[For this year’s installment in my annual Halloween series, I’ll be AmericanStudying ghosts in American society and popular culture. Boo (in the best sense)!]
On two cultural
fears lurking beneath Henry James’s gripping ghost story.
If you had told
me back when my teaching career began that Henry James’s 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw
would be one of the texts I would teach most frequently, I’d likely have
reacted much like Mrs. Grose does when the Governess tells her about seeing the
ghost of Peter Quint (inside Turn of the
Screw joke, my bad—that means incredulously). But because Turn works so well as a foundation
onto which to stack literary theories and critical frames, I’ve taught the
ghost story/psychological thriller/potboiler/Victorian class
study/metafictional masterpiece numerous times in both my undergraduate Approaches
to English Studies and graduate Literary
Theory: Practical Applications courses (as well as in my Major
Author: Henry James course). It’s a fun and engaging book, with so many
layers that I’m continually discovering new ones along with the students in
each such class. But it’s also a horror story (whether the horror is
supernatural or psychological, which depends on how you read it), and as I’ve
argued in this space many
times, horror stories almost always reveal shared cultural
narratives and fears.
In the case of Turn, many of those embedded cultural
fears focus on the story’s two
young children, Miles and Flora, and what might be (as the
governess-narrator sees it, at least) corrupting their innocent minds and
souls. The more obvious (of the two I’ll highlight in this post, anyway—nothing
is truly straightforward in James’s tortured text) corrupting forces have to do
with sex and sexuality. The ghosts who may or may not be haunting or possessing
Miles and Flora are of two former servants: Peter Quint, a manservant of whose
sexual perversions we hear repeatedly but vaguely; and Miss Jessel, a nanny who
was apparently pregnant (perhaps by Quint, perhaps by the children’s uncle) at
the time of her mysterious death (likely a suicide). A number of Victorian
fears overlap in those details, from worries about working-class influences on
upper-class children to mores about sexual freedom. But I would argue that by
far the most damning fears at play here have to do specifically with
homosexuality, and with the possibly that Quint has corrupted young Miles in
that vein (Miles finally admits, if still vaguely, that he “said things” to
male friends at school that he should not have said, leading to his expulsion).
In an era when Oscar
Wilde was imprisoned for homosexuality, it’s fair to say that James is not
overstating the cultural panic over such “perversions.”
There’s another
19th century cultural fear potentially buried within the stories of
Miles and Flora, however. In the novella’s complex prologue/frame, we learn
that the children had initially lived with their parents in the British
colony of India; it was only after they were orphaned that they returned to
England to live with their bachelor uncle. That’s the last we hear of India in
any overt way in the text—neither Miles (10 years old) nor Flora (8) seems to
have any memories of their childhood there, or at least none that they share
with the governess. Which is, of course, an important distinction to make—the
entire novella hinges on the question of what the children are hiding from the
governess, and so it’s entirely fair to imagine that there might be secrets
other than those of their prior servants that they do not divulge to her (and
thus to us, since she’s our narrator and sole perspective). In any case, in an
era when James’s home
country of the United States was debating seriously the possibility of
becoming an empire, and when his adopted country
of Great Britain was considering whether and how its empire was worth
sustaining, it’s at least important to note that James decides to include this
imperial history within the children’s backstory, to make it a part of the
heritage and identity of these two troubled young people.
Next
GhostStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other ghost stories or histories you’d share?
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