Christmas Reading '09: The Turn of the Screw

[Jozanny]

Jozanny, I'm also looking forward to it. I've thought about the story several times today and the more I think about it the more I think that it was the imagination of the governess. But, how did she so accurately imagine the two deceased people?

It may be amusing mother, in a way. I am not a Jamesian scholar, by any means, but I probably know the most about him, and how to read him, than many, in terms of a general population--and I am not trying to sound conceited, because I have failed in what I hoped to be, an intelligence in a butter tub who has retreated from the challenge of living, much like many of James's characters--but I can always read Henry James and never ever be bored, and that I think is the highest compliment I can pay a writer.

I told the James list before the holiday that he had been selected here, and that I was motivated to do a close reading to expose him to new audiences, and I am not sure I did this very well, as I am caught between wanting to gallop with the Jamesians, and take my dive into continuing theory *production*--a once removed way for professors to keep saying anything about James at all, and by the same token, not taking deep flights of fancy that would go over anyone's head, or sic Sche on me with an edit, but I will try to say a few more things, and then leave the field to others.

But some people spend their lives getting at this man, if that is any comfort, and I am only beginning to see how the keys fit in the lock, and I've been at him since far more happier days when I was in love with at least two of my professors, and barely knew which end was up.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Jozanny,

Yes sorry I have not contributed but I have been pulled into reading other things, though my thoughts essentially run alongside the standard psychoanalytical reading, which has been suggested by you and Dark Muse in places. Essentially I see the ghosts as visions as part of the governess’s sublimated feelings for her master. She has the perfect susceptible mind as apparent in her obsession for romance fiction (as quoted by somebody) and her passion for the master can also be seen in her non-action in contacting him over Miles etc. This is particular reading that I would go with first, though as I said at the start I think that James was conscious of playing with the two possibilities, both a Freudian explanation and that of a standard ghost story – though I would call this work anything but standard!

Good luck with your James project, though I don’t know what it is that you're working on exactly?

[Jozanny]

Neely, the James Society is offering two proposals at the ALA conference, one on theory production and one on James in culture. I do not think Dr. McWhirter would mind if I posted the call for proposals here, as he sent it to the list, but I can't ask him, as he is unavailable, and so I will hold off on that, but I thought I would go with James and theory production in the 21st century, with a focus on TOS, not just because I so recently reread it, but because I caught a whiff of something about the symbolism of salvation in the opening set up.

I am not 100 percent certain I am going to the conference, but my domestic aide told me last week he would become my state attendant if I can work out my problems with my provider, and he knows CA, so I am aiming to make the effort--and this is still not my wrap up post on this beautiful novella , but I will offer something by weeks end, I hope!

I have finished, but I am turning over on some final thoughts.

[Quark]

I've read through the novella again--and I have to say it's much more enjoyable the second time. It's certainly more understandable on another reading. James's syntax can be a little taxing after a while, and one catches themselves slipping over a sentence because they haven't finished parsing the previous one. Try to untangle this sentence quickly:

As they died away on my lips I said to myself that I should indeed help them to represent something infamous if by pronouncing them I should violate as rare a little case of instinctive delicacy as any schoolroom probably had ever known.

I get the sense that dependent clauses were like two-sided tape for Henry James, and that he had trouble keeping one separate from another. A little way into the work you get used to his hodgepodge sentences, but I read the book in chunks when I visited the bookstore so I rarely got into that rhythm. When I read it again at home I had much better luck.

Now that I've reread it, I'll try to catch up with what's been said in the thread.

I think most important of all is the notion of the visual and the act of seeing. Here the Governess takes in the entire scene, a visual listing (and audio in this case as well) of the surroundings. "To watch" and "to look" seems to be a predominant, recurring action in the story. Almost every other page seems to have a reference to the visual. I keep circling them as I come across them and they are so frequent that it's beyond just a story teller describing the action. James is clearly making a point.

Yes, I think James is making a point--or rather he's making several points. It seems like James is conjuring up the idea of "the visual" because of its many implications. The "visual" is a broad category. It can indicate the sense of sight which is a way of gathering information about the natural world. Much of the story is about the governess discovering various things around the premises or about the children. Sight is tied to her need for information. I think the "visual" enters the text in a number of other ways, though. It also refers to governess's frustration at being able to see only surfaces. Sight is ultimately shallow. It can't see under the exterior, and the governess feels the limitation keenly. She points it out at the beginning of chapter 19 when she's chasing Flora. The governess sees the surface of Bly, but she knows that Flora has experienced its depths. This frustration with appearances is also driving the dramatic language that recurs throughout the text. Quint reminds the governess of an actor, and she increasing sees her interaction with the children as a play. James frequently defined drama by the objective surface that it presented. In this sense, it's a visual phenomenon. I think James also invokes vision in the sense of perspective. At one point, the governess says "I saw, I felt" in a way that equates the two actions. In the same way feelings are personal experiences, sight also is personal. At times, the text seems to be bringing up this meaning of the "visual," as well.

[Virgil]

Quark, I think there is a consciously worked motif on "seeing" and I think it relates to the possibility of whether the ghosts are real and when is she hallucinating and when is she really seeing the ghosts.

[Jozanny]

If I am going to be attempting a proposal, I do not want to do it within these forums, as my failure or success should be on my own terms, but I will end as much as I want to say on this note:

1. Why does James situate this drama on Christmas Eve? Is salvation triumphant or thwarted? And no, I do not know the answer, because James allows you to read this either way: Either the governess is evil because her ego has been corrupted by desire, or the children have been corrupted themselves through the willful indifference (and thus his evil) of the uncle, in ways that we as readers do not wish to tread.

1. Quint and Jessel may have also been, simply, attempting to be kind to the children. Unlike Masie, James offers us absolutely no evidence that Quint or Jessel were engaged in harmful activity towards the children other than Mrs. Grouse's exaggerated offense of any supposed liberality, and that he died after he slipped upon having had spirits.

1.a There is no guarantee that Quint and Jessel haunt Bly. Quint looks like the uncle and Jessel could be the governess projecting herself.

Finally, Wayne C. Booth cites this in his book, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction as one of the most ambiguous and open endings in English Literature (pages 65 to 67):

My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made him avert himself again, and that movement made me, with a single bound and an irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him. For there again, against the glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was the hideous author of our woe -- the white face of damnation. I felt a sick swim at the drop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that the wildness of my veritable leap only served as a great betrayal. I saw him, from the midst of my act, meet it with a divination, and on the perception that even now he only guessed, and that the window was still to his own eyes free, I let the impulse flame up to convert the climax of his dismay into the very proof of his liberation. "No more, no more, no more!" I shrieked, as I tried to press him against me, to my visitant.

"Is she here?" Miles panted as he caught with his sealed eyes the direction of my words. Then as his strange "she" staggered me and, with a gasp, I echoed it, "Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel!" he with a sudden fury gave me back.

I seized, stupefied, his supposition some sequel to what we had done to Flora, but this made me only want to show him that it was better still than that. "It's not Miss Jessel! But it's at the window -- straight before us. It's there -- the coward horror, there for the last time!"

At this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled dog's on a scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light, he was at me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place and missing wholly, though it now, to my sense, filled the room like the taste of poison, the wide, overwhelming presence. "It's he?"

I was so determined to have all my proof that I flashed into ice to challenge him. "Whom do you mean. by 'he'?"

"Peter Quint -- you devil!" His face gave again, round the room, its convulsed supplication. "Where?"

They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the name and his tribute to my devotion. "What does he matter now, my own? -- what will he ever matter? I have you," I launched at the beast, "but he has lost you forever!" Then, for the demonstration of my work, "There, there!" I said to Miles.

But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him -- it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.

Why would Booth suggest this, even within his defense of the traditional canon? Well, either Miles is dead because this woman inadvertently killed him through her own hysteria, or he is saved because the governess rescued him from a demonic attachment.

Booth does not have a convenient index but if I can find his comparative argument I will cite it. I may need it in any case-- but having found it, what we take or plug into the narrative when James is at his best is our own values that we feed into what he will not spell out for us.

[Jozanny]

I am bored and should probably go do my interesting lateral transfer onto my shower chair and mind my hygiene, but another of James' sub-motifs preoccupies me after a fresh look at TOS, and that is the destruction of children. Dickens, to the best of my knowledge, only hints at this, but James and, interestingly, Ibsen, actually engage their audience with a casualty list (cf The Wild Duck, Little Eyolf).

In Ibsen this is symbolic of the struggle with the natural life force, but in James it is something else. In "The Author of Beltraffio", a lesser known tale, a wife literally facilitates the death of her son out of hostility to her husband's intellectual thought. In The Portrait of a Lady, Pansy is crushed by the authority of her father; the pupil in "The Pupil" literally dies of a heart attack when his parents, destitute, force him onto his tutor (again, James possibly sees any erotic exchange or transaction as lethal, but particularly the homoerotic), and in Masie, it is kind of up in the air if Masie is destroyed or not by her terrible parents--as she refuses "the human stain" of her step parents and their affair, even though they care for her in a more genuine fashion than mummy and daddy.

In TOS, the whole theme is the destruction of innocents through the lack of a unitary love-- or not. I myself will never know: Is Miles *gay* and therefore the contaminating influence the governess fears? Bearing in mind we hear her voice through the masculinity of Douglas. Does Flora exhibit lesbianistic tendencies at such a young age? Will either brother or sister go on to live life, to use a Jamesian axiom? We'll never know, but also never know if the price they paid was deserved.

As a university student, I sided with the governess. I missed the joke. As an adult I sided with the children--but not entirely, because it is a fact that Miles was expelled for *saying things*. (And all this will probably not appear in my proposal-- not to this extent).

[Gladys]

I've just finished and read the thread.

...but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.

Surely this implies Miles has died in the exorcism?

I've thought about the story several times today and the more I think about it the more I think that it was the imagination of the governess.

Imagination? Can she have imagined the strange behaviour of the children and the poor school report? Or is she psychotic, imagining even Miles' death?

...the destruction of children. Dickens, to the best of my knowledge, only hints at this, but James and, interestingly, Ibsen, actually engage their audience with a casualty list (cf The Wild Duck, Little Eyolf).

In Ibsen this is symbolic of the struggle with the natural life force, but in James it is something else.

Although a lover of Ibsen, I can't imagine what you mean by 'the natural life force'.

[Virgil]

I finished last night. Wow, what a smashing conclusion. I even had goose pimples reading that last chapter. I need to regroup and give it some thought. I'm not sure what it all meant, but it was a heck of a tale. Very nicely done. Can someone tell me why it's called "The Turn of the Screw?" I didn't pick up on it.

[Gladys]

Can someone tell me why it's called "The Turn of the Screw?"

In the prologue:

“I quite agree — in regard to Griffin’s ghost, or whatever it was — that its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular touch. But it’s not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children — ?”

“We say, of course,” somebody exclaimed, “that they give two turns! Also that we want to hear about them.”

And in Ch. XXII,

Here at present I felt afresh — for I had felt it again and again — how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking “nature” into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require more tact than just this attempt to supply, one’s self, ALL the nature.

Incidentally, my library book included The Aspern Papers, written a decade earlier. A truly enchanting novella that I enjoyed rather more than ours.

[Virgil]

In the prologue:

“I quite agree — in regard to Griffin’s ghost, or whatever it was — that its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular touch. But it’s not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children — ?”

“We say, of course,” somebody exclaimed, “that they give two turns! Also that we want to hear about them.”

And in Ch. XXII,

Here at present I felt afresh — for I had felt it again and again — how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking “nature” into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require more tact than just this attempt to supply, one’s self, ALL the nature.

Incidentally, my library book included The Aspern Papers, written a decade earlier. A truly enchanting novella that I enjoyed rather more than ours.

Thanks Gladys. I saw those quotes myself and had them underlined. So it's simply that the events of the story take another turn and nothing else?

Oh I read The Aspern Papers many many years ago and though I can't recall a thing about it, I do remember thinking highly of it. James seems to really have perfected the novella form. The Beast in the Jungle may still be my favorite all time novella of all time. Or certainly one of the best.

[Jozanny]

Gladys: I am not going to respond, as my mind is on writing some articles, and not so much what I believe--but that is the point--that James refuses to pin it down, one way or the other. The governess perceives, but her reliability is not ironclad.

Virgil--are you having trouble grabbing hold of James? You read a little unsure, unless I am mistaken. If I can be of assistance I will try to assist--as that too, might be worth writing about. James makes large things out of very little.

[Virgil]

Virgil--are you having trouble grabbing hold of James? You read a little unsure, unless I am mistaken. If I can be of assistance I will try to assist--as that too, might be worth writing about. James makes large things out of very little.

I guess I do feel insecure sometimes reading James. Sometimes I don't understand what point he's trying to make, if he is even trying to make a point. Who was it - TS Eliot? - who said James had such a fine mind that no idea could penetrate it.

[Gladys]

The governess perceives, but her reliability is not ironclad.

Agreed; but is there evidence she is more than just a romantic at heart? She certainly idolises the children and the master.

Does she alone see the ghosts? Does she single-handedly manufacture a fantasy around Quint and Miss Jessel? If the angelic Miles was expelled for demonic fantasies, has his return home served to befuddle a highly suggestible governess? Is Mrs Grose humouring the governess throughout? Is her account of the children's behaviour and words thoroughly embellished?

If so, why does her friend Douglas seem to respect her, or is he too fantasising? And what are we to make of the narrator in the prologue? All in all, I am struggling to find solid reasons to doubt the first-hand account of the governess.

[Jozanny]

I guess I do feel insecure sometimes reading James. Sometimes I don't understand what point he's trying to make, if he is even trying to make a point. Who was it - TS Eliot? - who said James had such a fine mind that no idea could penetrate it.

That is actually a valid critique of those who are less than sympathetic readers of James, and even I occasionally throw a tantrum; I am sure even upper class Victorians did not go around reading each other's faces with super-attenuated assumptions, but the greatest complaint against James is also part of his staying power. No one really knows where he stands. I certainly don't--I've simply come a long way from having any trust in the narrative reliability of his work at its greatest.

In The Golden Bowl, he seems to be offering a rather funky view on marriage, and some think Maggie and the Prince will survive *the crack* in their union because of Papa's last words about his daughter's fine objects--but Maggie's very last perception in the book is that she looks at her husband with terror and pity, before burying her head in his shoulder. I tend to be less optimistic thereby.

The stuff that keeps literary minds in business .