Review: The Turn of the Screw
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5 stars. About halfway through The Turn of the Screw, I almost put it down for good. The language was too dense and intricate, I didn't enjoy the "scary" elements, and I wasn't invested in the characters. But I kept going, and it was worth it. Things clicked. I had been trying too hard. Letting my eyes fly, instead of insisting they ruminate on each phrase or sentence, made this a more rewarding experience than I expected. I would argue it's a masterpiece.
First, for interest, the excerpt from Henry James' notebook on his inspiration for the story:
"Note here the ghost story told me at Addington (evening of Thursday 10th), by the Archbishop of Canterbury ... the story of the young children ... left to the care of servants in an old country house through the death, presumably, of parents. The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children ... The servants die (the story vague about the way of it) and their apparitions, figures return to haunt the house and children, to whom they seem to beckon ... It is all obscure and imperfect, the picture, the story, but there is a suggestion of strangely gruesome effect in it. The story to be told ... by an outside spectator, observer."
And so The Turn of the Screw became a ghost story about a governess assigned to care for two children. And care for them she does. Little Flora and her older brother Miles prove to be apt pupils and the governess settles into life in the somewhat isolated estate. Until she starts seeing ghosts. Terrified for herself and the children, the governess attempts to navigate, handle and justify her fear as apparently no one else can see the apparitions. Tragically, her relationship with Flora is destroyed and Miles ends up dead.
SPOILERS BELOW.
The beauty of this story is not in the writing itself, although the writing is very beautiful, and very difficult to appreciate, at times. James is a wordy, wordy, wordy, wordy author. His verbose rambling essentially eradicates any chance for genuine suspense or terror. Don't expect to be scared. But there is beauty here - and I would argue that it emerges via interpretation, or perhaps it is better to say via the many possible interpretations.
It reminded me a bit of Black Swan, a film with a terrific unreliable narrator. Like the governess, Natalie Portman's character seems a bit off, or stunted, or off-putting from the first scene. You root for her, because she's clearly not a villain, but things get weird and you learn not to trust her. The film ends in tragedy, but perhaps without as much ambiguity as the book. Still, it's similarly uncanny and you walk away with lingering questions.
In The Turn of the Screw, the governess is - no doubt about it - the only character to acknowledge the ghosts. To acknowledge them. Other characters might see them, or they don't. They certainly deny it. So the question becomes: is the governess mentally ill? Is she hallucinating? Is she manifesting her suppressed rage, or suppressed sexual desire, as old while male critics seem to think? Does Miles die because of an implication?
Or are the ghosts real? Are the other characters lying? Is she "gifted" in the sense that she's the only one who can interact with the paranormal? Is she the victim of a conspiracy led against her by the household and the children? Are the ghosts out to possess or harm her? Does Miles die because of a reality - a terrifying, supernatural reality?
Is she insane, or is she a hero? EITHER WAY, I'm disturbed. EITHER WAY, she loses. She is lost. We are lost. As Brad Leithauser writes in a review I love from The New Yorker,
"Yet—the book’s greatest feat, its keenest paradox—the ultimate effect is precisely the opposite of openness. “The Turn of the Screw” may be the most claustrophobic book I’ve ever read. Yes, you’re free to shift constantly from one interpretation to the next, and yet, as you progress deeper into the story, each interpretation begins to seem more horrible than the other. As the gruesomeness gathers, the beautiful country house effectively falls away, like flesh receding from the skull of a cadaver, and we’re deposited in a hellish, plantless, low landscape of bone and stone: plenty of places to run, but nowhere to hide."
Which is why I like both. I love that it is, or could be, or might be, or without a doubt is, both.
There's another moment in this book I'd like to consider - the moment when Miles confesses about why he was expelled from school. When I first read his admission, I instantly thought that the "words" he said must have been homosexual in nature. I believe Henry James was homosexual, and this clicks really well in my mental comprehension of the story. It's just my comprehension, though, and there are certainly so many possibilities.
This turned out to be much more of a reaction than a review, but I think that's a testament to the book's power. I want to discuss it. I want to do the "further reading." I want to analyze the shit out of that ending. I want MORE. And for that, this crazy, complicated book gets 5 stars. "No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!"