Christmas Reading '09: The Turn of the Screw

[Quark]

There are a few stock characteristics to Mrs. Grose. First she's Scottish, which in the perception of the Victorians was an unimaginative person, hard working, deligent, and down to earth. Second, she's older, uneducated, perhaps proned to superstition, but practical. She's the perferct contrast to the Governess.

Good point, Virgil. She mostly is a stock character, and you list most of the characteristics associated with a Scottish servant. I might add religiosity--of a particularly dogmatic kind--to the list, too, as that finds its way into the popular books on "Scottish life" during the late-nineteenth century. Mrs. Grose seems to share this attribute. I think you can see it come out a little an exchange she has with the governess in ch. XVIII:

"The trick's played, " I went on; "they've successfully worked their plan. He found the most divine little way to keep me quiet while she went off."

"Divine" Mrs. Grose bewilderedly echoed.

"infernal, then" I almost cheerfully rejoined.

The governess chooses her words somewhat carelessly, but Mrs. Grose notes the contradiction in calling something so evil "divine." In fact, that's all she notes. The rest of the governess's message just washes over her. Of course, the governess uses Mrs. Grose's little scruple to make another one of her big leaps. She latches onto whatever Mrs. Grose says and uses to construct a bigger context in which she, the governess, is the morally pure hero fighting against unspeakable evil. In this case, she starts by pointing out the cleverness of Miles's and Flora's plan to escape--their "divine little way." But, when Mrs. Grose indicates the moral import of a word like "divine," the governess immediately latches onto it--with some relish--and turns it, once again, to cast her conflict with the children as a grand fight between good and evil.

This seems to be the way Mrs. Grose and the governess collaborate. Mrs. Grose offers something up in a simple-minded way, and the governess uses it to create or detect (depending on whether the ghosts are real) a greater scheme. After all, everything the governess knows about Miss Jessel and Quint comes from the little bit of history that Mrs. Grose gives. The governess then projects or senses it out onto the estate. When the governess reports back to Mrs. Grose, the Scottish servant is bewildered, but we don't know whether that's because the servant is just so stupid--as the stereotype would have it--or whether she's just befuddled at how the governess could take the information she was given and concoct such weird stories.

Supposing the ghosts are fantasy, how are we to explain the following loose ends?

There are loose ends no matter which way you slice this story. You're right that if we take the ghosts to be pure fantasy then some parts of the story seem extraneous. Yet the same goes if you take the ghost to be real entities. How do readers account for the odd enthusiasm that the governess has about what's going on around her? If the ghosts are real, then the situation is terrifying--or at least unpleasant. The governess, though, seems to enjoy it to some degree. Another loose end to the story would be the way the governess is put into the place of the people she's supposedly resisting. James has the governess stand where Quint was supposedly standing and scare Mrs. Grose. This seems to indicate that she is to some degree responsible for the ghosts, and responsible for scaring everyone. Why do this? Why talk about who the governess was in love with? What does love have to do with a ghost story? I think you have to accept the possibility--at least to some extent--that the governess may be inventing the ghosts. Or else, parts of the story have nothing to do with anything. At the same time, I think you're right that one has to accept that the ghosts could be real for all the reasons you give.

It is interesting that the skeptics and believers seem to divide over the ghosts according to our skepticism or belief; I am about 91% with Neely, but reserve that last 9% precisely because Miles goes from angelically divine to sinister in the course of 30 pages or so--if his expulsion amounted to little more than boys being boys, we aren't really treated to much evidence of that.

I'm probably 91% for the ghosts being real, and 9% for them being delusion. The psychological reading is just so vaguely drawn in this story that's it hard to say that that's the primary reading. The ghosts could be fantasy, but James doesn't give us enough information to tell why she's fantasizing, what exactly the fantasy is, and why no one around her notices that she's mentally unstable. It takes a lot from the reader to fill in those blanks. I think you can, and to fully explain the this story you need to. But, it still works more convincingly as a ghost story, so I tend to believe that's the primary reading.


Oh, and I don't know about anyone else, but the longer we've been talking about the book the more it's grown on me. Kudos to whoever picked it.

[LitNetIsGreat]

I’m about 95% in favour of visions, as if you hadn’t guessed. I certainly see the framing prologue as setting up a ghost story and the part which Virgil quoted was one of the points I had in mind in this section, but for me outside of this the overwhelming evidence points to visions, not ghosts. Douglas might be convinced it is a ghost story but I am not. I mean, how do you account for the fact that Mrs Grose does not see them when given the opportunity and Flora is adamant that she has not too? How do you account for the governess’s claim that the visions are in her head? How do you figure the governess’s lack of sleep into the equation - which is undeniably a factor in causing visions? In short how do you account for her whole character as one that is “rather easily carried away” and full of deluded self-importance?

Surely these are more fundamental questions in the ghost/vision debate?

[Jozanny]

Oh, and I don't know about anyone else, but the longer we've been talking about the book the more it's grown on me. Kudos to whoever picked it.

I nominated it, but it won the vote by a hair. But as for me, I have exhausted the issue of *taking sides*, and grow increasingly interested, on a theoretical level, about why Henry James was so intent on being elusive, and what that means in terms of his continuing legacy, which is beyond the scope of this discussion, and maybe beyond the scope of my mental falculties at this point, as I just don't have all that would be necessary to tackle the issue under my belt, like a sufficient grasp of phenomenology, and my ignorance is frustrating.

Having conceded this, however, I think James draws theorists toward a teleology of perception, not that he ever had Kant on his mind--but there is a "window into" the narrative that boxes one in, much as Kant claims Enlightenment itself "a way out". Stay with me a moment. The majority of the classics we read together here are basically stories grounded in some sort of realistic context. Poe, Dickens, Chekhov, to name one of Quark's favorites. We read and assess, move on.

With James, I read and then want to commit murder, namely his, because my expections are continually frustrated in a way that locks people into the text, me, or the real scholars who have made an industry out of James and theory generation. Not that I want to stray so far that I get spanked, but I can never truly make up my mind when it comes to drawing conclusions about the characters James portrays, even in novels with different keynotes than what we have here.

What is James saying about what turns a vibrant young girl into a *lady* in Portrait? You need to marry a fortune hunter who pulls the wool over your eyes and suffer into refinement? Portrait is one of the works I best understand, and it is not as sinister as these smaller gothic off shoots, but is still in many ways, as equally ambiguous. I live through Isabel's journey, or Maggie's, or Kate Croy's, and even the governess, in ways that I simply do not do with other authors. David Copperfield is like sitting through a diet of excess sugar, by way of comparison--but the narrative, by being melodramatic and conventional, let's me out. James does not. I am always waiting for Isabel to confront her husband on that final train ride after she defies him--always hoping to discover how Maggie and the Prince turn out--or if Kate gets over Milly's victory and near redemption of the corrupted journalist who winds up living in the love of her memory, or even waiting for Miles to struggle out of this woman's arms and go on living, in a way that shows his fiction paves the way for the importance of phenomenology as a field of inquiry about the nature of consciousness.

[kasie]

Neely - you seem to place some measure of importance on the Governess' 'deluded self-importance' and comment that she was there only to teach them. I think you are underestimating her position: in the initial interview in Harley Street, the uncle stresses that she will be 'in supreme authority', the rest of the staff are there only to help. Like all teachers, she is in loco parentis - most teachers can (happily) hand back their charges at the end of the school day and return authority to the true parents: this poor woman can't, she is teacher and parent all day and every day. No wonder she is anxious and can't sleep - she is exhausted. Add to that the loneliness that she foresaw even before she took on the post and that may well be a condition for breeding visions but the first time she 'sees' Quint is quite early in her tenure and she is still delighted by her new job and exhaustion has not yet set in. She is quite well aware of her own weakness - vanity - but is in the early days at least confident that she is equal to the demands of her position:

'...They [her new circumstances] had, as it were, an extent and mass for which I not been prepared and in the presence of which I found myself, freshly, a little scared not less than a little proud...'

It is later that the sleepless nights set in.

I think it is important not to underestimate the influence of her vicarage upbringing - it may not have made a worldly-wise young adult of her but it would have imbued her with a sense of dedication and a determination to see a job through to the end.

How do we know Mrs Grose is Scottish, btw? I can find only a description of her solidity and reliability.

I am still suspicious of the uncle. He was willing to visit Bly and do what he could for the children in the early days, 'parting even with his own servants to wait on them' (presumably Quint). Now, however, he wants never to be troubled by the affairs of the children. I cannot believe this is just idleness - I am sure that the fervour with which he thanks the newly-appointed governess for 'disemburdening' him is relief that he has escaped from a truly horrific situation for which he, in some measure, has been responsible, whether wittingly or not.

And yes, I think the ghosts are 'real' - I don't discount the governess' susceptibilty for all sorts of reasons, 'Freudian' or otherwise, as James is at pains to stress her weaknesses and 'nervousness' but there are too many loose ends for them to be purely figments of her imagination. And I think Mrs Grose is all too aware of the ghosts - why won't she go back to the room where Miles and Quint are together but vehemently prefers to accompany the governess to the lake.

***SPOILER ALERT***

Neely, the un-Jamesian scene I had in mind re the Beeb's Christmas production was the largely silent scene showing a new governess arriving, being greeted by Mrs Grose and introduced to Flora who is drawing quietly in the schoolroom. Flora looks up, smiles sweetly and greets her new teacher with, 'Ah, there you are - we've been wondering when you would come' (or maybe 'where you were') . (My italics) Who is 'we' if not Flora and the ghosts?

[LitNetIsGreat]

Who is 'we' if not Flora and the ghosts?

I took the 'we' as the children, or the children and Mrs Grose - but you could read it the other way I suppose if you choose to.

I'm not underestimating her position. The position of a governess is an awkward one, she uncomfortably above and apart from the servants, but not really 'high' enough to demand respect from them or of course to fit into upper part of the family - for to them she is 'just a governess'. The position of governess is quite a lonely one. Here I suppose she is 'strangely at the helm' as she says herself, but only because of a severe and unnatural absence of anyone else and not really on her own merit.

I still however think that she overrates her position, especially as the visions set in fully as in "I dare say I fancied myself, in short, a remarkable young woman" and many more alike. It is her way of 'reading into' what other people do or say and twisting it to fit her own view of events that really clouds her as a character and furthers the position that the visions are just that. On top of this it doesn't answer why Mrs Grose and Flora do not see the ghosts when they are supposedly in front of them. It is true that Flora could be lying, but not Mrs Grose, if the ghosts are there why is it that only the governess can see them?

With her lack of sleep it starts immediately on the first and second nights of her stay. It is here that she first hears and sees minor things that she later believes to be more significant than she first realised. This is when she is still very excited by her position, which actually doesn't wane even with the terrifying prospect of the ghosts, it could even to said to harden.

That she works hard is more than true enough and is another factor in the ghosts as visions as I said before. Is it also coincidence that when she finally does have an hour to herself, her time to unwind, that she sees the 'ghosts' not once, but twice, the time of rest is when the mind is most susceptible to suggestion?

The uncle is a strange one, but as Mrs Grose claims that he didn't know the character of Quint that well and by giving away most of his servants, Mrs Grose included I think, that he perhaps feels he has absolved himself of his obligations to his wards.

I think 'Grose' is a stock Scottish surname so it is assumed that she is Scottish, though it doesn't say it implicitly.

[Quark]

I live through Isabel's journey, or Maggie's, or Kate Croy's, and even the governess, in ways that I simply do not do with other authors. David Copperfield is like sitting through a diet of excess sugar, by way of comparison--but the narrative, by being melodramatic and conventional, let's me out. James does not. I am always waiting for Isabel to confront her husband on that final train ride after she defies him--always hoping to discover how Maggie and the Prince turn out--or if Kate gets over Milly's victory and near redemption of the corrupted journalist who winds up living in the love of her memory, or even waiting for Miles to struggle out of this woman's arms and go on living, in a way that shows his fiction paves the way for the importance of phenomenology as a field of inquiry about the nature of consciousness.

I wouldn't have guessed you had such a cheerful reading of this story, Jozanny. I agree with some of what you wrote, but I'd take in a different direction. You're right that James throws up barriers to understanding this story. It's thoroughly ambiguous and incomplete in all its joints. Every key piece of information seems debatable, and, in a sense, this blocks our understanding of the story. Yet, I don't know if this locks the reader in so much as it locks the reader out. I don't get the sense that James is trying to show us a new way of looking at experience or knowledge so much as I think he's showing the frustrations we all encounter when we try to understand each other and interact. The story isn't epistemological or phenomenological. Rather, it's social. It's particularly about the barriers preventing social understanding and cohesion: class, materiality, the insufficiency of language. The governess has fallen in love with the gentlemanly uncle, but is separated by social caste and economic class. Her class also distinguishes her from the children and Mrs. Grose. Levels of refinement and education divide the characters, as well. Mrs. Grose is illiterate, the governess reads but lacks the sophistication of the children and their uncle. The walls between these characters are far more social than they are philosophical.

The opening frame of the story shows us a scene of such closeness and conviviality that it creates a sharp contrast to what we get in the governess's story. The narrator, Douglas, Mrs. Griffin, and the rest converse with a warmth and understanding that won't ever been seen in the story again. They read each other with skill and certainty. That can't be said of anyone in the governess's story. Her story is the opposite of the frame narrative. Once the manuscript comes up in the frame narrative, we start to transition to the socially fragmented world that the governess lives in. We learn that Douglas has fallen in love with the governess, but is separated by her death. The only scrap of her left is a manuscript. The governess's story reminds everyone that physical reality drives a wedge between people. It's the death of the governess's body and her entrapment in a document now that are the barrier between her and Douglas. Douglas's lament here probably wouldn't be a philosophical one about the nature of experience and knowledge. Most likely, he would be lamenting these physical limitation on his relationship with the governess.

These are the kinds of problems that the story explores. Ultimately, I think it's a rather pessimistic exploration, too. The story never return to the conviviality and understanding of the opening frame narrative. Instead, it ends at the most hopelessly ambiguous point. James doesn't offer any solutions to the problems above, but just points them out. I think that's what's going on in the text. I don't know if I see any enlightening statement about the nature of knowledge or experience.

How do we know Mrs Grose is Scottish, btw? I can find only a description of her solidity and reliability.

She might not be Scottish. That was suggested, and it seemed to fit. I can't find anything to back it up now, though.

On that note, I'm curious about why you think she's solid and reliable. Before you were arguing the opposite:

I've been wondering about Mrs Grose for some time and meaning to post some similar thoughts, Gladys. I think she is one of the least reliable characters in the story

[kasie]

It's James himself, albeit through the mouth of Douglas and the governess, who portrays Mrs Grose as 'thoroughly respectable', 'stout, simple, plain, clean, wholesome woman'. It's just my reading that she is unreliable: she is evasive about past events in the house, she is the one who identifies the apparition as Quint, she is either too slow or too quick to say she has not seen any of the apparitions, there's no outright, honest denial. I think she sees the ghosts all too well and has seen them from the beginning as well as witnessing the behaviour of the two in life, but cannot admit the horror of the implication of their presence, partly because of her position in the household, partly because of her nature, the very 'simple, plain, clean, wholesome woman' that she is.

I take your point about James trying to show the frustrations of trying to understand others - I think, as I've said before, it should be taken alongside brother William's suggestions about using intuition to read the behaviour of others, a proposition that would have been known to at least some of the readers at the time of publication - she said hastily to pre-empt anyone who objects to evidence being taken from outside the text, the whole text and nothing but the text.

[Gladys]

You're right that James throws up barriers to understanding this story. It's thoroughly ambiguous and incomplete in all its joints. Every key piece of information seems debatable, and, in a sense, this blocks our understanding of the story. Yet, I don't know if this locks the reader in so much as it locks the reader out. and reliable. Before you were arguing the opposite:

On finishing the book, I favoured real ghosts. Now I'm hopelessly ambivalent.

...always hoping to discover how Maggie and the Prince turn out...or even waiting for Miles to struggle out of this woman's arms and go on living...

Our ghost story is told on Christmas Eve, the last day of Advent, and tells of the saviour of two orphan children battling infernal powers. Do they ultimately prevail? Do we?

I think it is important not to underestimate the influence of her vicarage upbringing...

The governess has been well equipped to fight against demonic powers.

I am still suspicious of the uncle. He was willing to visit Bly and do what he could for the children in the early days, 'parting even with his own servants to wait on them' (presumably Quint). Now, however, he wants never to be troubled by the affairs of the children. I cannot believe this is just idleness...

Nor can I. And why did "Peter Quint -- his own man, his valet, when he was here!" wear the Master's waistcoats?

[Virgil]

Ok, I have not forgotten. I promised to return after first re-reading Jame’s novella and second reading all the criticism in the Norton’s Critical Edition. I have done so and have written what would easily amount to a term paper length write up here. This goes for fourteen and a half pages of single spaced lines, amounting to a 29 page paper if it were doubled space. It has taken me a couple of weeks and luckily I haven’t had that much to do while in Kazakhstan. Since this is very long, I’ve divided this into five parts, a post to each part. I think it’s definitive.

Part I

The question that has been argued in this thread is whether the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are real or figments of the governess’s imagination, and if figments of her imagination linked to a Freudian projection of her sexually repressed nature. Norton’s does present commentary from both perspectives but I think the commentary is quite conclusive as to where the story actually is. I will present what I think is an indisputable reading of the work, quoting extensively from two critics that I believe are considered to have presented the fundamental interpretations. The page numbers I list at the end of the quotes are from Esch, Deborah and Jonathan Warren, editors, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, Second Edition, W.W. Norton & Co., 1999.

First though, I wish to quote Henry James through his notebook entry on the story and a couple of comments he made to other writers in personal letters on the work. I do think these are quite revealing. First his notebook entry prior to writing the story.

James’s notebook entry, January 12th, 1895
Saturday, January 12th, 1895. Note here the ghost story told me at Addington (evening of Thursday 10th), by the Archbishop of Canterbury: the mere vague, undetailed, faint sketch of it—being all he had been told (very badly and imperfectly), by a lady who had no art of relation, and no clearness: the story told of the young children (indefinite number and age) left to the care of servants in an old country house, through the death, presumably, of parents. The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt the children; the children are bad, full of evil, to a sinister degree. The servants die (the story vague about the way of it) and their apparitions, figures, return to haunt the house and children, to whom they seem to beckon, whom they invite and solicit, from across dangerous places, the deep ditch of a sunk fence, etc.—so that the children may destroy themselves, lose themselves, by responding, by getting into their power. So long as the children are kept from them, they are not lost; but try and try and try, these evil presences, to get hold of them. It is a question of the children ‘coming over to where they are.’ It is all obscure and imperfect, the picture, the story, but there is a suggestion of strangely gruesome effect in it. The story to be told—tolerably obviously—by an outside spectator, observer. [Norton 112]

This here is James relating the germ of the story and it is quite clear that the germ has the ghosts as completely real, and also note the inherent “evil” of which the ghosts represent. The evil that is referred to in the story by the governess, while unspecified, is, if the story reflects James’s own initial thoughts, intended to be real.

Then there is this from a letter to H.G. Wells:

James letter to H.G. Wells, Dec. 9th, 1898
Bless you heart, I think I can easily say worst of T. of the S., the young woman, the spooks, the style, the everything, than the worst any one else could manage. One knows the most damning things about one’s self. Of course I had, about my young woman, to take a very sharp line. The grotesque business I had to make her picture and the childish psychology I had to make her trace and present, were, for me at least, a very difficult job, in which absolute lucidity and logic, a singleness of effect, were imperative. Therefore I had to rule out subjective complications of her own—play of tone, etc.; and keep her impersonal save for the most obvious and indispensible little note of neatness, firmness and courage—without which she wouldn’t have had her data. But the thing is essentially a pot-boiler and a jeu d’esprit. [116]

A couple of things might be ambiguous in there since James is speaking off hand and doesn’t feel the need to be clear. I do believe when he refers to the “childish psychology” James is referring to the governess’s trying to trace the children’s psychology, and not James referring to the governess’s psychology. I think the critical phrase is that James had “to rule out subjective complications of her own,” which suggests to me that the governess’s psychology is incidental. Note too that James refers to the work as a “pot-boiler,” which means it’s not a serious work, and “jeu d’espri,.” a very interesting phrase.

jeu d'esprit [zher des‐pri] (plural jeux), a French phrase meaning literally ‘play of spirit’, perhaps better translated as ‘flight of fancy’. The term is applied to light‐hearted witticisms and epigrams such as those of Oscar Wilde, and more generally to any clever piece of writing dashed off in a spirit of fun, such as a limerick or a short comic novel.

James conceptualizes his work as a “flight of fancy,” “light-hearted,” and more significantly, “clever.” James is definitely being clever. More on the clever later.

And then there is the letter to some writer friend named F.W.H. Myers:

James letter to F.W.H. Myers, Dec. 18th, 1898
The T .of the S. is a very mechanical matter, I honestly think—an inferior, a merely pictorial, subject and rather a shameless pot-boiler. The thing that, as I recall it, I most wanted not to fail at doing, under penalty of extreme platitude, was to give the impression of the communication to the children of the most infernal imaginable evil and danger—the condition, on their part, of being as exposed as we can humanly conceive children to be. This was my artistic knot to untie, to put any sense of logic into the thing, and if I had known any way of producing more the image of their contact and condition I should assuredly have been proportionately eager to resort to it. I evoked the worst I could, and only feel tempted to say, as in French, “Excusez du peu!” [118]

Again, as usual James is vague, (does James ever write definitively?), but what I can conclusively read from that is that James intended the evil of the ghosts to be real. I include this because now this is a statement after the actual publication of the work, and just like his notebook entry, the evil remains a real theme within the story.

There are other quotes from James’s letters and writings and I don’t think they amplify this discussion so I won’t quote them. But I can say that nowhere is it ever implied that the governess is under delusions of any sort. There is no suggestion anywhere that James either was aware of Freudianism or intended to create a delusional character. I also high urge that anyone wanting to get to the heart of The Turn of the Screw read James’s “Preface to the New York Edition” of the novella published in 1908 and included in Norton’s, pages 123-9. I’m not going to quote it here, but Shoshana Felman quotes the key passage, and I will quote it through her essay when I get to it below.

[Virgil]

Part II

The Freudian interpretation of The Turn of the Screw was put forth by Edna Kenton in 1924 (but no evidence provided) and Edmund Wilson in his essay, “ The Ambiguity of Henry James,” in 1934, excerpted in Norton, p. 170-173. Kenton’s assertion was a side comment of an essay on a different theme, but Wilson most succinctly and directly puts forth the notion with solid critical backing from the text. He is the one who is given credit for the idea, and after the 1934 essay, the idea took off like a ball of fire within the critical community. Many critics seemed to be convinced of his reading, but a substantial backlash to the Freudian reading also develop since it did not appear to explain the entire story. As Gladys and I have pointed out, there are significant holes to the Freudian reading. I’m not going to quote Wilson, but let it be known that it’s pretty much as Neely has put forth: a young woman who has desires for the master of the house begins to hallucinate the ghosts as an expression of her unfulfilled longings.

The essay which definitively rebuts Wilson’s Freudian reading came in 1947 by Robert Heilman. Let me quote extensively in order to establish the details in the story which are clearly in opposition to such a reading.

From Robert B. Heilman, “The Freudian Reading of The Turn of the Screw,” originally published in Modern Language Notes, November 1947, and excerpted in Norton’s from pages 177-84.

Wilson supposes the governess to be seeing ghosts because she is in a psychopathic state originating in a repressed passion for the master. In view of the terrible outcome of the story, we should at best have to suspect the fallacy of insufficient cause. But the cause does not exist at all: the governess’s feelings for the matter are never repressed: they are wholly in the open and are joyously talked about: even in the opening section which proceeds Chapter 1, we are told she is in love with him. [178]

This is one of the points that the anti-Freudians make, that there is no repression of desire. The governess is quite aware of her feelings, and given no repression, no Freudian sublimated expression could have occurred. If there were no repression, James could not be applying Freudianism. I continue from Heilman:

Like Miss Kenton, Wilson infers the unreality of the ghosts from the fact that only the governess acknowledges seeing them; he does not stop to consider that this fact may be wholly explicable in aesthetic terms. Of course Mrs. Grose does not see the ghosts: she is the good but slow witted woman who sees only the obvious in life—for instance, the sexual irregularity of Quint and Miss Jessel—but does not unassisted detect the subtler manifestations of evil. She is the plain domestic type who is the foil for the sensitive acute governess—Cassandra-like in the insight which outspeeds the perceptions of those about her—whose ideal function is to penetrate and shape the soul…But as, little by little, the tangible evidence, such as that of Flora’s language, corroborates the racing intuitions of the governess, Mrs. Grose comes to grasp the main parts of the issue as it is seen totally by the governess and to share her understanding of the moral atmosphere. The acceptance by Mrs. Grose is unimpeachable substantiation. [179-80]

This is a point I believe I have made, that the characters are within a contextual tradition of Gothic literature and so are acting according to norms. Ultimately based on the language of Flora, Mrs. Grose comes to the realization that there are truly ghosts. Mrs. Grose is a little slow, but she comes to believe the governess and there is no reason to refute her testimony. Heilman continues:

As for the children’s appearing not to see the apparitions: this is one of the author’s finest artistic strokes. James says that he wants to evoke a sense of evil: one of his basic ways of doing it is the suggestion, by means of the symbolic refusal to acknowledge the ghosts, of a sinisterly mature concealment of evil. But almost as if to guard against the mistaking of the denial of the ghosts for the non-existence of the ghosts, James takes care to buttress our sense of the reality of evil from another direction: he gives us the objective fact of the dismissal of Miles from school—a dismissal which is unexplained and is absolutely final. This dismissal Wilson, in plain defiance of the text, must attempt to put aside as of no consequence....Further, Wilson cannot deal with the fact that at the end of the final scene Miles, without hearing them spoken by anyone else, speaks the names of Miss Jessel and Quint and indicates his belief that they may be present. Again in plain defiance of the text, Wilson says that Miles has managed to see Flora before her departure and thus to find out what the governess is thinking about. Wilson says they met; James clearly indicates they did not. [180]

A number of points are made there. First, the fact that only the governess appears to see the ghosts are part of the aesthetics of the story: the evil is hidden and so it is ambiguous. James’s nature of evil is not clear cut and so the ghosts are such. Second, the Freudian reading gives no rationale as to why Miles is expelled from school. That critical part of the story is completely extraneous to a Freudian reading but clearly fits into the corrupting effects of the evil ghosts. Third, in the final scene, Miles knows without being told anywhere in the text by the supposed hallucinating governess that the ghosts are of Miss Jessel and Peter Quint.

And so on, Heilman demonstrates other errors that Wilson ignores or is in defiance of the text that a Freudian reading cannot answer throughout the pages 180-182. I’m not going to quote Heilman here since it’s too extensive, but let me try to list the additional unexplained details that a Freudian reading cannot account for.
(1) Mrs. Grose repeatedly comes into agreement with the governess, despite being initially being skeptical.
(2) A Freudian interpretation cannot account for what the children, eight and ten year olds, are doing on middle of the night escapades. And when questioned they are evasive to their motives.
(3) A Freudian reading does not account for why the children are plotting together.
(4) A Freudian reading does not account for why Flora is drawn across the pond and hiding the boat to hide her actions. This is an eight year old girl.
(5) Flora’s vulgar and mean reaction toward the governess when questioned about Miss Jessel and her lack of respect toward the governess again is unexplained for through a Freudian reading.
(6) Flora’s physical illness which brings her close to death. The illness is real.
(7) Miles’s physical death at the climax of the work.
These seven plus the three mentioned above make for ten solid details that the Freudian reading cannot account for but the reading of real and evil ghosts trying to snag the children fully accounts. Notice how the accumulating details become more solid as the story accelerates—Flora’s physical illness and Miles’s death at the story’s climax are unimpeachable evidence of contact with the evil ghosts. Heilman sums it up:

Such evidence suggests that a great deal of unnecessary mystery has been made of the apparent ambiguity of the story. Actually, most of it is a by-product of James’s method: his indirection; his refusal, in his fear of anti-climax, to define the evil; his rigid adherence to point of view; his refusal—amused perhaps?—to break the point of view for a reassuring comment on those uncomfortable characters, the apparitions. [182]

Heilman goes on to show how James’s reluctance to break the first person point of view of the governess is what accounts for the ambiguity between the readings. I’m not going to quote that because I think it’s somewhat flawed thought. True, James doesn’t break the point of view, but he still could have been clear in his dramatization of the governess’s credibility. Even the governess herself questions her own sagacity. The true reason for James’s ambiguity and the final nail in the coffin to the Freudian reading will be put forth by the next essayist.

[Virgil]

Part III

The Heilman essay detailed the discrepancies within the story regarding a Freudian reading. But Heilman really doesn’t get to the heart of James’s aesthetics of the story. He has an intuitive gleam for what James’s is after in his storytelling, realizing that James is playing with point of view and hidden details, but doesn’t completely conceptualize that the way the story is told is critical to the central theme, and that theme is right in the title of the story, a turn of a screw, and it has nothing to do with Freudian symbolism. The critic who puts this together is Shoshana Felman. First let me say that out of the 112 pages devoted to criticism, the editors of the Norton’s edition give Felman 32 pages of those 122, over a quarter of the critical space, and no one even comes close to half of 32 pages. The editors clearly gave her essay prominence.

Let me also state that her essay is written as a Freudian critic, and the overarching theme of her essay is what exactly is a Freudian reading and why Wilson’s reading is not what a Freudian reading should be. I’m only going to focus on her understanding of The Turn of the Screw and not get into some philosophic debate of what constitutes a correct Freudian reading of literature. For those interested in Freudian criticism, you can look her up. Let’s start with her summary of the Freudian debate of the story.

From Shoshana Felman, “Henry James: Madness and the Risks of Practice (Turning the Screw of Interpretations),” 1977.

The outraged agitation [of the story] does not, however, end with the reaction of James’s contemporaries. Thirty years later, another storm of protest very similar to the first will arise over a second scandal: the publication of a so-called “Freudian reading” of The Turn of the Screw. In 1934, Edmund Wilson for the first time suggests explicitly that The Turn of the Screw is not, in fact, a ghost story but a madness story, a study of a case of neurosis: the ghosts, accordingly, do not really exist; they are but figments of the governess’s sick imagination, mere hallucinations and projections symptomatic of the frustration of her repressed sexual desires. This psychoanalytic interpretation will hit the critical scene like a bomb. Making its author into an overnight celebrity by arousing as much interest as James’s text itself, Wilson’s article will provoke a veritable barrage of indignant refutations, all closely argued and based on “irrefutable” textual evidence. It is this psychoanalytical reading and polemical framework it has engendered that will henceforth focalize and concretely organize all subsequent critical discussions, all passions and all arguments related to The Turn of the Screw. For or against Wilson, affirming or denying the “objectivity” or the reality of the ghosts, the critical interpretations have fallen into two camps: the “psychoanalytical” camp, which sees the governess as a clinical neurotic deceived by her own fantasies and destructive of her charges, and the “metaphysical,” religious, or moral camp, which sees the governess as a sane, noble savior engaged in a heroic struggle for the salvation of a world threatened by supernatural Evil. [199]

I’m not sure why Felman refers to the opposition to the Freudian reading as “religious” because no critic included in Norton’s seemed to suggest a theological theme to the story. James’s evil is generic to me, though real. I also might criticize Felman’s characterization of the governess’s struggle as “for the salvation of a world,” which clearly it’s not; she is just trying to save two young children. So be it. Even critics will overstate.

But Felman is right on the mark when she cites James’s Preface to the work in one of the editions:

The scene of the critical debate [the final scene where Miles dies, and Felman actually references Heilman’s analysis of this scene as I’ve included above] is thus a repetition of the scene dramatized in the text. The critical interpretation, in other words, not only elucidates the text but also reproduces it dramatically, unwittingly participates in it. Through its very reading the text, so to speak, acts itself out. As a reading effect, this inadvertent “acting out” is indeed uncanny: whichever way readers turn, they can be turned by the text, they can but perform it by repeating it. Perhaps this is the famous trap James speaks of in his New York Preface:
It is an excursion into chaos while remaining, like Blue-Beard and Cinderella, but an anecdote—though an anecdote amplified and highly emphasized and returning upon itself; as, for that matter, Cinderella and Blue-Beard return. I need scarcely add after this that it is a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation, an amusette to catch those not easily caught (the “fun” of the capture of the merely witless being ever but small), the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious. [Cited by Felman but the entire “Preface” also can be found in Norton’s pp 123-9]

We will return later on to this ingenious prefatory note so as to try to understand the distinction James is making between naïve and sophisticated readers, and to try to analyze the way in which the text’s return upon itself is capable of trapping both. Up to this point, my intention has been merely to suggest—to make explicit—this uncanny trapping power of Henry James’s text as an inescapable reading-effect. [202]

The key point here is that James has created a reading effect, a “trap.” She, being a Freudian critic herself, goes on to point out that it is not out of line to assume a Freudian reading.

What, however, was it in James’s text that originally called out for a “Freudian” reading? It was, as the very title of Wilson’s article suggests, not so much the sexuality as “the ambiguity of Henry James.” The text, says Wilson, is ambiguous. It is ambiguous, that it, its meaning, far from being clear, is itself a question. It is this question which, in Wilson’s view, calls forth an analytical response. The text is perceived as questioning in three different ways:
1) Through its rhetoric: through the proliferation of erotic metaphors and symbols without the direct, “proper” naming of their sexual nature.
2) Through its thematic content—its abnormal happenings and its fantastic, strange manifestations.
3) Through its narrative structure which resembles that of an enigma in remaining, by definition, elliptically incomplete. [204]

Making a long analysis short, Felman proposes that James’s ambiguity is consciously done for two reasons. First, James will not acknowledge the sexuality that is implicit in human actions because such a literal presentation of sexuality is “vulgar.” Right on the third page of the story, James has Douglas respond to whether the governess is in love. “The story won’t tell,” said Douglas, “not in any literal, vulgar way.” What is the evil that Quint and Miss Jessel project? It’s never explicitedly said. The evil is their open sexuality and the fact that they will corrupt the children with it. So what the Freudian critic deems as hidden significance, James is resorting to symbols to carry the meaning of his nature of evil. Second, James still intends the reader to question the governess’s sanity. She herself questions the reality of the ghosts, and so the reader must too. This is part of the reading effect that James creates: a turn of the screw, in which the reader wishes to fix a notion of meaning while James is pulling the reader “into a labyrinth of mirrors” [215]. In essence James has laid a trap for the reader who wishes who refuses to turn with the screw of meaning. Felman continues:

What is interesting about this trap is that, while it points to the possibility of two alternative types of reading, it sets out, in capturing both types of readers, to eliminate the very demarcation it proposes. The alternative type of reading which the trap at once elicits and suspends can be described as the naïve (“the capture of the merely witless”) and the sophisticated (“to catch those not easily caught…the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious”). The trap, however, is specifically laid out not for naiveté but for intelligence itself. But in what, indeed, does intelligence consist, if not in the determination to avoid the trap? “Those not easily caught” are precisely those who are suspicious, those who sniff out and detect a trap, those who refuse to be duped: “the disillusioned, the jaded, the fastidious.” In this sense the “naïve reading” would be one that would lend credence to the testimony and account of the governess, whereas the “disillusioned” reading would on the contrary be one that would suspect, demystify, “see through” the governess, one that, in fact, would function very much like the reading carried out by Wilson…Since the trap set by James’s text is meant precisely for “those not easily caught”—those, who in other words, watch out for, and seek to avoid, all traps—it can be said that The Turn of the Screw, which is designed to snare all readers, is a text particularly apt to catch the psychoanalytic reader, since the psychoanalytic is, par excellance, the reader who would not be caught, who would not be made a dupe” [212]

The trap that James has laid out is to catch the sophisticated reader who thinks he sees more than is meant, who reads more than is actually there, and who projects a fixed significance to evolving turns of events. The Freudian reader has been duped for the very reason he thinks he’s more sophisticated and tries to see more.

Felman too goes on to criticize Wilson for his poor understanding of Freudian psychology and why sexual longings do not make for neurosis. But I found this to be quite revealing:

Let us return, one last time, to Wilson’s reading, which will be considered here not as a model “Freudian reading,” but as the illustration of a prevalent tendency as well as an inherent temptation of psychoanalytical interpretation as it undertakes to provide an “explanation,” or an “explication” of a literary text. In this regard, Wilson’s later semi-retraction of his thesis is itself instructive: convinced by his detractors that for James the ghosts are real, that James’s conscious project or intention was to write a ghost story and not a madness story, Wilson does not, however, give up his theory that the ghosts of the neurotic hallucinations of the governess, but concedes in a note:
One is led to believe that, in The Turn of the Screw, not merely is the governess self-deceived, but that James is self-deceived about her. (Wilson, note added 1948, p143)
This sentence can be seen as the epitome, and as the verbal formulation, of the desire underlying psychoanalytical interpretations: the desire to be a non-dupe, to interpret, i.e., at once uncover and avoid, the very traps of the unconscious. [212-3]

So in the end, Wilson himself acknowledged Heilman’s reading as being more accurate and really had the audacity to criticize James for not writing the story Wilson thinks he should have written. Now that is outrageous. I have railed against critics who put themselves above the artists. Wilson wants james to write another story as if Wilson knows what story James should write. This will be a growing tendency in 20th century criticism.

[Virgil]

Part IV

Ok, now to summarize, we see that James, in his personal notes and letters, is completely oblivious to Freudianism. There is no evidence that he was knowledgeable or even aware of Freudian psychology. We see through Heilman’s essay that there are at least ten details that the Freudian reading cannot answer. Wilson himself ultimately acknowledges these points, or at least several of them. Miles actually dies and that is a body that no Freudian explanation can explain away. We see through Felman’s essay that the ambiguity in the story that the Freudian’s rest their hat on is explained by James’s resistance to being “vulgar” and through his reading trap for sophisticated readers. I think this is a slam dunk at this point that the ghosts were intended to be real and are real.

I also want to point out my original reading of the story back in post #64 of this thread.

Ok, let me throw my two cents in at what I think this story is about. First, I don’t see any psychoanalytic anything in it, I don’t see any spiritual themes, or even really anything about the nature of good and evil. I don’t believe there are any real abstract themes in here. Bare (or is it bear?) in mind that I’m basing this off only a single reading and I really should read this again, and perhaps I will in the near future. But I don’t see any developed abstract theme throughout the work. Sure there are touches of this and touches of that, and they are either accidental or more likely calculated by James to lure you in and ultimately frustrate you. Ultimately as I see this story on this single reading, the core of it is about story telling and the nature of it.

The first question one must have is, why the frame structure at the beginning, and which never comes into play. Conrad uses that frame many times, and every time I can think of, like in Heart of Darkness, the intrudes into the story sporadically and certainly provides a conclusion at the end. Here the frame introduces the story and completely disappears, without even a coda at the end. James could have started with the governess’s tale and excluded the frame opening, but the frame accentuates the notion of first person narrator, both because the frame itself is in first person (which it didn’t have to be) and it identifies the 20 year old text of an excitable young woman: “She was young, untried, nervous: it was a vision of serious duties and little company, of really great loneliness. She hesitated--took a couple of days to consult and consider.” (from the Introduction) And then the text starts in the governess’s first person.

One of the key questions a reader must always ask himself with a first person narrator, is whether that narrator is reliable. With Douglass’s characterizing sentence I just quoted above, we have an undermining of the credibility of the governess to perceive reality, and so we are given the possibility that she is unreliable. That is why James makes so much with the motif of vision. Are the governess’s perceptions real or imagined. Now this is also a ghost story, and consciously chosen to be one. The nature of a ghost story rests on the credibility of whether the ghost is real and given this is in first person, we have a sort of double instability here. Is the ghost real or imagined? Is the narrator reliable or delusional?

We start the story believing, after all why should we really doubt her. The children are real, Mrs. Grose is real and she as an independent witness initially believes her. In fact we the reader are sort of at times in the shoes of Mrs. Grose. We judge the governess through her eyes. Mrs. Grose is a simple person, one that would believe in ghosts readily, and, while we initially believe the governess along with Mrs. Grose, we begin to doubt it as well. Mrs. Grose finally reaches a conclusion of doubt, and at some point even the governess begins to doubt herself. So we start with what appears to be a reliable narrator and it turns to apparently unreliability. Even at one point it appears that the ghosts are independently verified, as we see in the beginning of chapter XX:
Quote
Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she had stood the other time, and I remember, strangely, as the first feeling now produced in me, my thrill of joy at having brought on a proof. She was there, and I was justified; she was there, and I was neither cruel nor mad. She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there most for Flora; and no moment of my monstrous time was perhaps so extraordinary as that in which I consciously threw out to her--with the sense that, pale and ravenous demon as she was, she would catch and understand it--an inarticulate message of gratitude.

But as it turns out, the governess here only thinks it’s been verified. What appears to her as independent verification, is not. When the governess points the ghost out, Mrs. Grose doesn’t see it:

Quote
"She's there, you little unhappy thing--there, there, there, and you see her as well as you see me!" I had said shortly before to Mrs. Grose that she was not at these times a child, but an old, old woman, and that description of her could not have been more strikingly confirmed than in the way in which, for all answer to this, she simply showed me, without a concession, an admission, of her eyes, a countenance of deeper and deeper, of indeed suddenly quite fixed, reprobation. I was by this time--if I can put the whole thing at all together--more appalled at what I may properly call her manner than at anything else, though it was simultaneously with this that I became aware of having Mrs. Grose also, and very formidably, to reckon with. My elder companion, the next moment, at any rate, blotted out everything but her own flushed face and her loud, shocked protest, a burst of high disapproval. "What a dreadful turn, to be sure, miss! Where on earth do you see anything?"

I could only grasp her more quickly yet, for even while she spoke the hideous plain presence stood undimmed and undaunted. It had already lasted a minute, and it lasted while I continued, seizing my colleague, quite thrusting her at it and presenting her to it, to insist with my pointing hand. "You don't see her exactly as we see?--you mean to say you don't now--now? She's as big as a blazing fire! Only look, dearest woman, look--!" She looked, even as I did, and gave me, with her deep groan of negation, repulsion, compassion--the mixture with her pity of her relief at her exemption--a sense, touching to me even then, that she would have backed me up if she could. I might well have needed that, for with this hard blow of the proof that her eyes were hopelessly sealed I felt my own situation horribly crumble…

So we are left with really doubting the governess. So that they we the reader are in a situation of coming up with two possibilities. Either this proves the governess is unreliable or there is the possibility that the ghosts can make themselves visible to some and invisible to others. The story keeps turning in its instability.

Ultimately then the ghosts are experienced outside of the governess’s perception, so that we now have another turn of the screw as James says. The narrator was not unreliable after all, and what appeared as a farfetched tale has been independently verified. Or it could be that elements of the tale are unreliable and elements aren’t. What James has done is create a story about the nature of story telling and the instability (I like that word as a characterization of the story) that lies at the heart of every one’s story. When someone, take a person here on lit net, recounts an event, to what level is the recounting reliable, through his own filtering of facts, conscious and unconscious, what is independently verified, and what mixture of the real hard facts and perception is presented.

If you will allow me to toot my own horn, I think I nailed this story back then. While I don’t refer to the “reading effect” outright, I think my terminology of “an instability” is a sympathetic phrase, and possibly even a better phrase. Also kudos to Gladys for having the insight to notice all the discrepancies the Freudian readers had with the story.

[Virgil]

Part V

I also want to put out a few other observations and thoughts.

1. As to Freudian readings of this story and the history of that associated criticism, personally I believe that such readings and criticism is a wholly critic created phenomena. There is no evidence to justify that James intended for people to assume Freudian psychology in any way with this story. For critics to justify a Freudian reading, one of two things must be the case: either the author was consciously working Freudian psychology into the story or Freudian psychology must be real and part of human nature. James never mentions Freud or psychosomatic sexual neurosis in any of his personal notes or letters, and it’s highly unlikely that at the time of the writing of the story James was even aware of Freudianism. As to whether Freudian psychology is real and part of human nature, well, you know I think it’s a farce. There is no empirical evidence of such a part of human nature. We can argue that till we’re blue in the face, but let’s assume Freud is correct—even the Freudian critics point out that Wilson’s understanding of Freud is superficial and incorrect. The whole Freudian analysis of The Turn of the Screw breaks down to misreading and superficial Freud.

2. If it’s not Freudian psychosomatic neurosis, then what is James suggesting with the possible hallucinations and sexual imagery? To answer that is to put the story into its literary context. This is a gothic ghost story. The central female characters of gothic stories are all placed within a sexually tinged world. Just look at Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Both novels feature female characters that love and have erotic feelings for male characters, and there are real or assumed ghosts in both. In Jane Eyre, the ghost turns out to be Rochester’s living wife; in Wuthering Heights, the ghost (the deceased Cathy) is a real ghost. James is working in this gothic tradition. And he uses this tradition to create his “potboiler,” the turning of the screw of meaning, that clever “jeu d’espr,” to trap the reader by his very assumptions, the easily and not so easily duped.

3. As I think about the story and think about how James took that story’s germ (the anecdote told to him by the Archbishop), I think James took the most interesting possibility of the various possibilities of crafting this story. Let’s look at the possible permutations. I see six possibilities:

a) The author holds the reader in suspense as to whether the ghosts are real, and never resolves the mystery, leaving the reader up in the air to decide.
b) The ghosts are clearly real upfront and there is no suggestion of hallucination.
c) The ghosts are clearly not real upfront and hallucinations account for everything.
d) The ghosts are real and sometimes the governess hallucinates as well.
e) The author holds the reader in suspense as to whether the ghosts are real, only to find out the ghosts are not real.
f) The author holds the reader in suspense as to whether the ghosts are real, only to find out the ghosts are real.

Possibility (a) I believe would be a complete anti-climatic let down. Such a story could work in a really short story, such as Frank Stockton’s famous “The Lady of the Tiger?” Interestingly this story was written in 1882, almost cotemporaneous to The Turn of the Screw. Any story that takes the reader through a hundred pages of narrative and leaves the reader unsure of the basic details I think is flawed, and James would certainly realize that. Even the Stockton story for me ends up being trite. You can read Stockton’s story here: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-st...LadyTige.shtml.

Possibility (b) I think would just be a simple children’s tale and would not hold most adult’s attention.

Possibility (c) would be at best a clinical story. You might as well read a psychology case study because it would not have much more interest than that.

Possibility (d) is actually the second most interesting of the permutations. However, such a story would have to be way more complex and longer in order to resolve all the strands of mysterious details. It would probably have to be a 400 page novel instead of a 100 page novella. And such ambiguity of facts would completely alter the theme. I’ve come through this study to believe that James is quite serious as to his portrayal of evil in this story. Such ambiguity of basic perception would put the nature of evil in question and I don’t think that would fulfill James’s motives of writing it. If one were aiming for such an ambiguous theme, I don’t think the ghost story context is the best way to handle that.

Possibility (e) would again be a psychology case study, only this time the reader is held in suspense. A clear possibility but I think this lacks imagination. I think any second rate or third rate writer could have figured this one, and I think it would have been a second or third rate story.

Possibility (f), the one James actually takes, is in my opinion the most imaginative and ingenious of the possibilities, the trap of twisting perception and the reader’s desire to insert his notion of reality leads to his misconception. If one is to write a new and imaginative ghost story, this is the one.

And so I conclude this wonderful exploration of James’s The Turn of the Screw. I completely enjoyed this. I haven’t written such an essay since college days, and it’s made me really appreciate James’s tale so much more.

[Gladys]

A valiant research effort, Virgil. A fascinating read.

On Freudian interpretation, as a teenager I found Freud thoroughly unconvincing and have had no reason to reconsider. Freud and good literature - good science, good history, good psychology - don't mix!

f) The author holds the reader in suspense as to whether the ghosts are real, only to find out the ghosts are real.

Miles actually dies and that is a body that no Freudian explanation can explain away.

I too thought the ghosts were real and that Miles dies, but Jozanny has a point:

Miles may not have literally died, as we have to remember "his heart stopped" is a figure of speech, though of course he may have literally died in the governess's embrace.

Whatever James himself intended, the ambiguity is all embracing.

Originally Posted by Jozanny View Post
And kasie, Miles last words I think, are directed at the governess, essentially asking if she sees Quint, and calling her the devil.

Here's ambiguity at its worst: “Peter Quint — you devil!” can equally be read either way!

[Virgil]

Thanks Gladys. But everyone seems to accept that Miles dies. That would be a new one.

The other thing that the Freudians can't explain is the title, "The Turn of the Screw." That refers to the plot twists and turns.