My first reading of James' novella was already tinted by the old question - ghosts? madness? - as I had been made aware of the presence of this ‘crux’. In a way I wish this had not been the case, as it meant that I spent far too much energy on looking for clues to what was ‘really’ going on and not enough on enjoying the story. I cannot even recall being scared, and only very perplexed and bothered by the end. ‘That was it? Actually - what?’ After that I read it again and again, engaged with some of the criticism and wrote a dissertation on it. My own responses developed over the years and perhaps they will never quite settle. Ghosts... Madness..? Both. Neither? Something else?
When it was published, The Turn of the Screw was hailed as a ghost story, indeed as ‘the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read in any literature’ (by a reviewer in the Independent 1899). Whether evil or just very good, the supernatural side was not debated until Edmund Wilson argued that there might be a different explanation to the events; that the governess, as Wilson famously put it, is ‘a neurotic case of sex repression’. Enter the debate that has made James' novella the most hotly contested work of fiction in modern times. After many years of critics attempting to prove that one or the other side was, in fact, the right one, the interest started shifting to the debate itself and to the fact that it is obviously impossible to ‘prove’ at all. Structuralistically informed studies, which showed just how carefully James had crafted his ambiguity, followed until it could be said that yes, the story is entirely ambiguous - we simply cannot know.
James, undoubtedly, giggled in his grave. The intellectual games he liked to play certainly had everyone going.
Accepting that we cannot know whether there are ghosts (ontological status of ghosts, anyone?) or whether our unreliable narrator is delusional (or plain evil and lying?) or whether in fact Mrs Grose is the villain of the piece (argued in all serious tongue in cheek by one critic), we are still holding in our hands a story which moves and engages and wants to tell us something. I am inclined to leave the, as it were, ontological status of the ghosts aside. This is a story of haunting, it is a story about a woman who sees ghosts - and whether they are ‘actually’ there or is somehow beside the point. My reading of the story below could no doubt be challenged, as every reading of 'The Turn of the Screw' invariably is.
If we feel the need to employ one or the other stances the story becomes either a tale of a young woman battling against evil spirits, and ultimately unable to save one of her charges from death - or a tale of a madwoman who herself is the scariest spirit in the house, directly or indirectly responsible for the death of Miles. It is interesting to note that the prologue reveals that whichever ‘actually’ is the case, the young woman continued to work as a governess after the events at Bly. The death of Miles is a pivotal point for the story, no less because it happens in the final sentence of the novella. Up until that point the presences of the ghosts are scary, but essentially harmless. When Miles dies, however, we really need to start asking what killed him. Did Quint take his spirit? Did he die of shock? Did his governess kill him? To whom - Quint or the governess - are the famous words directed?
An interesting, and for me the best possible, interpretation was suggested by Ben Bolts subtly wonderful adaptation of the story (TV-production, 1999). The pivotal moment of Peter Quints final appearance is cleverly filmed in such a way that we do no know whether Miles can actually see him or not (he is spinning around and being shaken by the governess) and the famous line ‘Peter Quint – you devil!’ is pronounced with just enough of a pause in the middle that the emphasis is lost, and with it the clue to whom Miles is addressing, Quint or the governess. When Miles has said Peter Quints name the governess hugs him in relief and in the apparent belief that this has ‘exorcised’ the evil spirit. In her frantic relief, however, she hugs him too hard, and too long. There is the faintest little crack on the soundtrack which suggests that Miles’ neck is broken by the embrace and he dies as Quint fades out. The final two sentences of the story actually supports this reading: ‘I caught him, yes, I held him – it may be imagined with what 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.’ (my emphases).
The film suggests that there is no ambiguity in the cause of Miles’ death, he is quite simply choked by a passionate embrace lasting a good minute, nor is there any ambiguity about the governesses motives: it was an accident. The interesting point to be made is that this reading supports both sides equally in that it effectively declines to ‘pick a side’: the governess accidentally kills Miles because she sees a ghost. Whether the ghost actually ‘existed’ in ontological terms is entirely irrelevant. ‘The Turn of the Screw’, in this kind of reading, is a story about the tragic effects of being haunted, about letting one’s ghosts (quite literally) rule one’s life.
So what are the ghosts there for then? In my first reading, so affected by too much information, the ghosts had little power to frighten me. I do, however, remember being rather disturbed by the behaviour of the children, especially Miles. The eeriness of Miles’ ‘grown-up’ behaviour, his way of speaking and the mystery of what had happened at his school seemed scarier than ghosts appearing on the stairs. What on earth was going on there? The governess also focuses on Miles as the key to the mystery, but is unable to get a clear picture. Are the children, then, merely mysterious to their governess because she herself is crazy and unable to understand them? Or are they possessed?
In the prologue, which is quite important for the ambiguity of the piece, the interest for the story about to be told is focused around the fact that the ‘visitations’ have fallen upon children. It is this which gives the story it's ‘turn of the screw’. The prologue displaces the story within a complex web of narrators, while also providing key information of its frame. A first-person narrator tells of the evening when a guest at his house, Douglas, reads a document written some time after the events it narrates and 20 years previous to its reading. This document is then given to the first-person narrator, which he transcribes, prefaces with the prologue narrative and publishes to form the text which we are reading. The circumstances surrounding the story, as well as comments made about the character of the governess, all come from Douglas, who, it transpires, got them from her. The fact that he appears to have been in love with her puts his character judgment in question. Even before the story proper commences, we are presented with a narrative complexity which points to the unreliability of narrators invested in their own tales. It also tells us that the horror of it pertains to the children.
The governess, who is the only one - for all we know - who sees the ghosts, is obsessed with proving that the children not only also see them, but are influenced by them. Trying to make Miles and Flora confess that this is the case increasingly appears to her to be the only way to exorcise the evil spirits. As has been pointed out by many critics, there is little logic proving that this would be the case - showing that the governess, regardless of motive, operates from ideas which are her own and not always supported by fact. However, the question of influence does seem to be the crux here. The ‘spirits’ (in more senses than one) of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel linger over Bly. In every word and act the children display the influence exercised over them by the ‘corrupted’ pair while they were still alive. The fact that Miles has been dismissed from his school for ‘saying things’ does, of course, mean that he has learnt to say bad things, or had bad experiences to tell of, somewhere.
In this sense, ‘The Turn of the Screw’ is a tale of corrupted childhood a tale which dramatises the lingering of the ‘spirits’ by allowing them to become menacing presences. It is a tale of salvation, of a young woman trying to 'save' the children and giving them an education, but she is haunted by the evil and ultimately lets it control the situation. It is in this sense that she fails, and her failure has dire consequences. To our horror we do not know why she fails or indeed the nature of the evil which she faces; indeed, here lies the power of the tale.
Henry James, in his preface to the story, lamented the loss of the effective ghost story amid new types of ‘psychical cases’ which had been ‘washed clean’ of the supernatural and stated as his project to mystify and frighten. In a famous line he speaks of his novella as ‘a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation, an amusette to catch those not easily caught’, a statement which, along with the rest of the preface has only fuelled the ‘ghost or madness’-debate. It is, however, also a statement within his main argument: that by placing the events of the story within a web of subjective experience, with ghosts seemingly, but not conclusively, invested with agency the evil is only ever inferred. By the characters within the story, but more importantly by the reader of it. ‘Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications’, says James, and the debate about its ‘actual’ meaning is evidence of just how capable of inspiring reader involvement this novella is.
The supernatural, the gothic, the fantastic in general is often used to deal with the ‘darker’ aspects of human nature and our experience of it. Describing fear, as well as inducing it in the reader, allows for a representation of repressed horrors which perhaps would have been ‘weaker’, as James puts it, if specified within a framework of psychological realism. What did Quint and Miss Jessel do to the children? What did they see? We have to fill in the blanks, taking our cue from a petrified and disturbed narrator, unable to deal with the effects of acts which haunt Bly.
What actually happened? Well, what do you think happened?
1 comment:
Terrific. Very well written.
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