*Spoilers dot the landscape of this post like ghosts in a Gothic horror novel. Be warned.*
I had read Henry James’s Turn of the Screw back in my graduate
school days in the mid-1990s, and I enjoyed it thoroughly then. I picked it back up after seeing Floria
Sigismondi’s flawed cinematic interpretation of the novel earlier this year. In criticizing the film, I wanted to reread
the novel to make sure I understood the source material. So here we are.
While I enjoy reading James’s prose, I found myself having a rather hard
time following the action of the novel.
In part, it was due to James’s long sentences filled with subordinate
clauses. But confusion arising from his
sentences was short-lived as a rereading readily cleared things up. In part, it was due to my reading the book
aloud to my wife at night before sleeping, which made me want to reread as
little as possible for her listening enjoyment, though I admit I had to anyway
just to find the cadence of the sentence which I sometimes lost amidst his
clauses. But of course, the real
difficulty comes from the narrator’s desire to speak delicately of her
subject. Much is left alluded to and
unstated in the novel, which invites the reader to fill in those blanks, just
as the narrator herself fills in the blanks of the mystery that she finds
herself in the center of.
It occurs to me this time around that this notion of holes in a narrative
and our eagerness to fill in those holes is central to the novel. Admittedly, when I first read the novel, I
was really into it _as_ a ghost story. I
aligned myself fully with the narrator and enjoyed her worries and speculations
as though they were my own. (And that
was as a graduate student of literature?! I am as surprised as you.) But on this read, I was acutely aware of all
the leaps the narrator takes in unraveling the mystery before her. In fact, her leaps actively create the
mystery that she is determined to unravel.
When she first spies Quint on the crenelated towers of Bly, she knows
nothing about him. That chapter, the
third chapter, ends thus: “He walked away; that was all I knew.” That matter of knowing is central to the
tale. When Quint appears to her again,
this time looking through the dining room window, we are told: “On the spot
there came to me the added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had
come. He had come for some one else. The flash of knowledge—for it was
knowledge in the midst of dread—produced in me the most extraordinary effect.” When she knows Quint is looking for another,
she calls it first a “certitude” and then goes out of her way to label that
knowing as “knowledge” as opposed to a suspicion. She makes her leaps of knowledge again and
again in the novel. She is certain that
Flora sees Miss Jessel, without any indication.
She is certain that Quint and Jessel want the children. She is certain that Miles distracts her so that
Flora can get away to meet Jessel. And
at each of these leaps, the narrator gives no basis for her insight, only that
she _knows_ it to be true. If it happened
once, it would be a convenient plot device.
The repetition speaks of purpose.
Of course the central debate about the book is whether there are really
ghosts or whether it is all in the narrator’s mind. The debate at this point is as traditional as
the debates concerning Hamlet, so I see no reason to retread that ground
here. Instead, I’ll say that we as
readers are put in the same position as the narrator, faced with a bunch of
mysterious holes and the need to fill them in for ourselves. As nature abhors a vacuum so we humans abhor
uncertainty. The unexplained is precisely
where our minds grasp at any and all evidence to create meaning and a
consistent narrative.
There are a few holes that the narrator refuses to fill in spite of all
her certainty. The central hole, of
course, is the reason for Miles’s suspension from school. This is the central mystery that pre-dates
Quint’s appearance on the tower, the moment that sends the narrator’s mind
skipping over possibilities. How could
an angelic boy like Miles do anything wrong.
The suspension must either be the fault of the schools, because Miles is
innocent, or evidence that Miles is morally compromised. That uncertainty the narrator cannot brook,
but cannot solve either. Quint and Jessel
are manifestations of the corruption stalking the innocent souls. (Yes, see me filling holes and creating narrative?) The striking part of the novel is that it
never fills in that hole at all; we never know why Miles is suspended from school. So if we are to find satisfaction in the
ending, we need to fill that hole in for ourselves, or at least entertain what
it might be. So let me offer my reading.
Miles says his major error was that he “said things” to “only a few. Those I liked.” The narrator cannot make heads or tails of
that, but Miles conjectures that those he told “must have repeated” his words “to
those they liked.” I am assuming that
Miles was either at an all-boys boarding school (oh, the holes keep getting
filled!), and that the people he “liked” were fellow boys. It seems to me (with my backhoe) that Miles
must have expressed love and affection for “those [he] liked,” and his words of
love were received by the headmasters as a homosexual threat to be rooted
out. Miles is treated disturbingly sexually
by the narrator throughout the book (“We continued silent while the maid was
with us—as silent, it whimsically occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their
wedding-journey, at an inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter.”—ew), so it
seems fitting to make the logical leap that other adults view the 10-year-old's
actions through the lens of adulthood as well.
The book is a quick and satisfying read, not one that can be undertaken
in a distracted state. It requires a lot
of attention, but it rewards a lot of close reading, since the holes are
everywhere with piles of literary dirt just waiting to be shifted about. If you can find a copy of Tor’s 1993 edition,
I highly recommend it—the cover rocks.
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