Haunting The Critics

 

Haunting the Critics: The Turn of the Screw and its Interpretations

Discuss the view that The Turn of the Screw eludes analysis in terms of any single critical theory by virtue of the irreducible ambiguities of the text.

INTRODUCTION

In order to complete the story of The Turn of the Screw one must have an interpretation of the events that occur within the story, to give from the outset a structualist slant.  It is deliberately ambiguous and has no explanatory conclusion, it is up to the readers to decide what happened to the characters and construct the conclusion for themselves.  There are many interpretations given by various scholars to explain the meaning behind the ending and what came before, some fit better than others but no one theory can explain the story in its entirety.  Therefore it may be that multiple theories have to be given in order to approach a completeness that the story naturally lacks. 

David Mcwhirter says in his essay on The Turn of the Screw ‘In the “Other House” of fiction’ ‘there is no compelling reason to assume they are [the interpretations] are mutually exclusive’[1] and it points to a point where perhaps maybe only one interpretation just is not good enough and we actually have a need for more than one interpretation in order to cover all the ambiguities that the book holds.

There is also a problem with the question as it tries to tackle a ghost story, which is supposed to be difficult to analyze, and really it could have been any ghost story written in the Victorian period.  What I have to tease out is the specific instances that make this particular story ambiguous and attempt at an answer, if I can find any, to be given for such an instance. 

In this essay I will be exploring the different interpretations that are given for The Turn of the Screw and analyze each one in light of the others before concluding with my opinion on whether the story needs more than one interpretation due to its ambiguities.  I will be focusing on three main theories that best interpret the story and their various combinations while commentating on how successful each of them are at giving a full picture to the novel.  The theories I will look at are Psychoanalysis (the Freudian variety), Marxism and Feminism.

FREUDIAN

The Freudian explanation for the events in The Turn of the Screw says that the ghosts that governess sees are a product of the sexual repression that she experiences.  This interpretation makes it clear that the ghosts have no supernatural basis but actually have grounding in an unhealthy mind.  It implies that the governess is unsound psychologically and is a danger to the children.  However does that really explain the ending?  Does the governess willfully end the life of Miles because she has no control over her actions?

Maxwell Geismar dismisses the Freudian view in 'Henry James and His Cult':

‘James himself again rejected the notion of psychic or psychological ghosts as being suited for an “action”, and his story was “an action, desperately, or it was nothing”[2]

Later on in the same paragraph Geismar says, ‘James repudiated both the notion of actual ghosts and of psychological ghosts’.  Geismar suggests that the ghosts of the story are meant to be actual supernatural ghosts and not ghosts through natural means.

James was writing at a time where the science of psychology was just around the corner but also at a time where talking about child sexuality was a taboo.  Children where meant to be the height of innocence and goodness.  He was very much interested in people’s motives and behavior devoting many big books to the dissecting of human beings’ psyche.  Novelists have done the job of psychologists for many years before psychology arrived on the scene and so we should find it no surprise, as when humans advance scientifically their writers would also take a more scientific approach to their writings.  Psychology seemed to be emerging in Victorian society with or without Freud’s help.  There is also a personal link with psychoanalysis that James unfortunately had with his sister who suffered from mental illness and had to visit hospital a number of times.  So from first hand knowledge James was bound to write about the psychological factors resulting in human behavior.     

The ghosts could be a manifestation of some trauma that the governess had experienced in her life.  This could explain her overprotectivness with the children and her lack of awareness of what harm she was doing to Miles.  She suffers from delusions and cannot tell the difference between reality and fiction.  Though the servants had actually existed in life their presence as ghostly forms can be seen as a form of fiction as they are not actually there on the tower or in the garden looking for the children. 

Where the purely psychological answer to the book’s question starts to stretch is in the fact that the governess can perfectly describe a human being who has lived without ever having known them before, which is puzzling but also indicates that the ghosts are in fact real and this, psychologically, is difficult to explain from a materialist viewpoint.  Which is also a problem for our next theory.

MARXISM 

This interpretation states that the ghosts are symbols of the anxiety a middle class woman feels towards the working class.  The working classes here are something to fear as they might decide to have a Marxist revolution against the conditions they are put through.  The Master is noticeably absent and is a type of ghost himself.  The governess is middle class putting her in the middle of the Master and the ghostly servants.  The novel is deliberately unstable.  It has an incomplete framing device and a questionable heroine. 

This has similar problems with the novel as the psychological interpretation has.  Coming from a materialist viewpoint it has difficulty explaining the nature of the ghosts but gets around this by saying that the ghosts are in fact metaphors of a political reality.  There is no reason to take a piece of fiction as a form of reality as we experience it.  We can look at it symbolically as well.  There is much to be made from the class difference between the characters, a fact that James was surely aware of and made use of, and it can explain the fraught nature of the governess’ mind, but is it enough? 

The governess is also an authority figure who has ‘doubts about the legitimacy of her authority, especially in relation to Miles, whom she recognizes as possessing “a title to independence, the rights of his sex and situation”[3].  There is a type of power struggle between the two characters.  Should the governess have power because she is an adult in charge of the children or do the children have power by being of a higher class than her?  The feminist angle to the story, in relation to Marxism will be brought in soon. 

Later I will be looking at Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism together seeing how they compliment each other, as they both have much in the way of similarities while helping each other to patch over the gaps that they both have. 

FEMINISM

The interpretation that a feminist might give for this story would emphasis the fact that the main character, the governess, is a woman who has been given a role of responsibility by the male Master.  I think it is fair to assume that the governess would not have any children of her own so the children that she has come to look after at Bly could be seen as her adopted children and her relationship with them would be a type of motherly one.  The ghosts could well be reminders of a failed love affair that she once had and reminders that she is in no position to have children herself.  This point of view could interpret the ending as the governess killing Miles because of her jealously towards the Master for having children and her anger at him for neglecting them so carelessly.  This, I realise, could be seen as quite a unique view as I have not come across any similar argument from any critic on James. 

The guardians are the ones who are supposed to be looking out for the best interests of those they are looking after, but here we see James presenting the role of authority to be open to the weaknesses of human beings, the fallacy of the belief in the supernatural and the consequences of having such a fervent belief.  Some people can see the power of what is not there, the historical implications that certain places have and that can be passed down into the present through sheer atmosphere and affect those that have no links to that history. 

The framing narrative forms an idea of what the governess was like.  Millicent Bell says in her essay ‘Class, sex, and the Victorian Governess’ that ‘He [Douglas] clearly sees her as an ideal governess of earlier days, a lady with every appropriate sign of grace and breeding, though fallen on hard times.’[4]  In other words the governess is supposed to be the perfect model of femininity that is in complete charge of her own mind. 

Perhaps the feminist interpretation has been overblown as Mcwirter here suggests about the death of Miles:

‘Mile’s death…is less the destruction of a certain “will to masculinity” at the hands of a castrating woman than the agony of an as yet unfixed sexual identity being forcibly spilt and bound’[5]

Yet I think, despite this, that the feminist points still stand and should be taken seriously.  James does suggest interesting things about typical women living around that time and their role in society.

Here James shows, it could be said, women to be fallible and capable of great failings in regards to the upbringing of the children but then this problem really could be traced back to a shadowy paternal figure that wishes to have nothing to do with the children.  It is the patriarch’s failing of not being involved with his offspring that ultimately causes the demise of one of his children.  The Master’s removal of his love might be the reason why the governess starts seeing the ghosts as what they really represent are the sins of the father whom only the governess has the moral insight to see this.   

These single theory interpretations all have their incomplete weakness approaching The Turn of the Screw so it is time to look at the theories in combination to see if that gives a fuller account of the tale.

FREUDIAN-MARXISM

In a combination of Freudian and Marxist theory one could interpret the novella in a way to show the governess is sexually repressed because of the social condition she is kept in along with the constructed fear of the class boundaries coupled with sexual transgressions that Jessle and Quint undergo.  This perspective shows that the material conditions of the world the governess lives in has an effect on the mental well being of the people who have to live in it.  The servants seem to be depraved exactly because of their social class, meaning that they are easily given into perversions of love and sex. 

This interpretation has weight if you take the implications of Jessle’s and Quint’s wrongdoing to their full extent.  It is implied in the story that they were inappropriate with the children, ‘“Quint was much too free”’ says Mrs. Grose to the governess regarding his relationship with Miles.  The lack of description in passages such as this one leaves the interpretation of the expression wide for various ideas.

This theory will have problems in determining the symbolic relevance of the ghosts; if they are not real then can they be seen as symbols of repression, class guilt or merely an unexplained phenomenon.  The problem of evil at that time of James’s writing was one that was seen as stale, old hat and not very interesting.  Maybe it was interesting in a time of Puritan upbringing but not in the time of scientific progress.  So here it could be James’ representation of a problem he finds so interesting that other people might not find it so.  Here James is the governess given the responsibility to look after a young form of art and he sees evil everywhere whereas his readers and fellow writers do not and yet he is obsessed by it and fears the worst, that he may not be able to do his duty and may kill the thing he has been so patient in nurturing.  

MARXISM-FEMINISM

The governess is not given a name and is merely a type of person, a commodity rather than an individual.  A man who is in higher social standing then herself pays her.  There is another woman who is almost her equal in the novel.  Mrs. Grose is there to give the governess confirmation that the ghosts that she sees are real people who have a disordered past.  It is this detail, that the governess can accurately describe people who have lived but she does not know herself, that makes the idea of the ghosts real.  Then the question we have to answer is if the ghosts are real why do they only show themselves to the governess.  The governess seems to think that the ghosts are after the children but that may not necessarily be the case.  Because the ghosts cannot be seen by anyone else gives credibility to the theory that they are just psychic disturbances on her part.

Millicent Bell says of Miss Jessel: ‘her transgression of sexual limits has also been a transgression of social boundaries if she, a lady, has had an affair with Quint, who was no gentleman.’[6]

In this interpretation the emphasis is on the situation of the governess, the material situation as well as the gender situation.  The governess is middle class and possibly has aspirations to achieve an even higher class, maybe through marriage.  What haunt her are the transgressions of those who were rebellious enough to get what they wanted out of life and damn the consequences.  The governess might feel that she is stuck in her role and cannot get out of it through social mobility of either promotion or marriage and therefore fears the worst for her life.  The ghosts are a reminder of another kind of life she could have, possibly a more carefree and slightly lower class one where she could rebel and do what she wants. 

 

Bell mentions that Quint represents the ‘demonic side of maleness an class power in the Master’[7], which is worth looking at.  Here Quint takes the clothes of the Master as a mockery of authority.  This must shake up the submissive governess as her question with authority is not in doubt, and also he is making a fool of her, as she is a type of authority he is making fun of or threatening.

Millicent Bell does go on to say that:

‘James saw the ambiguity in masculine and class hegemony and saw the Governess both as a sympathetic and even valorous person and as one made dangerous to her society by her “status incongruity” and her nostalgia for the lost security of the class into which she had been born.’[8]

FEMINISM-FREUDIAN

This interpretation could make the argument that it is because of the governess’ point of view as a woman gives her complexes and makes her see ghosts.  Here in this interpretation it is not straightforward if the ghosts are real or just a figment of her mind.  It could be that being a woman gives the governess a particular insight into the world around her and metaphorically gives her ability to see images of perceived moral unbalances in Bly’s history.  If this is the case then the main weakness of this particular interpretation is that fact that if women have a special insight then why does Mrs. Grose or Flora not see the ghosts?  Is it because the governess is the only one who has the pressure of becoming a mother while the others either are already happy mothers or children too young even to think of becoming one? 

Bell comments: ‘It was often true that a governess was a depressed woman who might break down under the conditions of her narrow life.’[9]  She also says later on in the essay that:

‘The Victorian governess was expected to police the emergence of sexuality in the children in her charge and to be, herself, the “tabooed woman”, and James makes his Governess more tabooed than any real governess by the absoluteness of her employer’s prohibition of communication with him.’[10]

The Turn of the Screw could be read as an anxiety tale about motherhood and the over protectiveness that comes with it.  The irony is that it is the care that the governess which becomes ultimately fatal for the little boy.  The ghosts she perceives may not be real and so her fears are unjustified and her actions are over-the-top.  Being a woman in those times might give   

CONCLUSION

One of the problems with this question is that it could be about any piece of literary work.  It is more geared towards general speculation about reading theory than it is about the book in question.  And one of the problems about treating a work in this genre in such a way is that it is exactly this open endedness that ghost stories try to attain.  In a ghost story there is something of the un-analyseable, which lay claim to their power.

Ultimately this is a narrative that is aware of it as being a narrative and plots against the reader and his assumptions.  The novel puts the reader in an awkward position as they know that they have to give an interpretation to complete it but the difficulty arises as to which interpretation they should give, even picking and choosing the best bits of several interpretations and going along with that.  James is aware of this difficulty and he has precisely calculated that such was going to be its fate in order to make the reader feel uncomfortable, which is what a ghost story is ought to do.  What we don’t get from the book is a reaction from the people who were listening to the story in the beginning.  That framework is not completed leaving us abruptly in the dark having to figure out what is what.

The various interpretations make various claims and all try their best at arguing their points of view but one cannot help but feel that they are trying to tie up knots in a story already contentedly knotted up. The interpretations have much strength, I particularly liked the Freudian-Marxism take on the story but then the Freudian-Feminist theory works well too but perhaps structuralism and post-structuralism readings would have worked even better.  It is possible that there is no such interpretation that could explain everything satisfactorily for James had constructed it in such a way that makes consistent interpretation impossible, yet one would think that he would enjoy the ongoing debates surrounding what is, for him, a minor work.  It is inscrutable and a mystery to all. 

As David Mcwhirter has pointed out:

‘Critics in recent decades have seemed increasingly willing to allow James’s narrative some thing like a fundamental ambiguity, and to accept the premise that James, as one commentator puts it, wanted his readers to experience “a persistent and uncomfortable vibration between the two interpretations’[11].

BIBLOGRAPHY

Bell, Millicent, ‘Class, sex, and the Victorian Governess: James’s The Turn of the Screw’ from New Essays: Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw ed. by Vivian R.Pollak, (USA: Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Geismar, Maxwell, Henry James and His Cult’, (USA:Chatto and Windus, 1963)

Mcwhirter, David, ‘In the “Other House” of Fiction: Writing, Authority and Feminity, in The Turn of the Screw’ from New Essays: Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw ed. by Vivian R.Pollak, (USA: Cambridge University Press, 1993)

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[1] David Mcwhirter, ‘In the “Other House” of fiction: Writing, Authority, and Femininity in Turn of the Screw from New Essays: Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw ed. by Vivian R.Pollak, (USA: Cambridge University Press, 1993)

[2] ‘Henry James and His Cult’ by Maxwell Geismar, (USA:Chatto and Windus, 1963)

[3] Mcwhirter

[4] Millicent Bell, ‘Class, sex, and the Victorian Governess: James’s The Turn of the Screw’ from New Essays: Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw ed. by Vivian R.Pollak, (USA: Cambridge University Press, 1993)

[5] Mcwrirter

[6] Bell

[7] Bell

[8] ibid

[9] ibid

[10] ibid

[11] David Mcwhirter, ‘In the “Other House” of fiction: Writing, Authority, and Femininity in Turn of the Screw from New Essays: Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw ed. by Vivian R.Pollak, (USA: Cambridge University Press, 1993)