Henry James needed an imagination of Evil; it was a requirement of his artistic vocation as well as his personal identity. He had a huge ambition not only for his own fiction, but for the novel generally, which in his moment was still an adolescent inhabiting the outskirts of cultural respectability, where film (or “the movies”) lived twenty years ago. James worked as a propagandist for the genre, playing a kind of shell game by worrying in his essays or prefaces over various aspects of fictional composition, as though one could simply assume for it the serious stature of lyric, epic, and dramatic poetry. But when in his own work he wanted to connect allusively to these established literary traditions, the problem of Evil became his chief conduit. I want here to examine this process in two of James's most famous short works, Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw, and one of the great novels, The Portrait of a Lady, to question why Evil so dominates his imagination when the very concept had, by his own estimation, become creaky, suspect, lame.