Garry Gillard > writing > lectures > 229 > 12
H229 Narrative Fiction 1
Lecture 12 1995
As I said last week, in these last two lectures on texts I intend to present interpretations rather than theory, flying in the face of Susan Sontag. In fact what I shall do this week is read today's text, The Turn of the Screw, as a realist novel. What I should be doing, of course, in this unit, is to show how Todorov's theory of the fantastic works in relation to this text, but I think you can do that for yourselves, as I'm sure you've read both Todorov and James without any difficulty in either case—so, here we go! I begin with a crucial quotation from the novel.
'Peter Quint—you devil! … Where?'
In this lecture I'll offer a number of different interpretations—or rather a number of different readings—of The Turn of the Screw, some of which may to some extent contradict one another. In coming to this particular text, I see from the outset two main lines of approach I could adopt. One is suggested by the placing of the reading from Todorov's book on the fantastic in the course Reader, and the references to it in the 'lecture' on this text; the other is suggested by the existence of this text in the particular intertextual field created by the very existence of the course, and by this particular selection of texts. With regard to the first course of action, I shall almost completely disregard Todorov's theory of the fantastic. I think it is an illuminating description of the phenomenon, and I commend it to your interest, and it is dealt with to some extent, as I say, in the 'lecture' printed in the Study Guide. But I am compelled by the force of history acting on me, the history of teaching and learning in this course, and the history of my research trajectory, to take a particular line on the questions of the 'marvellous', the 'fantastic' and the 'uncanny,' and to a large extent to set aside those notions. We can take them up on another occasion. For this particular reader, the 'indecision' that Todorov and the 'lecture' refer to is not a matter for reception theory at all, but rather a structural matter, arising from the narrative situation created by the 'tale.'
The Turn of the Screw—in my first reading—is not a ghost story but a story about power and its abuse. It is a parable, by inversion, about the inscription of the individual as mad within a system that is inconvenienced in some way by her or him. I say 'by inversion' because in fact in this case it is the mad person who is screwing the sane, rather than the other way round. And I think it is this inversion which constitutes the ambiguity of the piece, rather than some question of fact. We are so convinced by notions of the trustworthiness of respectable bourgeois in our society that we tend not to doubt the judgement of governesses, social workers, psychologists, men, and lecturers, at least not in comparison with that of children, prisoners, prospective mental 'patients,' women, and students—the least reliable of all those in this list. Let me put in this way, so that I can invoke the name of the patron saint of West Murdoch: Saint Michel (Foucault): this is a story about the power of discourse: the power of the discourse of the narrator, which tends to have an effect of disempowerment on the other characters and even on the sceptical reader.
The point of the story is to be found in the point of view: it is always that of the governess. She is clearly screwy, but in a position of almost absolute power, including that of the angle of vision (which is the power that James gives her in the adoption of this narrative strategy), and she bends everyone else to her will: Mrs Grose (half) believes in the visitations, Flora has to leave her home, and Miles dies. She says that if Miles confesses he will be 'saved,' but this turns out to mean that when he gives in to her will in saying what she wants to hear (as a 'tribute to her devotion', 261) he is so overmastered by her that he dies—and only in that sense is saved—from her. So the narrative point, the screw that is turned, has to do with another meaning of the phrase: the screw that is turned by the governess on the other characters, with the results I've mentioned.
Let us look at some examples of how this works—how there are usually two possible interpretations of events at any given moment in the narrative—and how we are led to trust that of the narrator, the governess. If we do not at least tend in that direction, there is no point to the story: not only do the visitants cease to exist, but the genre changes: there is no longer a ghost story but only a case history of a paranoid schizophrenic, of a person placed in a position of complete trust and absolute power who turns out to be completely untrustworthy and quite mad. But of course, at least on the first reading, we all agree that The Turn of the Screw is a ghost story, don't we? And that, I want to show you, is because of James's brilliant manipulation of the narrative situation and the angle of vision, or the nature of the 'focalization,' as Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan prefers to call it. James himself writes, and I believe he is thinking mainly of 'focalization,' that '[t]he thing was to aim at absolute singleness, clearness and roundness …' And I see the 'absolute singleness, clearness and roundness' as being that of the angle of vision, the point of view, the 'focalization' of the 'supposititious narrator.' Let us look, as I say, at some examples.
I would be interested to see how The Turn of the Screw worked as a play. If you look at any of James's dialogue you typically find the lines interspersed with a good deal of authorial commentary which qualifies, equivocates, dissembles, and generally confuses the issue—with the utmost precision. Stripped of this authoriality—as it would be in a stage play—the dialogue would work quite differently indeed. This is particularly noticeable in the case of dialogue between the governess and Mrs Grose, and I think it is precisely the uncertainty (created by this commentary technique) as to whether Mrs Grose believes what the governess tells her—this uncertainty that is the source of the 'uncertainty' which Todorov finds to be the origin of the fantastic.
I take my first example from the second chapter, page 159 in the Penguin edition which includes The Aspern Papers. It is an example of astonishing triviality, and yet I think it is the beginning of the setting of the 'tone' that is so important to James, 'the tone,' he writes, 'of suspected and felt trouble, of an inordinate and incalculable sort—the tone of tragic, yet of exquisite, mystification.' The governess is speaking about the Master.
'He seems to like us young and pretty!'
Oh he did,' Mrs Grose assented: 'it was the way he liked every one!' She had no sooner spoken indeed than she caught herself up. 'I mean that's his way—the master's.'
I was struck. 'But of whom did you speak first?'
She looked blank, but she coloured. 'Why of him.'
'Of the master?'
'Of whom else?'
There was so obviously no one else that the next moment I had lost my impression of her having accidentally said more than she meant …'
Reading this passage on this occasion I found myself putting 'red herring' in as a margin note, referring to the 'authorial' comment: 'She had no sooner spoken indeed than she caught herself up.' It is this comment that introduces an element of uncertainty into the moment, rather than anything Mrs Grose says as such. There is a deliberate suggestion—but which remains only a suggestion—that Mrs Grose is concealing something. If we read the dialogue again without the comment this suggestion tends to disappear.
'He seems to like us young and pretty!'
Oh he did, it was the way he liked every one! … I mean that's his way—the master's.'
'But of whom did you speak first?'
'Why of him.'
'Of the master?'
'Of whom else?'
Notice that Mrs Grose has changed her tense between one statement and the next, which I suggest is sufficient grounds in itself alone for the restatement. She could then be seen as avoiding the implication that the master is dead in some sense, as opposed to being just temporarily absent. A second justification for the rephrasing could be that she wants to soften any judgement that might be called down upon the master for his liking 'them' 'young and pretty.' If it's just his way, then there must be an inclination to forgive him. (Though you probably do need to take away the emphasis that the original text indicates on the word 'his.' However, I see this emphasis as the kind of trick which James sees himself as being allowed to play within the bounds of the convention in which he's writing: the ghost story. There are other much grosser tricks—especially the governess's knowing exactly what Peter Quint and Miss Jessel looked like and wore.) We are explicitly told, in the sentence that I left out on the second reading, that Mrs Grose barely hesitated: 'She had no sooner spoken indeed than she caught herself up.' And yet paradoxically the sentence that the narrator 'speaks' to tell us that there was no hesitation itself causes one. And into the lacuna which the hesitation creates, the narrative—having at the outset established itself as a ghost story—the narrative slips in an element of suspense, a suggestion that there is an Other, who or which will appear in the story, and who or which likes 'them' 'young and pretty'.
So what I'm saying—to try to be as clear as I can—is that there are two sets of meanings running alongside of one another through almost all of this narrative: that of the governess and that of everyone else—usually represented by Mrs Grose, but also by Miles and Flora, to a lesser extent.
Let us now examine, in Chapter 21, the exchange between the governess and Mrs Grose about Flora. This comes immediately after the scene in Chapter 20 by the pond in which both Mrs Grose and Flora have made it quite clear to the governess that she is bonkers. Mrs Grose has told Flora in no uncertain terms.
'She isn't there, little lady, and nobody's there—and you never see nothing, my sweet! How can poor Miss Jessel—when poor Miss Jessel's dead and buried? We know, don't we, love?' … 'It's all a mere mistake and a worry and a joke—and we'll go home as fast as we can!'
And Flora has in her turn told the governess in no less uncertain terms.
'I don't know what you mean. I see nobody. I see nothing. I never have. I think you're cruel. I don't like you!'
And she asks Mrs Grose to get her away.
'Take me away, take me away—oh take me away from her!'
Of course the narrator can supply the fantastic explanation: 'The wretched child had spoken exactly as if she had got from some outside source each of her stabbing little words …' But this is an involved, first-person narrator, and, I suggest, an unreliable one. And of course on that judgement—of her unreliability—hangs the whole 'tone,' as James would say. Without this narratorial gloss, the facts are plain: only the governess can 'see' the visitants.
In the following scene, in Chapter 21, the governess and Mrs Grose are discussing Flora's attitude to the former. She, the governess, believes that Flora's hate of her is caused directly by her 'friends,' Miss Jessel and Quint. And as she is doing most of the talking, it is difficult to separate Mrs Grose's opinion as potentially at odds with hers, particularly as she puts the usual glosses on everything the others say or appear to think. But I want you particularly to attend to Mrs Grose's lines, and hear what they are plainly saying, even though the governess herself cannot hear or anyway believe.
'She persists in denying to you that she saw or has ever seen, anything?'
My visitor's trouble truly was great. 'Ah Miss, it isn't a matter on which I can push her! Yet it isn't either, I must say, as if I much needed to. It has made her, every inch of her, quite old.'
'Oh, I see her perfectly from here. She resents, for all the world like some high little personage, the imputation on her truthfulness and, as it were her respectability. "Miss Jessel indeed—she!" Ah she's "respectable," the chit! The impression she gave me there yesterday was, I assure you, the very strangest of all: it was quite beyond any of the others. I did put my foot in it! She'll never speak to me again.'
Hideous and obscure as it all was, it held Mrs Grose briefly silent; then she granted my point with a frankness which, I made sure, had more behind it. 'It think indeed, Miss, she never will. She do have a grand manner about it!'
'And that manner'—I summed it up—'is practically what's the matter with her now.'
Oh that manner, I could see in my visitor's face, and not a little else besides! 'She asks me every three minutes if I think you're coming in.'
'I see—I see.' I too, on my side had so much more than worked it out 'Has she said to you since yesterday—except to repudiate her familiarity with anything so dreadful—a single other word about Miss Jessel?'
'Not one, Miss. And of course, you know,' my friend added, 'I took it from her by the lake that just then and there at least there was nobody.'
'Rather! And naturally you take it from her still.'
'I don't contradict her. What else can I do?'
'Nothing in the world! You've the cleverest little person to deal with. They've made them—their two friends, I mean—still cleverer even than nature did; for it was wondrous material to play on! …' (243-244)
If we take Mrs Grose's words separately we see that she is simply telling the governess that Flora will never speak to her again, and that she is constantly on her guard against her coming into her room—being aware of how dangerous she might be. Not only that, but Mrs Grose tells her again that both she and Flora do not believe in the existence of the visitations of Miss Jessel. But the governess is able to take all this in her stride of course as she has her paranormal explanation: Flora is possessed and Mrs Grose is persuaded.
But the most striking parallelism of the series, and the one that has attracted the most comment, is of course Miles's last moment when he finally utters the words the governess wants to hear: the name of Peter Quint. By this time I see James as allowing himself to show the gap getting wider and wider: the gap, that is, between the obvious facts of what is being transacted between the characters on the one hand and the narrator's gloss on those transactions on the other. James is quite happy to make it perfectly clear that Miles cannot possibly be addressing the words 'you devil' to the apparition of Peter Quint, as he is facing away from the window. This is made explicit not only on his next and last word: 'Where?' but also in the following paragraph, in which he is said to 'jerk around' to face the window. There is therefore no doubt that the besieged and oppressed child has not only decided that his governess—the person on whom he must depend for support, protection and succour—is a devil, but is also prepared to call her so to her face: a death-defying action. I say that James is allowing the disparity between what is explicit and what is merely suggested to become egregious by this time, because I believe that he thought that the set of ghost story conventions was carrying the illusion of the supernatural along quite effectively by now and he could afford to be what I see as quite reckless, carrying the apparatus of narrative nearer and nearer to the edge of failure and daring his readers to disbelieve in the paranormal explanation. They prefer not to, as I said near the beginning, because if they do the tale disappears along with the genre—and the jouissance—the pleasure—along with them. This risk-taking of James's is, I believe, the kind of thing he is referring to in general terms in the Preface, in passages where, for example, he says things like this: 'To what degree the game was worth playing I needn't attempt to say: the exercise I have noted strikes me now, I confess, as the interesting thing, the imaginative faculty acting with the whole of the case on its hands.' What amazes me is that people's willing suspension of commonsense is so powerful that they insist on the ambiguity of the passage I'm referring to, despite indications about as subtle as something in a Road Runner scenario. We find our Introducer on this occasion, for example, one Anthony Curtis, telling us that 'The two interpretations clash head-on at this point. Either reading is possible and we shall never know for sure what James intended.' And then he goes on to talk as if the possession reading had prevailed! 'The exorcism is at last achieved …' and so on. Of course we know for sure what James intended: he wanted the two interpretations to clash head-on at this point. Different readings, however, don't clash, they diverge, differ, defer.
An ambiguity which still remains for me, however, lies in the referent of 'the beast' in that paragraph. 'I have you,' I launched at the beast, 'but he has lost you for ever!' The governess is clearly addressing Miles here, so why does she seem to call him a 'beast?' You've probably noticed other references to a beast: page 163, for example, where we find the sentence, 'The change was actually like the spring of a beast.'—referring to the change the governess perceives in the children from innocence to experience. And there is a James story called 'The beast in the jungle.' This is a kind of ambiguity which does not permit of a structural explication, and we must look elsewhere to understand what might be going on between the governess and those in her care.
A psychoanalytical interpretation might see the illusions of the apparitions of the figures of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel as being projections, screens, covers for the governess's own desire for the children, 'children perpetually bowed down over and hugged'; 'wondrous material to play on.' Alternatively they might represent her fears in relation to her own inadequacies, possibly in the areas of sexuality (with regard to Peter Quint) and professional competence (with regard to Miss Jessel, whom she sees sitting in her chair in the schoolroom in her third appearance, in Chapter 15). We know that the governess is young and inexperienced, from a large family, and the daughter of a poor clergyman. At one point she expresses her feeling that she is not competent to look after these clever children—in an expression that could be read in a number of ways: [Miles, she says,] 'was too clever for a bad governess, for a parson's daughter, to spoil.'
She is also obsessed by her infatuation for The Master. When Flora rejects her, her main fear is that she will report back to him: 'she'll make me out to him the lowest creature—!' she says to Mrs Grose (244). So this is a third fear driving her to distraction—the fear of the powerful Father who distances himself while at the same time demanding complete loyalty and obedience.
In a reading of a different kind, in which we might read The Turn of the Screw (1898) together with and in the light of What Maisie Knew (1897), and, taking the minds of the children as the ultimate point of reference, we might see the projections of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel as representing two types of the adult, which, from the viewpoint of the children, is simultaneously to be feared in the present—as bringers of oppression of whatever kind, and in the future—as the people the children might perhaps become. These adult projections, then, although they do not proceed in the diegesis from the minds of the children, might still in a more abstract reading, represent the fears of the responsibilities and powers of adulthood.
This biographical reading, as it were, was suggested to me by the remarks made by Paul Theroux, in his Introduction to What Maisie Knew, in which he refers to what he calls James's 'innocent-child phase.' This period, 1896‑1899, Theroux tells us 'was the period of The Turn of the Screw (1898), with its pair of terrified tots. There were blameless kiddies' [he goes on] 'in The Other House (1896), and one each in 'The pupil' (1890) and 'In the cage' (1898), and the anxious virgins of An Awkward Age (1899).' He also suggests that this was a 'harrowing time' in James's career, and quotes his biographer, Leon Edel, as seeing a great of deal of Henry James in Maisie: 'Maisie's bewilderment and isolation is [sic] James's … but the world's cruelty and hostility are recreated into a comic vision of benign childish curiosity.' In The Turn of the Screw, the children Flora and Miles are equally in a situation of bewilderment and isolation, but the vision on this occasion is not a comic one but one of Gothic horror. We tend to miss this awareness of their situation, however, if we read The Turn of the Screw in isolation, because of the power of the first-person narrative situation. We are not used to encountering what Wayne C. Booth calls 'unreliable' first-person narrators, tending always to trust the figure who is telling us the story. And what we encounter here is something for which I want to find some special term, to cover such situations as when, for example, it is the narrator of the story who turns out to be the murderer, as in one of Agatha Christie's stories, or when the very taciturnity, the understatement, of the narrator leads to an misinterpretation of him as uncaring, when he is in fact a deeply feeling human being, as in The Outsider, by Albert Camus. In the meantime, I guess referring to these situations as 'unreliable first-person narrators' will have to do.
In yet another interpretation it is possible to put the emphasis more on the relationship between the governess and the absent Master, and on the letter which she fails to send to him. In his Preface to The Turn of the Screw, James calls this an 'irresponsible' fiction; and, from a feminist point of view, it is. What it does to the governess is not unlike what Freud does to 'Dora' in his story about her, and which he was writing four years after James wrote his. In Freud's tale, Dora is in love with an older man, a man of her father's generation, in fact a friend of the family: he's called Mr K. And Dora's father is having what these days we call a 'relationship' with Mrs K. (He was having a turn of the screw, too.) Now one day Mr K presses his attention on Dora, quite understandably, as she is an attractive young woman of fourteen years of age. He 'suddenly clasped the girl to him and pressed a kiss upon her lips.' And Freud tells us that 'This was surely just the situation to call up a distinct feeling of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen who had never before been approached.' But to Freud's surprise, Dora resists Mr K's advances and seems even repelled—and yet Freud tells us that Mr K is an attractive man! Dora is obviously in some inward conflict, and it drives her mad: she becomes 'hysterical,' develops a 'nervous cough,' and her good father brings her to the Good Doctor Freud for adjustment. Freud is trying to convince Dora of the sexual nature of her problem, and getting close to a cure, when suddenly she breaks off the treatment, refusing to accept Freud's description of the problem.
And in The Turn of the Screw, the Good Doctor James tells us about the problem being experienced by the governess. She is also in love with an older man, and is also unable to express her love for him. Unlike Mr K, he does not press himself on the young woman, but on the contrary absents himself, makes himself absolutely unavailable. So she goes mad and starts seeing things that aren't there. And what she sees in her fantasies are images of inappropriate sexual desire: fantasies of what I called in an earlier lecture in this course 'structural incest.' The images of the previous governess and valet—who desire to get possession of the beautiful young children for their explicitly evil purposes—are metaphors for the governess's own displaced desire. Turned back from its more natural object, The Master, by her inability to express it (her letter is never sent), her desire becomes attached to the children. And by virtue of that complicated process that Freud calls 'overdetermination,' it takes the form of projections of perverted desire, directed at the children, but not manifestly emanating from the governess, but only revealed latently so to be, after a process of psycho-analysis. Dr James shows us in his case study how the governess's desire is displaced from its natural and appropriate and socially sanctioned object and condensed into a scenario of evil possession. But it is the governess who is possessed, not the children. Although, at the end, Dr James show us the extent to which misdirected desire can reach. Such is the force of the governess's desire to prove her connexion with the one of the children who still remains within her force field that, unleashed in close proximity, it overwhelms and kills him. She asks the boy to confess, but really, we analysts know, it is she who is confessing, by her actions, the profundity of the desire which drives her.
I must insert an interpolation here about 'evil.' I said just now that Miss Jessel and Peter Quint 'desire to get possession of the beautiful young children for their explicitly evil purposes.' And I'm afraid that I spelt out what I see those evil purposes as being: the satisfaction of inappropriate, because incestuous, sexual desire. Some of you may be almost as horrified as James himself would have been at this suggestion. He, as you know, goes to some pains in his Preface to tell us how he went to some pains in the story itself specifically not to specify what the nature of the evil is, the point being that if you leave it to the readers to supply 'their own evil,' according to their own desires, the emotional impact will be that much more effective. And I think he's right. My defence is of course that I am engaged in delineating merely one possible reading, supplying one possible kind of evil, not in the service of saying what the text 'really means,' but in making it do some work for us as readers, now.
Now I don't know what James meant by calling The Turn of the Screw 'an "irresponsible" fiction,' but what I mean by it, 'reading as a woman,' is this: he gives his central character no options. She is deprived by the narrative of any way of expressing her desire, which is not only sexual but also a desire for autonomy and some access to a degree of power. She is explicitly barred from any contact with the man with whom she is in love, or perhaps I should say more conditionally, the man with whom she would be in love if it were permitted. She is deprived of information, especially about the nature of Miles's drives, which have caused him to be expelled from the company of his peers, which he therefore desires. And she has inadequate information about the situation into which she has come and of which she is supposed to be in control. And the narrative makes it clear that she is incapable in fact of being in control. 'Well, I was strangely at the helm!' she writes. Whenever anything serious crops up, it is immediately a question of contacting the Master, sending for him, writing to him, sending Flora to him. The narrative never contemplates that the governess could take charge of the situation: it is consistently suggested that it is not reasonable of the Master to put her in charge without access to him to deal with all the difficult issues.
The relationship between the two women, which might seem superficially to be loving and supportive, you must remember is always seen only from the angle of vision of the governess. If you look a little deeper and consider how crazy the governess is, you begin to see that what appears to be affectionate support on the part of Mrs Grose is actually simply participation in a folie à deux, the technical term for a shared madness in which two people reinforce each other's craziness. Mrs Grose never sees what the governess is always raving on about, and yet she does not have enough force of character to deny this explicitly, but tends to equivocate, sometimes making remarks which can be taken either way, sometimes giving explicit support, and only rarely daring to suggest that the children are 'right' and the governess 'wrong.' They are merely weak women together, one so weak as to herself to go mad, the other too weak to help her get free from her delusions. So it is in this specific sense that I am saying, with Henry James, that this is an 'irresponsible' fiction: in its inadequate, prejudiced, chauvinist view of women and their place in the House of Fiction.
I should point out that this kind of criticism does not require its object—the story, in this case—to be otherwise than it is. James himself deals with this kind of criticism in his Preface, the kind that suggests that the author 'hadn't endowed her with signs and marks, features and humours, hadn'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.' In a way, he specifically contradicts what I have just put to the story, in saying that woman is disempowered, when he writes: 'She has "authority," which is a good deal to have given her, and I couldn't have arrived at so much had I clumsily tried for more.' No, what this kind of criticism tries to do, I take it, is to put a text to work in a way which is at odds from its original reasons for coming to exist, to put into a political context of another kind and see how it survives there. Such a use of Freud's Dora, I suggest, has been enormously re-empowering for women, because of the shock which inevitably ensues from a feminist reading of the story. Such a reaction to such a reading is capable of changing lives (as the blurb on the cover of The Women's Room says, if I remember correctly). What this kind of reading endeavours to do is to place the text in the futurity of the intertextual field, to make it part of the continuing debate about the causes and effects of reading and writing.
In the context of an intertextual reading of The Turn of the Screw we must of course be struck by the similarity of the origins of this story and another one also concerned with a monster—and I refer of course to Frankenstein—because the governess is clearly the main monster in the present fiction. In rather the same way that Frankenstein's Monster is a projection from his creator's mind—as Victor Frankenstein is in turn from Mary Shelley's, so are Peter Quint and Miss Jessel the monstrous products of this mad creator: the governess, who is in her turn the creature of Henry James. And both stories, their authors tell us in their respective prefaces, have their origins in friendly evenings filled with Gemütlichkeit and ghosts. Each of them stems from a desire to shock, to scare—and also to outdo, to master, to show a superiority to the ability of others to do these things. From their very inception both are imbricated in a relationship of power—the power of the imagination over the imaginer, the power to produce the 'dear old sacred terror' which only 'the good, the really effective and heart-shaking ghost-stories' are capable of producing. And the imagined world that will produce such 'heart-shaking' are those which succeed in creating the illusion of an alternative reality: 'an annexed but independent world in which nothing is right save as we rightly imagine it.' (Preface)
I leave you with this last, delicious question. You know what I mean by the 'frame narrator,' don't you—the one who sets up the story in the introduction, before the governess begins her account, a man whose surname is Douglas? Well, if the governess who tells the story which ends with the death of Miles was, as he tells us, the governess of the frame narrator's sister, then who, one wonders, is the frame narrator, Douglas? Is he perhaps the undead Miles?
Garry Gillard | New: 16 January, 2018 | Now: 20 December, 2018