: for all our exteriority, for all our ability to deceive ourselves or each other, our true, interior selves and intentions will ultimately be revealed by the effects they have on others and the world. And in the end, all intentions will be laid bare--not by the preternatural, but by the truly supernatural, that which transcends all things.
Iudex ergo cum sedebit,
Quidquid latet apparebit:
Nil inultum remanebit.
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