Miles The Turn of the Screw seems a promising place to approach this question, since it was one of the first works of literature to be subjected to, or illuminated by, a psychoanalytic reading at odds with its surface meaning, in Edmund Wilson's famous essay of 1934, an essay which takes both of the approaches that have later been found problematic, psychoanalyzing a character and speculating about the author's own neuroses. When one excludes too much of oneself from consciousness, part of the price may be no longer knowing the difference between “bad” and “evil”—a condition of which the double stands as a terrible reminder. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. The Victorian anxiety about including sexual drives in a complete picture of human nature was, of course, particularly acute where women were concerned. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!” ― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw. The ghosts are in some sense the shadow side of the governess, and of other characters as well. They knew that they, like the governess, had excluded too much from their sense of what a “good” person would be, do, or think. She was notoriously underpaid (as James's governess is not—an important, though not the decisive, reason for her willingness to accept the odd conditions). I don't like you!,” the narrator has no qualms about condemning this expression of direct feeling, in class terms, as the “deliverance … of a vulgarly pert little girl in the street” [78]). A young girl, Nora, attempts to borrow her guardian Roger's watch-key, but finds it a “complete misfit,” whereas his (as Skura puts it) “manly friend” Hubert's watch-key, after “some rather intimate fumbling … worked admirably.” The Freudian meaning of the passage is obvious, as a foreshadowing of the future psychosexual relations among the characters. Seen from this point of view, the tragedy of the book begins not with the first appearance of Peter Quint but with the governess's decision not to question Miles about his expulsion from school—her inability, essentially, to tolerate the idea that the completely “good” false self is not the child's whole self. By preventing us from being completely certain that Adela was alone in the cave, and that what happened can therefore be reduced to sexual hysteria, Forster opens the door to the novel's widest sense of mystery—the sense that there may be transpersonal states of good and evil, which can, at certain moments, utterly seize all the individuals involved in a situation, beyond the control of their personal wills.). And the nineteenth century's fascination with her, it seems to me, stands in for a much larger issue: how will a woman's intellectual semi-independence carry over into the sexual realm? There is, in fact, exactly such a story in the background of The Turn of the Screw. Especially after Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair, the governess's isolation in a household with a dominant male makes her sexual availability a nagging under-theme. (She may have put Peter Quint on the tower in the first visitation; but it is James who has put her in a tower room in the later one.) We all know, I think, what story will proceed from this beginning (Measure for Measurebeing the most obvious instance). Flora performs the “disagreeable duties” of the schoolroom as if she did so “as a mere result of the affection she had conceived for my person” (14). may imply that he is being dispossessed by the evil demon. It is, of course, not news that James's governess's fantasies about the master reflect, and were doubtless influenced by, the Jane Eyre plot. ), I tend to agree with Wilson, also, that there is no evidence the children ever see any ghosts, and that the governess may have “literally frightened [Miles] to death” by revealing that she does.12 But is his story any less terrible if the ghosts represent an accurate intuition about the most troubling aspect of his past, than if they have nothing to do with him, but only with the governess's own unconscious? referring to Peter Quint as the devil, then Miles’s subsequent death It may be germane, therefore, turning to the reader's perspective, to consider how prominent double stories like James's are in nineteenth-century literature: Dostoyevsky's The Double; Poe's “William Wilson”; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; The Tales of Hoffman; The Picture of Dorian Gray. Just as she goes on to demand of Miles, “What were these things?” [93] Quint reappears. is determined to wrench a confession from Miles, convinced that The governess’s description of herself Miles does not actually see the ghost, but the Governess thinks he does. It is equally unsatisfactory to assign it to “Nora's or Roger's secret wish,” or, still more reductively, to “James's purely irrelevant fantasies.”3 Here Skura dismisses the whole issue as an “ambiguous, hovering sexuality”; though elsewhere in her book, as we shall see, she comes up with far more productive formulations.4, Norman Holland, on the other hand, finds the locus of psychoanalytic criticism neither in the author's nor the character's mind, but in the reader's.
The Turn of the Screw was in fact published three years after Studies on Hysteria, and two years before The Interpretation of Dreams. What I'd emphasize, though, is the aura of real sexuality, not just sexual fantasy, that attaches to her. Quint's second appearance to the governess is outside the dining room window, suggesting a reflected image, and, indeed, she immediately rushes outside to “place myself where he had stood,” thereby giving Mrs. Grose “something of the shock I myself had received” [24]—so that again, as with Miss Jessel, she is made to embody the horrifying power in her own person. He must also be aware of her primness; and the crucial question, for him, might well be how much he can reveal of his past, of the side of himself that does not fit the Victorian image of a “good child,” without forfeiting her love. Knowing from the start that the governess has, later, captivated a Trinity undergraduate ten years younger than herself, who “liked her extremely and [was] glad to this day to think she liked me,” prevents us from ever seeing her as a pathetic fantasizer, or as a woman unaware of her own sexual power. The governess is determined to wrench a confession from Miles, convinced that doing so will rid him of the demon Quint, and she turns to terrifying “ice” to get it out of … that she may have misjudged the situation, but again, the situation “ice” to get it out of him. We all know, I think, what story will proceed from this beginning (Measure for Measure being the most obvious instance). 4 Skura, and Holland as well, do seem to me excessively critical of efforts to “psychoanalyze” characters. It is, moreover, only the first of many instances of doubling—and while some of them pair Quint and the master, others do not. But sometimes, it is the governess and Quint who are brought into alignment.
10 James R. Kincaid, Child Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 80–81.
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