Christmas Reading '09: The Turn of the Screw [Archive]

Jozanny

12-19-2009, 07:01 PM

Yes, that is James though, but it is worth sticking with. I have said before about this that it is one of the longest short stories I've ever read!

I first read this the year before last to go with psychoanalysis of which this story is surely a solid set text? I think it highly likely that James was even feeding directly from the work of Freud, he probably was, either way it doesn't matter of course.

I also think that it is highly significant that we start at the fireplace, but don't end there (I won't go into details of the end though of course). This sort of technique has been done before and since no doubt, and seeks to trap you into the narrative without giving you the freedom of realising that it is "only a story" at the end.

Neely: Freud has written about his professional relationship with William James, the equally famous younger brother who was the father of modern American psychology, so that Henry was channeling psychoanalytic theory was not unlikely. I am uncertain, however, in relation to dates, as I know Freud's reference to be about 1910 or so. I will ask on the Jamesian listserv, and am debating wading in further over dinner, as I am snowbound, and I cannot drive my power chair outside for quite some time:p. (Thankfully I can meet all of my needs online for awhile.)

Virgil--James is "like that" so you aren't alone. It has taken me over 20 years to understand how he *says* things without saying them. Dr. Hathaway suggests just letting it flow:D. You'll be fine.

***
Additions:

kasie, you are correct about the possessive of "Griffin's ghost" as Mrs. Griffin is one of the minor supporting characters in the opening, but I am preoccupied with James use of the proper name, simply due to the fact that I am looking for deeper clues, if they are to be had, and I do not think Griffin is arbitrary. It is the famous creature, with your alternate spelling too, and I find this on Wiki:

A 9th-century Irish writer by the name of Stephen Scotus[citation needed] asserted that griffins were strictly monogamous. They not only mated for life, but also, if either partner died, then the other would continue throughout the rest of its life alone, never to search for a new mate. The griffin was thus made an emblem of the Church's views on remarriage.

Douglas also met the governess at Trinity College, and gives the manuscript to his narrator on the third day, as is mentioned, so, just like Dickens, James is playing with some of the most powerful symbolism within Christianity. Dickens has three ghosts, James has Trinity, etc.

I am also curious as to Douglas's credibility, as James was the master, in his maturity, on making the careful reader question the reliability of the teller's authority. Douglas loved this woman, who apparently suffered no adverse consequences over her conduct or her subsequent course of action.

James is at best, diffident about intimacy, and while Douglas vouches for the governess, I am not sure the "I" of the story, the outside narrator, vouches for the veracity of either.

The ancient crones on the list are sniping with each other about a layman's attack on Dickens and their own personal reputations, things I have been weary of for a long time, but I hope tomorrow some of those whom I respect will assist me with some questions. I know it is not kosher to talk about internal fractures within other communities, but trust me, you can take comfort in the fact that we are all flawed, vain, petty mortals at times :rolleyes:.

My insufferable list-antagonist writes me thus: "You might say The Turn of the Screw is the flip side of A Christmas Carol, "sinister romance" vs. "a good cry...[combined] with uplift." Whether James consciously had Dickens' story in mind is a matter of conjecture."

He would know, much more than even I'd care to (sigh).

Dark Muse

12-20-2009, 12:06 AM

It is funny, I remember the first time I read the story, while I enjoyed it, I was not really over-awed with it to say the least, but than at the time I was reading it for school and taking multiple different English classes, so I did not have leisure in my reading of it, and had other things to think about, as well was not reading it just for the sake of personal enjoyment.

Now reading it for the second time, when I can read it at my leisure and now that I already know what to expect, I have more of a luxury to focus upon the prose of the story, and I am beginning to like it a lot more the second time around than I did the first.

kasie

12-20-2009, 07:34 AM

Jozanny - further to William James - my edition of Oxford Companion to Eng Lit (6th ed, pub 2000) has James' Priciples of Psychology published in 1890, some eight years before TotS, so Henry would surely have known of his brother's opinions. OCtEL says this book shows James' psychology has 'a tendency to subordinate logical proof to intuitive conviction' - might be something to bear in mind as the story in TotS develops?

Also re: griffin/gryphon - Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable gives further info that the creature 'was sacred to the sun and kept guard over hidden treasures'. (You see how, when in doubt, I have recourse to the book-shelf rather than the Net - must be my age...) I haven't heard of the symbol used with regard to marriage/fidelity but perhaps it foreshadows the relationship between the two former employees at Bly?

Dark Muse - I am finding the same thing - the date in my copy is forty-one years ago: I was deep into Finals at the time and I think I must have acquired TotS as background reading as Portrait of a Lady was the James title on the set reading list.

Jozanny

12-20-2009, 01:21 PM

kasie, I am wary of being too hemeneutical, of course, but still, I have the feeling I may have stumbled onto a fresh insight, and that is exciting, but I shall hold it in reserve.

By the time Douglas is in the actual recital, however, we know a few things. The governess is the daughter of a parson, she is nervous, impressionable, was taken with the uncle, thinks the situation grim, but accepts it, even with his somewhat hideous *condition* imposed, and we also have this foreshadowing about Miles, from the uncle himself, which in this reading I more readily picked up on:

She would also have, in holidays, to look after the small boy, who had been for a term at school -- young as he was to be sent, but what else could be done? --

If the actual evil of the story is to be sourced, I think it stems from the uncle's desire to abnegate his responsibility to his brother's children, a responsibility that involves more than throwing money and shelter at them, and the primacy of his own interests, which the poor young woman accepts, but evidently not without becoming conflicted by it.

James may be indicating some interesting things about desire which exists, but ferments, unrealized. We are also made aware of the death of the lady before her, at this point.

Dark Muse

12-20-2009, 04:09 PM

If the actual evil of the story is to be sourced, I think it stems from the uncle's desire to abnegate his responsibility to his brother's children, a responsibility that involves more than throwing money and shelter at them, and the primacy of his own interests, which the poor young woman accepts, but evidently not without becoming conflicted by it.

I think the pressure does start to get to the governess being placed under such circumstances, as there is a lot going on within the story to work against her and let her mind start to play tricks upon her or perhaps for stress to just start to shape itself in various different ways.

For she herself is a young and inexperienced woman who is put in a position of being fully responsible for these two children knowing she has no real support system.

It is alluded to the fact that she may have fallen in love with the Master, even if her contact with him is all but non-existent so she is eager to please him by not forcing him to have more responsibility but takes it all upon her own shoulders to appease his wish to be left completely out of it. Her only confidant being Mrs. Grose who is not much help at all.

Her first introduction to the young boy being under the condition of some mysterious trouble he got himself into and Mrs. Gose's evasiveness about the nature of the child's behavior.

In addition to the rather vague disappearance of the former governess coupled with the background of being mostly alone within this rather large and strange house.

It would put quite a strain upon a person and cause their thoughts to start to crop up various different plausible scenarios to try and make since of some of the vague and elusive mysteries that do hover around the house and those connected to the house.

James may be indicating some interesting things about desire which exists, but ferments, unrealized. We are also made aware of the death of the lady before her, at this point.

That makes me think of her first encounter with the "figure" whom she sees within the tower, and rather conveniently the image appears to her shortly after she had just been contemplating now nice it would indeed be if she were to encounter another person upon her walk.

Jozanny

12-20-2009, 07:48 PM

Mmm. This is why I have always loved reading James so much, as even old, he is new. Even now though, from the very introduction to this woman's POV, her perceptions are not quite trustworthy, from her "flights and drops" to her calling Flora "my little girl".

Another cue, as the child isn't her little girl. It may seem innocent and tender enough to develop an attachment to a beautiful orphan--but for me the possessiveness of that statement raises a flag that the governess is too invested from the very start.

I do want to thank you all, because I am beginning to envision the prospect for a possible paper to the HJR; a small one to be sure, but possible, and I am internally connecting the dots, and have contact, if needed, with the editor. It will take some real legwork, and I would have to get to a research library and get hold of an MLA manual, but Michael, who is one of my blessed ghosts on my shoulder, always urged me to write an article, and I think I see a way, after all these years, of aiming for a quiet byline.

And to think I begrudged rereading TOS again-- that should teach me a lesson :rolleyes:

Dark Muse

12-20-2009, 07:56 PM

Mmm. This is why I have always loved reading James so much, as even old, he is new. Even now though, from the very introduction to this woman's POV, her perceptions are not quite trustworthy, from her "flights and drops" to her calling Flora "my little girl".

Not to mention Miles the little boy. By nothing more than her first laying eyes upon him she completely disregards the letter which came from the school about his behavior, and presumes because he is a "beautiful" child that he must be innocent.

So she automatically within the first seconds of meeting the boy decides that the school where the boy has been attending for sometime must either be lying for some unknown reason, or made some horrible mistake.

She does not even decide to try and get further information from the school about the incident.

kasie

12-21-2009, 06:55 AM

I'm seeing all sorts of parallels with Jane Eyre in the opening part of the story - the lonely, young, orphaned outsider, retained by a handsome, mysterious man to care for a dependent child (or in this case, two) with whom he has no wish for contact, an isolated house, a solidly sensible housekeeper who is holding back information. The young Jane even dreads 'seeing' the ghost of her dead uncle. Rochester, however, does become involved in the events at his country home, whereas this man (are we ever told his name?) is reluctant to have anything to do with his charges and for no given reason - is he resentful of their dependence on him or just idle?

Given her circumstances, I don't think it is so strange that the governess develops a strong attachment to her charges - teachers can be a bit like that!

I've noticed however how often she refers to them as 'angelic' or 'heavenly'. I'm reading now with half an eye on brother James' idea of 'intuitive psychology' and am beginning to wonder if big brother Henry is quietly saying he is more than a little wary of relying on intuition as a guide to judging people.

Dark Muse

12-21-2009, 01:37 PM

I'm seeing all sorts of parallels with Jane Eyre in the opening part of the story - the lonely, young, orphaned outsider, retained by a handsome, mysterious man to care for a dependent child (or in this case, two) with whom he has no wish for contact, an isolated house, a solidly sensible housekeeper who is holding back information. The young Jane even dreads 'seeing' the ghost of her dead uncle. Rochester, however, does become involved in the events at his country home, whereas this man (are we ever told his name?) is reluctant to have anything to do with his charges and for no given reason - is he resentful of their dependence on him or just idle?

This story makes me think of Jane Eyere as well. I think that he just does not like being bothered by the children. It was a responseblility that came upon him rather unexepcedly and to say the least suddenly finding yourself with children will disrupt your life. He probably does not like the inference they have on his routine.

Given her circumstances, I don't think it is so strange that the governess develops a strong attachment to her charges - teachers can be a bit like that!

Even so, I think it is a little insensible to decide that just by the child's appearance before she has even said a word to him that he must be innocent of any charges against him. I would think a teacher would want to actually investigate the matter of his possible behavior problems and not just dismiss because he is pretty to look at.

Dark Muse

12-21-2009, 06:06 PM

a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement?

Here is what could be a direct reference to Jane Eyre and knowing the that woman by her own admission is given to flights of fancy if we suppose she has read the novel, thus finding herself in a similar position, and seeing by the reference to Udolpho her tendency for Gothic novels it is easy to see where these things would start to play within her mind being in such a house under such circumstances.

Virgil

12-22-2009, 07:48 PM

Ok, I'm half way through and really enjoying this. I do want to highlight an important sentence from chapter 1 that I think brings together several motifs that I'm seeing running through this.

But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connection with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several times rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect; to watch, from my open window, the faint summer dawn, to look at such portions of the rest of the house as I could catch, and to listen, while, in the fading dusk, the first birds began to twitter, for the possible recurrence of a sound or two, less natural and not without, but within, that I had fancied I heard.
First that's a great sentence. I love the winding nature of it, and the modifying clauses that are tacked on, extending the experience and linking so many things together. What I'll point out I'll call motifs because without having read the entire story yet, I don't know if they're full fledged themes or how they relate to the themes, but they do see to recur. First is this notion of beauty and how that's associated with the children. That stands in contrast to the "evil" of the ghosts. There's no particular reason that I can see why the ghosts must be evil (it doesn't have to be by definition), but the Governess (we never do get a name for her, do we?) seems to jump to that conclusion. However, the anglic beauty versus evil contrast is very stark and intentionally so.

Second motif is this notion of natural and unnatural. I'm not sure this is clear to me, but certain things seem to be associated with natural, like the birds here, and unnatural such as the ghost of Peter Quint. Certainly Quint's cause of death is an unnatural act.

Third is the notion of "fancied" or what the Governess imagines and what she discerns as fact. It seems to me that there is a sort of blurring of the two going on and we aren't always sure. I do think the ghost is discerned and real.

Fourth and 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. Here let me list a few:
From chapter 2:

She was evidently grateful for such a profession. "See him, miss, first. Then believe it!" I felt forthwith a new impatience to see him; it was the beginning of a curiosity that, for all the next hours, was to deepen almost to pain. Mrs. Grose was aware, I could judge, of what she had produced in me, and she followed it up with assurance. "You might as well believe it of the little lady. Bless her," she added the next moment--"Look at her!"
From chapter 3:

It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember, two distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first and that of my second surprise. My second was a violent perception of the mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the person I had precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a bewilderment of vision of which, after these years, there is no living view that I can hope to give. An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred; and the figure that faced me was--a few more seconds assured me--as little anyone else I knew as it was the image that had been in my mind. ...It was as if, while I took in--what I did take in--all the rest of the scene had been stricken with death. I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there was no other change in nature, unless indeed it were a change that I saw with a stranger sharpness. The gold was still in the sky, the clearness in the air, and the man who looked at me over the battlements was as definite as a picture in a frame. That's how I thought, with extraordinary quickness, of each person that he might have been and that he was not.
From chapter 4:

He appeared thus again with I won't say greater distinctness, for that was impossible, but with a nearness that represented a forward stride in our intercourse and made me, as I met him, catch my breath and turn cold. He was the same--he was the same, and seen, this time, as he had been seen before, from the waist up, the window, though the dining room was on the ground floor, not going down to the terrace on which he stood. His face was close to the glass, yet the effect of this better view was, strangely, only to show me how intense the former had been. He remained but a few seconds--long enough to convince me he also saw and recognized; but it was as if I had been looking at him for years and had known him always. Something, however, happened this time that had not happened before; his stare into my face, through the glass and across the room, was as deep and hard as then, but it quitted me for a moment during which I could still watch it, see it fix successively several other things. On the spot there came to me the added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come there. He had come for someone else.
And these from chapter 6:

This chance presented itself to me in an image richly material. I was a screen--I was to stand before them. The more I saw, the less they would. I began to watch them in a stifled suspense, a disguised excitement that might well, had it continued too long, have turned to something like madness. What saved me, as I now see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn't last as suspense--it was superseded by horrible proofs. Proofs, I say, yes--from the moment I really took hold.

Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the other side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator. The way this knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world--the strangest, that is, except the very much stranger in which it quickly merged itself. I had sat down with a piece of work--for I was something or other that could sit--on the old stone bench which overlooked the pond; and in this position I began to take in with certitude, and yet without direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third person. The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant shade, but it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, still hour. There was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least, in the conviction I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I should see straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of raising my eyes.
Notice how all these paragraphs have a reference to seeing or the act of the visual. I can't say it's voyerism, but it is a passive act. I don't know what to make of it yet, but it's there in almost every chapter.

Dark Muse

12-22-2009, 08:10 PM

First is this notion of beauty and how that's associated with the children. That stands in contrast to the "evil" of the ghosts. There's no particular reason that I can see why the ghosts must be evil (it doesn't have to be by definition), but the Governess (we never do get a name for her, do we?) seems to jump to that conclusion. However, the anglic beauty versus evil contrast is very stark and intentionally so.

It is interesting the way in which the age old notion of good vs. evil is rather contorted within this story, and questions where does the true good and the true evil lie? If they exist at all? Considering that it is all within the own mind of the governess and how she becomes so truly obsessed with the children whom she constantly likens to angels.

So by contrast of the children our angels than the apparitions must thus be evil as it is interesting the way she than sets herself up in the position of being the protectors to these little heavenly beings. Perhaps within it there is some notions of self-grandeur as she refers to herself as being the "heroine"

It is also a complete invention of her own mind that the ghost/Quinn must be after Miles, there is nothing in her brief encounter with the apparition to suggest that he has any interest in the boy. But she out of the blue makes this presumption and than convinces herself of its truth by taking the vague information that Mrs. Gorse gives her.

Third is the notion of "fancied" or what the Governess imagines and what she discerns as fact. It seems to me that there is a sort of blurring of the two going on and we aren't always sure. I do think the ghost is discerned and real.

Yes, the Governess seems to take what vuage facts she manages to preduce from Mrs. Grose and than she completely runs away with it, and starts filling in the blanks to come up with all of these wild assumptions which she convinves herself must than be the truth.

Scheherazade

12-22-2009, 08:32 PM

My library does not have a copy and cannot tell me when they can get me a copy because of Christmas and New Year holidays so will have to skip this one.

Jozanny

12-22-2009, 08:42 PM

Though I cannot take in all Virgil's leaps at once, and I am taking a break from all this reading I am doing to work, ludicrous as the idea may be three days before holiday week is in full swing, my assessment of Miles' dismissal is that the governess assumes too much, and assumes the worst, where a more experienced caretaker might have been more pragmatic. When *Miss* says to Mrs. Grose that the headmaster's refusal to have Miles back can *only* have one meaning, she is sorely mistaken. This is a young boy probably better able to remember his parents, and grieve them, than his sister, and might have as much acted on this impulse as any desire to *contaminate* or *corrupt*.

If, over the years, I have come to distrust her voice and dislike her character, my distaste becomes all the stronger the closer I read the text.

I am not sure I will finish reviewing all the rest tonight, as I am preparing notes for a possible paper, I will probably conclude by Thursday.

Dark Muse

12-22-2009, 10:54 PM

When reading the story today I was particularly struck by a curious idea, though know I am not sure how much validity there is to support the idea. In the start to the text when Douglass introduces the story, it alludes to the fact that the Governess was in love with the Master.

Though considering how much she comes to care for the children it seems hard to believe that she could have such feelings for the man whom neglected them in such a way and shows no interest in them (but then she is young and unreasonable)

There is a moment where she reflects upon the character of the Master, which does not seem to be overly flatteringly and does not appear to come from a woman given to strong emotions whim is in love with such a mysterious figure in her life:

This squared well enough with my impressions of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so very particular perhaps about some of the company HE kept. All the same, I pressed my interlocutress. "I promise you _I_ would have told!"

I began to wonder if in fact she was in love with Miles, for those she cares for both of the children it seems to me that she does take a most particular interest within the boy.

Though when going back and re-reading the introduction to the story it was a bit more specific about her alleged feelings for the Master than I had first thought or remembered. But of course this information is given 2nd and could perhaps just have been Douglas' impressions and his reliability as a narrator has already been put to the question.

Virgil

12-23-2009, 12:01 AM

I meant to ask about the Master. Did I miss it? Why is he not around?

Dark Muse

12-23-2009, 12:46 AM

I meant to ask about the Master. Did I miss it? Why is he not around?

It does not really explain but the general impression is that he simply dosen't want to have any bother or trouble with anything to do with the children. He wants to kept out of thier life and concerns as much as possible. Though just where he is, I do not think is made known. He stays away from the house becasue the children are there.

Paulclem

12-23-2009, 05:42 PM

When reading the story today I was particularly struck by a curious idea, though know I am not sure how much validity there is to support the idea. In the start to the text when Douglass introduces the story, it alludes to the fact that the Governess was in love with the Master.

Though considering how much she comes to care for the children it seems hard to believe that she could have such feelings for the man whom neglected them in such a way and shows no interest in them (but then she is young and unreasonable)

There is a moment where she reflects upon the character of the Master, which does not seem to be overly flatteringly and does not appear to come from a woman given to strong emotions whim is in love with such a mysterious figure in her life:

I began to wonder if in fact she was in love with Miles, for those she cares for both of the children it seems to me that she does take a most particular interest within the boy.

Though when going back and re-reading the introduction to the story it was a bit more specific about her alleged feelings for the Master than I had first thought or remembered. But of course this information is given 2nd and could perhaps just have been Douglas' impressions and his reliability as a narrator has already been put to the question.

I'm getting the impression that she is attempting to win him the master - over. She threatens to leave if Mrs Grose tells the Master. Is this because that would go against the wishes of the Master, and she would have failed in the task given her?

I also take Virgil's point about about seeing. As he says, there are lots of references to views etc, but perhaps the Governess' view is meant to contrast with our own. As has been pointed out, the Ghosts are attributed with evil intentions by the Governess, but we only have her point of view about that, and the narrative structure allows us to question her account.

Also, does she see Quint and the former governess as rivals for the care ofthe children?

Dark Muse

12-23-2009, 06:48 PM

I'm getting the impression that she is attempting to win him the master - over. She threatens to leave if Mrs Grose tells the Master. Is this because that would go against the wishes of the Master, and she would have failed in the task given her?

I just find it interesting that considering how emotional she is, and the fact that she doesn't show any real restraint or sensibility of anything else, and the way she gushes over the children, and how passionately she does feel things, she doesn't really express any feelings for the Master, but the occasional thoughts that do seem somewhat critical regarding his inattention to the children.

Her threats to leave if Mrs. Grose tells the Master, could perhaps come from her fear of the Master interfering in her personal heroisms for the children. As she declares herself as "their shield" the one who must stand between them and evil. Perhaps at this point she does not want now the Master to come between her and the children. She has set herself up in this self-important role of the defending of good against evil and doesn't thing anyone else can do what she can for the children.

I also take Virgil's point about about seeing. As he says, there are lots of references to views etc, but perhaps the Governess' view is meant to contrast with our own. As has been pointed out, the Ghosts are attributed with evil intentions by the Governess, but we only have her point of view about that, and the narrative structure allows us to question her account.

I also can't help but to wonder, just what is Mrs. Gorse's view. Does she truly believe the Governess in her claims? Or is she just sort of humoring the Governess?

Because in observering one the conversations that the Governess had with her after she saw the ghost of the woman. Mrs. Grose was really just asking the Governess clarifying questions on just how she did come up with her conclusions she did and the Governess than took the questions as validation, but that could just as well be her own fancy.

She brought me, for the instant, almost round. "Oh, we must clutch at
THAT--we must cling to it! If it isn't a proof of what you say, it's a
proof of--God knows what! For the woman's a horror of horrors."

Mrs. Grose, at this, fixed her eyes a minute on the ground; then at last
raising them, "Tell me how you know," she said.

"Then you admit it's what she was?" I cried.

"Tell me how you know," my friend simply repeated.

The Governess makes the automatic presumption that the ghost she saw, whom she presumes to be Miss Jessel must be a wicked woman, while Mrs. Grose replies "tell me how you know" which in fact could just be a simple valid question asking her, just how she is so certain that the figure she saw was one of evil since she does seem so certain of it. But the Governess interprets the question as a way of confirmation that indeed the specter must truly be evil.

Jozanny

12-24-2009, 12:53 AM

Dark,

I have no doubt that the governess has an excess of feeling for Miles. One of the prevailing literary interpretations of the story is in fact heavily based in psychoanalytic theory, but since I do not want to sound too pompous, I will let you all dig that up on your own.

Where I disagree with you though, is about what she feels for the uncle. Though we are getting this through the frame of the narrator framing Douglas who in turn frames the governess, the governess is also framing herself--she is a mature woman chronicling herself as nearly a young girl. To use modern language, if you will all excuse me for doing so, the uncle who is a cad turns her on, but she knows full well she ranks well below his caste, and aside from that, is out of his league. She transfers this unmet desire onto his neice and nephew, in a sense, trying to protect them from her own needs, needs unmet, like Douglas's, in fact.

Dark Muse

12-24-2009, 02:17 AM

Where I disagree with you though, is about what she feels for the uncle. Though we are getting this through the frame of the narrator framing Douglas who in turn frames the governess, the governess is also framing herself--she is a mature woman chronicling herself as nearly a young girl. To use modern language, if you will all excuse me for doing so, the uncle who is a cad turns her on, but she knows full well she ranks well below his caste, and aside from that, is out of his league. She transfers this unmet desire onto his neice and nephew, in a sense, trying to protect them from her own needs, needs unmet, like Douglas's, in fact.

I just feel that there is nothing to go on regarding her feelings for the Master outside of the fact that Douglas tells us that she was in love with him and we have no way of knowing where he got this information. There is no particular reason to suppose it from the manuscript itself. It seems that the idea of her feelings for the Master come completely from Douglas's interpretation, which in itself makes it suspect. For in a way he could be transferring his own feelings for the governess by imagining that she had this attachment to the Master.

Though the manifestation of Quinn and Jessel and their "evil" nature, and the suggestive things of which the Governess begins to allude to and project onto them, could be a transference of her own desires and her acting out inappropriate feelings towards the children based upon her attraction to the master.

Jozanny

12-24-2009, 03:11 AM

Ah, but the opening of the third chapter, before she projects her vision, has a highly sexualized connotation:

It was a pleasure at these moments to feel myself tranquil and justified; doubtless, perhaps, also to reflect that by my discretion, my quiet good sense and general high propriety, I was giving pleasure -- if he ever thought of it! -- to the person to whose pressure I had responded. What I was doing was what he had earnestly hoped and directly asked of me, and that I could, after all, do it proved even a greater joy than I had expected. I daresay I fancied myself, in short, a remarkable young woman and took comfort in the faith that this would more publicly appear. Well, I needed to be remarkable to offer a front to the remarkable things that presently gave their first sign.

It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour: the children were tucked away, and I had come out for my stroll. One of the thoughts that, as I don't in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with me in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn't ask more than that -- I only asked that he should know and the only way to be sure he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome face. That was exactly present to me --

If that is not a passionate longing unfulfilled, I do not know what is, because it is shortly after this that she has what could possibly be construed, in modern terms, as a psychotic break.

Though I like, as well, the affinity kasie found to Bronte.

I really might, if possible, go to the ALA conference on James in late spring, and this cheers me up immensely. What I owe to LN after all, eh? :)

Dark Muse

12-24-2009, 03:14 PM

In a way I think that her alleged feelings for the Master is really just another fabrication of her own mind, that is to say, I do not think she genuinely is attracted to the Master, or has real feelings for him, but rather is carried away with the excitement the idea of being in love would bring her.

She alludes to Jane Eyre and makes a direct reference to The Mystery of Uldolpho so we can see she enjoys these Gothic Romance type stories, and clearly she has a very active imagination. She finds herself now in this house which feels so much like one of the stories she enjoys reading and to say the least just being a plain old governess is not all that exciting nor particularly important outside of the realm of the children whom she is in charge of.

I think particularly out of boredom, and perhaps because of the responsibility which has been placed on her because of the Masters complete neglect of the children and leaving everything up to her, she fancies herself as being a Jane Eyre like figure and begins to create this scenario of herself being in one of her stories. So her attraction to the Master does not come so much from the flesh and blood person, but rather from the fairy tale she weaves in her mind to make herself feel more important than she really is.

I think the events that are soon to follow come more from her being a young woman who is board, perhaps lonely, and has an over active imagination than they do from some great unrequited passion.

She expresses that she has these delusions of grandeur when she declares herself the hero of the children and wants to make her role seem all the more significant by creating this great epic battle between good and evil in which she must be the sole defender to goodness against the dangers of the lurking evil.

Jozanny

12-24-2009, 11:34 PM

I caught the reference to Ward's Udolpho in section IV. I may not have known its full import in the past because I am not sure I ever looked it up before and never read Ward, although she is now on my kindle and I may get The Italian too, eventually, if I can stomach the former, whenever I get to it; for someone so marginalized in her social structure I have taken on not a few insignificant burdens in recent months, but as always, James refuses not to intrude! :rolleyes:. Every reading I give him opens new possibilities, even when I have exclaimed, "Oh so that's it, boy was I stupid..."

I pretty much adhere to the psychoanalytic reading of the story, which is that the governess, by degrees, descends into an hysteric insanity, by which she then terrorizes Flora and possibly frightens Miles to death, though this is not absolutely certain--as must be the case when dealing with James--but he is toying with Gothic conventions too.

I may finish tonight as I had intended, as I have more than one motive for taking some furious notes.

I am on my own for this part of the holiday, not on scrupple but because travel is too difficult for me this year, given what I have been through and the age of my old power chair, so I may actually finish up early Christmas Day.

********
To be honest, I bought a mah jong solitaire program for myself, and after 15 minutes of writing, blew it off and played some formats. I like GameHouse versions the best, but the Quests aren't really that much worse for being cheaper, -- really, I should wrap up my review by tonight...

Jozanny

12-27-2009, 08:03 AM

Okay, I am now back to *unblowing* as it were, and I am almost finished this reread, and wanted to qualify that psychoanalytic plotting points are not the beginning and the end of plugging in to the ambiguity of the text. One can also look at a homoerotic coda, very subtlely immersed within the text, that, to use a Jamesian clause not my own, "subverts the normal Victorian bonds"; it may be slightly less obvious in TOS than in other of James's works, but it is there.

Since I am falling asleep in my Quickie and have to transfer to bed yet, my last observation in relation to my progress this morning is--if one doesn't want this woman to be crazy when she starts seeing Quint, by the time she suspects 10 and 8 year old children to be in collusion with spirits--it is time to call William James and get lithium in caplet form. Even in the text itself, she starts to lose Mrs. Grose's sympathy at this point, meaning the housekeeper cannot follow where the governess is going. I will add a bit more later.

**********
12/30: I also would have missed the importance, in earlier readings, of the reading material the governess has busied herself with on the night of Flora's so called cavorting. Has anyone read Fielding's Amelia? I have just downloaded it, as I just realized I confused Joseph Andrews with Tom Jones and own the former as opposed to the latter.

But as you can see, James is having a lot of fun in TOS playing upon cultural references: the art of Raphael, the various literary tropes, even fantasy, which is rare for James.

I will feel badly if my passion for the Master has deterred anyone from making further comments; I hope not, but I will have more to add on the by and by. I may extend my posts into the New Year.

Quark

01-01-2010, 01:35 AM

I will feel badly if my passion for the Master has deterred anyone from making further comments

Well it made me a little hesitant, but, no, it hasn't completely deterred me. Really, I've just been away from LitNet so much that I haven't had time to get into a book club discussion. I'd like to, though. Is the conversation still going on? Give me a couple of days and I think I can start posting.

Dark Muse

01-01-2010, 01:44 AM

I will feel badly if my passion for the Master has deterred anyone from making further comments; I hope not, but I will have more to add on the by and by. I may extend my posts into the New Year.

As for me, I just fell behind on my reading of the story over the holidays.

Virgil

01-01-2010, 02:31 AM

I will feel badly if my passion for the Master has deterred anyone from making further comments; I hope not, but I will have more to add on the by and by. I may extend my posts into the New Year.

Absolutely not. I've had a break in my reading, but I will get back to this tomorrow. :)

Jozanny

01-01-2010, 02:45 AM

Well it made me a little hesitant, but, no, it hasn't completely deterred me. Really, I've just been away from LitNet so much that I haven't had time to get into a book club discussion. I'd like to, though. Is the conversation still going on? Give me a couple of days and I think I can start posting.

Cool Quark, I am a bit overwhelmed myself, and this is all a fault of my own making, so I will ease up for at least a few days and give you a chance to catch up.

I guess it is okay if we extend the discussion into January--since I do not intend to earn any money on it, I may post my abstract here, I will think about it, as I do not want to be laughed at by James scholars who write these proposals for a living. The gent in charge was perfectly polite to me, however, and said he'd be happy to read it, and told me I can attend the conference either way--though I could envision making a buck or two on a James article for an education periodical.

Happy New Year to all! (Virgil, Dark, kasie, Neely...)

motherhubbard

01-02-2010, 12:50 AM

I finished today. I must admit that I had to read and reread a lot of it. I would just get lost in the sentence. I was on the edge for the entire story. It doesn't take much to spook me ( I failed to tend my animals until after dark and there is a fog in the fields so it was horridly frightening out there after this) I'm still not sure what I think about it. One moment I the children are trying to drive her mad. The next I think of Flaubert's Madam Bovary being carried away by her own desire for romance and excitement. I was somewhat disappointed in the ending because it leaves me still undecided.

Virgil

01-02-2010, 06:34 PM

I have to admit I'm a little confused. What is the problem with Miles and his being expelled and why is it important? I've got about 30 pages to go and I can't piece the significance of it together.

Jozanny

01-02-2010, 08:04 PM

Virgil, I was not ready to post yet, as I was going to make a heady summation, with the precaution of putting it onto my word processor first--but James is playing on exaggerated irony here, with Miles and school. The governess assumes, and assumes is a key word here--that the masters decline to have the boy back because he did something bad--that he contaminated others, corrupted. Mrs. Grose makes equally exaggerated protests against this--and when the governess actually sees Miles, what does she say? That he had more of the *divine* in him than any other child she ever knew.

James is deliberately trying to frustrate the reader's expectations, and he does, because anyone would want to know why their child was expelled, but the uncle doesn't care, and the governess declines to investigate because she gives way to what she sees as divine beauty within the boy.

Virgil

01-02-2010, 08:34 PM

Hehe, he's suceeded in frustrating mine. ;) I'll be looking forward to your summary. I hope to finish the story by tomorrow.

motherhubbard

01-02-2010, 10:40 PM

Jozanny

01-03-2010, 12:29 AM

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:eek:, 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:banana:.

LitNetIsGreat

01-03-2010, 06:13 PM

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

01-03-2010, 07:51 PM

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

01-05-2010, 12:39 AM

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

01-05-2010, 07:29 PM

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

01-06-2010, 07:09 PM

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

01-06-2010, 10:54 PM

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

01-08-2010, 07:49 AM

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

01-11-2010, 09:42 PM

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

01-11-2010, 10:32 PM

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 (www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34096), written a decade earlier. A truly enchanting novella that I enjoyed rather more than ours.

Virgil

01-11-2010, 10:42 PM

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 (www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34096), 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

01-14-2010, 07:22 PM

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

01-14-2010, 09:09 PM

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. :lol:

Gladys

01-15-2010, 01:11 AM

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

01-15-2010, 07:18 AM

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. :lol:

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:D--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 ;).

Gladys

01-16-2010, 01:42 AM

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.

Now reading The Wings of the Dove , I feel exhilarated rather than insecure reading Henry James: The Golden Bowl (www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?p=829380#post829380).

Jozanny

01-16-2010, 07:08 AM

As a James reader, I do not think I ever felt insecure. Frustrated, yes. Determined to understand, yes. I took many things at face value that I no longer do, and I finally understand "the experiment" in The Europeans even if Eugenia remains a puzzle--however, much as in The Golden Bowl, there is a subtext about pair bonding in The Turn of The Screw.

But James leaves it up to the reader to latch onto their own points, for the most part. We see what we want to with our own values. I have done some reading on gender identification in children, and the evidence seems to indicate that boys and girls know fairly early how they identify in terms of gender, so it is not beyond the pale that Miles leans toward homosexual tendencies despite his age. It is simply not conclusive in this novella--nor if James is preying upon our fears, more or less, as well as coping with his possible repression--but again, no one actually knows. Some Jamesians like to believe that James was actively gay, in modern terms. Some think he was cellibate, and some think there was a middle ground, that as a young man James risked an affair or two.

I don't know, but I do get the sense, in his last works, that he wanted to come out, and that he was in pain about his preferences, though in TOS this is relatively oblique. He is not, I suppose, as obvious in his agenda as we can say EM Forster is. I think Forster was the first gay writer as we would characterize it today, genre wise. I don't mean that he was the first gay writer, just that he set the table for the modern advent of gay and lesbian activism. James was more coded, and much more complex in his views on intimacy between people.

kasie

01-16-2010, 08:22 AM

So do you think Miles has been 'perverted' by Quint? And has he in turn being trying to 'pervert' other boys at his school? And does the uncle know about it? Did he know Quint had these tendencies? Is he himself been involved with Quint in the past? Is the reason he wants nothing to do with the children that he knows what has happened and feels guilty/responsible/attracted, even? Or am I reading too much into this?

And who says that last 'Peter Quint - you devil?' I read it as Miles, but who is the 'devil', Quint - or the governess?

Virgil

01-16-2010, 12:09 PM

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:

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:

"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.

Jozanny

01-16-2010, 01:51 PM

Virgil

01-16-2010, 03:21 PM

Virgil, I disagree on two things: the story is Freudian. Papers have been written on it and it helped me understand why and how the governess sees and reacts as she does.

Two: it is spiritual. I grant you that James is a little more urbane and not as direct as Dickens, but Christian themes loom large in his master works, and they loom in TOS.

The tale begins the night before the birth of the Incarnate and lasts three days. Surely that isn't lost in the catholic in you.

The governess is the daughter of an episcopalian priest. Significant tensions occur during church services, which the children attend and the governess doesn't. Salvationist hints run through the entire story, my friend.

I will come back to the rest later tonight. I am a bit busy and just logged on to see the tv schedule and here I am yapping!

You're going to have to show me. Like I said, I think James purposely touches on those things and brings them to a dead end. But I do not think they are developed or thematic or even integrated with the anrrative. How does the fact that she's a minister's daughter have to do with seeing or not seeing ghosts? The Freudian idea completely baffles me. Of course you may ask why James brings in extraneous threads only to have them come to an unfruitful conclusion, but I can't quite answer that yet. It's an intuitive feeling that needs to be thought through, and unfortunately may require a second full reading. It has to do with the nature of storytelling.

Gladys

01-17-2010, 08:32 AM

The tale begins the night before the birth of the Incarnate and lasts three days.

Are there more Christian allusions? Connecting Christmas with the Passion narrative is beyond me: who is the incarnate, crucified and redeeming Saviour here? And what role have ghosts in the Gospels?

Edit: Christmas Eve, Virgil, is a time of hope and promise but Golgotha soon follows. How about, 'He [Our governess] descended into hell. On the third day he [she] rose again'? Her short stay at Bly was an encounter with demons - metaphorically a descent into Hell. Too tenuous?

Virgil

01-18-2010, 08:41 PM

Edit: Christmas Eve, Virgil, is a time of hope and promise but Golgotha soon follows. How about, 'He [Our governess] descended into hell. On the third day he [she] rose again'? Her short stay at Bly was an encounter with demons - metaphorically a descent into Hell. Too tenuous?

No I understand that. But what does that have to do with the story? I don't see the significance. The only significance of it being during Christmas is that James I think wants to link this story to Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Otherwise what else is the significance of Christmas?

Gladys

01-18-2010, 10:39 PM

Otherwise what else is the significance of Christmas?

That Golgotha follows Christmas Eve: Hell follows hope?

It's interesting that the prime Biblical allusion in The Golden Bowl is almost equally cryptic: Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken (www.online-literature.com/forums/showpost.php?p=818068&postcount=3).

Virgil

01-18-2010, 10:42 PM

I haven't read The Golden Bowl, so I can't comment. I just don't see any religiosity in this story. Other than some superficial details, which I maintain are dead ends in terms of reaching any theme, there really isn't any.

Gladys

01-19-2010, 02:48 AM

I just don't see any religiosity in this story.

I agree. Even the psychology seems less than profound (like Freud himself). The governess writes this account decades after the event, and has become, according to Douglas and her own account, a sensible and intelligent woman. How could she have fabricated so much!

Unless someone can show me more subtlety than a few loose ends, I'm inclined to rank this novella with James's less than convincing, serialised who-dun-it The Other House, written two years earlier.

LitNetIsGreat

01-19-2010, 02:18 PM

Like Jozanny is saying there are huge amounts of Freudian elements to this story that must be considered when weighing up what is going on - even if you ultimately reject them in favour of other explanations. However, I don't think that there are any simple answers in this story, I get the feeling that you are supposed to leave the story with more questions than answers - and I think in this James certainly succeeds.

LitNetIsGreat

01-19-2010, 06:23 PM

I think one of the main arguments from a psychoanalytical perspective is that we see the Governess as a sexually repressed figure (massively sexually repressed as I see it) and as this built-up repression can’t find a natural outlet it is transferred or projected in other areas. For example it could be seen in the visualisation of Quint and Jessop or in an Oedipal way to that of Miles (and I know that there have been other suggestions that go further too). I think that the mind of the Governess is extremely susceptible, found in her constant daydreaming and romanticising, and is therefore the perfect vehicle to convey such things. All this is pretty standard psychoanalytical stuff and The Turn of the Screw is very much a bit of a set text for psychoanalytical readings, so I am not stating anything unique or outrageous by far.

Anyway, as I say, the most important element is that we see the Governess as a sexually repressed individual, I think this is the key to most of the psychoanalytical readings. Often people think that this is due to her obsession with the master of the house, which is perhaps true in a way, but I also think that such was there even before her meeting with him, as carried away in her vast imagination. But before this I think we are told in a tongue-in-cheek manner by Douglas what is half going on:

“The story won’t tell,” said Douglas; “not in any literal, vulgar way.”
“More’s the pity then. That’s the only way I ever understand.”
(original italics)

I think you could perhaps make a case for James himself having a bit of a joke here, though I don’t like to mix narrator with author ever; but nevertheless I think it is an interesting passage and a potential argument. It could also be saying that we won’t have answers at the end, like I said above, more questions come of this text than answers – or at least more points of view than answers and not many of them concrete.

It is also stated very early on that the Governess is in love:

Yes, she was in love. That is she had been. That came out – she couldn’t tell her story without it’s coming out.

This is immediately reinforced by the character Griffin (who some argue even invented just to reinforce this line):

Mrs Griffin, however, expressed the need for a little more light. “Who was it she was in love with?”
“The story will tell” I took it upon myself to reply.

So we are already primed for the fact that the Governess was in love and this is even repeated twice. This is I think important - because James is someone who I don’t think uses language sparingly – it is all there for a reason, one way or another...

So to the meeting with the master:

This person proved, on her presenting herself, for judgement, at a house, in Harley Street, that impressed her as vast and imposing – this of life, such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage.

This I think is an important passage. We see the mind of the Governess as someone who is already influenced by dreaming and romances as being impressed by this sort of knight of a figure. It is also emphasised that she was an anxious girl who has lived in a quiet vicarage – certainly not much room for sexual freedom there to boot! Though I think that it is not too big a leap to see that she may have escaped from her boredom in the vicarage by reading such romances that she already at this point relates in the master as something straight out of a romantic fiction, he is already a hero figure of an impressionable mind. Also note the word “dream” which is very important of course to Freud and any psychoanalytical reading. You can see her romanticising in the passage which immediately carries on from this one:

One could easily fix his type; it never, happily, dies out. He was handsome and bold and pleasant, off-hand and gay and kind. He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid, but what struck her most of all and gave her the courage she afterwards showed was that he put the whole thing to her as a kind of favour, and obligation he should gratefully incur. She conceived him as rich, but as fearfully extravagant – saw him all in a glow of high fashion, of good looks, of expensive habits of charming ways with women. He had for his town residence a big house filled with the spoils of travel and the trophies of the chase.

Now to me, if this is not the depiction of a romantic hero I don’t know what is. It seems that she may be in love with him, but certainly she is in love with “his type” the dashing prince or knight in shining armour. This passage comes on the next page to the one previously quoted, so to me the idea that she is in love, is obsessed, with the idea of some sort of chivalric romance is a fairly straightforward assumption to make. Put this together with a frustrated girl who comes from a vicarage and already with a figure that is loaded with a lot of Freudian potential. It seems that she has already projected her feelings onto the master, so that the master becomes all of her previous desires all rolled into one figure. The fact that he might “gratefully incur” on her a favour if she does her job properly also to me suggests that she would go to any length (such as not contacting him over issues) when not asked to do so.

Douglas also emphasises this love/passion clearly, it says:

And Douglas, with this, made a pause that, for the benefit of the company, moved me to throw in –
“The moral of which was of course the seduction exercised by the splendid young man. She succumbed to it.

As if we really needed telling on this point, but once again James is prone to really labour the point home.

It should be noted that when she arrives at Bly she is impressed by his house and notes that:

What I was to enjoy might be something beyond his promise.

We should probably see this primarily as meaning the property that she should enjoy, but it certainly could mean that her hope is much more than this. Either way she soon advances upon her own importance in the household, which could be seen as part of her added delusion and grandeur of power, and hope that she might eventually be more than a Governess to the master.

The large, impressive room, one of the best in the house, the great state bed, as I almost felt it, the full, figured draperies, the long glasses in which, for the first time, I could see myself

I mean apart from seeing her room as the best in the house, you can almost feel the sexual tension in this brilliant line here, really the line itself is hugely one of sexual repression – note also that she is quick to mention the bed, along with the large, impressive fullness!

At the same time that she is quick to overplay her importance, (and thus her potential position as more than the Governess) she is quick to down play the house keeper as:

Stout, simple, plain, clean wholesome woman

Which not only downplays her as a person and raises herself, but the very overt simplicity of James’s language here almost hurts, it is very bluntly expressed – and because it is James certainly means something!

If we have not got all this to work out for our self about the Governess, which hardly takes much of a leap into the outrageous theoretical world! the Governess claims herself that she is easily led:

“I’m rather easily carried away. I was carried away in London!”

You don’t say.

But then she then goes on to describe the place with its “empty chambers and dull corridors” which could certainly go to describe her own sexual or emotional self. The chapter ends with her assertion that she is “at the helm” of the house, again pushing her self-importance, although it is that as a Governess she does posses some degree of power, certainly above that of the serving staff, I think that there is ample evidence that suggests she places herself well above her own station in the hope of getting more from the master that her position dictates.

If we look at the first vision of that of “Quint” then, to me, it cries out of that of a depiction of her imagination – and thus her sexual repression. It is even as obvious to state before she sees him that she would wish to see a vision:

It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour; the children were tucked away and I had come out for my stroll. One of the thoughts that, as I don’t in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with me in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn’t ask more than that – I only asked he should know; and the only way to be sure he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome face. That was exactly present to me – by which I mean the face was – when, on the first of these occasions, at the end of a long June day, I stopped short on emerging from one of the plantations and coming into view of the house. What arrested me on the spot – and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed real. He did stand there!

She goes on to say, which I think could be used to totally debunk the “ghost” theory of the image she sees as:

The figure that faced me was – a few more seconds assured me – as little anyone else I know as it was the image that had been in my mind. I had not seen it in Harley Street – I had not seen it anywhere.

The figure which is standing above her on the tall “tower” with its “measure” and “elevation” which “loomed” in “grandeur” “very erect” - is the figure of her imagination - at the thrust of her sexual desire. Again, I don’t think James uses such words in an off-hand manner, even though the sexual connotations in this section can hardly be seriously overlooked. Immediately after this section she is quick to assert her love of mystery romances mentioning the famous text Udolpho and of course Jane Eyre:

Was there a “secret” at Bly – a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement?

For me the line above clearly suggests that she would want it to be so. Her wild over-active and susceptible imagination would seem to want it to be so very much and that her knight would come and rescue her from it all, just in all the romances. (Of course in Jane Eyre the Governess does marry the master.)

When she speaks of him to the houses keeper she describes him as like an actor:

“His mouth’s wide, and his lips are thin, and except for his little whiskers he’s quite clean-shaven. He gives me a sort of sense of looking like an actor”
“An actor”” it was impossible to resemble one less, at least, than Mrs Grose at that moment.
“I’ve never seen one, but as I suppose them. He’s tall, active, erect”.

[...]

“But he is handsome?”
I saw the way to help her. “remarkably!”
“And dressed - ?”
“In somebody’s clothes. They’re smart, but they’re not his own.”
She broke into a breathless affirmative groan. “they’re the masters’s!”

So this is part of the argument I suppose that she is transferring her desire from the master-like figure onto that of Quint, with the added point that Quint is really the actor, who of course plays the part of somebody else.

On her second vision of Quint it once again comes about after reading, this time Fielding’s Amelia. It further adds to the argument that after filling her head with romance and novels she is primed to see the “visions” which leads to the position that she is really “seeing” these figures through her own imagination and ultimately, her sexual desire for the master, or master-like imaginary figure. This at least would be one position from a Freudian point of view, though I have hardly even covered main few notes on this text form a psychoanalytical reading. There really is a huge amount out there from this perspective, I’ve not even had time to consider the Oedipal consequences of her desire onto Miles:

I threw myself upon him and in the tenderness of my pity I embraced him. Dear little Miles, deal little Miles -!
My face was close to his, and he let me kiss him, simply taking it with indulgent good humour.

I mean come on! It is really quite packed through with psychoanalytical stuff, it is quite hard to avoid it, whether we like the perspective or not, and it is certainly not one of my favourite points of view, but it is simply difficult to ignore in this story! :nod:

Virgil

01-19-2010, 09:37 PM

You point out some good observations Neely. And just like there are critics who have supported the Freudian reading, there are others that dispute it. What you point out as Freudian can be read into any gothic novel. There is always a young lady who can be viewed as repressed. Just look over a dozen gothic novels. This is part of the genre. You can also say that Isabel Archer from James’ Portrait of a Lady, written before Freud in 1880, can be seen as repressed. Actually as I think over every single work James wrote, I think I can identify a character as repressed. This seems to be part of what his imagination leans to in characters, not necessarily a theme. I do also think there are some holes in your argument. Let me respond to the holes and then I’ll look for some common ground.

I think one of the main arguments from a psychoanalytical perspective is that we see the Governess as a sexually repressed figure (massively sexually repressed as I see it) and as this built-up repression can’t find a natural outlet it is transferred or projected in other areas. For example it could be seen in the visualisation of Quint and Jessop or in an Oedipal way to that of Miles (and I know that there have been other suggestions that go further too).
Oedipal? I thought Freud was quite clear that Oedipal was for a boy loving his mother, and did not apply to women. And Freud did not use the term Oedipal until 1910, a full 12 years after this story was written. Be that as it may, how widespread were Freud’s theories to his exact contemporaries? Does anyone know what the latest theories of anything within at least a decade of being widespread? Especially when mass communication was not like it is today? Freud was first writing of repression at almost the same time James is writing this story.

I think that the mind of the Governess is extremely susceptible, found in her constant daydreaming and romanticising, and is therefore the perfect vehicle to convey such things. All this is pretty standard psychoanalytical stuff and The Turn of the Screw is very much a bit of a set text for psychoanalytical readings, so I am not stating anything unique or outrageous by far.
Like I said above, this is every gothic story. Every gothic story has a repressed woman in it. And how about the story that this owes the most to, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol – is Scrooge repressed? Now there is no way that Dickens was thinking of Freud, but if someone wanted to, they could make the same case that Scrooge is repressed. God, you could write a book on psychoanalyzing Scrooge. And I bet someone has. ;)

Anyway, as I say, the most important element is that we see the Governess as a sexually repressed individual, I think this is the key to most of the psychoanalytical readings. Often people think that this is due to her obsession with the master of the house, which is perhaps true in a way, but I also think that such was there even before her meeting with him, as carried away in her vast imagination. But before this I think we are told in a tongue-in-cheek manner by Douglas what is half going on:
Quote:
“The story won’t tell,” said Douglas; “not in any literal, vulgar way.”
“More’s the pity then. That’s the only way I ever understand.”
(original italics)
I have read a number of Jame’s work, and he often uses the word “vulgar” to mean lower class or common. Frankly, that doesn’t necessarily refer to sex. What Douglas is answering is Mrs. Gryphon’s question of “Who was she in love with?” The story doesn’t say in some “literal, vulgar (meaning common story telling) way” but in an artful way. James is concerned with art and the art of story telling, and he is contrasting that with common, vulgar street anecdotes.

Quote:
This person proved, on her presenting herself, for judgement, at a house, in Harley Street, that impressed her as vast and imposing – this of life, such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage.
This I think is an important passage. We see the mind of the Governess as someone who is already influenced by dreaming and romances as being impressed by this sort of knight of a figure. It is also emphasised that she was an anxious girl who has lived in a quiet vicarage – certainly not much room for sexual freedom there to boot! Though I think that it is not too big a leap to see that she may have escaped from her boredom in the vicarage by reading such romances that she already at this point relates in the master as something straight out of a romantic fiction, he is already a hero figure of an impressionable mind. Also note the word “dream” which is very important of course to Freud and any psychoanalytical reading.
And so whenever there is a young woman in love, the author is implying Freud? You mean when Madam Bovary dreams and romanticizes, when Anna Karenina dreams and romanticizes, when Catherine Earnshaw dreams and romanticizes, when Jane Erye dreams and romanticizes, the authors are referring to Freud, even though Freud didn’t even think of his theories for decades? Because a character dreams and romanticizes proves nothing. Young women dream and romanticize. In fact, young boys dream and romanticize. Pip (Great Expectations), Tom Sawyer, Tom Jones, and Don Quixote, for crying out loud. Was Don Quixote sexually repressed?

And sexual freedom? Until the 1960s there was no sexual freedom. In fact 99% of the people before the middle of the 20th century would be considered sexually repressed by your definition. James wouldn’t of thought her limited sexuality as unusual.

You can see her romanticising in the passage which immediately carries on from this one:
Quote:
One could easily fix his type; it never, happily, dies out. He was handsome and bold and pleasant, off-hand and gay and kind. He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid, but what struck her most of all and gave her the courage she afterwards showed was that he put the whole thing to her as a kind of favour, and obligation he should gratefully incur. She conceived him as rich, but as fearfully extravagant – saw him all in a glow of high fashion, of good looks, of expensive habits of charming ways with women. He had for his town residence a big house filled with the spoils of travel and the trophies of the chase.

Oh there is definitely romanticizing going on, that I agree. But that is a different thing from Freudian repression. That is not the same thing at all. Literature from the beginning of time has dealt with some form of romanticizing. What you quote there is that he’s a good looking guy that she’s attracted to. What does that have to do with Freudianism? As if characters before Freud were not attracted to each other?

Now to me, if this is not the depiction of a romantic hero I don’t know what is. It seems that she may be in love with him, but certainly she is in love with “his type” the dashing prince or knight in shining armour. This passage comes on the next page to the one previously quoted, so to me the idea that she is in love, is obsessed, with the idea of some sort of chivalric romance is a fairly straightforward assumption to make. Put this together with a frustrated girl who comes from a vicarage and already with a figure that is loaded with a lot of Freudian potential.
Some but not conclusive. Like I just said before, just because a girl is attracted to guy does not imply the author was referring to Freud. My God, Jane Austen had no knowledge of Freud. Her female character all dream on some guy. And where does it say that the Governess was “frustrated?” That’s your term, not James’.

It seems that she has already projected her feelings onto the master, so that the master becomes all of her previous desires all rolled into one figure. The fact that he might “gratefully incur” on her a favour if she does her job properly also to me suggests that she would go to any length (such as not contacting him over issues) when not asked to do so.

Douglas also emphasises this love/passion clearly, it says:
Quote:
And Douglas, with this, made a pause that, for the benefit of the company, moved me to throw in –
“The moral of which was of course the seduction exercised by the splendid young man. She succumbed to it.
As if we really needed telling on this point, but once again James is prone to really labour the point home.

It should be noted that when she arrives at Bly she is impressed by his house and notes that:
Quote:
What I was to enjoy might be something beyond his promise.
We should probably see this primarily as meaning the property that she should enjoy, but it certainly could mean that her hope is much more than this. Either way she soon advances upon her own importance in the household, which could be seen as part of her added delusion and grandeur of power, and hope that she might eventually be more than a Governess to the master.
Sure, I agree, that she is attracted to the master, but why are you saying it’s Freudian? She’s actually quite conscious of the fact that she is. There is nothing unconscious about it.

Quote:
The large, impressive room, one of the best in the house, the great state bed, as I almost felt it, the full, figured draperies, the long glasses in which, for the first time, I could see myself
I mean apart from seeing her room as the best in the house, you can almost feel the sexual tension in this brilliant line here, really the line itself is hugely one of sexual repression – note also that she is quick to mention the bed, along with the large, impressive fullness!

At the same time that she is quick to overplay her importance, (and thus her potential position as more than the Governess) she is quick to down play the house keeper as:
Quote:
Stout, simple, plain, clean wholesome woman
Which not only downplays her as a person and raises herself, but the very overt simplicity of James’s language here almost hurts, it is very bluntly expressed – and because it is James certainly means something!

If we have not got all this to work out for our self about the Governess, which hardly takes much of a leap into the outrageous theoretical world! the Governess claims herself that she is easily led:
Quote:
“I’m rather easily carried away. I was carried away in London!”
You don’t say.

But then she then goes on to describe the place with its “empty chambers and dull corridors” which could certainly go to describe her own sexual or emotional self. The chapter ends with her assertion that she is “at the helm” of the house, again pushing her self-importance, although it is that as a Governess she does posses some degree of power, certainly above that of the serving staff, I think that there is ample evidence that suggests she places herself well above her own station in the hope of getting more from the master that her position dictates.
What isw Freudian about any of this? You are reading into all of that. The full figured draperies? The long glasses? The empty chambers? The dull corridors? That’s Freudian? What??

If we look at the first vision of that of “Quint” then, to me, it cries out of that of a depiction of her imagination – and thus her sexual repression. It is even as obvious to state before she sees him that she would wish to see a vision:
Quote:
It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour; the children were tucked away and I had come out for my stroll. One of the thoughts that, as I don’t in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with me in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn’t ask more than that – I only asked he should know; and the only way to be sure he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome face. That was exactly present to me – by which I mean the face was – when, on the first of these occasions, at the end of a long June day, I stopped short on emerging from one of the plantations and coming into view of the house. What arrested me on the spot – and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed real. He did stand there!
She goes on to say, which I think could be used to totally debunk the “ghost” theory of the image she sees as:
Quote:
The figure that faced me was – a few more seconds assured me – as little anyone else I know as it was the image that had been in my mind. I had not seen it in Harley Street – I had not seen it anywhere.
The figure which is standing above her on the tall “tower” with its “measure” and “elevation” which “loomed” in “grandeur” “very erect” - is the figure of her imagination - at the thrust of her sexual desire. Again, I don’t think James uses such words in an off-hand manner, even though the sexual connotations in this section can hardly be seriously overlooked. Immediately after this section she is quick to assert her love of mystery romances mentioning the famous text Udolpho and of course Jane Eyre:
Now here I agree with you. The ghost clearly is represented in sexual language. In the interest of saving space, I will agree with the rest of your analysis of how she uses sexual terms to describe the ghost. I agree there. But sexual language is a far different thing than a Freudian interpretation. So let’s say there is a repressed desire here. What’s the point? A Freudian story would go along the lines that the repressed desires would cause her to see a ghost, that the ghost was an outgrowth of the repression. And I would be inclined to agree with this as a Freudian story, if the ghost was imagined. But the ghost turns out to be true and real!! Therefore repression had nothing to do with it. And what does Miles’ death at the end have to do with her Freudian expressions? He dies because the ghost took his life. You have to tie her repression with the story line, otherwise it’s just an interesting detail, like she had blond hair. What does her Freudian repression have to do with the story? What is the theme that you are alluding to? All you did was point out a few observations. You have not tied anything into a coherent statement. I repeat, what does her repression have to do with the story?
I mean come on! :p

Gladys

01-20-2010, 01:21 AM

I mean come on! It is really quite packed through with psychoanalytical stuff

All the passages you quote are most interesting, particularly: 'The figure that faced me was – a few more seconds assured me – as little anyone else I know as it was the image that had been in my mind.'.

Whether or not Freud could pontificate on these passages, I agree with Virgil that the young governess seems an unremarkable romantic of the Mills and Boon variety, complete with subtle sexual innuendo. Many a young woman has consciously seen the world this way since time immemorial, so why invoke Freud? In her transcript, our venerable governess dispassionately recounts her romantic fantasies as an impressionable and insecure girl in a strange place.

Incidentally, Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer) (Studien über Hysterie, 1895), was the only major work of Freud published before The Turn of the screw, 1898.

But the ghost turns out to be true and real!!

I agree, but do others?

LitNetIsGreat

01-20-2010, 11:46 AM

I don't have much time to make a proper reply, but I'll do what I can in what time I have for you:

You point out some good observations Neely.

Ha, ha thank you, that is good praise coming from you in these matters.

What you point out as Freudian can be read into any gothic novel. There is always a young lady who can be viewed as repressed. Just look over a dozen gothic novels. This is part of the genre. You can also say that Isabel Archer from James’ Portrait of a Lady, written before Freud in 1880, can be seen as repressed.

Every gothic story has a repressed woman in it.

And so whenever there is a young woman in love, the author is implying Freud? You mean when Madam Bovary dreams and romanticizes, when Anna Karenina dreams and romanticizes, when Catherine Earnshaw dreams and romanticizes, when Jane Erye dreams and romanticizes, the authors are referring to Freud, even though Freud didn’t even think of his theories for decades? Because a character dreams and romanticizes proves nothing. Young women dream and romanticize. In fact, young boys dream and romanticize. Pip (Great Expectations), Tom Sawyer, Tom Jones, and Don Quixote, for crying out loud. Was Don Quixote sexually repressed?

Incidentally, Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer) (Studien über Hysterie, 1895), was the only major work of Freud published before The Turn of the screw, 1898.

Whether James is aware of Freud or not doesn’t matter. Whether the author is consciously using Freud’s ideas or not doesn’t matter. I actually think that James was aware of Freud which is why I asked Jozanny about this earlier, but the point is that any theory can be applied well before the actual theory was formalised, whatever the theory is. It is perfectly acceptable, say, to use psychoanalysis or most other theories in order to examine any literature, even as far back as Greek literature for example – (which is of course where the Oedipal complex is taken from anyway). If we are talking about applying theory to a text it makes absolutely no difference what the author was consciously trying to do or construct – I mean you can even psychoanalyse the author in their motives, though I am not a fan of this much, but it is still there.

You are quite right to point out that any of the characters you mentioned and others “could” be sexually repressed, but you have to argue your case for this on an individual basis. I happen to think that in the case of this story the Governess is much stronger than in other situations, she seems to me quite a strong candidate as a sexually repressed individual.

And sexual freedom? Until the 1960s there was no sexual freedom. In fact 99% of the people before the middle of the 20th century would be considered sexually repressed by your definition. James wouldn’t of thought her limited sexuality as unusual.

Of course I wasn’t referring to waving bras around or wearing mini-skirts, I am quite well aware of the constraints of the Victorian period for women, especially those of the middle or upper classes. This only plays into the fact that she would have had no natural sexual outlets. My minor point about the vicarage is that it is not impossible to image that her life as the daughter of a vicar could have been even stricter, I mean why did James tell us this? Of all the things she could have been she happens to have lived in a vicarage, which would could assume (though we would be making assumptions) that things would have been even tougher? Who knows, it is just a small point, but still it adds to the case.

Oedipal? I thought Freud was quite clear that Oedipal was for a boy loving his mother, and did not apply to women. And Freud did not use the term Oedipal until 1910, a full 12 years after this story was written.

Again it doesn’t matter when Freud wrote this down at all, in fact he takes the term from Greek mythology which was around long before Freud! It is true that the Oedipal complex is usually ascribed to the boy loving the mother, although it can be the other way around – here the boy figure is taken as Miles and the mother figure the Governess.

Sure, I agree, that she is attracted to the master, but why are you saying it’s Freudian? She’s actually quite conscious of the fact that she is. There is nothing unconscious about it.

No, there is nothing unconscious about it, there doesn’t have to be. The point is that this woman has no sexual outlets and so they have to be let out in some way, which is why she sees the visions – this is called sublimation.

I have read a number of Jame’s work, and he often uses the word “vulgar” to mean lower class or common. Frankly, that doesn’t necessarily refer to sex. What Douglas is answering is Mrs. Gryphon’s question of “Who was she in love with?” The story doesn’t say in some “literal, vulgar (meaning common story telling) way” but in an artful way. James is concerned with art and the art of story telling, and he is contrasting that with common, vulgar street anecdotes.

Yes OK, that is fair point about the word vulgar, but I wasn’t referring to sex in this instance, more that it won’t tell in a simple way, vulgar outright way, it will be more complicated than that.

when Jane Erye dreams and romanticizes, the authors are referring to Freud, even though Freud didn’t even think of his theories for decades?

I think I have laboured the point about the author not having to be aware of psychoanalysis (or any theory for that matter) but, actually Jane Eyre is a very good text for psychoanalysis, Feminist and for Marxist theory as it happens...

Young women dream and romanticize. In fact, young boys dream and romanticize. Pip (Great Expectations), Tom Sawyer, Tom Jones, and Don Quixote, for crying out loud. Was Don Quixote sexually repressed?

Well, like I said before you can make the case if you want to, though I think some would be more successful arguments than others. In the case of the Governess here I think there is a strong case to answer in terms of Freud. If I had time I would bring more examples, but I don’t at the moment – maybe I will at a later date if necessary.

Oh there is definitely romanticizing going on, that I agree. But that is a different thing from Freudian repression.

Well yes, that is up to you to see how you read it, personally I see it in terms of Freudian repression for the most part, though as I say I don’t think it answers all the points - I don't think James is looking for total closure in this text particularly.

And where does it say that the Governess was “frustrated?” That’s your term, not James’.

Yes that is my term because it is my argument, I think that there is a case to be made in the things I quoted previously and in other points I didn’t have time to include.

What is Freudian about any of this? You are reading into all of that. The full figured draperies? The long glasses? The empty chambers? The dull corridors? That’s Freudian? What??

Empty chambers and dull corridors are very common terms referring to, shall we say, a female dissatisfaction, it's just another peg in the argument.

Now here I agree with you. The ghost clearly is represented in sexual language. In the interest of saving space, I will agree with the rest of your analysis of how she uses sexual terms to describe the ghost. I agree there. But sexual language is a far different thing than a Freudian interpretation.

Well the two often go hand-in-hand with one another, especially if the argument is that she seeking sexual satisfaction, it therefore follows that sexual language is going to slip out in the text.

So let’s say there is a repressed desire here. What’s the point? A Freudian story would go along the lines that the repressed desires would cause her to see a ghost, that the ghost was an outgrowth of the repression. And I would be inclined to agree with this as a Freudian story, if the ghost was imagined. But the ghost turns out to be true and real!!

Yes that would be one of the arguments that I am suggesting. I don’t see that it is conclusive that there is or isn’t an actual ghost in the story, as proof so I think it is very much an open debate, but I take it seriously that she admits at one point that the visions are in her head (as I previously quoted).

Therefore repression had nothing to do with it. And what does Miles’ death at the end have to do with her Freudian expressions? He dies because the ghost took his life. You have to tie her repression with the story line, otherwise it’s just an interesting detail, like she had blond hair. What does her Freudian repression have to do with the story? What is the theme that you are alluding to? All you did was point out a few observations. You have not tied anything into a coherent statement. I repeat, what does her repression have to do with the story?

Well I suppose his death could been taken for the natural conclusion to the Oedipal complex, she smoothers him and consumes him.

Though as I said above I give far more weight to her repression and think that it has to be seriously considered as a result of the ghosts as internal visions due to sexual repression. So if this is the case, it has a lot to do with the story!

Virgil

01-20-2010, 10:36 PM

All the passages you quote are most interesting, particularly: 'The figure that faced me was – a few more seconds assured me – as little anyone else I know as it was the image that had been in my mind.'.

Whether or not Freud could pontificate on these passages, I agree with Virgil that the young governess seems an unremarkable romantic of the Mills and Boon variety, complete with subtle sexual innuendo. Many a young woman has consciously seen the world this way since time immemorial, so why invoke Freud? In her transcript, our venerable governess dispassionately recounts her romantic fantasies as an impressionable and insecure girl in a strange place.

Incidentally, Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer) (Studien über Hysterie, 1895), was the only major work of Freud published before The Turn of the screw, 1898.

I agree, but do others?
we seem to have had the same reading. :)

Ha, ha thank you, that is good praise coming from you in these matters.

Why thank you kindly Neely. :)

Whether James is aware of Freud or not doesn’t matter. Whether the author is consciously using Freud’s ideas or not doesn’t matter.
Now this is where I fundementally disagree with you. A critic doesn't have the right to impose his vision into the story. Sure I can accept an evolving understanding of a work. Sometimes we get new insights into the culture it was written in or the author writing it, but to impose a 20th century idea into a past work where the author had no conception of that idea is to put tghe critic at the same level as the author. In some cases, with the contemporary modes of analysis (New Criticism, deconstruction, etc.) is to actually put the critic in a superior role to author. That to me is outrageous. I will say that at least freudians don't go so far.

I actually think that James was aware of Freud which is why I asked Jozanny about this earlier, but the point is that any theory can be applied well before the actual theory was formalised, whatever the theory is.
It's possible James was aware of bits and pieces of Freud, and I think te Freudian argument rests on whether the ghosts are real or not. If they are real then the whole Freudian argument collapses. If not real, it think you have a legitamate reading.

It is perfectly acceptable, say, to use psychoanalysis or most other theories in order to examine any literature, even as far back as Greek literature for example – (which is of course where the Oedipal complex is taken from anyway). If we are talking about applying theory to a text it makes absolutely no difference what the author was consciously trying to do or construct – I mean you can even psychoanalyse the author in their motives, though I am not a fan of this much, but it is still there.
You are assuming that Freudian psychology is valid and science. I think it's been pretty much repudiated by contemporary psychology. There is no psychoanalysis, there is no oediple complex, there is no id, ego, or superego. If you can find a map of the brain that shows those parts, let me know. ;) Psychologists don't use word associations and seek hidden memories to find some deep event that caused a person to go crazy. Insanity is biological and medications are used to treat the patient. Patients don't sit on a couch and recount their childhood. Unfullfilled sexual desires doesn't make a person go bonkers. Millions of people go years without sex and there is nothing psychologically wrong with them. Other than for historical purposes, Freud is not taught in psychology departments. The only place that Freud is taught these days is in literature departments. Now ask yourself, if Freudian psychology turned out to be a crock (I say if, because i know you don't accept what I just said :lol:), then everything all these Freudian critics have written is a waste of time. To me the only time it's ligitamate to use Freudian interpretation is if the author intended it to be in the work.

You are quite right to point out that any of the characters you mentioned and others “could” be sexually repressed, but you have to argue your case for this on an individual basis. I happen to think that in the case of this story the Governess is much stronger than in other situations, she seems to me quite a strong candidate as a sexually repressed individual.
I don't know. Jane Eyre, Madam Bovary, you can make the case they are sexually repressed. But ok, I'll acknowledge that the Governess has not had sex. :D

Of course I wasn’t referring to waving bras around or wearing mini-skirts, I am quite well aware of the constraints of the Victorian period for women, especially those of the middle or upper classes. This only plays into the fact that she would have had no natural sexual outlets. My minor point about the vicarage is that it is not impossible to image that her life as the daughter of a vicar could have been even stricter, I mean why did James tell us this? Of all the things she could have been she happens to have lived in a vicarage, which would could assume (though we would be making assumptions) that things would have been even tougher? Who knows, it is just a small point, but still it adds to the case.
Ok, accepted. :)

Again it doesn’t matter when Freud wrote this down at all, in fact he takes the term from Greek mythology which was around long before Freud! It is true that the Oedipal complex is usually ascribed to the boy loving the mother, although it can be the other way around – here the boy figure is taken as Miles and the mother figure the Governess.
Oh I see your poiint now.

No, there is nothing unconscious about it, there doesn’t have to be. The point is that this woman has no sexual outlets and so they have to be let out in some way, which is why she sees the visions – this is called sublimation.

Well, like I said before you can make the case if you want to, though I think some would be more successful arguments than others. In the case of the Governess here I think there is a strong case to answer in terms of Freud. If I had time I would bring more examples, but I don’t at the moment – maybe I will at a later date if necessary.
This rests on whether the ghost is real or not.

Empty chambers and dull corridors are very common terms referring to, shall we say, a female dissatisfaction, it's just another peg in the argument.
I'm not aware. Ok, I'll accept it. I've led sheltered life. :p

Yes that would be one of the arguments that I am suggesting. I don’t see that it is conclusive that there is or isn’t an actual ghost in the story, as proof so I think it is very much an open debate, but I take it seriously that she admits at one point that the visions are in her head (as I previously quoted).
Ah, now that didn't occur to me. I will acknowledge there is a Freudian reading possible (on the slim basis that James had heard of Freud's ideas), if the ghosts turn out to be not real. I think the freudian argument rests on this.

Well I suppose his death could been taken for the natural conclusion to the Oedipal complex, she smoothers him and consumes him.
Well, that's unlikely. To be honest, as I read those last pages, I can't figure out what Miles dies of. Something supernatural is the only explanation I can come to.

Though as I said above I give far more weight to her repression and think that it has to be seriously considered as a result of the ghosts as internal visions due to sexual repression. So if this is the case, it has a lot to do with the story!
Yes, I agree if the ghosts are not real. I will have to read the story again one day and defintely keep your ideas in mind. But by your reading, what does the title The Turn of the Screw refer to? It can't be sexual, that would be too vulgar for James.

Gladys

01-21-2010, 02:56 AM

I will acknowledge there is a Freudian reading possible (on the slim basis that James had heard of Freud's ideas), if the ghosts turn out to be not real.

If not real, it's strange that Douglas relates talks with the aging governess 'in which she struck me as awfully clever and nice', and even stranger the ingenuous way the governess recounts her spring and summer months at Bly. Is the recommendation of Douglas reliable?

Insanity is biological and medications are used to treat the patient.

Is the science really so clear cut? My reading of research suggests that psychoanalysis, behavioural modification or the ministrations of a receptive pastor generally do as well or better than medication. If the governess is victim to mental illness, on leaving Bly she soon recovers and lives happily ever after without the need for medical intervention.

Freud aside, let us suppose our governess is suffering from a three-day bout of female hysteria. Wikipedia tells us:

Female hysteria was a once-common medical diagnosis, made exclusively in women ... Hysteria was widely discussed in the medical literature of the Victorian era.

Galen, a prominent physician from the second century, wrote that hysteria was a disease caused by sexual deprivation in particularly passionate women: hysteria was noted quite often in virgins, nuns, widows and, occasionally, married women.

A physician in 1859 claimed that a quarter of all women suffered from hysteria ... one American physician expressed pleasure that the country was ”catching up” to Europe in the prevalence of hysteria. One physician cataloged 75 pages of possible symptoms of hysteria and called the list incomplete...

In 1873, the first electromechanical vibrator was used at an asylum in France for the treatment of hysteria. While physicians of the period acknowledged that the disorder stemmed from sexual dissatisfaction, they seemed unaware of or unwilling to admit the sexual purposes of the devices used to treat it.

Even if female hysteria has briefly beset the governess, I still find the novella less than convincing.

LitNetIsGreat

01-21-2010, 05:40 AM

Really short of time, because I have an exam today (it is on theory so at least I am partially revising!)

Now this is where I fundementally disagree with you. A critic doesn't have the right to impose his vision into the story. Sure I can accept an evolving understanding of a work. Sometimes we get new insights into the culture it was written in or the author writing it, but to impose a 20th century idea into a past work where the author had no conception of that idea is to put the critic at the same level as the author. In some cases, with the contemporary modes of analysis (New Criticism, deconstruction, etc.) is to actually put the critic in a superior role to author. That to me is outrageous. I will say that at least freudians don't go so far.

Did I answer your questioning then with this part, or do you still feel the way you do above?

Again it doesn’t matter when Freud wrote this down at all, in fact he takes the term from Greek mythology which was around long before Freud! It is true that the Oedipal complex is usually ascribed to the boy loving the mother, although it can be the other way around – here the boy figure is taken as Miles and the mother figure the Governess.

Oh I see your point now.

Because it is not the same thing as imposing a 20th century ideas onto earlier societies which are very different to ours – because I agree with you here we can’t impose our own ideologies onto past societies (even if it is hard not to). However, doing so via theory is not the same thing because it attempts to explain and understand things in the original context - so Marxist theory (in a literary sense) looks at the structures and institutions of that society and not ours etc, etc.

I'm not aware. Ok, I'll accept it. I've led sheltered life.
:lol:

Ah, now that didn't occur to me. I will acknowledge there is a Freudian reading possible (on the slim basis that James had heard of Freud's ideas), if the ghosts turn out to be not real. I think the freudian argument rests on this.

Well I suppose his death could been taken for the natural conclusion to the Oedipal complex, she smoothers him and consumes him.

Well, that's unlikely. To be honest, as I read those last pages, I can't figure out what Miles dies of. Something supernatural is the only explanation I can come to.

Oh please don’t rest the entire Freudian point of view on this, it is just part of the overall picture. Yes the ending is incomplete because I sure that James is purposely seeking an open sort of ending – which is of course much more fun.

You are assuming that Freudian psychology is valid and science. I think it's been pretty much repudiated by contemporary psychology. There is no psychoanalysis, there is no oediple complex, there is no id, ego, or superego. If you can find a map of the brain that shows those parts, let me know. Psychologists don't use word associations and seek hidden memories to find some deep event that caused a person to go crazy. Insanity is biological and medications are used to treat the patient. Patients don't sit on a couch and recount their childhood. Unfullfilled sexual desires doesn't make a person go bonkers. Millions of people go years without sex and there is nothing psychologically wrong with them. Other than for historical purposes, Freud is not taught in psychology departments. The only place that Freud is taught these days is in literature departments. Now ask yourself, if Freudian psychology turned out to be a crock (I say if, because i know you don't accept what I just said ), then everything all these Freudian critics have written is a waste of time. To me the only time it's ligitamate to use Freudian interpretation is if the author intended it to be in the work.

Author intention ouch! I’ll come back to that another time... Certainly there are huge weaknesses in the Freudian point of view from a psychological and a literary point of view, huge problems. However I don’t agree that we must therefore totally dismiss everything in a black and white, right or wrong manner. Some elements of psychoanalysis are interesting and useful, therein lies its value if nothing else. I mean the ghost/vision debate via Freud in this text has been going, I think, since about 1934!

I might add that when it comes to using theory in general the very act of interpreting a text means, as Barry says, a person is likely to be using theory “whether they are aware of it or not”. I mean even on a basic level anyone who has ever used symbolism – (white represents purity, a candle flame hope/light) is in part using/interpretation from a psychoanalytical point of view – in transferring or substituting one image for another, which is the basis for a Freudian reading.

For it is not about closing the text down to any particular reading, but in keeping it open. I’m quite willing to roll out of bed next week and look for evidence to support a completely different reading along the ghost line or something else entirely. I had a very quick glance at some journal articles yesterday, one of them from the psychoanalytical debate for/against the ghosts/visions. The other suggested that the Governess acts as a medium whose very presence triggers the appearance of the ghosts she is trying to dispel!

Overall, I am concerned with not having to tie the text down to one particular “correct” reading because I don’t think the very best of literature works like that. Certainly theory is not a threat to the art neither does it reduce the status of the author, if anything it supports wider interpretations which only opens and enriches the experience of reading.

Even if female hysteria has briefly beset the governess, I still find the novella less than convincing.

That's a bit of a surprise, I think this little story is quite compelling, though one a first reading I wasn't utterly convinced myself if I recall, it tends you very much grow on you though, or at least it did me and others I know.

Quark

01-21-2010, 03:06 PM

It's possible James was aware of bits and pieces of Freud, and I think te Freudian argument rests on whether the ghosts are real or not. If they are real then the whole Freudian argument collapses. If not real, it think you have a legitamate reading.

I don't think real ghosts and a psychological reading of the story are mutually exclusive. The ghosts might exist, but the governess's presentation of them in her manuscript might be colored by her psychological state. In fact, I would be surprised if it wasn't. We know that she was rather overwrought by loneliness and her unexpressed feelings for the gentleman uncle. If the ghosts are not outright creations of her condition, they certainly will be changed in her representation of them. She may have seen ghosts, but how was she able to attribute such malignant intentions to them so quickly? When she notices Quint outside the parlor window, she immediately knows that he looked for someone else? How does she know this? Even supposing the reality of Quint's apparition, the governess is clearly adding something. Her interpretations just seem to facile--unless you interpret her as some kind of medium who can sense these things. She also positions herself as the sole defender of the children, and portrays the rest of the servants as bumbling illiterates. She won't even alert the uncle after the situation has clearly become a crisis. Increasingly, she sees herself in grand and heroic terms. This isn't exactly a level-headed response to what she's seen. Again, the story seems to be pointing to the alarmingly aberrant mind of the governess, and none of this conflicts with the reality of the ghosts.

If not real, it's strange that Douglas relates talks with the aging governess 'in which she struck me as awfully clever and nice', and even stranger the ingenuous way the governess recounts her three days at Bly. Is the recommendation of Douglas reliable?

I noticed Douglas's approval, as well. That would seem to lend credibility to the governess's tale. One wonders whether this is undermined by the suggestion that Douglas is in love with her. Perhaps Douglas's take on the story is clouded by his feelings for the governess.

Also, I don't know how I feel about describing the governess's narration as "ingenuous."

Yes the ending is incomplete because I sure that James is purposely seeking an open sort of ending – which is of course much more fun.

The open ending seems to be there for thematic reasons, as well as fun, although fun is not a word I usually associate with Henry James. A couple of pages back, Virgil talked about the "instability" of the story's meaning which I think is an important point, and the ending plays into this greatly. The story questions, not only whether meaning is reachable, but also the degree to which it's worth pursuing. Remember that it's the governess's insatiable need to know and to make other admit the truth that drives her to extremes. At some points in the story, she's less interested in the welfare the children than she is in exposing the ghosts. To some degree her quest for certainty is what kills Miles. Whether she psychotically smothered him or exorcised his tormenting ghost, the governess's motivation for this is the need to make Miles vindicate her version of events. She wants the certainty of a well-corroborated story. James seems to question whether there ever can be an agreed upon story, and he shows what can happen when one presses too hard for one.

One could say the same thing about the theme of good and evil in this story. In the preface to 1907 edition of his stories, James notes that he was trying to draw the most disturbing picture of evil possible in The Turn of the Screw. I don't know whether he succeeded in doing that, but that's at least what he thought he was doing. I think the same questions that the story poses about the demand for certainty could apply the fight against evil. The governess portrays herself as a noble hero because she tries to expel the evil ghosts from the household, but one wonders whether simply fighting evil makes one good. The governess's actions endanger and scare those around her. At one point, the story draws an equivalence between her and Quint. After the governess sees Quint outside the window, she leaves the house to put herself in Quint's place and looks in, only to scare her assistant. In a sense, she has become as disturbing as the ghosts. More disturbingly, if we take a comprehensive psychological reading of the story and say the ghosts are just the governess's delusions, then we're left to conclude that evil is just the obverse image of our thwarted desires. When we try to fight evil, then, we're just fighting ourselves--or our delusions, at least.

Both of these themes seem to rely on the undecidability of the ending.

I might add that when it comes to using theory in general the very act of interpreting a text means, as Barry says, a person is likely to be using theory “whether they are aware of it or not”.

Sure, but just because one is using a theory doesn't mean they accept the validity of all theories. Freud is a controversial figure, and any interpretation based on his work is going to run into resistance.

LitNetIsGreat

01-21-2010, 08:26 PM

Yes some good points there, but like I said: "certainly there are huge weaknesses in the Freudian point of view from a psychological and a literary point of view, huge problems" so of course you are going to run into problems with theory - particularly psychoanalysis, because like Virgil says it is not built upon that solid a ground - but this doesn't dismiss the whole thing entirely. Also from an individual point of view, we are going to prefer one theory over another, but just because this is so, it doesn't invalidate another theory for another person.

Personally, I like to keep them all as open as much as possible because my main interest is in opening the reading as much as possible - I'm quite happy for another 50 posters to come on here now and relate different readings of the text, to bring in new things as you did, and as Gladys did with the hysteria.

It is a sad state of affairs, usually, when a text is only capable of one quick reading, and one point of view - this is often a sure sign of mediocre literature. As the wonderful Mr Oscar Wilde said: "Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital/When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself" certainly such applies to this text which Wilde himself said was a “most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale”.

(On a side note I think I did OK in my last ever exam, hurrah :banana: which ended up being a defence of theory and a Marxist analysis of a extract of prose, woo whoo, last ever exam..., sorry...though I am allowed to get excited occasionally...:))

Gladys

01-21-2010, 09:34 PM

The tale begins the night before the birth of the Incarnate and lasts three days.

Where are these three days indicated in the Prologue?

Poor Douglas, before his death — when it was in sight — committed to me the manuscript that reached him on the third of these days and that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he began to read to our hushed little circle on the night of the fourth.

The whole thing took indeed more nights than one, but on the first occasion the same lady put another question. “What is your title?”

I've edited an error concerning three days in my last post. On a Thursday evening four days after Christmas Eve, Douglas tells his tale, over more than one night, about several months at Bly, from June to summer.

Virgil

01-21-2010, 09:53 PM

If not real, it's strange that Douglas relates talks with the aging governess 'in which she struck me as awfully clever and nice', and even stranger the ingenuous way the governess recounts her spring and summer months at Bly. Is the recommendation of Douglas reliable?

I had not even considered Douglas's reliability. That is an interesting thought. As I reflect on it now, it does intuitively feel that he may be unreliable.

Is the science really so clear cut? My reading of research suggests that psychoanalysis, behavioural modification or the ministrations of a receptive pastor generally do as well or better than medication. If the governess is victim to mental illness, on leaving Bly she soon recovers and lives happily ever after without the need for medical intervention.
I'm not a psychologist/psychiatrist, so i can't say with any authority. I've mentioned in other places on the forum how my mother has had a mild depression and some paranoid-esk halucinations for a good part of her life, and it's through medications that eliminated them and regulates her. If you read through this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine) about dopamine, which is one of several chemicals that regulates the mind, you'll see that anyone suffering from a lack of it can exibit all these ridiculous freudian claims. Now this is not the chemical that inflicts my mother (I forget which one) but I remembered this one and serves as a perfect example. Also, notice how the dopamine is connected to hormones and glands. It's a bio/chemical issue, not a repressed emotional issue like Freud claims.

Virgil

01-21-2010, 10:22 PM

Really short of time, because I have an exam today (it is on theory so at least I am partially revising!)

Oh good luck. Concentrate on your test. This can always wait. What ever happened to Jozanny? :lol:

Did I answer your questioning then with this part, or do you still feel the way you do above?

Again it doesn’t matter when Freud wrote this down at all, in fact he takes the term from Greek mythology which was around long before Freud! It is true that the Oedipal complex is usually ascribed to the boy loving the mother, although it can be the other way around – here the boy figure is taken as Miles and the mother figure the Governess.
Yes, I understand your point. I disagree, and if i were in a professional literatrue critic, I would be a dissenting voice in such an approach to literature. I'm fully aware of that view and it dominates the university system. Frankly it's college professors making themselves the equivilant of the artist and justifying their careers and publications.

Because it is not the same thing as imposing a 20th century ideas onto earlier societies which are very different to ours – because I agree with you here we can’t impose our own ideologies onto past societies (even if it is hard not to). However, doing so via theory is not the same thing because it attempts to explain and understand things in the original context - so Marxist theory (in a literary sense) looks at the structures and institutions of that society and not ours etc, etc.
Yeah, I don't care for those readings either. If a social element is important to the story, put it forth. But to impose a theory onto a story that the author had no intention of implying, I don't think that's a valid way to read literature. So why stop at freudian, or Marxian, or feminist theories? Why are there Christian theories (Miles could have been taken over by the devil) or a capitalist theory (The Governess was out to sell her story ;)) or biological theory (the lack of dopamine in the Governess's brain caused her to be delusional)? Those aren't the best examples, but you can see my point. Why is it that all those theories happen to be part of left wing constructs? Is it just possible that it's because over 90% of literature professors are politically on the left? I think there is a relationship there. I'm not claiming their promoting their politics, but it's how they see the world. And therefore that proves that the critic is imposing his views into the work.

Oh please don’t rest the entire Freudian point of view on this, it is just part of the overall picture. Yes the ending is incomplete because I sure that James is purposely seeking an open sort of ending – which is of course much more fun.
I'll have something to say on that later in a day or so. If James intended to end it with the ambiguity, I think the story would be joke and hardly worth anyone's time.

Author intention ouch! I’ll come back to that another time... Certainly there are huge weaknesses in the Freudian point of view from a psychological and a literary point of view, huge problems. However I don’t agree that we must therefore totally dismiss everything in a black and white, right or wrong manner. Some elements of psychoanalysis are interesting and useful, therein lies its value if nothing else. I mean the ghost/vision debate via Freud in this text has been going, I think, since about 1934!
I can understand someone in 1934 reading it that way. But today we know Freud is wrong, so unless james is intentionally using Freud, i see no reason to bring it up.

I might add that when it comes to using theory in general the very act of interpreting a text means, as Barry says, a person is likely to be using theory “whether they are aware of it or not”. I mean even on a basic level anyone who has ever used symbolism – (white represents purity, a candle flame hope/light) is in part using/interpretation from a psychoanalytical point of view – in transferring or substituting one image for another, which is the basis for a Freudian reading.
I'm certainly for using literary theory. I support New Criticism and Formalism as approaches to reading literature, and frankly they are in their way modifications to Aritotle's approach. I have a problem with the critic not remaining objective and imposing his world view into the work of someone not familiar with it and could never have thought of it in the first place.

Overall, I am concerned with not having to tie the text down to one particular “correct” reading because I don’t think the very best of literature works like that. Certainly theory is not a threat to the art neither does it reduce the status of the author, if anything it supports wider interpretations which only opens and enriches the experience of reading.
I'm open for a critic in laying out options, but they have to be objective options. I've accepted the possibility that James could have intended the freudian reading of this story. I'm going to weigh the various possibilities in a post later this week or over the weekend.

That's a bit of a surprise, I think this little story is quite compelling, though one a first reading I wasn't utterly convinced myself if I recall, it tends you very much grow on you though, or at least it did me and others I know.
I'm with Gladys on that. It would seem rather superficial if that were it. But I've only read this once.

Virgil

01-21-2010, 10:27 PM

I don't think real ghosts and a psychological reading of the story are mutually exclusive. The ghosts might exist, but the governess's presentation of them in her manuscript might be colored by her psychological state. In fact, I would be surprised if it wasn't. We know that she was rather overwrought by loneliness and her unexpressed feelings for the gentleman uncle. If the ghosts are not outright creations of her condition, they certainly will be changed in her representation of them.
Yes, i agree with that. I may have even alluded to that in my post where I delineated my reading. Not sure if I did. That's part of the "turn of the screw" in that we turn from believing her to doubting her to fianlly accepting her visions. Her psychological state is critical to the story. It's the specific claim of Freudianism that I rejected and now perhaps hold as a possibility, though a remote possibility.

She may have seen ghosts, but how was she able to attribute such malignant intentions to them so quickly? When she notices Quint outside the parlor window, she immediately knows that he looked for someone else? How does she know this? Even supposing the reality of Quint's apparition, the governess is clearly adding something. Her interpretations just seem to facile--unless you interpret her as some kind of medium who can sense these things. She also positions herself as the sole defender of the children, and portrays the rest of the servants as bumbling illiterates. She won't even alert the uncle after the situation has clearly become a crisis. Increasingly, she sees herself in grand and heroic terms. This isn't exactly a level-headed response to what she's seen. Again, the story seems to be pointing to the alarmingly aberrant mind of the governess, and none of this conflicts with the reality of the ghosts.
I agree with all of that. Frankly like I said somewhere, the genre itself requires a nervous young lady proned to romanticizing. But there is a leap of thought to go from that to the claim of freudian repression.

Quark

01-22-2010, 12:39 AM

Her psychological state is critical to the story. It's the specific claim of Freudianism that I rejected and now perhaps hold as a possibility, though a remote possibility.

Yeah, I completely agree. In fact, I don't think we've done a good enough job distinguishing different psychological interpretations from each other. There's quite a difference between saying that the governess has pent up feeling that she displaces into delusion, and saying that governess is experiencing Oedipal sublimation. I think you made it clear which of those interpretations you prefer. What I'm saying, though, is that your interpretation and Neely's are just different species of psychological readings, and that neither exclude the possibility that the ghosts are real. Your last post was making it seem like we have to choose between a psychological reading (whether Freudian or not) and the reality of the ghosts. It tempting to slip into that either/or interpretation, but I think that kind of reading misses a lot of this story's thematic content. As I was saying above, I think much of the story is about the degree to which we pursue certainty and evil in a place that promises neither conclusively. To say that the ghosts are either entirely real or entirely delusion would cover up this question--or, at least, reduce it to a simple choice.

if i were in a professional literatrue critic, I would be a dissenting voice in such an approach to literature. I'm fully aware of that view and it dominates the university system. Frankly it's college professors making themselves the equivilant of the artist and justifying their careers and publications.

Yeah, I don't care for those readings either. If a social element is important to the story, put it forth. But to impose a theory onto a story that the author had no intention of implying, I don't think that's a valid way to read literature. So why stop at freudian, or Marxian, or feminist theories? Why are there Christian theories (Miles could have been taken over by the devil) or a capitalist theory (The Governess was out to sell her story ) or biological theory (the lack of dopamine in the Governess's brain caused her to be delusional)? Those aren't the best examples, but you can see my point. Why is it that all those theories happen to be part of left wing constructs? Is it just possible that it's because over 90% of literature professors are politically on the left? I think there is a relationship there. I'm not claiming their promoting their politics, but it's how they see the world. And therefore that proves that the critic is imposing his views into the work.

I can understand someone in 1934 reading it that way. But today we know Freud is wrong, so unless james is intentionally using Freud, i see no reason to bring it up.

That's a lot to say so quickly. It sounds like you've got four main problems with contemporary literary theory--and maybe Freudian readings in particular:

1) That it was developed and practiced by self-important professors

2) That it reflects a leftist world view

3) That Freudianism is discredited

4) That certain theories misplace readers attention onto the critics rather than the authors

The first points may be true, but it doesn't really prove anything one way or another. Yes, there are scholars who put their careers over knowledge, but that doesn't necessarily mean their ideas are wrong. It just means they're unpleasant people. Even if your ad hominem is a fair one, it doesn't really change my view of theory.

Similarly, I'm willing to concede the second point, but I don't think it's a reason not to trust theory. Sure, much of theory reflects the leftist atmosphere of Humanities Departments. Yet this doesn't mean that theory is wrong--it just means that theory is limited.

The third point is most damning for Freudianism, and it's why psychoanalytic readings receive the skepticism they do--even from theorist. This is stumbling block for most Freudian critics, and I don't see much of a way around it. I don't think this is true of all theory, though. It's a specific criticism of Freud.

The last point is the most complex. It sounds like what you're complaining about here is what called "the hermeneutics of suspicion"--a familiar phrase probably. I think you're saying that critics should interpret the text as something that's completely aware of itself--something that's consciously trying to create an effect, and either succeeds or doesn't. "The hermeneutics of suspicion," though, argues that the text works its effect in bad faith. It unconsciously bears the marks of the situation in which it was created. Hypothetically, from this perspective, a critic who understands these unconscious messages in the text could claim that they're superior to the author who wrote it--since they see more of the work than the author does. This seems to be your complaint. Yet I think this misses the point. It doesn't matter who is superior--critic or author. Critics are just trying to understand the text, and to do so means that they have to look at what the author consciously expresses and what the author unconsciously expressed. Clearly, there are things that are not meant to be said that somehow come out when one is speaking. When Douglas is describing the governess, it slips out that he's quite enamored of her--even though he never says so directly. When you put on certain clothes, it probably reflects your gender, class, and even nationality, but when you were dressing you probably were not thinking: I'm going to put on my middle-class, male, American outfit today. Things slip out when anyone makes a decision. "The hermeneutics of suspicion" are merely one way of decoding those things that slip out. Any critics who is honest about what they're studying has to admit that there are things like this in a text. If it gives them a big head, I guess that's a personal problem, but it isn't an interpretative one.

On a Thursday evening four days after Christmas Eve, Douglas tells his tale, over more than one night, about several months at Bly, from June to summer.

Good catch. I'm not observant enough for those kind of things, and I probably would have just believe the three day timeline until I reread the story again years later.

like Virgil says it is not built upon that solid a ground - but this doesn't dismiss the whole thing entirely

When someone says something doesn't stand on solid ground, usually they're trying to dismiss that thing. It sounds like you have some way of rescuing the Freudian reading, but you didn't put it into your last post. Or maybe I overlooked it. I think we've established that James may have been aware of Freud's 1895 work, but Freud's early publications don't really go into the kind of sublimation and Oedipal complex you're talking about. That doesn't come out until well into the twentieth-century.

Personally, I like to keep them all as open as much as possible because my main interest is in opening the reading as much as possible

That's a good outlook to have, and I hope I'm not shutting down any readings prematurely, but I think a comprehensive Freudian reading built on sublimation is a little weak.

(On a side note I think I did OK in my last ever exam, hurrah

I'm sure all that stopping and thinking with Barry must have helped you.

Jozanny

01-22-2010, 01:52 AM

Jozanny huffed and puffed off for a bit, but damn you have been busy, and Neely, you were dead on about the governess and evil. James just stuns me to silence at times, with how much he achieves, so simply.

Gladys, I thought the obvious allusion to the importance of three within Christian symbolism comes here, despite that I may have mischaracterized:

Poor Douglas, before his death -- when it was in sight -- committed to me the manuscript that reached him on the third of these days and that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he began to read to our hushed little circle on the night of the fourth. The departing ladies who had said they would stay didn't, of course, thank heaven, stay: they departed, in consequence of arrangements made, in a rage of curiosity, as they professed, produced by the touches with which he had already worked us up. But that only made his little final auditory more compact and select, kept it, round the hearth, subject to a common thrill.

Whether it relates to the Trinity or the Resurrection? 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.

Neely, I may be doing an article on TOS, as I have been in conference with certain authorities, and if I might quote you, even informally, I will ask if that is okay when I am ready. Actually you might consider an article yourself, truly. When you are on you really know how to slant a perspective.

Gladys

01-22-2010, 08:25 AM

With regard to literary theory, I embrace any methodology that extracts meaning inherent in a text. Freud, for instance, seems to offer little of substance for any field of endeavour!

I do agree with Quark that, whatever the psychology, the two ghosts may well be real.

If James intended to end it with the ambiguity, I think the story would be joke and hardly worth anyone's time.

Owing to ambiguity I rated the book merely 'Average' and patiently await enlightenment before I repent.

LitNetIsGreat

01-22-2010, 09:05 AM

Neely, I may be doing an article on TOS, as I have been in conference with certain authorities, and if I might quote you, even informally, I will ask if that is okay when I am ready. Actually you might consider an article yourself, truly. When you are on you really know how to slant a perspective.

Yes sure, no problems, pm me if you need any further details, thank you very kindly. :blush: I don't know which part you meant (or even if it was me) but you are of course welcome indeed.

LitNetIsGreat

01-22-2010, 12:53 PM

Owing to ambiguity I rated the book merely 'Average' and patiently await enlightenment before I repent.

If James intended to end it with the ambiguity, I think the story would be joke and hardly worth anyone's time.

I don’t understand why any story with an open ending would automatically qualify that text as “average” or a “joke”. Here, if we can’t say one way or another if they were ghosts or not, what bearing does that have on it at all? By the same stroke, is J. B. Priestley’s "An Inspector Calls" also a throwaway text too? Is every text with an air of mystery no good? Is every text that doesn’t provide definitive closure to be treated in the same way?

That's a good outlook to have, and I hope I'm not shutting down any readings prematurely, but I think a comprehensive Freudian reading built on sublimation is a little weak.

Yes it probably is, but I am betting that there are very few, if any, fully compressive readings of this text in existence. I don’t see the harm though in detailing particular elements of interest – I’ve not thought about it all that much to be honest - I just dashed off a few things from when I read it a couple of years ago.

When someone says something doesn't stand on solid ground, usually they're trying to dismiss that thing. It sounds like you have some way of rescuing the Freudian reading, but you didn't put it into your last post. Or maybe I overlooked it.

Not really. I’m far from an expert in Freud, or particularly like psychoanalysis that much, but I think the sublimation as an explanation for the visions just about holds its ground. I didn’t go into detail above because of time, but I think a mentioned a few things previously.

I think we've established that James may have been aware of Freud's 1895 work, but Freud's early publications don't really go into the kind of sublimation and Oedipal complex you're talking about. That doesn't come out until well into the twentieth-century.

I don’t see what that has got to do with it. I’m completely in disagreement, massively so, with Virgil that the author, for some reason, has to be aware of the theory before it is OK to read the text through it. Whether James was aware of Freud or not, has very little bearing on my own thoughts in the matter.

Jozanny

01-22-2010, 03:42 PM

As Neely has indicated, psychoanalytic readings of the story have been around for a long time. Like Neely, I feel TOS does not necessarily have to be analyzed along classic psychoanalytic lines, but it is a useful platform.

Virgil, I think your hostility to Freud goes a little too far. He did revolutionize the way traditional western medicine looked at mental illness--which he recognized was a matter of degree, and he was one of the first to do so. My bosses respected both William James and Freud, and both men are still relevant historical scientists.

I also think, and this is a fresher view for me, that James is raising subtle questions about how believers contemplate salvation. Dickens fondly bludgeons his readers over their heads, and James, in answer to Charles, presents a more nuanced challenge, showing us that we all have degrees of self-interest, which invariably corrupts our souls, even Douglas, and he is only sketched in as a man impacted by an extraordinary experence, though I suspect he is much like Stransom in The Altar of The Dead.

I think James often challenges his readers with spiritual questions, and I will come at this with more vigor if I can manage to present something for publication in the future.

Virgil

01-23-2010, 03:07 AM

What I'm saying, though, is that your interpretation and Neely's are just different species of psychological readings, and that neither exclude the possibility that the ghosts are real. Your last post was making it seem like we have to choose between a psychological reading (whether Freudian or not) and the reality of the ghosts. It tempting to slip into that either/or interpretation, but I think that kind of reading misses a lot of this story's thematic content. As I was saying above, I think much of the story is about the degree to which we pursue certainty and evil in a place that promises neither conclusively. To say that the ghosts are either entirely real or entirely delusion would cover up this question--or, at least, reduce it to a simple choice.

I see what your saying, and you're looking at the ideas in a rather abstract way. I'm looking at the story as an integrated work of art, and to have the ghost as inconclusive after a 100+ pages is theatrical manipulation - jerking the reader. I'll have more on this possibility later.

That's a lot to say so quickly. It sounds like you've got four main problems with contemporary literary theory--and maybe Freudian readings in particular:

1) That it was developed and practiced by self-important professors

2) That it reflects a leftist world view

3) That Freudianism is discredited

4) That certain theories misplace readers attention onto the critics rather than the authors
Sure I can agree with all those, though I would phrase #2 differently. "That it reflects a leftist world view" is a symptom of critics projecting their world view unto a work. It's not that the overwhelming college literature professors are left wing (though I don't care for that either ;)) but that they impose it on art, art that in many cases was written in an era when current ideas weren't even conceptualized. Yeah that's a serious problem.

The first points may be true, but it doesn't really prove anything one way or another. Yes, there are scholars who put their careers over knowledge, but that doesn't necessarily mean their ideas are wrong. It just means they're unpleasant people. Even if your ad hominem is a fair one, it doesn't really change my view of theory.
I would say that the treatment of art to be mere texts is a devaluation of the art. New Historicism (taken from all the deconstruction crap) goes so far as to claim that a telephone book is as much as a text as Hamlet. And that is not only the critic imposing himself on a work, but actually being superior to it.

Similarly, I'm willing to concede the second point, but I don't think it's a reason not to trust theory. Sure, much of theory reflects the leftist atmosphere of Humanities Departments. Yet this doesn't mean that theory is wrong--it just means that theory is limited.
Ok.

The third point is most damning for Freudianism, and it's why psychoanalytic readings receive the skepticism they do--even from theorist. This is stumbling block for most Freudian critics, and I don't see much of a way around it. I don't think this is true of all theory, though. It's a specific criticism of Freud.
Yes, I was being specific to Freud. Once such a theory is proven to be wrong, then any further interpretation of a work through it is flawed, except if the author is intentionally using it or believes in it. Frankly this is really moot. There aren't any real freudian critics out there any more. It's a hold over from the 1930's through 50s when Freud was credible.

The last point is the most complex. It sounds like what you're complaining about here is what called "the hermeneutics of suspicion"--a familiar phrase probably. I think you're saying that critics should interpret the text as something that's completely aware of itself--something that's consciously trying to create an effect, and either succeeds or doesn't.
Yes. That's essentially New Criticism, formalism, or Aristotilianism. That is the true and lasting approach to reading literature. All these other "-isms" will fade into posterity over time.

"The hermeneutics of suspicion," though, argues that the text works its effect in bad faith. It unconsciously bears the marks of the situation in which it was created. Hypothetically, from this perspective, a critic who understands these unconscious messages in the text could claim that they're superior to the author who wrote it--since they see more of the work than the author does. This seems to be your complaint.
I'm not claiming it's in bad faith. It's just a wrong headed approach. A hundred years ago, there was probably 1/20th of the number of literature professors in the world that there are today and 1/20th of the journals. Those journals need to be filled and those professors need to do something and they compete with each other for the next break through. They all want to be the next I.A. Richards or Lionel Trilling or Harold Bloom. Such quanatity and outlet and competition generates a lot of crap, though in all fairness it generates good criticism as well.

Yet I think this misses the point. It doesn't matter who is superior--critic or author. Critics are just trying to understand the text, and to do so means that they have to look at what the author consciously expresses and what the author unconsciously expressed. Clearly, there are things that are not meant to be said that somehow come out when one is speaking. When Douglas is describing the governess, it slips out that he's quite enamored of her--even though he never says so directly. When you put on certain clothes, it probably reflects your gender, class, and even nationality, but when you were dressing you probably were not thinking: I'm going to put on my middle-class, male, American outfit today. Things slip out when anyone makes a decision. "The hermeneutics of suspicion" are merely one way of decoding those things that slip out. Any critics who is honest about what they're studying has to admit that there are things like this in a text. If it gives them a big head, I guess that's a personal problem, but it isn't an interpretative one.
Those are all details the author chose, and if they fit into the story line, then fine. That is not what I'm objecting to. It is one thing to look at those items, it is another to say that the character is sexually repressed because of he is wearing tight jeans, especially if the author was before Freud. That is to draw a conclusion based on the critic's ken of knowledge, or better stated outside the author's ken of knowledge.

Virgil, I think your hostility to Freud goes a little too far. He did revolutionize the way traditional western medicine looked at mental illness--which he recognized was a matter of degree, and he was one of the first to do so. My bosses respected both William James and Freud, and both men are still relevant historical scientists.

I didn't think I was hostile to Freud, so much as condemning imposing an idea into a work that wasn't intended. But yes, i guess i don't have much respect for Freud. He was in fact a fraud. I think there are books out there that revealed he had falsified his work to reach many of the conclusions he did, and that at a minimum his scientific method was crap. He made far expansive conclusions on a sample of one or two people. As science, his theories aren't credible at all. You can look it up.

Jozanny

01-23-2010, 01:32 PM

I know something about the case history controversy surrounding Freud and Breuer, if this is what you mean by calling a man who spent his life trying to improve mental health treatment "a fraud," but I think your leap is a bit too expansive, even though I understand some feminist theory hostility to Freud's work. Feminist theory hostility is no stranger to James feminine psyches either, but I am not sure that conflict is one of my primary concerns.

Virgil

01-23-2010, 10:48 PM

Let me get back to the story. I was at the library today and I found the Norton Critical Edition of TOS, and of course those editions have essays and original source material after the story. I've been reading and let me list a few things I've come across so far.

1. In none of the source materials (Jame's notebook and letters and his preface to the work) does he mention Freud anywhere.

2. The germ of the story was a annecdote told to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

3. Where ever he mentions the ghosts, it sounds to me he's referring to them being real. Here's an important passage from the Preface:

"Good ghosts, speaking by book, make poor subjects, and it was clear that from the first my hovering prowling blighting presences, my pair of abnormal agents, would have to depart altogether from the rules. They would be agents in fact; there would be laid on them the dire duty of causing the situation to reek with an air of Evil. Their desire and their ability to do so, visibly measuring meanwhile their effect, together with their observed and described success--this was exactly my central idea; so that, briefly, I cast my lot with pure romance, the appearences conforming to the true type being so little romantic."
Of course you could probably read that different way. :lol:

4. Critics seem to differ as to whether the ghosts were real. Even before the 1934 essay by Edmund Wilson that first introduced the Freudian idea, some critics believed that the Governess was hallucinating.

5. There seems to be a consenus that only the Governess sees the ghosts, and that the children are led to believe what she says.

I've decided to re-read the work. It's worth it. This discussion has inspired me to try to come to some conclusion on it. Plus, now I've got a bunch of essays to go through, and it feels like I'm back in college. :D

Quark

01-24-2010, 01:01 AM

but I think the sublimation as an explanation for the visions just about holds its ground. I didn’t go into detail above because of time, but I think a mentioned a few things previously.

I was just trying to get you to spell it out a little more. There are a number of possible psychological and Freudian readings, and I wasn't sure what exactly you were driving it. You could be saying that the ghosts are an invention of the governess, and that she projects her feelings for the gentleman uncle onto the ghosts. This really wouldn't be sublimation so much as it would be projection.

Another possible reading is that the ghosts are real, and that she diverts her feelings for the gentleman uncle into defending the children. This would be sublimation. Sublimation is the process of diverting illicit desires into some socially acceptable behavior. In The Turn of the Screw, the governess might have to sublimate her desire for the uncle because he is unobtainable. She could do so by focusing on protecting the children from a threat--since that would be something socially acceptable.

Or, perhaps the ghosts are invention of the governess that she projects her sexual desires onto, and she's sublimating her feelings by focusing on shielding the children from a perceived threat. That would combine both of the above readings.

Still another reading is that the governess is sublimating her sexual urges by focusing on defending the children, but the ghosts represent her sexual urges reemerging after being concealed by sublimation. In this reading, the sublimation wouldn't be entirely successful. The ghosts constantly remind her of her unfulfilled desires.

Those are just four possible psychological readings of the ghosts and the governess. I could keep offering up more suggestions, but it might be easier if you explained what it is you were going for. I think the fourth option I gave was the coolest, but the first one seems more in line with the story. Maybe you have something else in mind, though.

Owing to ambiguity I rated the book merely 'Average' and patiently await enlightenment before I repent.

You don't have to defend your rating, but I'm curious why ambiguity is drawback.

I also think, and this is a fresher view for me, that James is raising subtle questions about how believers contemplate salvation. Dickens fondly bludgeons his readers over their heads, and James, in answer to Charles, presents a more nuanced challenge, showing us that we all have degrees of self-interest, which invariably corrupts our souls, even Douglas, and he is only sketched in as a man impacted by an extraordinary experence, though I suspect he is much like Stransom in The Altar of The Dead.

Wow, you're pretty harsh on Douglas. Do you think he's really "corrupt[ed]" by "self-interest"?

Let me get back to the story.

It's probably best if we all do that. If you want me to respond to the post before this, I can PM you or something. I think it would lead the thread away from its topic, though, if we really got into Freud and literary theory too much here.

I've decided to re-read the work. It's worth it. This discussion has inspired me to try to come to some conclusion on it. Plus, now I've got a bunch of essays to go through, and it feels like I'm back in college. :D

And your research has paid off already. I think the points you make above are key to understanding the story--particularly that bit from the Preface.

Jozanny

01-24-2010, 02:04 AM

Wow, you're pretty harsh on Douglas. Do you think he's really "corrupt[ed]" by "self-interest"?

Douglas is not fully fledged as a character, but yes. I think he is either the model for or modeled on Stransom, as I've mentioned. James presents him sympathetically, of course, but he is besotted with the woman, and her adventure, or both. This is not to say he is a liar, or doesn't mean well, but he sat on this, kept her and her manuscript a secret, until what we may presume to be his old age. It bespeaks obsession, and obsessions transform.

I have to go back and read Virgil's posts again and I shall. I'm also very impressed with the discussion. You have all kept me on my toes, so we all deserve a hand, and I think Henry is pleased. I feel him with me now and again.

Quark

01-24-2010, 02:21 AM

I think he is either the model for or modeled on Stransom, as I've mentioned.

That probably means more to you than it does to me. I'm not so well-read on James. In fact, I could count the number of Henry James stories I've read on one deformed, six-fingered hand: The Aspern Papers, Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Turn of the Screw, The Golden Bowl, Daisy Miller. You'll have to explain the Stransom comparison to me.

James presents him sympathetically, of course, but he is besotted with the woman, and her adventure, or both. This is not to say he is a liar, or doesn't mean well, but he sat on this, kept her and her manuscript a secret, until what we may presume to be his old age. It bespeaks obsession, and obsessions transform.

I completely agree with that. His estimation of the governess is clearly suspect if he's as enamored of her as Mrs. Griffin seems to believe. Of course, Mrs. Griffin is a bit of a ditz, so I'm not sure if we should believe her. She seems a little overeager to draw these kinds of connections.

Jozanny

01-24-2010, 03:02 AM

That probably means more to you than it does to me. I'm not so well-read on James. In fact, I could count the number of Henry James stories I've read on one deformed, six-fingered hand: The Aspern Papers, Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Turn of the Screw, The Golden Bowl, Daisy Miller. You'll have to explain the Stransom comparison to me.

Not a bad selection at all Quark; when you are of a mind try this one. (http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JamDead.html). What can I say Altar is about? Living in memory? Not living at all but feeding on those who do? It is definitely James at his most Catholic. The French director Truffaut made a movie adaptation.

My most beloved works by James are all of three:

The Portrait of A Lady
The Beast In The Jungle
and
The Altar of the Dead

I could not live without these--not that I haven't read almost everything, but these--they are sheets of soul music that makes everything worth it. I am going to sleep now:)

Gladys

01-24-2010, 07:52 AM

I don’t understand why any story with an open ending would automatically qualify that text as “average” or a “joke” ... Is every text that doesn’t provide definitive closure to be treated in the same way?

You don't have to defend your rating, but I'm curious why ambiguity is drawback.

I adore the majestically obscure endings in such works as Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, Woolfe's To the Lighthouse, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Ibsen's Ghosts. All of them offer the possibility of a preferred interpretation. The ending in The Turn of the Screw seems to me impenetrable, simpler, emptier, and therefore of less enduring interest. I find less to ponder, less to inspire. While 'definitive closure' is unnecessary in a novel, the potential for closure is!

5. There seems to be a consenus that only the Governess sees the ghosts, and that the children are led to believe what she says.

A consensus whether or not the ghost are deemed real, I presume?

LitNetIsGreat

01-24-2010, 08:24 AM

I've decided to re-read the work. It's worth it. This discussion has inspired me to try to come to some conclusion on it. Plus, now I've got a bunch of essays to go through, and it feels like I'm back in college.

That’s cool!

I was just trying to get you to spell it out a little more. There are a number of possible psychological and Freudian readings, and I wasn't sure what exactly you were driving it.

Yes, ok that’s far enough. I think like Virgil though, I really need to return to the text and to gather my thoughts a little better. In short, I don’t see the ghosts as real ghosts at all, but as figments of the governess’s imagination as a result of pent up sexual frustration/repression. I was thinking sublimation mixed with transference really, to answer for the visions of Jessop and Quint. Sublimation, in that she believes that these figures really after the children – which would but her in a socially noble position as defender of the children - mixed with transferring or projecting her love for the master onto the image of Quint - which would explain why he is being classed as an “actor” wearing the master’s clothes etc, etc. I can piece together a few things later today or tomorrow maybe.

As an aside there was a very good BBC adaptation of this story over Christmas (the BBC are good at such dramatisations) and they went to pains to obviously allow for the psychoanalytical reading, even more so than the book suggests. I don’t know if anybody saw it, but it worth a view if anyone can get hold of it.

I adore the majestically obscure endings in such works as Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, Woolfe's To the Light House, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Ibsen's Ghosts. All of them offer the possibility of a preferred interpretation. The ending in The Turn of the Screw" seems to me impenetrable, simpler, emptier, and therefore of less enduring interest. I find less to ponder, less to inspire. While 'definitive closure' is unnecessary in a novel, the potential for closure is!

OK, I think I see what you are getting at, though for me there is plenty to ponder! Of course people have different opinions on such things which is perfectly understandable and right.

Virgil

01-24-2010, 09:55 AM

It's probably best if we all do that. If you want me to respond to the post before this, I can PM you or something. I think it would lead the thread away from its topic, though, if we really got into Freud and literary theory too much here.

No, that's alright. I've had my fill of Freud. :)

My most beloved works by James are all of three:

The Portrait of A Lady
The Beast In The Jungle
and
The Altar of the Dead

Oh those are my three favorites too. But I would add The Ambassadors to the list. I loved that one too.

I adore the majestically obscure endings in such works as Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, Woolfe's To the Light House, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Ibsen's Ghosts. All of them offer the possibility of a preferred interpretation. The ending in The Turn of the Screw" seems to me impenetrable, simpler, emptier, and therefore of less enduring interest. I find less to ponder, less to inspire. While 'definitive closure' is unnecessary in a novel, the potential for closure is!
Outstanding point Gladys. There are several approaches to ambiguity for an author. It is appropriate to end a story with the future unresolved, though the issues contained in the story are resolved. For instance in the classic "The Lady or the Tiger" the reader is left with a decision. I don't find that kind of ambiguity troubling. More profound examples of that are the D.H. lawrence novels Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow. But when there is ambiguity on the foundational crux of the story, whether the ghost is real or not, and the author takes us through a 100+ pages and leaves it there, I feel that's cheap and just a trick. There better be a very good reason for that.

A consensus whether or not the ghost are deemed real, I presume?
No. :lol: It seems some think the ghost is real and some don't. That's why I need to read the story again.

Quark

01-24-2010, 01:33 PM

What can I say Altar is about? Living in memory? Not living at all but feeding on those who do? It is definitely James at his most Catholic. The French director Truffaut made a movie adaptation.

I'll have to give it a read at some point. It really wasn't on my radar until you mentioned it, but if both you and Virgil are supporting it then I'll look it up. I don't think it's a long story, so I'll try to read it before this thread closes.

If I had to compare this story to another Henry James work, though, it would probably be Daisy Miller. I think there's a strong parallel between the governess defending the children and Winterborne trying to discover whether Daisy is innocent. Both characters pry into the lives of others and are obsessed with corruption and evil. Both stories make us question what the root of the obsession is, and whether Winterborne and the governess are making the right decisions. Yet I think I like The Turn of the Screw better on this issue since it leaves this issues undecided. The closure of Daisy Miller makes it seem more moralistic. The ending to The Turn of the Screw is more realistic because we never really know whether we've gone too far or whether the evil we were fighting against is real. It's a judgment that we have to make with limited information.

A consensus whether or not the ghost are deemed real, I presume?

No, probably not. The critics seem just as confused by this story as we are.

As an aside there was a very good BBC adaptation of this story over Christmas (the BBC are good at such dramatisations) and they went to pains to obviously allow for the psychoanalytical reading, even more so than the book suggests. I don’t know if anybody saw it, but it worth a view if anyone can get hold of it.

Yeah, the psychological reading makes the story more interesting, but I don't think it's very present in the text. James seems to have focused on telling a good ghost story in the original, and only vaguely sketched alternate psychological interpretations. I think they're there, and that they make the story more worthwhile. I'm glad the BBC version incorporates them into the story. But, in the end, they're only loosely conceived in the novella.

That's why I need to read the story again.

Everyone's rereading the story, I guess. I probably need another reading myself, but I'm short on time at the moment. Besides, it takes all my effort just to keep up with the thread. It's quite a busy conversation.

Speaking of good conversations, I'm sure we would all have one over Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy. It's nominated for the Valentine's Day discussion. Go vote for it here:

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=50061

Jozanny

01-24-2010, 02:27 PM

I may look up a particular passage here or there, but I have read it many times, and have much on my plate, so, you will all forgive me if for right now I leave a full rereading for a fresh year.

As to the displeasure of Gladys and Virgil, I will say one or two things and then leave well enough alone, as I know I cannot be brought around to The Idiot and I would fain bring around those who deconstruct James with less sympathy, but

1. To me James very strength is he realizes getting hold of an idea is dangerous, even when it goes against committing himself, like to another man, for instance, or to love in general. I think one of his major themes in all of his work is that passion is a double-edged sword.

2. I believe he is in fact a very spiritual writer, but he wants me, as a reader, to decide for myself which way I want to go, how I choose to see modes of redemption.

3. As to the open ending, love it or hate it, the debate goes on. Honestly, I don't know if the ghosts are real or manifestations at any number of levels, but I can never trust the veracity of any of the three narrative voices, and that is where I have to leave that.

And kasie, Miles last words I think, are directed at the governess, essentially asking if she sees Quint, and calling her the devil. That's how I read it.

4. As to James's humor, one caveat: It is easy to forget that nearly all of his work is a comedy of manner, though be it with serious motifs in play.

Gladys

01-24-2010, 09:44 PM

A consensus whether or not the ghost are deemed real, I presume?

Sorry for my poor English and the consequent misunderstanding. While there is 'consensus that only the Governess sees the ghosts, and that the children are led to believe what she says', I presume there is widespread disagreement on reality of ghosts that only she sees?

In this regard I am most interested in Mrs Grose. Does she see the ghosts? Either way, does she believe in them, is she thoroughly superstitious, or is she just kindly humouring the governess? Why is Mrs Grose so guarded about the past and, in particular, the history of Quint, Jessel and the Master? Is she hiding something sinister as the governess suggests, or simply declining to gossip out of respect for the privacy and reputation of others?

I find myself frustrated that none of these questions about Mrs Grose seem answerable, even tentatively.

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!

It is easy to forget that nearly all of his work is a comedy of manner, though be it with serious motifs in play.

Like Austen and Dostoyevsky, Henry James is deftly amusing.

Quark

01-25-2010, 02:48 AM

4. As to James's humor, one caveat: It is easy to forget that nearly all of his work is a comedy of manner, though be it with serious motifs in play.

There is a quiet wit about everything that Henry James writes. I don't know whether there's any real guffaws in his works, but certainly there's humor. The opening frame of the story is quite funny, as are some of the exchanges between the governess and Mrs. Grose. I particularly like the description the governess gives Mrs. Grose of Quint:

"What's he like?"
"I've been dying to tell you. But he's like nobody."
"Nobody?" she echoed.
"He has no hat."

I would have made that little back-and-forth my signature if it wasn't too many lines.

In this regard I am most interested in Mrs Grose. Does she see the ghosts? Either way, does she believe in them, is she thoroughly superstitious, or is she just kindly humouring the governess? Why is Mrs Grose so guarded about the past and, in particular, the history of Quint, Jessel and the Master? Is she hiding something sinister as the governess suggests, or simply declining to gossip out of respect for the privacy and reputation of others?

Mrs. Grose is hard to gauge in this story because the governess's view of her is so condescending. It's possible she could be as dimwitted as the governess makes her out to be, but that seems unlikely.

It's also hard to determine her views because she doesn't have any direct contact with the ghosts or the letter about Miles. She's always away from the ghosts or shielded from them in some way, and her illiteracy means she can't read the letter.

I'm not sure if we can really come to any conclusion on her interpretation of events. I tend to think of her as acquiescing to the governess, but secretly doubting her at the same time. I'm not exactly sure what makes me say that, though. I'll have to think about it more.

kasie

01-25-2010, 06:15 AM

.....In this regard I am most interested in Mrs Grose. Does she see the ghosts? Either way, does she believe in them, is she thoroughly superstitious, or is she just kindly humouring the governess? Why is Mrs Grose so guarded about the past and, in particular, the history of Quint, Jessel and the Master? Is she hiding something sinister as the governess suggests, or simply declining to gossip out of respect for the privacy and reputation of others......

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, along with the uncle. It is Mrs Grose who immediately identifies the apparition as Quint, with no prompting from anyone else: I think she is fully aware of what has been happening and is much relieved that the governess has arrived to shoulder the burden of responsibilty. Her later reluctance to confirm the governess' experiences is an indication of her reluctance to become involved again in events which have previously thoroughly frightened and mystified her. Likewise, I think the uncle is fully aware of what has been going on and by stressing to the governess that he does not wish to be involved, is denying any responsibility for the happenings in his own house. It was he, after all, who left the children to the care of Quint and Miss Jessel; Quint had been in his employ for some time - surely he knew the man's character? I think he feels guilt over how events developed - maybe he had come under Quint's malign influence himself and banished the man to the country to escape from him, only to realise too late the peril in which he had placed his wards.

Now, I have offered no textual backup for this interpretation! But James (William) proposed that events should be interpreted by intuitive means rather than logical deduction, so I'm following Jamesian lines of analysis - and was brother Henry doing the same thing?

Thanks for your interpretation of the line from the end of the story, Jozanny, but I'm still not sure how it should be read - it's the final ambiguity.

LitNetIsGreat

01-25-2010, 07:11 PM

I think the uncle is fully aware of what has been going on and by stressing to the governess that he does not wish to be involved, is denying any responsibility for the happenings in his own house. It was he, after all, who left the children to the care of Quint and Miss Jessel; Quint had been in his employ for some time - surely he knew the man's character? I think he feels guilt over how events developed - maybe he had come under Quint's malign influence himself and banished the man to the country to escape from him, only to realise too late the peril in which he had placed his wards.

I don't go along with this reading personally. Mrs Grose says that the master didn't know what he was like, although he was "his" man. I think he just wants to be left alone because he doesn't really have any affection for the children and just wants to carry out his sort of bachelor lifestyle.

As for Mrs Grose being unreliable, possibly, but we of course she her through the governess's eyes, who for me is utterly unreliable being full of wild romantic notions and the overblown image of her self-importance - so much so that it makes you wonder that any of us believes a word she says!

I've nearly re-read this story again and if anything, I am more convinced that we are dealing with visions from a deluded mind and not the ghosts of Quint and Jessel. I'll post something else tomorrow on it if I can.

Virgil

01-25-2010, 07:21 PM

LitNetIsGreat

01-26-2010, 05:51 PM

I said earlier that I would be quite prepared to accept various readings on this text, something along the lines of that I could get out of bed next week and support an entirely different reading. Well, having re-read this I am now hardened in my belief in my interpretation that we are dealing with a deluded, almost certainly repressed, individual who sees the visions as a result of that repression. Even if she is not repressed (which I think she is) she is in my mind clearly deluded and not to be believed, and I can't seriously support any reading that argues for the ghosts as real visitants. Put it this way, if I was on a jury I wouldn't believe her story one bit; I'd send her to a madhouse!

I think in terms of Freud we could use some elements to possibly detail how and why, she has visions, but overall I think that she hangs herself as mentally unstable without these regardless. I've made quite a few notes against the governess, but I haven't got time to write them all out!

In terms of Freud, I think that there is a case for sublimation, transference of some sort and Oedipal feeling towards that of Miles, though, as I say I think it stands perfectly well without Freud that these images are part of her twisted imagination regardless of how we classify them.

Virgil, do you still support a reading alongside that of the ghosts, I know you said you were re-reading it, or has the second read changed your mind a little? I just can’t imagine a strong case to be made for the ghosts as real, outside of minor possibilities.

Gladys

01-26-2010, 09:05 PM

...she is in my mind clearly deluded and not to be believed, and I can't seriously support any reading that argues for the ghosts as real visitants.

Supposing the ghosts are fantasy, how are we to explain the following loose ends?
The sudden and mysterious departure and death of the former governess, Miss Jessel.

The significance of Quint's untimely death.

The unsavoury relationship that had existed between Quint and Jessel, and their negative influence on the two children.

The reasons for Miles expulsion from school and his impeccable behaviour on returning home.
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, along with the uncle.

Let's suppose that Scottish Mrs Grose, and eventually the children, are as deluded as the governess. All mystery and ambiguity are resolved, and we are dealing with mass hysteria, not merely female hysteria. In this case, the conspiracy theories, delusions and exaggerations of Mrs Grose infect our impressionable young governess and her two wards.

Mrs Grose is to blame!

kasie

01-27-2010, 04:17 AM

...... Put it this way, if I was on a jury I wouldn't believe her story one bit; I'd send her to a madhouse!.....

But didn't you say you had watched the Beeb's version over Christmas, Neely? I have it recorded to watch after these discussions are over as I don't want a visual interpretation to influence me too much but I caught the last few minutes of the live transmission and couldn't quite work out what was happening. I take it the governess (Oh, I wish she had a name!) was being driven off to the local Asylum, though I did at first think she was being taken to be executed, with the Scripture-reading cleric following the carriage. This would be in your line with your interpretation of her being insane - but how do you interpret that final (non-Jamesian) scene of Flora with the new governess?

Gladys: I wouldn't go quite that far - I just said she was unreliable. :)

LitNetIsGreat

01-27-2010, 04:08 PM

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

1. The sudden and mysterious departure and death of the former governess, Miss Jessel.

2. The significance of Quint's untimely death.

3. The unsavoury relationship that had existed between Quint and Jessel, and their negative influence on the two children.

4. The reasons for Miles expulsion from school and his impeccable behaviour on returning home.

Yes there are some interesting points, but I don't really see how they connect to the visions versus ghosts debate (even if that is an over simplification of the "debate"). We take a lot for granted because I see the governess as someone who is quick to run with an idea and "reads into" things that are and aren't there. (See below). So for example these points are only significant because the governess runs with the idea of them as important. For me, these two people died young and that's it. Early death would not have been unusual at this time.

But didn't you say you had watched the Beeb's version over Christmas, Neely? I have it recorded to watch after these discussions are over as I don't want a visual interpretation to influence me too much but I caught the last few minutes of the live transmission and couldn't quite work out what was happening. I take it the governess (Oh, I wish she had a name!) was being driven off to the local Asylum, though I did at first think she was being taken to be executed, with the Scripture-reading cleric following the carriage. This would be in your line with your interpretation of her being insane - but how do you interpret that final (non-Jamesian) scene of Flora with the new governess?

:)

I'll not spoil the BBC version for you so I won't say on that point - get back to me when you have seen it though and tell me what you thought. As you expect from TV adaptations though they take the liberty at times, but overall it is a good production.

Do you mean the scene when Flora reacts strongly against the governess? Actually that fits into my reading of the governess as a deluded individual from whom any sane person would want to flee, also covered below.

Here is a rough list of some of my main points against the governess in rough note form (please forgive the messiness of it): (And the high threat of typos.)

1 She constantly “reads into” what other people are saying or thinking and then puts her interpretation on that. She is being manipulative, whether she is aware of it or not. She’s just not to be trusted.

I only sat there on my tomb and read into what my little friend has said to me the fullness of its meaning p81.

“But none the less, between Miles and me, it’s now all out.”
“All out?” My companion stared. “But what, Miss?”
“Everything. It doesn’t matter I’ve made up my mind.” p85.

“He was looking for someone else , you say – someone who was not you?”
“He was looking for little Miles.” A portentous clearness now possessed me. “That’s whom he was looking for.”
“But how do you know?”

“I know, I know, I know” My exaltation grew. “And you know, my dear!”

“Flora saw!”
... “She has told you so?”
“Not a word – that’s the horror”. P45.

“...if I had “made it up”, I came to be able to give, of each of the persons appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail, their special marks” p50. (Because you so manipulate Mrs Grose.)

I just can't trust the governess, she does this throughout.

2 She has lived a sheltered life and is almost certainly repressed in some way.

I learnt something, at first certainly – that had not been one of the teachings of my small, smothered life; learnt to be amused, and even amusing, and not to think for the morrow. It was the first time, in a manner, that I had known space and air and freedom, all the music of summer and all the mystery of nature. P25

Eccentric nature of my father. P72.

3 Her head is full of romance literature and she constantly imagines that she is playing the part in some big romance. She is very unstable and dreamlike.

“Well, that, I think, is what I came for – to be carried away. I’m afraid, however.” I remember feeling the impulse to add, “I’m rather easily carried away”. P17.

Was there a “secret” at Bly – a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement? (Of course the reference to Jane Eyre is also apt as the governess in that story married the master!) p28.

I call it a revolution because I now see how, with the word he spoke, the curtain rose on the last act of my dreadful drama and the catastrophe was precipitated. P77.

The book I had in my hand was Fieldings’s Amelia; also that I was wholly awake. I recall further both a general conviction that it was horribly late and particular objection to looking at my watch. P58. (As with previous encounters her visions come after reading or dreaming.)

4 She is highly passionate, this is seen in the overflowing of emotion towards the children. Perhaps this is also part of the escape of her repressed and idealised vision of life?

With a great childish light that seemed to offer it as a mere result of the affection she had conceived for my person, which had rendered necessary that she should follow me. I needed nothing more than this to feel the full force of Mrs Grose’s comparison, and, catching my pupil in my arms, covered her with kisses in which there was a sob of atonement. P21.

“Oh handsome – very, very,” I insisted “wonderfully, handsome. But infamous”. P48.

“... an imperturbable little prodigy of delightful, loveable goodness”. P52.

5 She suffers from a lack of sleep, which by itself is enough to cause visions! On the two days she had no sleep at all and the first hints of visions (strange noises etc) came at this time. It was two weeks later that she saw the first vision of Quint, so we can assume that she slept better after that, but we can be relatively certain from this evidence that her excitability results in poor sleep, which only makes the potential for greater visions more likely.

But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connexion with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several times rise and wander about my room. P. 16.

I had better have let it wait till morning, for it gave me a second sleepless night. P19.

6 She is full of her own self-importance that goes beyond her position.

I was strangely at the helm! P18.

I dare say I fancied myself, in short, a remarkable young woman and took comfort in the faith that this would more publicly appear. P26.

7 She works hard and only has one hour a day to herself. This is also the point when she saw the first two visions/ghosts I don’t take it as coincidence that the one time of day that she can relax her mind is when the visions first appear.

In the first weeks the days were long; they often, at their finest, gave me what I used to call my own hour.

“When was it on the tower?”
“About the middle of the month . At the same hour”. P35.

8 She is in love with the master or, more importantly perhaps, has been in love with the idea of someone of that status.

[On Quint] He remained there a few seconds – long enough to convince me he also saw and recognised; but it was as if I had been looking at him for years and had known him always. P32.

“I was carried away in London!”...
“Well, Miss, you’re not the first – and you won’t be the last”. P17.

[She refuses to contact the master even when events go too far] They were too beautiful to be posted; I kept them myself; I have them all to this hour. P76.

My letter, sealed and directed, was still in my pocket. P91.

9 She actually says that the visions are in her head!

What arrested me on the spot – and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed for – was that sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there! P26.

Yet it was not at such an elevation that the figure I had so often invoked seemed most in place. P26.

...and the figure that faced me – a few more seconds assured me – a little anyone else I know as it was the image that had been in my mind. I had not seen it in Harley Street – I had not seen it anywhere. P27.

10 Mrs Grose does not see the visions.

Miss! Where on earth do you see anything? P100.

“I took it from her, by the lake that, just then and there at least, there was nobody.” Italics in was. P104.

11Flora does not see the visions (or at least she doesn’t admit to it).

I see nobody. I see nothing. I never have. I think you’re cruel and I don’t like you. P101.

She persists in denying to you that she saw, or has ever seen, anything? P103.

12 Miles does not see them either, or doesn’t admit to it, I can't find evidence at the moment, but I have noted it somewhere.

13 She ruthlessly refuses to contact the master, even when it goes way too far, as covered above in letters.

Freudian elements that may support the visions as actual visions (she also mentions repression, “she would repress every betrayal” p99.):

14 The language used to describe Quint is heavily sexual, more so than at any other time in the whole story. This shows her sexual repression which is perhaps partly to answer for her visions.

“Tower” “measure” “loomed” “grandeur” p26. “so intimately concerned” p29. He’s tall, active and erect. P36, etc.

15 Sublimation is perhaps present in her self-imposed role as protector of the children. Here we could argue that her repression is being released in this form.

I was there to protect and defend the little creatures. P42. [Well no, you are there to teach].

I was in these days literally able to find a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded of me. P42.

They had never, I think, wanted to do so many things for their poor protectress. P56.

They were at this period extravagantly and preternaturally fond of me. P56.

16 Transference could be ascribed to the vision of Quint (she could even see herself as Jessel).

[On Jessel with Quint] “it must have been also what she wished!” (italics on she) p49.

He gives me a sort of sense of looking like an actor. P36 (Actors of course playing the part of someone else.)

17 Oedipal feeling perhaps spill over into her affection towards Miles.

He bent forward and kissed me. It was practically the end of everything. I met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a minute in my arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry. P67.

He “had” me indeed, and in a cleft stick; for who would ever absolve me, who would consent that I should go unhung, if, by the faintest tremor of an overture, I were the first to introduce into our perfect intercourse an element so dire? P67.

My face was close to his, and he let me kiss him simply taking it with indulgent good humour. “well, old lady?” p90.

We sat there in absolute stillness; yet he wanted, I felt, to be with me. P102.

Get off with his sister as soon as possible and leave me with him alone. P105.

My voice trembled so that I felt it impossible to suppress the shake.
“Don’t you remember how I told you, when I came and sat on your bed the night of the storm, that there was nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for you?” p114.

The idea of grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful intercourse. P115.

My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner...p120.

As I say, this is just a list of notes, but I think you can see my point (hopefully) against the governess's position, some of them overlap and support each other, the overall point being that I can find little in support of the ghosts as real figures, at least alongside the points above. There are a couple of points in favour of the ghosts, such as a mention at the start of another ghost story with affecting two children, and a couple of minor points here and there, but overall for me the governess is clearly deluded, and the "ghosts" are surely visions of some sort.

Virgil

01-27-2010, 08:04 PM

Virgil, do you still support a reading alongside that of the ghosts, I know you said you were re-reading it, or has the second read changed your mind a little? I just can’t imagine a strong case to be made for the ghosts as real, outside of minor possibilities.

I just started the other night. Most of my reading gets done on the weekends (unless it's a poem). I did get through the frame part of the story and it seems that Douglas fully believes the ghosts are real, despite acknowledging the Governess being nervous and in love. So far I don't see anything that would suggest that my original reading is incorrect. Those that would claim the ghost is a hallucination still haven't answered why the story is named The Turn of the Screw. Look at this passage from the openning frame:

"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."

Gladys

01-27-2010, 11:16 PM

Yes there are some interesting points, but I don't really see how they connect to the visions versus ghosts debate

Here's the connection. Let's assume the two ghosts are mere visions of the governess - nothing but fantasy. My four questions become critical because they have nothing to do with the governess and her fantasies, yet are fundamental to the story, to the mystery. If the ghosts were real, the four are easily answered! Otherwise the four questions hang disconcertingly in the air at the end.

If the ghosts are fantasy I now blame, as I said before, a neurotic Mrs Grose for starting and fuelling the train of events recounted in the transcript of the governess. This would best explain the respect Douglas has for the old governess, and the prologue narrator for Douglas.

LitNetIsGreat

01-28-2010, 09:07 AM

I just started the other night. Most of my reading gets done on the weekends (unless it's a poem). I did get through the frame part of the story and it seems that Douglas fully believes the ghosts are real, despite acknowledging the Governess being nervous and in love. So far I don't see anything that would suggest that my original reading is incorrect. Those that would claim the ghost is a hallucination still haven't answered why the story is named The Turn of the Screw. Look at this passage from the openning frame:

Yes that is one of the points I have got for the ghosts too, there are one or two other little pointers, but overall the evidence against the governess (as I detailed above) is massive.

Here's the connection. Let's assume the two ghosts are mere visions of the governess - nothing but fantasy. My four questions become critical because they have nothing to do with the governess and her fantasies, yet are fundamental to the story, to the mystery. If the ghosts were real, the four are easily answered! Otherwise the four questions hang disconcertingly in the air at the end.

If the ghosts are fantasy I now blame, as I said before, a neurotic Mrs Grose for starting and fuelling the train of events recounted in the transcript of the governess. This would best explain the respect Douglas has for the old governess, and the prologue narrator for Douglas.

I think if anybody is neurotic that title surely has to go to that of the governess! I just think that Mrs Grose is a little easily led, though from that a little unreliable. But anyway, I don't think that they do become loose ends if we take it that the governess has visions. I don't take it as significant that two middle aged people died in the Victorian period, their deaths I think means little.

With Miles being excluded from school, again it is an annoying little mystery why he has been, but I don't think it is fundamental to the story either way.

More apt I think is the massive list against the governess detailed above most of which point directly to the idea of visions from a deluded mind. I mean how do you explain the fact that she actually admits to having visions, the fact that she stuggles sleeping, the fact that she is sexually repressed, and a thousand other things?

No, I can't read a single page of the story (almost) without seeing something against the governess and that is where the truth of the matter surely lies.

Virgil

01-28-2010, 09:39 PM

Here's the connection. Let's assume the two ghosts are mere visions of the governess - nothing but fantasy. My four questions become critical because they have nothing to do with the governess and her fantasies, yet are fundamental to the story, to the mystery. If the ghosts were real, the four are easily answered! Otherwise the four questions hang disconcertingly in the air at the end.

If the ghosts are fantasy I now blame, as I said before, a neurotic Mrs Grose for starting and fuelling the train of events recounted in the transcript of the governess. This would best explain the respect Douglas has for the old governess, and the prologue narrator for Douglas.

Very good points Gladys. I'm reserving any judgements until I do my second reading, but it does feel that there are too many unresolved issues if the ghosts are not real.

Jozanny

01-28-2010, 09:48 PM

Virgil

01-28-2010, 10:23 PM

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.

:lol: Yeah, it's hard to explain Miles if the ghosts aren't real. So you lean to the ghosts aren't real theory? How do you explain the title, The Turn of the Screw?

Gladys

01-31-2010, 01:59 AM

I think if anybody is neurotic that title surely has to go to that of the governess! I just think that Mrs Grose is a little easily led, though from that a little unreliable.

Why not call both neurotic; doesn't Mrs Grose feed the fantasies of the governess?

I don't take it as significant that two middle aged people died in the Victorian period, their deaths I think means little.

With Miles being excluded from school, again it is an annoying little mystery why he has been, but I don't think it is fundamental to the story either way.

If so, am I the only one who vainly scanned every page for answers to these mysteries?

Virgil

01-31-2010, 08:59 AM

If so, am I the only one who vainly scanned every page for answers to these mysteries?

No, no, Gladys. I'm re-reading. I'm looking for all that now.

Quark

01-31-2010, 06:16 PM

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

02-01-2010, 10:51 AM

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

02-01-2010, 04:51 PM

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

02-02-2010, 07:35 AM

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

02-02-2010, 08:20 AM

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

02-02-2010, 03:01 PM

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

02-02-2010, 04:12 PM

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

02-03-2010, 02:39 AM

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?

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_9xEFiXC8uwA/SzOB2WRf0FI/AAAAAAAABHA/QuJTab_NK4I/s400/holyfamily.jpg

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

06-27-2010, 06:13 AM

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

06-27-2010, 06:14 AM

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

06-27-2010, 06:16 AM

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

06-27-2010, 06:17 AM

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. :wink5: 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

06-27-2010, 06:18 AM

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. :p

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-stories/UBooks/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

06-30-2010, 01:25 AM

A valiant research effort, Virgil. :thumbsup: 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

06-30-2010, 02:37 AM

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.

Gladys

06-30-2010, 05:58 AM

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.

How typical of James to use the title so cryptically in the second and final reference, toward the end of the novel.

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.

Such usage by James lends credibility to the opinion of Douglas that the governess simply musters natural courage to fight against evil and prevail. Virtuous, she stands alone against unspeakable forces of evil.

Virgil

06-30-2010, 08:45 AM

How typical of James to use the title so cryptically in the second and final reference, toward the end of the novel.

Such usage by James lends credibility to the opinion of Douglas that the governess simply musters natural courage to fight against evil and prevail. Virtuous, she stands alone against unspeakable forces of evil.

Right on Gladys. I had not realized that!

LitNetIsGreat

06-30-2010, 11:10 AM

Firstly, an excellent write-up by Virgil, with many good points well presented. It’s been a long time since I thought about this book. However, there are a few things that I would like to point out in response to Vigil’s post. I’ve not looked back at what I said previously, instead I’ll just point out a few minor issues that I might have with what our dear Virgil has detailed, though I might have slightly misread him as there was a lot of stuff in there, and I apologise for ripping through obviously researched and detailed stuff and responding merely with personal opinion. However it was this or nothing (because of time) and I thought Virgil would prefer some response as opposed to nothing. :smile5:

The letters of James.

All of the stuff in James’ letters is very interesting and is good stuff to be able to call upon, however they are of little value in determining if there are Freudian elements to the tale. We can tell from them that James didn’t intend to use the Freudian or psychoanalytical method within the story certainly, but this doesn’t mean that a person can’t interpret the text through psychoanalytical methods or any other method that might seem appropriate to the reader or critic.

Since this is very long, I’ve divided this into five parts, a post to each part. I think it’s definitive... I will present what I think is an indisputable reading of the work.

There is no such thing as a “definitive” reading, just differing interpretations.:smilewinkgrin:

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.

Again, it may be true that James intended the story to be based on real ghosts, as opposed to visions as a result the governess (or whatever/whoever) but this doesn’t stop various interpretations arguing otherwise. It does tell us what James intended and is very interesting for that point, but it doesn’t mean that the meaning of the text is buried just because James intended X or Y.

As Gladys and I have pointed out, there are significant holes to the Freudian reading.

There may be holes in the Freudian reading of the text but there are still holes in the classic ghost story too. There are still significant elements to the text which work stronger through the ghosts as fragments of her imagination as opposed to them being real.

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.

However her sexual feelings for the master are not released, she is still a sexually repressed woman with all the potentials for visions and what that entails.

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.

It doesn’t matter what James intended. It doesn’t matter that the Freudian method (according to your research) cannot answer all the points. It is enough that we can read psychological elements into story or into certain scenes. It is enough that the psychological method raises questions, it doesn’t have to have all the answers, let’s not close a text down and release it of all of its mystery! The real point is that there are holes in the ghost reading of the text as well. There is ambiguity throughout the story.

3. 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.

Yes, all of them and none of them and many more...

Again, these are just some of the main points of opposition of your write-up, there are many things I agreed with and found interesting, but I thought I'd just share with you my points of contention.

Gladys

06-30-2010, 08:50 PM

Again, it may be true that James intended the story to be based on real ghosts, as opposed to visions as a result the governess (or whatever/whoever) but this doesn’t stop various interpretations arguing otherwise. It does tell us what James intended and is very interesting for that point, but it doesn’t mean that the meaning of the text is buried just because James intended X or Y.

Can it be that the considered works of great literary minds inadvertently express so much that they are but dimly aware of? :confused5: That Freud thought so is hardly a recommendation in view of his diminished standing in all fields excepting, perhaps, literary criticism.

Virgil

06-30-2010, 10:43 PM

I'm not going to have time for at least a week to offer any responses. But I have to say, that was a pretty weak response Neely. :lol:

Quark

07-01-2010, 01:33 AM

Well, thanks for the reading Virgil. I don't think we discussed the story from quite this angle before. I probably won't have time to respond to everything from your posts, but I'd like to talk about a few things. I think we can split your posts into two parts. The first part seems to be your response to the Freudian reading. I don't have much to say about that (really, I've been on the sidelines for that argument, and I think I'll just stay there). The second half of your series of posts appears to argue that the story lures readers into misreading before revealing a simple explanation for everything. This is the part that I'm most concerned with. The reading is plausible, but you don't really give very conclusive evidence for it. You may have gotten tired from the first half of your argument and simply not posted everything you had for the second. But, the way it is now, it seems like you're relying almost entirely on Felman's reading of the Preface. Now, I haven't read Felman's article. I don't have Norton's edition, and your citation is a little incomplete so I haven't been able to track down the piece. If you know what journal or collection of essays the article is from that might help. I haven't had any luck searching for it on JSTOR or ProjectMuse.

In any case, though, what you've posted from the article makes me highly suspicious of it (at least of its reading of the Preface). Here's the part of the Preface that it comments on:

It [The Turn of the Screw] 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.

Felman's gloss of these appears to be that James is indicating here that the story is trying to "catch" sophisticated or intelligent readers in a trap of misreadings before illuminating them with a simple and obvious explanation:

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]

There's a rhetorical sleight of hand here that makes one a little wary. Henry James refers to a "capture" of "the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious," but nowhere does he talk about a "trap" for "sophisticated" readers. Felman introduces this quotation as "the famous trap James speaks of," but James never uses the word "trap" anywhere in the Preface. Felman goes on to use the word "trap" ten times in just the portions from the article you quoted. "Capture" is certainly more accurate--it is the word in the text, after all. But, it becomes pretty clear why Felman hits readers with "trap" again and again (to the point where we almost believe that's the word James used). It's because the word "capture" has other meanings which are more probable given the context of that passage. The whole paragraph the quotation is from is long, but it's necessary to show what "capture" means:

Nothing is so easy as improvisation, the running on and on of invention; it is sadly compromised, however, from the moment its stream breaks bounds and gets into flood. Then the waters may spread indeed, gathering houses and herds and crops and cities into their arms and wrenching off, for our amusement, the whole face of the land – only violating by the same stroke our sense of the course and the channel, which is our sense of the uses of a stream and the virtue of a story. Improvisation, as in the Arabian Nights, may keep on terms with encountered objects by sweeping them in and floating them on its breast; but the great effect it so loses – that of keeping on terms with itself. This is ever, I intimate, the hard thing for the fairy-tale; but by just so much as it struck me as hard did it in The turn of the screw affect me as irresistibly prescribed. To improvise with extreme freedom and yet at the same time without the possibility of ravage, without the hint of a flood; to keep the stream, in a word, on something like ideal terms with itself : that was here my definite business. The thing was to aim at absolute singleness, clearness and roundness, and yet to depend on an imagination working freely, working (call it) with extravagance; by which law it would n’t be thinkable except as free and would n’t be amusing except as controlled. The merit of the tale, as it stands, is accordingly, I judge, that it has struggled successfully with its dangers. It is an excursion into chaos while remaining, like Blue-Beard and Cinderella, but an anecdote – though an anecdote amplified and highly emphasised 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. Otherwise expressed, the study is of a conceived ‘tone’, the tone of suspected and felt trouble, of an inordinate and incalculable sort – the tone of tragic, yet of exquisite, mystification. To knead the subject of my young friend’s, the supposititious narrator’s, mystification thick, and yet strain the expression of it so clear and fine that beauty would result: no side of the matter so revives for me as that endeavour. Indeed if the artistic value of such an experiment be measured by the intellectual echoes it may again, long after, set in motion, the case would make in favour of this little firm fantasy – which I seem to see draw behind it to-day a train of associations. I ought doubtless to blush for thus confessing them so numerous that I can but pick among them for reference. I recall for instance a reproach made me by a reader capable evidently, for the time, of some attention, but not quite capable of enough, who complained that I had n’t sufficiently ‘characterised’ my young woman engaged in her labyrinth; had n’t endowed her with signs and marks, features and humours, had n’t in a word invited her to deal with her own mystery as well as with that of Peter Quint, Miss Jessel and the hapless children. I remember well, whatever the absurdity of its now coming back to me, my reply to that criticism – under which one’s artistic, one’s ironic heart shook for the instant almost to breaking. “You indulge in that stricture at your ease, and I don’t mind confiding to you that – strange as it may appear! – one has to choose ever so delicately among one’s difficulties, attaching one’s self to the greatest, bearing hard on those and intelligently neglecting the others. If one attempts to tackle them all one is certain to deal completely with none; whereas the effectual dealing with a few casts a blest golden haze under cover of which, like wanton mocking goddesses in clouds, the others find prudent to retire. It was ‘déjà très-joli’, in The turn of the screw, please believe, the general proposition of our young woman’s keeping crystalline her record of so many intense anomalies and obscurities – by which I don’t of course mean her explanation of them, a different matter; and I saw no way, I feebly grant (fighting, at the best too, periodically, for every grudged inch of my space) to exhibit her in relations other than those; one of which, precisely, would have been her relation to her own nature. We have surely as much of her own nature as we can swallow in watching it reflect her anxieties and inductions. It constitutes no little of a character indeed, in such conditions, for a young person, as she says, ‘privately bred’, that she is able to make her particular credible statement of such strange matters. She has ‘authority’, which is a good deal to have given her, and I could n’t have arrived at so much had I clumsily tried for more.” [Bold added where Felman draws his quotation from]

The first few sentences lay out the paragraphs topic: how to keep improvisation within aesthetic boundaries. The image of the river shows the flowing nature of invention as well as it's tendency to get out of hand. James is saying that invention or improvisation can manage to depict things well enough, but it struggles to stay true to itself as a story and art. It needs some control to keep in bounds. James goes on to tell readers that he sees The Turn of the Screw as an exercise in controlled improvitization:

Improvisation, as in the Arabian Nights, may keep on terms with encountered objects by sweeping them in and floating them on its breast; but the great effect it so loses – that of keeping on terms with itself. This is ever, I intimate, the hard thing for the fairy-tale; but by just so much as it struck me as hard did it in The turn of the screw affect me as irresistibly prescribed. To improvise with extreme freedom and yet at the same time without the possibility of ravage, without the hint of a flood; to keep the stream, in a word, on something like ideal terms with itself

James concludes that he's done exactly that: "The merit of the tale, as it stands, is accordingly, I judge, that it has struggled successfully with its dangers." This is where Felman's quotation comes in:

It is an excursion into chaos while remaining, like Blue-Beard and Cinderella, but an anecdote – though an anecdote amplified and highly emphasised 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.

The first sentence just reinterates what's been said above. The story is an "excursion into chaos" like the river overflowing. Yet, it's a controlled "anecdote" that comes back to the rules that bind effective storytelling: it "return[s] upon itself." The paragraph is pretty much entirely about invention and storytelling. How does one improvise, but still keep the story interesting, entertaining, dramatic, well-formed? The next sentence phrases itself as just a further extension of this idea: "I need scarcely add after this that." So, we assume that it's going to go further into this idea of improvising, yet staying artistic: "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." (An "amusette" is French for a frivolous pastime or diversion.) "Capture" in this context doesn't really sound like a trap here. What's being captured is not misreadings (those have never been talked about in the entire paragraph, nor will they be discussed in what follows). Rather, it sounds like interest. The concern of this paragraph (which this sentence is supposed to be an extension of--"I need scarcely add after this that") has been with the danger of improvisation turning ugly, uninteresting, and non-artistic. James is trying to sell his story as an improvised anecdote that's also aesthetic and interesting. That's what's being talked about here. After talking about improvisation for so long, he's trying to reassure readers that there's still a story to be had. And, it's a story that will "capture" readers--difficult readers. Readers disillusioned or fastidious are hard readers for a anecdote like a fairy tale to "capture." That's part of the exercise that James is doing here. Nowhere does this paragraph or even this sentence indicate that James is trying to create a misreading. Why would he jam that suggesting into a paragraph about improvising an interesting anecdote? Why would he jam it into a sentence that claims to be an extension of the thoughts in the paragraph? Why would he then return to talking about improvisation again immediately after talking about reading and misreading?

"Capture" does not mean what Felman thinks it means, and he's aware of the other meanings that the word has so that's why he quickly switches it with "trap" and repeats the word ten times. Honestly, it's a little underhanded. I also think cutting the quotation as was done is opportunistic. The context clearly matters when the key sentence begins with "I need scarcely add after this that." It's very unlikely that James would insert in half a sentence something about misreadings in the middle of a long dissertation on a different subject, nor would phrase it in such equivocal language. If "trap" were meant there, James would not be so sloppy about stating it. The concern of the entire paragraph is an aesthetic and formal one. It doesn't have anything to do with interpretation. Yet, that's what Felman assumes is obviously intent. To make that kind of assumption is just poor criticism.

Now, if you're basing your reading of the story on Felman's gloss of Preface, then you might be in some trouble. It's my assumption, though, that you had more to say on that point, but were just running out of patience and used Felman as a shortcut to making your point. If that's true, I'd love to hear about what leads readers into a misreading and then clears it up. Like I said above, that's a new interpretation and it's certainly worth exploring.

Oh, and I have more to post about your series of posts, but I'm running out of time tonight. Specifically, I think the nature of evil in this story is another point we might disagree on, so I probably should post something on that.