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The Turn of the Screw
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As I said in my GR review (quoting from myself shamelessly): The Turn of the Screw is a story about...well, it's about "something". What that "something" is depends on who is reading the story and the interpretation they choose to give to it. Ghosts? Insanity? Child Abuse? Supernatural Forces? All of the above?
I have my own ideas, but I would be interested in finding out what everyone else thinks. Do you think the governess was trying to protect the children from supernatural forces? Do you think the children themselves were evil? Do you think the governess was mad?
*********SPOILERS BELOW************
My personal opinion is that the governess was...well, not insane necessarily, but definitely unstable. I first had concerns about her stability when she went into raptures over the children after first meeting them. In a flash she went from worrying about the loneliess and boredom she faced in her new position to the opposite extreme of praising them for their "angelic beauty" and declaring that time spent with them is "the first time...that I had known space and air and freedom" in my "small, smothered life". Anyone who has spent time taking care of children knows that it was very unlikely that time spent with an 8 and 10 year old was "all the romance of the nursery and the poetry of the school room."
As the children begin, inevitably, to fall short of her ideal, her vision of them as angelic is replaced by one of them as evil. She cannot see them as they really are: perfectly ordinary children. If they cannot be angels than they must be devils. And not only does their being evil explain to her personal satisfaction why they have not lived up to her high expectations, but she admits that it adds some excitement to her life; "I used to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I thought strange things about them ... I trembled lest they should see that they were so immensely more interesting."
To add to her obsessive - and possessive - behavior, she then begins to further isolate them from the only person who might have interfered with her. Although their uncle has demonstrated absolutely no interest in the children, she cannot take the risk that he may change his mind so she takes the additional precaution of "let[ting:] my charges understand that their own letters [to their uncle:] were but charming literary exercises. They were too beautiful to be posted; I kept them myself." In fact, she begins to believe that their desire to see their uncle is actually a desire to hurt and mock her: "it was exactly as if my charges knew how almost more awkward than anything else that might be for me."
In the end she does have a moment of clarity: during her final confrontation with Miles she experiences a moment of doubt and feels the "appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent." However, rather than being good news this possibility terrifies her; "for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?"
In the end she cannot face the possibility that she has done anything but what was right and Miles suffers the consequences of that refusal to see.
********SPOILERS OVER***********
But I would love to know what other people think. Do you think I am way off base? Were the ghosts real? Were the children evil?
ETA: No matter what I do, all my brackets seem to end up with colons next to them. Please ignore.

Personally, I have several reasons for viewing the story as an actual ghostly tale: Douglas, who knew the governess, testified to her worthiness; she had never been told of Quint's existence before she saw him, but Mrs. Grose could recognize him from her description (and the "explanation" that she could have heard a description of him in the village pub --to which James never suggests that she ever went-- strikes me as particularly lame); and the described circumstances of Miles' death are not, IMO, consistent with being frightened to death or smothered by the governess; the intensity of his psychological reaction is only explicable if Quint is a continuing powerful, presence in his life. And at the end, the only interpretation of his words that I find plausible is that he recognizes and admits Quint's continued existence. But then, maybe I'm the one who's way off base! :-)


Werner - I didn't realize that the literary critics agreed with me! Hmmm. Not sure how I feel about that. However in their case(s) I think you may be right that it is more prestigious to read an "intellectual" psychological drama than a so-called "low brow" ghost story.
In my case, well...I don't know for sure. I certainly enjoy ghost stories, but personally I find the idea of insidious insanity to be much more frightening than any outside evil could be. Maybe that's why I interpreted the story the way I did.

"The Red Pony" was assigned to me 3 times in school & ruined Steinbeck for me for years - until my youngest boy talked me into reading "Of Mice & Men". Then I found I actually liked Steinbeck.
Luckily, no matter how poor the book choices were, I was a fan of reading, but I know it turned off many of my class mates.

Laura, for me the fear quotient isn't necessarily the appeal of the supernatural genre --I like a lot of it that isn't scary at all-- but I agree that inner evil is much more frightening than evil "outside." If one views the ghosts here as real, it's possible to see them not as the exclusive sources of evil, but as agents of evil, invoking, nurturing and bringing out an inner evil that's already in the children --and, by extension, in all of us. That's just a thought!





On a more serious note, I'd also like to suggest Edith Wharton's literary ghost stories. I have to admit that I like them even better than James'.

Alfred Bendixen's anthology Haunted Women includes Wharton's top-notch ghost story "Pomegranate Seed," and Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories (which is on our group's "Read" shelf) includes another excellent story by her, the title of which I can't recall at the moment. These are the only two of her supernatural tales that I've read, but if those are a sample, the rest would be well deserving of attention, too! (She was clearly strongly influenced by James, but her style is much less ponderous and her plots less heavily dependent on intuition --and I agree that makes her stories better, based on my limited sample for comparison.) Laura, the library where I work has her collection Tales of Men and Ghosts; have you read that one, and would you recommend it?

I haven't read Tales of Men and Ghosts, but I looked up the table of contents online and the only story I recognize is "The Eyes". That would actually be a good one to read and compare to The Turn of the Screw in some ways. Darn! Now I want to read it. I'm going to have to get another copy of that book...





Books mentioned in this topic
The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton (other topics)Animal Farm (other topics)
Lord of the Flies (other topics)
The Turn of the Screw (other topics)
The House Of Mirth (other topics)
More...
In another group I belong to, Litwit Lounge, we also have a Turn of the Screw thread going. Any of you who want to are invited to check out that discussion (and, if you want to join that group, to chime in).