“Advance a little in the process of a goal:
unlearning the inherent dominant mode.”
~ Edward Said, literary critic and more
After the first reading of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw – a novella framed as a Gothic-Victorian ghost story and/or psychological thriller – this disappointed (desensitized?) reader wanted to fling the text across the room. James employed the devices and linguistic dressage of a ghost story – ghosts, staircases, chills, wind, dark of night, children, and a body of water (Zacharias 291), but all that only gives it a superficial appearance of a ghost story. This reader saw hints of “malignant religiosity” more so than spiritual beings from another dimension. On more than one occasion, James, himself, alluded that things often are not as they appear; ergo, The Turn of the Screw is not entirely what it appears to be. A game was afoot!
Taking up the mantle of the responsible reader, the quest to find out what TTOTS was possibly – truly – about began. As Booth described, this curious reader has been “occupied in the sense of filling our time with the story – its time takes over... And we are occupied in the sense of being taken over, colonized: occupied by a foreign imaginary world” (139). Not identifying with the story, but wanting to identify the story’s roots. An intellectual desire to pierce the veil and solve the mystery of TTOTS became akin to an obsession. “It occupies us in an intense way” (Booth 129). Where does the inspiration for this gnostical puzzle originate?
As Booth also suggested, it is important for all readers (and critical theorists) to remember: Bly and the world of TTOTS are artificial; they are not real. Equally important to remember: It is James’s duty as a writer to make them seem real. This is literary realism. And, given the extent of James’s oeuvre, it is possibly magical realism (liminal realism? spectral realism?). One axiom of creative writing is “write what is known” and James was not a stranger to borrowing plot lines and characters from real life events and people. One example is Isabel Archer; the heroine of The Portrait of a Lady is a caricature of his cousin, Minny Temple (Habegger 477). “A good ghost story… [any good story] must be connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life” (James ix). So, what is the context of the text in comparison to the context of the tri-layered author creating the tri-layered narration of the text? What is the author intending to “teach” the discerning reader?
Stop the Psychoanalytic Madness
P.D. Juhl concluded that a literary work can have “a number of logically incompatible meanings” or interpretations (1423). Any one of which may or may not be what Brook’s refers to as the author’s intention.
Juhl suggests to this reader that literary criticism be more like life itself; it offers a variety of perspectives each with a unique set of beliefs. One is not superior to another; one may be more practical than another in a specific application, but that usefulness does not make any perspective superior, only different. (This sounds a bit like Marcus Aurelius.)
Nota bene: The psychoanalytic approach appears to be the dominant mode of published critical interpretation. A library database supersearch yielded 87 returns for “Turn of the Screw” AND psycho* and, of those, 35 are Freudian. (This number would likely be much larger outside the limiter of the university only and is closer to 1,500 searching the title alone.) By contrast, “Turn of the Screw” AND “reader response” yielded two sources, and “new criticism” returned 53. Queer/Gender as a search term returned 5 and 8 respectively. There is one interesting student-crafted thesis that TTOTS is about the homoeroticism of the Victorian era. It also uses Britten’s operatic adaptation to suggest that Quint is a pedophile and Miles was/is his target. It prompted this author to consider that Quint represents the specter of impending adulthood for Miles as Miss Jessel (Jezebel?) represents for adulthood for Flora. Crossing the threshold from youth to adolescence to young adulthood is complex and complicates life.
“The time has come,” Beider wrote, “for us to try to reorient ourselves away from the assumptions prevalent at the end of the twentieth century and toward the assumptions prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century… to reconstruct the intellectual climate that James and his readers shared” (Zacharias 290). It is past time to stop with the Freudian projections and the hyper-sexualization of children! This reader read more than two dozen of these dominant psychoanalytic theory critiques and, biased by my own training in Adlerian psychology, concluded they were off the mark; in part due to the confusion surrounding the word love. (Returning to the Greek classification system may be a necessary idea; for example, eros and ludus have different aspects.) Contrasting the Freudian perspective, “seduction” can be emotional and or intellectual, even spiritual – to be seduced by an idea or a belief or with uncontested power is closer to what James was working with, not sex. Think: ecstasy of Saint Theresa (transcendence), not Anais Nin (orgasm), and TTOTS changes dimension.
“In love” is a delightfully complex, convoluted, misused, abused, and equivocal term. The critical history suggests that the tradition is to believe the Governess was in love with the master of the manor who hired her. No. It is likely that the Governess was in love with her notions of God, salvation, and charity (as in love thy neighbor) coupled with her desire for authority. She conjures a curious mix of Hawthorne’s Reverend Dimmesdale and Machiavelli’s Prince… absolute power corrupts and corruption is another word for sin.
Conventional Conformity
Beider goes on to attempt to reconstruct context by examining 2,000 ghost narratives and ghost sightings written during the second half of the nineteenth century from the U.S., Britain, Europe, and India (Zacharias 290). Admirable. However, this contextual evidence does not represent the contemporary intellectual climate that James abided (nor viewed himself as occupying); his readers are included, definitely, as the success of TTOTS was a reversal of fortunes for James and a turning point.
Writing was James’s livelihood as well as his craft and calling. Income was necessary and, yes, he wrote in this form because it would sell. And his spectral realism form works; it allows readers to apply their own imaginations to “supply [them] quite sufficiently with all the particulars” (James 8). TTOTS was also the tipping point signaling James’s mature prose style and the beginning of the major works of his canon.
James also alluded in the preface to TTOTS that very few people would understand what he was doing – hiding a deeper story inside a “shameless potboiler” that would sell. “I need scarcely add that [TTOTS] is a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation,” James wrote in a preface to the novella (5). “[A]n amusette to catch those not easily caught (the ‘fun’ of the capture of the merely witless being ever so small), the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious,” he explained (5). “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” (James 5) .
One such person who would understand would be his brother William. Together they created an intellectual climate shared during the span of their lifetimes. Beider failed, in 1989, to produce documentation that Henry was aware of William’s lecture and involvement in the psychical phenomena; ergo, “no certain relationship can be determined” (Zacharias 291). Today, we can verify that James was indeed aware. The Society for Psychical Research originated in London: “Founded in 1882, The SPR was the first society to conduct organised scholarly research into human experiences that challenge contemporary scientific models” (SPR website). William was president of the SPR from 1894-1895 (Luckhurst xix) and helped establish an American psychical laboratory at Harvard (Skrupskelis and Berkeley 297).
However, TTOTS possibly (probably) connects back to a much earlier lecture of William’s: Is Life Worth Living? appeared in the International Journal of Ethics in October 1895 (Skrupskelis and Berkeley 327.)
The Assault of Suggestion and Aposiopesis
Familiarity with TTOTS is assumed. A close reading (or several) shows that all of the details in the story are provided by the Governess as anecdotal evidence of an alleged experience/event. Information framing her background is added by the author-narrator and may be based in part on what information Douglas shared… whose source would be the Governess. All of the details she reports are her own suppositions, assumptions, conclusions, assessments, and inferences. Nothing is verified; the Governess jumps to conclusions, rushes to judgment, and then believes everything she thinks is absolute truth. (This is not critical thinking, but an example of the “simple minds” James described as “easily ensnared” in the preface.)
Another prime example is Peter Quint whose ghost materializes approximately five (quintuple) times in the story. “Peter Quint’s ghost is produced by the ‘holes in discourse’ as the Governess and Mrs. Grose finish each other’s sentences so as to rhetorically construct the ghosts” (Teahan 166). Yet, Quint is necessary to help translate what is most difficult to translate: personal experience (aka phenomenology).
Translation of texts was (and is) standard rigor in classical education and chances are good that Henry James practiced during his Liberal Arts education, first with Latin texts and then French and German. It is also likely that he studied a Roman theoretician named Quintilian.
Quintilian emphasized “the usefulness of paraphrasing a given text as a means… to analyze the structures of a text and to experiment in turn with forms of embellishment or abridgement” (Bassnett 56). Substitute the word text with experience and it seems James found the perfect name and the perfect idiom for Quint and possibly any future ephemeral characters. “Translation is viewed as a skill, inextricably bound up with modes of reading and interpreting the original text [experience], which is proper source material for the writer [Governess narrator] to draw upon as he [she] thinks fit” (Bassnett 58).
What are the Governess’s motives? First, she wants to achieve absolute authority of the manor as bestowed to her by the Master of Bly. Second, quite possibly, she wants to exercise what she believes is her divine providence. (Again, Dimmesdale meets the Prince.)
Nameless – this is perhaps a clue that Henry Jr. shared his father’s view of women as inferior; perhaps it is a clue that she could be anyone known to the reader – the Governess is approximately forty years old when she writes down what she recalls twenty years after it “occurred.” Given the abrupt ending of the tale, she could have recorded a nightmare that seemed real just as easily as a “real” event within the context of the narrative. “I am as sure today as I was sure then,” the Governess prefaces the strength of her convictions (James 85). She could also be a ghost herself.
When he shares the tale fireside, Douglas has held onto the manuscript for forty years since… and then, during the author-narrator’s retelling, it is revealed that Douglas, too, is dead, and the author/narrator admits “that this narrative, from an exact transcript of my own made much later” is what the reader is getting. So, what the reader is getting is a “shadow of a shadow” (James 178). Unreliable narrators abound. Anything in recall is not a transcript nor is it exact. It is a perspective that over time and via reflection and contemplation becomes memoir and speculation. (James also thus suggests the reliability of other texts such as the Bible are not whole but hole-y.)
All we have of Brook’s author-narrator are the clues to be discerned from James’s own notes and his flesh-and-blood life.
Reverberations
Kathleen Lawrence wrote “Call Me Isabel: Reverberations of James’s Archetypal Plots in the Lives of His Readers.” In the essay style criticism, she elaborates on her life as a reader of James’s work. “James’s inventions follow us into the unrecorded moments of our lives… as we ask, ‘How did he know?’ ” (Lawrence 177).
He knew from the context of his own life – details that are often overlooked or ignored or granted a superficial glance in much of the literary theory catalog. Autobiography is excluded from the literary criticism of fictional literature because to include it suggests the genre shape-shifts to memoir. Ironic as literature itself suggests and shows how the events in a character’s life influence what that person does and who that individual becomes. This is one of the reasons we read literature: to learn how to be (and how not to be). Proposal: All writing, regardless of genre, contains an aspect of memoir/autobiography. (See first axiom and Brooks.)
Much of the creation story surrounding TTOTS is evasive, a red herring dangled by James himself. Possibly because the story was too close to his experience… writing it scared him.
Context Is Everything
A close friend to Henry Sr. as well as his personal, homeopathic physician, “Dr. Joseph T. Curtis was a man of many achievements… and he was hounded by voices from the spirit world” (Habegger 310). Henry Sr. would write to Henry Jr. about Curtis as well as others from the community. “These beings, as [Curtis] informed James [the father], belonged to a ‘great society of illuminati’ who guided human history and in every age selected a certain man ‘to be the Lord Christ of the time’ ” (Habegger 310). Curtis, presumably preternaturally, was the one appointed for his generation and the spirit voices would ask him to do things which he “resolutely attempted to carry out, and even told him to kill his own children” (Habegger 310). He was committed to an asylum, twice, in 1848. Over the years, he attempted to control the voices. In 1857, Curtis bought a pistol and silenced the unmanageable voices. Henry Sr. advocated that Curtis was sane for decades after the doctor’s death (Habegger 310).
Henry Sr. heard a different voice: it was the one of his own anxiety and self-doubt. The sins of the father, he feared, could be and would be cast upon the children. Instilled in him was the “appalling conviction that his own innocent children, Willy and Harry, would be drawn into the same extremes of guilt and rigidly compensatory goodness that had disfigured his own life” (Habegger 224). This anxiety along with a witch’s brew of other afflictions – including re-membering the amputation of his leg due to gangrene, Henry Sr. had a breakdown.
In 1859, Henry Sr., a Calvinist turned Swedenborgian, confided in a letter to a friend that “this prospect was so fearful that he beseeched God – ‘on knees from morning until night’ – to take his children before they knew these spiritual agonies [the evils of sin]. Only if the children were sacrificed could the father find relief” (Habegger 224).
These morbid fears make headlines in contemporary society. A Texas woman drowned her five children one by one in the bathtub because, echoing Henry Sr.’s fear, she believed she was not a good mother and the children were "not developing correctly." She'd been having thoughts about hurting them during the past two years. She indicated that she believed God would "take [the children] up" when she killed them. The question was reversed and she was asked what might have happened if she had not taken their lives. "I guess they would have continued stumbling," which meant "they would have gone to hell. They didn't do things God likes" (Ramsland 3).
Another mom, divorced, suicidal, and struggling to care for her autistic son and make financial ends meet, kills her son out of concern for his well-being because of his dependency and attachment to her, and not wanting to leave him alone in a system that was already failing him, then kills herself.
These are often referred to altruistic killings. The act is done with the belief it is for the benefit of others, and it is right and good (i.e., moral). There are several instances of foreshadowing in TTOTS where the Governess expresses her great love for the children. This echoes the Swedenborg idea that if a child dies before he or she knows sin or is corrupted, then the child is accepted into Heaven and instructed there by angels in the ways of the God.
So, picture being youthful Willy and Harry and witnessing and receiving your father’s anxiety and apostolic ferocity. Also envision being adult William and Henry and finding that 1859 letter in their father’s papers two decades later as they manage his estate. (Henry Sr. died December 1882.) Imagine the influence this knowledge and confluence of experience had on the development and writing of TTOTS.
Correspondence
In a letter to his brother William, December 1895, Henry wrote, “Apropos of beautiful things I never yet have thanked you for your splendid paper in the October Ethical Review. I find it a pearl of wisdom & art” (Skrupskelis 327). The paper is William’s “Is Life Worth Living?” and is reprinted in The Will to Believe (1897). In this paper, William addresses the question that he, Henry, and sister Alice often discussed.
Reading William’s work shed some very interesting light on Henry’s TTOTS. Too much to attempt to address or quote here in this context. (See The Will to Believe.)
One biographer of Henry Sr. observed: “This woman, [the Governess,] who seems to be as refined, idealistic, and noble as Henry Sr. believed Dr. Curtis to be, is certain that two sinister [former servants both dead] are in demonic pursuit of the children. The secondary narrator who reads the Governess’s first person account to a group of listeners [Douglas] has been sitting on [the story], someone says, for forty years. This, as it happens, is the interval between Curtis’s suicide in the Fall of 1857 and Henry Jr.’s composition of the story in the Fall of 1897.” (312)
TTOTS is quite possibly an elegy to Father from son; it is possibly an attempt to understand his father’s paradoxes, contradictions, and ambiguities. Or maybe the author did not see what he wrote until it was there on paper and that is what gave him a fright. Henry Jr. struggled to understand his father and his father’s faith (zeal) in Swedenborg’s religious credo. He stated that it was something he could not adopt for himself. So, perhaps TTOTS is a parable of sin and redemption… or perhaps it is a parable of aesthetics – a loving God would not create beauty and purity only to destroy it.
Perhaps, TTOTS is intended as a shared psychical event. A dream or nightmare left to be interpreted by the reader.
Embracing Ambiguity
Regardless of the critical theory chosen, TTOTS created Henry James just as much as Henry James created TTOTS. “No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar [writer] from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his [her] involvement with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of society. These continue to bear on what he [she] does…” (Said, 219). These continue to bear on what he or she writes. TTOTS had deeply personal roots for Henry James, Jr.
At the same time, it is not wholly representative of who he was nor what he believes. “There is not only from beginning to end of the matter not an inch of expatiation [elaboration], but my values are positively all blanks save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness…” (James 9). This fits with Brook’s tri-layered view of the author. James continued, “Of high interest to the author meanwhile – and by the same stroke a theme for the moralist – the artless resentful reaction of the entertained person who has abounded in the sense of the situation. He visits his abundance, morally, on the artist – who has but clung to an ideal of faultlessness” (9).
It may be that TTOTS is indeed about innocence, purity, and beauty as well as who bears responsibility for determining what is morally right or wrong, and it is about perfecting one’s own thinking and craft. And wrought from life about life, TTOTS contains an element of the autobiographical for the author and for its readers.
One moral that James may be attempting to teach is don’t believe everything you think.
Another may be, mind the boundaries. “It is difficult to trace the dividing line between the real and the romantic” (James ix).
A possible third, part of the aesthetic experience (and the fun?) is not knowing.
Works Cited
Bassett, Susan. Translation Studies. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Booth, Wayne C. “Who is Responsible in Ethical Criticism, and for What?” The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. 125-155. Print.
Habegger, Alfred. The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Print.
James, Henry. “Introduction.” Ghost Stories of Henry James. Ed. Martin Scofield. London: Wordsworth Editions, 2001. vii-xxii. Print.
Juhl, P.D. “Does a Literary Work Have One and Only One Correct Interpretation?” The Critical Tradition. Ed. David Richter. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1989. 1411-1423. Print.
Lawrence, Kathleen. "“Call Me Isabel”: Reverberations of James’s Archetypal Plots in the Lives of His Readers." The Henry James Review 33.2 (2012): 177-187. Project MUSE. Web. 12 Dec. 2012. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.
Luckhurst, Roger. ed. “Introduction.” Late Victorian Gothic Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ix-xxi. Kindle ebook.
Ramsland, Katherine. Andrea Yates: Ill or Evil? Crime Library, TruTV, Turner Entertainment Networks, Inc., A Time Warner Company, 2013. Web. Accessed 30 April 2013.
Said, Edward. "Introduction to Orientalism, 1978." The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. Ed. Neil Badmington and Julia Thomas. New York: Routledge, 2008. 213-233. Print.
Skrupskelis, Ignas K., and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, eds. William and Henry James: Selected Letters. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Print.
Society for Psychical Research, 2009. Web. Accessed 30 April 30 2013.
Teahan, Shelia. “The Afterlife of Figures.” Henry James and the Supernatural. Eds. Anna Depotopoulou and Kimberly C. Reed. New York: Palgrave MacMillan/St. Martin’s Press LLC, 2011. 165-182. Print.
Zacharias, Greg W. "Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James: The Turn of the Screw at the Turn of the Century." Henry James Review 12.3 (1991): 290. Publisher Provided Full Text Searching File. Web. 30 April 2013.
Works Consulted
Depotopoulou, Anna, and Kimberly C. Reed, eds. Henry James and the Supernatural. New York: Palgrave MacMillan/St. Martin’s Press LLC, 2011. Print.
James, William. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1896; 1912. Kindle ebook.
Smyth, Julian K., and William Wunsch. The Gist of Swedenborg. New York: Swedenborg Foundation, Inc., 1920. Kindle ebook.