The governess realizes Miles is dead becomes frantic with grief (Turn of the Screw by Sandy Welch, 2009)
Dear friends and readers,
I feel I’ve had a full Henry James double season. First this summer, Roderick Hudson, then the biography of James by Fred Kaplan, and now as part of the course “exploring the gothic” I’m teaching and my study of the gothic for a paper on Northanger Abbey, I’ve slowly read James’s “The Turn of the Screw” and would to suggest an uncommon but recently endorsed view: the governess is neither simply a victim, utterly passive, nor pathological liar.
It’s convenient to begin with the older view of Oscar Cargill: he opens with rejecting documentary evidence of three different kinds. As a scholar of earlier periods, this is prima facie suspicious. I do not question documentary evidence unless I have evidence to show it’s made up. So for example, the argument that James made up the archbishop, lied in his story in the notebooks is unacceptable unless Cargill has evidence to show this. His rejection of James’s preface is wrong on the same grounds. He is calling James a liar in effect. I found four places in the story where Mrs Grose acknowledges the governess has seen the ghosts because the governess knows details about their appearance she couldn’t any other way and several where she says she believes the governess is seeing ghosts.
The argument the governess is a pathological liar won’t do also for the reasons Wayne Booth outlined in his classic The Rhetoric of Fiction in the 1950s. We can only go so far with unreliability; we can have an unreliable narrator whose judgment is misguided but if we begin to say the very narrator is a liar from the get-go we can believe nothing we read. We would have to reject the basis of most stories written since the popularity of unreliable narrators began (later 19th century). The opening gambit on Xmas eve has the narrator, Douglas, go out of his way to say the governess was the most aimable well-educated governess he ever met, that he liked her very much (almost loved her).
The arguments that dismiss the external documentary evidence provided by James remind me of the arguments which call Mary Shelley a liar and say she made her notebook entries up so Frankenstein is written by Percy Bysshe.
Also that what allows these readings of the tale castigating the young woman is that the other three chief character do not unambiguously admit to seeing the ghosts. As a reader of ghost stories, I know this is commonplace. Often the ghost only shows him or herself or themselves to one person, the one the ghost is harassing. This is true of Susan Hill’s Woman in Black which we recently read in my classes (a classic novella ghost story). It’s part of driving the central character mad and isolating him or her.
Quint and Miss Jessel (2009 TOTS)
That the governess misjudged and overreacts is true — she is another in the long line of unreliable narrators: Like Winterbourne in Daisy Miller, like Rowland Mallett, she is overreacts with conventional morality and, meaning to do some good, she makes things much worse. In her case though her situation against these sinister ghosts with no help from her employer is very bad.
My argument is that James is showing us how hard it is for us to deal with what we term unspeakable (Eve Sedgwick’s term) and unconventional sex. We deal with it very badly and make things worse — as we deal with mean teasing, money problems and class. On one level, everyone in the story, all the adults, cause Miles’s death. The uncle first of all. He wants to know nothing, will not even read the headmaster’s letter, left his valet, Quint, in charge of the house.
The plausible too busy man, who wants to know nothing, be told nothing, not be bothered (2009 TOTS)
He doesn’t care what happens to Miles. We have hints from Mrs Grose that Quint and the master were in the house together and shared clothes so probably the master has sex with Quint. Quint had sex with Miss Jessel and probably got her pregnant. He was “free” with everyone says Mrs Grose — so the other servants. That he was found dead on the road coming back from the pub shows he had enemies in the pub too. A roughhouse type, nasty, a Stanley Kowalski so-to-speak (the nightmare of the sensitive homosexual male).
Mrs Grose sometimes admits that she thinks Quint molested Miles but in front of the children she always draws back. She also does not want to get involved.
Sue Johnson as frightened Mrs Grose; sometimes she is sinister and complicit in this movie too (2009 TOTS)
Again and again she won’t admit she sees anything in order to turn away (this is the way the role is played in the 2009 film). So she is like her employer. No wonder he keeps her on.
Mrs Grose tells the story of Miles going off with Quint to the governess when the letter comes. We are to understand the school was a place of bullying, fag system, and Miles was part of this. The governess’s first response to say and do and ask nothing is not a good one, but she was told by her employer not to bother him and she has no rank to write the headmaster.
Miss Jessel was also to blame as when confronted by Mrs Grose on how Quint was with the boy, Miss Jessel said “mind your business.
The governess kills the boy too because she over-rreacts and hates homosexual sex and also child-abuse but because the children tease her and seem complicit, she sees them as allowing it and so regards them as evil too.
Flora
This is what happens by the way in the stories about priests’s molesting boys: it does not come out because parents fear their boys will be blamed.
One level of the story is this shows how “I am not my brother’s keeper” leads to evil
But another is, what can we do? Once Miles is molested, what can we do? to transgress on his psyche and insist he tell, confess, be abject is wrong the story tells us. It’s wrong to bully the boy this way and it doesn’t help. Here that James was himself a young boy with homosexual orientation suggests he identifies with Miles — and indicts society for the way it treats such a boy — and encourages him too (as a rich boy).
Miles
James also engages or identifies with the governess. It’s not until about half-way through the story that the governess seems to change from simply protecting the children. It’s an old motif of ghost stories the ghost wants to take the child away. About p 79 or Chapter 10-11 in my book she begins to want power. She begins to gloat over knowing more; she seems to want to penetrate (that’s the word) not just Mrs Grose but both children and she herself wants to possess Miles. She becomes an instrument of the evil infecting the house. She knows she would be called “mad.”
It’s around this time the letter business happens. Miles does want to contact his uncle. That shows the boy has a healthy instinct there. He wants another school. So the governess lets both children write but she hides their letters. She does not want their account to reach the Powerful Man. Then she writes a little later and Miles steals her letter because he does not want her account to reach the uncle.
A power struggle between Miles and the governess ensues. The children smell a weak woman who is sensitive and can’t cope with teasing so they play games with her by waking her, going into the garden and so on. At one point I think the text does show that Flora sees Miss Jessel and went off with her but won’t admit it — as she enjoys teasing the governess. It’s the incident where Mrs Grose is dragged out to the scene and, harried, the governess asks Flora if she saw Miss Jessel. Not in front of the children. Mrs Grose then shouts that Flora is an angel and pulls her away.
Flora is a survivor, not an angel.
Other themes of the story which relate to our world: Miss Jessel as governess. Since the master seems to know how she died and know about her going away, it might have been the master who impregnated her. It’s hard to tell. The governess sees Miss Jessel crying at one point and her immediate reaction is mean: she calls Miss Jessel “wretched terrible woman’ instead of empathizing .After all the governess is herself a governess: poor, played upon by the uncle-master. But in the next scene the governess does seem to have listened to a story told by Miss Jessel which made her see they are alike in situation. The Dear movie had Miss Jessel sitting at the desk in a way then precisely imitated by the governess to make the point they are a doppelganger. What saves the governess (ironically) is her overstrict morality and her loneliness.
So it’s about women’s positions too.
Class: the governess at first sneers at Miss Jessel for gong with Quint as “dreadfully low” and Mrs Grose too. This is the dialogue where I felt James laughing at them as a pair of clowns.
And sex. At times the story anticipates Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. The simplest statement about something else can be read as about sex because of the use of innuendo. For example,
To do it in any way was an act of violence, for what did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of the possibilities of a beautiful intercourse (Chapter 23).
The governess is literally saying she would like to know what happened to the letter she had written Miles’s uncle, her employer.
But at the end it’s a tragedy too: the house is haunted. Evil things have been happening there for quite some time and ends in disaster. How did Miles die? In that final scene he turns and admit he sees Quint and calls him “you devil.” Maybe Miles has a heart attack because finally he is terrified of this ghost and doesn’t want to go with him. The Governess’s hysteria may given him a heart attacK. It might be she asphyxiated the boy by holding him so tight so as to keep Quint from grabbing him.
Now all this occurred 70 years ago. The governess told no one the true story and no one cared enough to investigate. It was in the uncle’s interest to cover it up. She went on being a governess and first told a young man she like who liked her 40 years later. 20 years ago just before she died she wrote what happened down, and now on Xmas eve Douglas brings this story forth.
But it’s not about the past. It’s about today.
I was bothered by something that did occur in my second class. It’s 21 males against 3 females. The first reaction some of the guys had what the governess killed the boy and their first impulse was to blame her because she was sexually uptight. In talking though other of the boys saw the larger picture and Russell Baker’s introduction about it’s being a story of child-abuse by the ghosts also helped. So did the film So I conclude the so-called Freudian Cargill reading is partly a strong symptom of the misogyny of our culture which hates single women especially those who seek to control male sexuality (there’s a hatred of Austen in Twain, Lawrence that comes from this). We despise those who can’t cope with teasing as the governess could not. out of this comes the feeling the children are just playing. Right: that’s Mrs Grose. (gross is the allegory behind that one).
I think also the unwillingness to confront that Miles talked dirty sex with other boys (that’s what he says he did) and maybe allowed Quints to indulge in sex with him comes out of the unwillingness even to discuss pederasty or homosexuality.
So moral panic kills but not doing something moral is wrong too. At the time when Quint was left in charge the evil began. Something should have been done then and again by Mrs Grose when Quint took over the boy. The boy was puzzled, confused, led to boast and try for power as an upper class male against the governess, but he was too young and weak physically if nothing else so died.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
I agree with trust the tale not the teller necessarily In this case though we have a tale which does show the housekeeper validates the governess’s visions three times: I counted twice where the governess describes the two revenants. And my reading was based on the tale.
Documentary evidence is different in the sense of what’s in notebooks. I take it as important not to say that a document is literally lying unless there is strong reason to believe this — in other words, more documentary evidence. So the case with Mary Shelley seemed a good parallel.
Now the prefaces to the tales are am ambiguous matter. Are they part of the tales or outside. I’d say part — as I suggested over on ECW for Scott and that the modern scholar-editors who nowadays take away Scott’s prefaces, appendices, some of this written later, but some at the time of the novels so that we no longer have Scott’s full text as intended.
E.M.
As for the famous article, Feldman, Shoshana. “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.” Yale French Studies 55-56 (1977): 94-207:
It is filled with jargon, but its first nugget is the pathological reading does not explain the text or (in her language) “pathology as such cannot explain the text” in front of us.
There is a lot of convolution about the manuscript and three letters (two by children, one by governess). Also about the preface by Douglas and his explanation and description of the governess.
I skimmed only the opening and first third so don’t know what she comes up with to explain why this idea of pathology emerged. After all if someone gets sexually hysterical (which the governess may be said to be in the last third of the story) that is not to say the person is lying.
I wonder how many ghost stories Feldman (or Cargill or any of these critics) have read. They are not respected; they are often written by women. It’s important in understanding a ghost story to know the typical conventions. If you can accept the idea this is a parody, and James wrote other ghost stories, then all the more it’s important to know the conventions.
Ellen
Other points: it’s a Christmas tale. A group of peope are sitting about scaring one another, and one man says what about a story where not only one but two children have “visitations.” Then the first turn: he’s not going to tell it, oh no, it’s manuscript.
This reminds me of Umberto Eco’s at the opening of _The Name of the Rose,_ “naturalment, uno manuscritto.” As you begin to read the frame falls away (you forget it), but then again towards the end you realize that this governess telling the story may not be alive right now as this is a manuscript. The manuscript stops dead as if cut off when the boy’s heart stops beating and that’s it. So we don’t know what happened to the governess, ghosts, housekeeper, Flora. Perhaps finally their guardian (whose name we are not told) finally took an interest: one which would probably not be in the governess’s favor (whose name we are not told).
Everything swirls about unspoken suspicions of sexual action: be it the boy since he was expelled from a school who never want him back (all boys’s school we are told), or between the boy and Quint (who “wants” him we are told) or the boy and Miss Jessel, or Miss Jessel and Flora or Miss Jessel and Quint. The atmosphere is everything.
I’ve not begun to do justice to the pyschological feel. James was gay and is talking about himself of course in part; he probably detested the narrow minded bigot but he does sympathize with this governess. She is archetypal: naturallly a vicar’s daughter, naturally all alone, and she is working ever so hard to educate these children, with them night and day.
Miss Jessel went away shattered; this reminds me of the man (father) in Wings of the Dove who lives furtively in an apartment scared to go into the streets. As Alan Bennet has shown in his stories, there is no safety for homosexual man, and one photo of James shows him looking nervous and rumpled.
At the opening there’s an allusion to Udolpho too.
E.M.
And last: I’ve now seen an opera based on it (Britten’s) and recently watched the most recent movies, I’m aware of how the visual and dramatic renditions go far away from the original, one apparently influencing the next, so that the 1999 Britten who sympathizes with the governess strongly and takes her view of Quint and Miss Jessel as right becomes all this in the Nick Dear 1999 movie, with Miles’s behavior now at least suspicious (is Quint an ex-lover of the boy) and the housekeeper apparently complicit, and finally in the 2009 the governess as outright victim, Flora now in on the torture and use of her.
You can’t say the ghosts weren’t there and the governess mad because in his preface James reveals they are there, and says that’s important and that they are sinister, evil figures of horror. The governess describes Quint although she’s never seen him when alive. Miles is sent away from school for something, and while the housekeeper at times seems to regard some of what the governess says as mad or deplorable (the housekeeper wants to take the children as innocent), nonetheless the housekeeper agrees Quint and Miss Jessel were just deplorable in life.
Yet there are so many ways we could react to them, and this time I really think James is laughing at these women as naive fools. When they go on in this horrified way about sex and even more about rank, I get the extraordinary feeling we are to laugh at them — and more seriously, reject this crazy anti-sex view they both have. This can be seen in the over-the-top language: Quint was so “dreadfully low” says the housekeeper to which the governess just about jumps in horror that “a lady” like Miss Jessel could or would “lower herself.” They are simpletons, clowns in such scenes too.
This relates back to RH: it seems to me that frequently James’s narrators are satirized and he lives at a distance from them — so that Rowland is a jerk too, his attitude towards whatever Roderick does offstage something we are to reject, if not laugh at. So if RH is an early work and seemingly more bold about presenting two homosexually-inclined males (Roderick may be active), Turn of the Screw is more mature and bold in rejecting in presenting the point of view that regarding sexual passion that comes natural to human beings as abominable as ridiculous.
It’s quite a feat to do this because at the same time we are invited to empathize profoundly too.
I’ve found I’ve felt this when reading Hamlet: at the end the tragedy is so anguished and yet there is this laughter, savage, floating in the air as Fortinbras takes over and the world goes back to asses running it. Hamlet’s sensitivity, sensibility, desire for some kind of integrity has made not one iota of difference. People back to making love to their employment.
E.M.
From Robert Champ:
“”What do you think of “The Innocents”–a film version of TTotS with a script by, of all people, Truman Capote?”
To which I replied:
I’ve not seen it. I’ll put it on my queue at Netflix. E.M.
Judy Shoaf:
Didn’t know Capote wrote it. I remember my friend Diana telling me (in 1961? 6th grade?) about a ghost movie she had seen which was really amazing. I dismissed it at the time (not something I had a chance of seeing in the theater, and I was a great one for sour grapes). Later I understood what the film was and realized it must have been very good, based on her reaction. I finally saw it a few years ago. Really amazing film!”
To which I replied:
“I’ve made it No 2 on my queue. I see it has Deborah Kerr in the leading role: her typology is one of a sympathetic heroine. Ellen”
More Notes:
A. In his notebooks James writes:
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 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 and deprave 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 se’em 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 they try and try and try, these evil presences, to get hold of them. It is a question of the children ‘coming over to where (hey 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.
***********
Freudian interpretations inevitably are hostile to the governess simply as repressed and a proto-murderess.
The above was also written shortly after James had that crushing experience in the theatre over Guy Domville. James had tried to make it on stage and when at the opening night of a play he had really had high hopes for and seemed to go over well, he went up on stage. He was booed, ridiculed, hooted, laughed at; at the same time as a core of fans clapped enormously. He was shattered and shaken.
Matthiessen and Murdock, the editors of the notebooks, provide the following note to the entry:
[The Turn of the Screw (Collier’s Weekly, 5 FebruarY-16 April 1898) has in recent years been frequently interpreted in Freudian terms-as a fantasy conjured up by the children’s governess (who is the narrator) as a result of her own neurotic repression. It is tllerefore worth noting that the anecdote from which James started posited both that the children had been corrupted and that they were still being influenced by the apparitions of the dead servants. James is again explicit on this’ point in his preface, where he discusses the kind of ghost story he was attempting in his imagined treatment of demonic possession. He added his incisive formulation of how to create a sense of evil: ‘Only make the reader’s general vision of evil intense enough . . . and his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy (with the children) and horror (of their false friends) will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.’]
B. Screw in title refers to old torture chambers and chairs from Renaissance to Revolution where torture was outlawed and at least disappeared as a regular procedure in criminal cases for making people “confess” – you tightened whatever it was by a screw to make the pain more excruciating.
C. He has stories where children are treated as not there and exposed to debauched and corrupt sex going on around them (not directly in front), most of the little girls survive, the boys die. Now he wants to return to school he says; we know he’s been expelled, one reason for this kind of thing was in these all-boy schools with their fag and bullying systems, homosexuality often emerged especially a slightly older boy (teen) on a younger one. Miles finally asked replies “I said things.” He said them to boys he liked and they said them to others and these reached the masters. On the other hand, it would be natural for Miles to stay around a male servant. Edel connects boy to James: bullied by his older brotherc, called a “sissy” and found himself in a “feminine” world. Nightmare vision of his own helplessness as a child
D. Everyone agrees employer is negligent and governess wrongly romances him.
E. The crux is how do you explain that Mrs Grose appears not to see the ghosts and neither is there any evidence the children do. If they appear nervous, overwrought, come and go, not one of them says I saw a ghost. Why should they just haunt her? In Woman in Black others turn frmo seeing the ghost. First there are ghosts who haunt just the one person as in teh “Old Nurse’s tale,” but it’s a child. So here we have the governess can write. There is another vision at the end of the “Old Nurse’s Tale” and nurse does see child ghost.
1. Key are dialogues with Mrs Grose and children. Any signs they really saw a ghost and any evidence why they would not tell if they did see.
F. At same time point of assigning it is it begins sophisticated uses of ghost tales where psychological understanding of the unconscious is called into play as the source of gothic visions. And we examine the family group, sex to understand.
E.M.
Close reading the book up to Chapter 11 (Norilana classics edition) and then a kind of quick overview of the rest of the text. Each number stands for a chapter.
Text begins.
I. Like The Woman in Black, it begins on Xmas eve and it’s a case of reading a written out manuscript; here we do not return to the Mr Douglas as in Hill’s very last words we return to Arthur Kidd in the present
A. Someone first tells a story of a ghost who visited a child, old house, dreadful vision, wakes his mother for comfort and then she sees it. Another weaker story and then two nights later Douglas broaches the one he knows. Just “deadful, dreadfulnes … uncanny ugliness and horror and pain” p 8 tops all. Story written many years ago and is in a locked drawer.” Written with beautiful hand of governess just before she died, 20 years ago she died.. She was his sister’s governess, 10 years older than him. Sense Douglas really liked her and she him. Mrs Griffith thinks Douglas was in love with the governess and we work out he has not told for 40 years. Next night Douglas very communicative and ms comes on third day. The ms we are readnig is the unnamed narrator’s transcription of copy Douglas owned.
B. Tale begins after she is hired by employer and interview: she is innocent, young, up from country, he a type “that happily never dies out.” Rich, gay, careless, handsome. Children’s parents died in India, his young brother’s, put them in his second country house with excellent servants including woman once his mother’s own maid. A governess they “had the misfortune to lose.” Did they misplace her?
1. Narrator quick to ask what did former governess die of? Douglas: It will come out
2. Really a grim outlook, all alone, “serious duties, little company … really great loneliness.” But big salary and she can’t afford not to have a job, so she “faced the music, and engaged.” She should never trouble him, let him alone.
C. Tale beings
Prologue. p. 7 Happy opening of lovely day, rosy child so bright, with an intimation of child’s cry but nothing more, though it ends “the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship” (p. 19)
1. p. 16 She settles in
2. p. 20 The letter from her employer enclosing the headmaster’s expelling Miles and she is told “deal with him; bu tmin you dno’t report. Not a word. I’m off”
a. Sex not mentioned between housekeeper and governess, it’s assumed, p 20, and governess sees Mrs Grose (gross) avoiding her, so governess challenges Mrs Grose; at frist he’s as innocent as Flora, and then are you afraid he’ll corrupt you, p 22: how ridiculous
b. Now governess thinks of previous governess, how pretty she was, how employer liked that, and Mrs Grose says she won’t tell tales and she went off and then they heard she was dead from the master; he never told Mrs Grose what she died of. Inbetween was a pretty good nursemaid.
3. p 24 Miles impresses her at first as angelic, p 25
a. Now thinks letter horrible and grotesque, p 26; they’ll do nothing and “see it out.” Looking back from years later she says this was fatuous and simple of her (she wrote down this story just before she died so years later); she reveled in freedom, thought about the “rough future” these childern must endure. But we get this sentence: “that hush in which something gathers and crouches The change was like the spring of the beast.” She was off her guard; they gave such little trouble.
b. She dreams of her employer coming and seeing and we have the first sight of Quint, p 28; in “the clear twilight,” p 29; she begins to be afraid, she feels death near.
c. Who is this person she is ignorant of, there should be no such ignorance or person, p 29 he has no hat, he watched her, fixedly
4. p 31 She is deeply troubled, was there a mystery of Udolpho, comes in, anxious when she sees her.
a. She broods about it, someone has taken a liberty rather gross, unscrupulous traveller made his way unobserved
b. That she loved the work with the children, p 33: she felt he is too “fine and fair” for “little hrrid, unclean school world” and that was it, “he had made the whole charge absurd.”; “stupid — sordid schoolmaster … “vindictive” he never ” spoke of school, never mentioned a comrade”
c. “Disturbing letters from home, things not going well …”
d. Day is now gray, “afternoon light still lingered,’ and she sees this man looking in at her through the window” She felt she had “been looking at him for years and years … ” (in her dreams) not for her he comes but for someone else.
c. Mrs Grose comes in and behaves towards governess the way the governess had behaved towards Quint: she turns white, blanches, she stared and retreated. Governess wonders why she should be scared
5. p. 37 Dialogue of Mrs Grose and Governess; first crux
a. Mrs Grose asks if he was a gentleman which suggests she has not seen anything, p 38; in middle of talk she cuts to say they had better go to church. “won’t it do you good?” She’s afraid for children, of him
b. What is this “consciousness more acute” and why does Mrs Grose ask what time the governess saw the man on the tower. “Middle of month. At this same hour.” Mrs Grose: “Almost at dark
c. This dialogue has the most proof; governess’s description unerves compnoin, “a gentleman he/” no, it can’t be. In gentleman’s clothes, to which Mrs Grose says they are the master’s. then it’s clear she knows somthing, It’s Quint. Quint never wore a hat but coats were missed. Both here last year, then master went home and Quint “alone with us.” “in charge.” Then he went too. Died. Governess feels terrified. p 41
6. p. 42 They do not go to church; they retire to commune together, Mrs Grose has seen nothing but she accepts governess’s truth without impugning her sanity, treats her with tenderness
a Mrs Grose says you say he was looking for someone else, not you. Governess offers little Miles; “but how do you know?” p 43
b why do pupils never mention him; Flora never heard or knew — odd phrase for it. p 44; Governess said you said he and Quint were “great friends.” Oh it was not Miles it was Quint who wanted that, then Mrs Grose about how Quint too free with everyone
c. All night session: midnight, Mrs Grose leaving, was Quint “bad” “not admittedly, I knew it — but the master didn’t.” That’s what Mrs Grose thinks — we do begin to talk like this, p 44 Master hated complaints so Mrs Grose didn’t say anything. Afraid of what he might do; governess leaps to, to the children; she cries over how Quint had control over everything including children. Governess feels there’s a “word Mrs Grose keeps back,” p 45
d. Governess is overreacting with litle evidence and then is told that Quint was found visible wound to the head, talk abuot “strange passages and perils” and “secret disorders” perhaps murdered on the road, perhaps just died
e. Governess does revel in her heroine role; she watches them with suspense but then “superceded by horrible proofs,” p 47
f. Moment of horrible proofs she is in garden with Flora; that children play games that don’t include her acting out, they make her into something they imagine, and ignore her, she sits (she is something that can sit) to sew, and we are told about “brightness of afternoon hour”, there’s an alien object or character in view which has “the character and attitude of our visitor” p 48. Child is playing with make believe boat and governess ‘shifts eye” to ‘face what I had to face.”
But then nothing.
7. p 50 Governess insists the children know and Mrs Grose is “incredulous” She insists Flora saw.
a. So now 2 figures, woman in black, pale, dreadful, and how governess asserts it was Miss Jessel, Mrs Grose looks uncomfortable and asks how can you be sure, and Governess says through Flora
b. There is no proof on p 51 that Flora saw the female ghost in black. Mrs Grose makes a joke, perhaps Flora doesn’t mind, perha s sign of innocence.
c. No proof Flora saw, the governess feels woman ghost looked at child with a “fury of intention … to get hold of her …” p 52. But now governess called Mrs Grose “the victim of my confidence” as she describes Miss Jessell as very beautiful and shabby
d. Now Mrs Grose says “Miss Jessel — was infamous — they were both infamous,” p 53; Mrs Grose admits to an affair while says “she was a lady .. and he so dreadfully below .. ” Governess jumps to “The fellow was a hound,” he did what he “wished with them all.” Stanley Kowalski type. governess it must have been what “she wished,” and them Mrs Grose “she paid for it,” does not want to know what Miss Jessel died of. “She couldn’t have stayed … fancy it here … for a governess” — an open affair, having a baby? Why is having a baby or affair dreadful is the implied author at quite a distance
e.Governess jumps to they’re lost with Mrs Grose holding her
8 p 55 Late that night Mrs Grose goes all the way with the governess “as to its being beyond doubt exactly what I had seen.” Their special marks now appear to include Miss Jessel, Mrs Grose wished to sink whole subject but governess won’t let Mrs Grose
a at the same time they will not go into extravagant fantasies
b Again that she has identified and described both without seeing them; her “new suspicion was intolerable,” that the children were guilty. Question arises why didn’t she question the child and she has again to referf to how suspicious was that increase of distracting activity she noticed
c. Then apparently she pushes Mrs Grose to tell her much more and Mrs Grose does but we are not told what Mrs Grose said, only that the governess then says “I don’t believe in anything so horrible.” Why had Mrs Grose said under cross-questionnig after the school letter that she couldn’t pretend for him he had never been “literally” bad. Mrs Grose comes out with the information that Miles and Quint had been perpetually together, p 57. Mrs Grose had hinted to Miss Jessel about the “propriety of this, incongruity of such a close alliance. Miss Jessel told Mrs Grose to mind her own business so “good woman’ went to Miles and said “she liked to see young gentlemen not forget their station.” Mrs Grose cares more about class transgression than anythnig else it seems. Mrs Grose said the boy denied — said he had not been with Quint. Mrs Grose insinuates that Miles would not think anything bad since Miss Jessel didn’t mind. Governess now asks if Miles seemed to know something going on between Quint and Miss Jessel, and Mrs Grose groans and just repeats the boy denied
d. This “getting out of Mrs Grose” yet is a bad thing — governess is screwing Mrs Grose; when the governess says this shows what they made of him (that is, a goodbetween) mrs Grose protests that’s “not nice” of the governess p 59
e. Governess guesses the boy said Mrs Grose was also “a base menial,” beneath him and Mrs Grose says she forgave the boy
f. There emerges from Mrs Grose that when Miles was with Quint Flora was with Miss Jessel. Surely Mrs Grose suggests that the governess is not accusing the boy of carrying on soem intercourse (with the ghost?)
9 p. 61 She now says they seemed so innocent and she wonders if she is betraying too much that she thinks strange things about them; they seemed preternaturally fond of her at this time; they were impeccable at school, doing all, reciting all
a. she said nothing about a new school and it did appear that she as a teacher could not harm such a boy; he seemed tremendously excited (she could be imagining this); what coarseness could she break into? if they practiced on her it was with minimal grossness
b. she must not hang back but tell what was hideous at Bly, then we are told how one night with nothing to prepare for this; she is reading Fielding’s Amelia, feels a breeze, an open casement and is just exquistely delighted to play sleuth, locks the door to her room; her candle goes out
c and then she sees him on the stair and he her; they face for a long time and he turns and goes down into the darkness
10. p 66 she comes in room and Flora’s bed empty, but to her “unutterable relief,” she is behind the window blind, and yet she had “never felt such a sense of losing an advantage” — for she wants to accuse Flora of something and finds herself accused or having to explain. Flora said she had got up to find where the governess went.
a something about Flora’s denial that she saw anyone comes across as a lie Governess wants to know why she hid when governess first came in, Flora says not to frighten Governess
b she kept going out to find him but never again, only once a woman in attitidue of intense woe from the back; she vanished without looking at governess
c she counts the nights. She is enjoying this; that’s the problem p 68; finally she lays to sleep with laxity but now she feels a hand shook her and she finds herself in darkness and Flora’s bed empty; child looking out the window and governess assumes she si face-to-face with apparition but we are not given details and proof, p 69
d she goes into corridor and sees brother’s door; she is moving about with intense excitement — it does remind me of Catherine Morland so excited by ideas of live burial; governess thinks to go into immense lower room and looks out and sees a person on the lawn, motionless. She thinks there is a person above her (upper room) and a presence on the tower and on the lawn is Miles
11 p 71 Seh now says she didn’t speak to Mrs Grose until the next day; Mrs Grose keeps up idea that the children are fine since nothing showed; only the “sad case presented by instructress” was the worry. It relieves the governess that Mrs Grose “believed her … absolutely” p 71
a she does feel that there is in Mrs Grose an “odd recognition of my superiority” at the same time as Mrs Grose will not appreciate how magnificent she was when coming to Miles from the terrace she took him back to his forsaken room up the very staircase Quint had waited
b she feels she cannot be explicit as then he would have her for the caretakers who minister to superstition and fear are seen as criminals so she can just ask him generally: what were you doing down there, why go?
c: Boy: “If I tell you why, will you understand.” He did that to make her follow, to make her think him bad, he never undressed, stayed up and read went down at midnight; he had arranged with Flora to make sure the governess would know; ends on how good he was in this little joke
Martin Scofield: Implied story
What is the ‘implied story’ in The Turn of the Screw? Firstly it is the story of what happened before the governess’s own story begins, which, it has to be stressed, we learn about almost entirely from the narrative of the governess herself (with the exception of one or two details we get in the ‘introduction’ from the second narrator, Douglas–who has himself got them from the governess). The governess is told explicitly, by Mrs Grose, that the two children, Miles and Flora, were tutored by Peter Quint and Miss Jessel (whose ‘ghosts’ the governess sees); and that Quint died falling at night on an icy path. We are also told by Mrs Grose that Quint wore the Master’s clothes; that he was ‘too free’, ‘too free with everyone’7; and she was afraid of him, afraid of ‘things that man could do’ and that she ‘couldn’t bear’ him being in charge of Miles (202) We also, enigmatically, learn (from Douglas) of ‘the great awkwardness’ of the death of Miss Jessel (179). We learn from Mrs Grose that Miss Jessel ‘was infamous … They were both infamous’; and to the governess’s ‘Come, there was something between them [Quint and Jessel]’ she replies ‘There was everything’. ‘He did what he wished’, Mrs Grose goes on. ‘With her?’ the governess queries. ‘With them all’. Mrs Grose replies (208).
From these and other hints and suggestions we gradually infer an implied story about the past: that Quint was a sexual libertine and that he and Miss Jessel were lovers; that they in some way corrupted or damaged little Miles and Flora; and also that Miss Jessel (probably) committed suicide. These supposed facts also help us to interpret the implied story about Miles’s expulsion from school. The governess tells Mrs Grose of the letter from the school saying it was ‘impossible to keep him’, and interprets this as having ‘but one meaning’: ‘That he’s an injury to others’ (185) (This is, of course, itself the drawing out of a supposed implication). Later the governess learns from Miles that he ‘said things’. When asked to whom, he gives ‘a sick little headshake’ and says ‘… only a few. Those I liked.’ (264) The stories earliest critics were not inclined to speculate further or to draw the implication out, and the most recent have perhaps taken it for granted, but the implication would seem to be that Miles made sexual, perhaps homosexual, remarks to his friends at school and that these were (rather surprisingly, one might think) taken as signs of great depravity in a small boy of–what? ten? (We are told that Flora is eight–changed from six in the earliest published version–but we never learn the precise age of Miles). We could further speculate that Miles had sexual relations with other boys, but unless we read James as signalling such things in the only way current sensibilities would let him, this is perhaps more meaning than James’s words will bear. Either way, the implication is that Miles had been ‘corrupted’ by Quint, either by homosexual seduction or by being involved in some way in the affair between Quint and Miss Jessel (as a witness? as a sexual participant?). The governess also clearly believes that Flora has also become corrupted too–Flora refuses to admit she sees the figure of Miss Jessel on the other side of the lake, and turning on the governess, becomes at the same time ‘hideously hard’ and ‘vulgarly pert’, her face ‘dreadful’ (250). Mrs Grose later tells how she has heard ‘horrors’ from Flora. ‘On my honour, miss, she says things.’ And a few moments later: ‘Really shocking … About you, miss–since you must have it. It’s beyond everything for a young lady; and I can’t think wherever she must have picked up–‘ ‘The appalling language she applies to me? I can then,’ the governess interjects. And Mrs Grose adds: ‘Well, perhaps I ought to also–since I’ve heard some of it before!’ (254-5)
So the implication is–again, from the point of view of the governess–that Miles and Flora have been victims of what today is called child-abuse: have been involved in some way with Quint’s and Miss Jessel’s sexual relationship, perhaps simply as witnesses, perhaps even as participants, and that this has destroyed their innocence and is now affecting their behaviour–is the subject of their secretive conversations, lies behind their mischievous teasing of the governess8. And then of course, in the ‘explicit’ story, as told by the governess, the malign influence of Quint and Jessel continues in the haunting by their ghosts.
Modern secular anti-governess
he ‘ghosts’ were simply figments of the governess’s overheated imagination. A host of variations on this reading have followed, so that one can fairly say it has carried the day. Here the implied story becomes quite different, and countless small ambiguous details (which I needn’t retail) are adduced to support it. The reading appeals to a frame of reference which includes modern secular thinking and in particular, of course, Freud and psychoanalysis, ideas of repression, the unconscious etc.–as opposed to what one might call a largely ‘Victorian’ frame of the idea of childhood innocence, female purity, the ‘unspeakableness’ of sexuality; and an even older or more traditional frame of a cosmos in which the powers of evil battled against the powers of good
Purpose: to create moral panic, meant to tease us
ut more importantly, from my present point of view, is the way he talks about the implied story of Quint and Jessel, and what happened to Miles and Flora–the ‘evil’ of the story. And here the point is the implications are deliberately left ‘a blank’.
What, in the last analysis had I to give a sense of? Of their being, the haunting pair, capable, as the phrase is, of everything–that is of exerting, in respect to the children, the very worst action small victims so conditioned might be conceived as subject to. What would be then, on reflection, this utmost conceivability?–a question to which the answer all admirably came. There is for such a case no eligible absolute of the wrong; it remains relative to fifty other elements, a matter of appreciation, speculation, imagination–these things moreover quite exactly in the light of the spectator’s, the critic’s, the reader’s experience. Only make the reader’s general vision of evil intense enough, I said to myself–and that already is a charming job–and his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy (with the children) and horror (of their false friends) will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.(8)
This then is the essence of the matter. The reader’s imagination is to be prompted by hints and suggestions towards ‘the very worst actions small victims so conditioned might be conceived as subject to’. What are these? Well, to every reader their own horror. In the light of twentieth century real life horrors it might not be too difficult to speculate. But one might note that the essential frisson is not directed towards cruelty, sadism, murder–the ‘very worst’ things, one might think–but towards unspeakable sexuality. This is the real lure: the implied story is a blank surrounded by suggestive details which prompt readers to create their own fantasies.
It is the technique of the creator of a ‘moral panic’–that calling up of fears and bugbears, goblins and ‘folk-devils’–which are not specified but merely gestured at to create the maximum anxiety–whether (how laughable these seem now) about rock ‘n’ roll, or mods and rockers; or about sex in the cinema; or (not laughably) about AIDS or (close in theme to James’s story), child pornography, ‘satanic abuse’ or whatever.
Comes from an archbishop
Myself I think it’s a parody, anti-gothic — the ultimate gothic heroine as victim and reveling in her pain; the heights of agony
11. p 7. 11. p 71 governess now overdoing it: the four perpetually meet. This seems overwrought, p 75. Mrs Grose says she must write employer and she refuses because he’ll think her mad, 77; employer ought to be here, he ought to help
13: p 81: she knows she has become obsessed
14 p 84: the walk to church where Miles says he ought to be sent to another school; it comes out that Miles is aware the governess has a low opinion of what happened at the school,
15 p. 90: then there’s a vision of Miss Jessel
16-17: more teasing; 18: Mrs Grose says have you written, she has but we know the letter never got there
To cut to the conclusion: what precipitates the ending is Flora’s illness and the governess decision to send her away to safety. Leaves her alone without Mrs Grose with Miles and then Quint comes for him. text.
Ellen
“Miles talked dirty sex with other boys (that’s what he says he did)”
No he didn’t. You’re projecting. He said “Well — I said things.”
Your criticism is just one of several that have long been posited, including that he was speaking of ghosts.
I hope you are not of the school which says there were no ghosts and dismisses James’s preface. Ellen
“The Innocents” — Jack Clayton, John Mortimter. &c
I did see _The Innocents_ about two nights ago. The aesthetics (the way the woman were shot in darkness and light) and their gestures, especially the governess, reminded me of the 1961 Helman’s Children’s Hour film we discussed here maybe a couple of years ago now?
Hellman’s play was similarly transformed into a similarly hateful film about women who do not want penetrative sex (this point is made in _The Innocents_, for the governess clearly towers over Miles and would dominate him were he to succumb to her).
It does achieve the unnerving despite the articificial aesthetics (for us today) of the sets, hair-does and costumes. I recommend as instructive in how to James’s tale into a tale of a witch: Deborah Kerr is first seen as a pair of intense hands stretching out, looking eerily almost gnarled, and last scene, after a full mouth-kiss on the boy she has just killed, putting out those hands again:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055018/
At important hinge points in the film, James’s original text is changed so that nowhere does Mrs Grose ever acknowledge that the Miss Giddens (our governess is named) acknowledge any information about the appearance of Quint the governess had about the ghosts she can only have gotten through seeing him, nowhere ever credit the governess. Lines are kept which blacken the governess (she’s hateful, it’s her fault they are now unhappy, since she came they are miserable — all given to Flora), and the end scene the words changed so the boy does not address “you devil” to Quint, but first say he sees nothing and then says “you devil” to Miss Giddens. It’s not a paradox that the ghost for Miss Jessel seems a melancholy pathetic kind of Jane Eyre type: you see she’s okay, she went in for male sexuality even if at the cost of her reputation and life.
The one thing that was heartening is to compare Dear and company’s 1999 film and then Welch’s commentary 2009. It did not take long after James’s death to make the tale into something misogynistic and while the 1999 and 2009 films do some work in getting back to the original text and (2009) reading it out with the preface in mind (but omitting that the governess went on to teach for 50 more years and then first wrote her account 20 years ago), I saw in my class how many of them worked hard to find essays which damned the governess. Watching Wright’s Atonement (film from book) I noticed it too damns a female at the center who reacts negatively to male sexuality and makes a numinous goddess (Keira Knightley) the woman who is absolute in her fierceness and submission.
Ellen
I wrote that I would not assign this book again because while the class seemed interested by it, it soon became apparent few did or could read it; they were galvanized by the 1999 film (script Nick Dear, director Ben Bolt). I’ve a new reason for never assigning it again: it awoke virulent misogyny; worse yet many of the students showed themselves incapable of articulating, writing about, mentioning the topic of homosexuality. It was revealing to see this. The blankness here allowed for some of the hatred of the governess.
How can an group of people so anathemized hope to gain any respect or equality or justice if we are still in a state where what their sexual orientation is is unmentionable. I have seen this before (as here when we discussed Roderick Hudson). All very strange to me. Some sex surveys suggest that 80% of heterosexuals practice anal intercourse (among other many practices shared by GLBT people).
James’s story does no good. I once assigned Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Never again there either. There I had the excuse it was the department community text.
Relevant Alan Bennet’s sombre account of how he almost was killed in Italy because he and his friend were regarded as “out of the loop” of people police or anyone would be at all concerned for.
Ellen
James’s The Turn of the Screw is a masterpiece of ambiguity. There are two possible readings: the ghosts are real, or the governess is mad, a result of sexual repression. James’s master stroke is that each reading cancels the other out, but they are both possible. It’s like this image: Is it a chalice, or two profiles? Elaine
My reply:
For me the key to the story’s meaning is whether we are to empathize with the governess. The school of thought which argues there are no ghosts and she’s mad tends to be misogynistic because the inference is she killed the boy out of her cruel and insane hatred/fear of sexuality — that has been the underlying thrust of many essays on Turn of the Screw.
I used the term moral panic to try to cross these two schools: I believe James when he says that the ghosts are there — I believe he asserts it in two places, but because the ghosts are there that does not mean the governess is any more comfortable with transgressive sexuality; what to me it does mean is she is a victim, and a typical one for ghost stores where the central figure is often malignly and mischievously destroyed by forces of the supernatural outside.
When you look at it that way, as a more complicated deeper version of the paradigmatic ghost story, the sex just becomes a means for these outer forces to destroy her and the boy — much as they get back at the central female figure in The Haunting of Hill House or the male in Woman in Black. In those cases the central figure is innocent of hurting anyone, any wrong-doing (someone else did something vicious) so the wild injustice continues.
The thrust of this blog is that James’s story shows us the evil of homophobia and all phobias with respect to sex. That is it’s a homosexual and heterosexual liberation story. What Quint does to women is what in a patriarchical society men are permitted to do — and they are not punished for it when they are upper class like the governess’s employer who neglects the children and makes them her burden and will take no responsibility. As I recall, I half-believe (from my reading of the story, a while back now) the previous governess was also seduced by the employer.
Ellen