Narrative Games: The Frame of "The Turn of the Screw" Author(s): Jeff Williams Source: The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Winter, 1998), pp. 43-55 Published by: Journal of Narrative Theory Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30225481 Accessed: 17-02-2017 14:29 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Journal of Narrative Theory is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Narrative Technique This content downloaded from 198.246.186.26 on Fri, 17 Feb 2017 14:29:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Narrative Games: The Frame of The Turn of the Screw Jeff Williams The Turn of the Screw has been the site of a long-standing and seemingly intractable critical controversy. What Bruce Robbins ironically calls "The Thirty Years' War" ("shooting" 192) proceeded up to the 1970s over the pivotal question of whether the governess really sees the ghosts-taking her at her word, so it is a ghost story and an entertainment-or whether she hallucinates-taking her as unreliable, innocently due to her youth and inexperience or to her sexual repression and confusion, or more ominously due to her mental disorder or her manipulative scheming. Most early (pre- New Critical) readings see the novel unproblematically as a ghost story, after the manner of the gothic, and find support in James's efforts, after failing as a playwright, to write a sensationalist bestseller-in his famous formulation, a potboiler. The first parry against these unassuming readings is generally attributed to Edmund Wilson, who, in "The Ambiguity of Henry James," finds the governess to be a patent example of Freudian psy- chology and repression (underscoring the phallic topoi, such as the tower Quint stands on, the mast Flora tries to insert into the boat at the lake, etc.), and inaugurates the more sophisticated line of reading that the gov- erness suffers from psychosexual delusion.1 Cumulatively, this vein of criticism demonstrates an exercise of critical virtuoso, posing progres- sively more elaborate and nuanced readings of the text. The Journal of Narrative Technique 28.1 (Winter 1998): 43-55. Copyright a 1998 by The Journal of Narrative Technique. This content downloaded from 198.246.186.26 on Fri, 17 Feb 2017 14:29:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 44 1 N T This debate has become so entrenched that more recent critics question whether it is possible to read The Turn of the Screw any longer, and take it then to be an exemplary metacritical text, offering a case study of the processes of interpretation. Vincent Pecora, for example, argues that: "The story has now become almost completely a metacritical one: we cannot lit- erally see the story but through the nearly opaque screen of more than half a century of critical argument" (28). Brenda Murphy lists a plethora of in- terpretive variations (nearly one hundred) and concludes that the lack of critical consensus indicates a kind of critical relativism, by which readings are dependent upon where one is standing" (200). Dieter Freundlieb makes a similar point, taking The Turn of the Screw to be a case study in hermeneutics and arguing that critics apply their particular "knowledge frames" to the text, hence generating the multiplicity of interpretations. While this conclusion strikes me as reductive and finally trivial-after all, every text is encountered by the frame of the interpreter-the critical con- versation clearly demonstrates a saturation of if not impasse in interpretive possibilities.2 Partly as a result of this saturation, and probably also as a result of the general poststructural attention to marginal and reflexive features, the frame has been enlisted in the recent reception as an untapped resource to help adjudicate the status of the governess's story. In the early criticism, the frame is elided or taken as a garnish to the governess's story. For those few critics who mention it, they primarily read it as a preparatory toner. Alexander Jones, in a 1959 PMLA article, represents the general tenor of this line of commentary, noting that the prologue "set[s] the mood at the proper emotional pitch" (112). More recently, Susan Crowl calls for con- sideration of the ignored frame, noting that the frame's open-endedness- its singulative occurrence in an introductory frame-"demands a flexible reading" (122). Still, she concludes that, "Considering the minute atten- tion given to the rest of the tale, this inattention is probably not critical oversight. It is not uncritical to view the frame of a ghost story as a purely conventional, and critically expendable, piece of machinery" (110). William Goetz also points out the singulative occurrence of the frame, al- though he charges it more negatively than Crowl, finding that it frustrates interpretation since it refuses the completion that a closing frame would presumably provide (73). Richard Rust goes a step further, indicting the frame's incompleteness, claiming that "the story ends terribly unframed This content downloaded from 198.246.186.26 on Fri, 17 Feb 2017 14:29:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Frame of The Turn of the Screw 45 with the shocking death of Miles. The horror is accentuated by the under- mining of the frame structure itself, something we counted on to provide control" (444).3 In short, then, this group of readings focuses on the frame but finds its formal asymmetry to reinforce if not precipitate problems en- gendered by the governess's story. Focusing more closely on the various layers of the frame, Anthony Mazzella, Michael Taylor, Shoshana Felman, and Bernard Duyfhuizen un- derscore its complications, Mazzella noting that the governess's manu- script is mediated through Douglas's transcription and editing, and Taylor the mediation of the unidentified (unnamed, uncharacterized, ungendered) first narrator. Felman, in her influential "Turning the Screw of Interpreta- tion," notes the "echoing effect" of the three narrators ("I," Douglas, and the governess) and the "narrative chain" of displacement they present, which works to dissimulate an origin and thus a fixed point of reference for the story. Felman goes on to extend the chain of displacement to the critical reception and finally to the larger question of interpretation, find- ing that the frame emblematizes the transferential relation and psychoana- lytic process (see esp. 119-33). Duyfhuizen deciphers five layers of trans- mission compacted in the frame (the narrator's account, the narrator's previous transcription, Douglas's reading, Douglas's receipt of the manu- script, and Douglas's original transcription), and finds that "the prologue, which is supposed to establish a meaningful context for the manuscript, is lost in a regress of transmissions and transformations" (169). Together, these readings find that the frame, contrary to normal expectation, under- mines an authoritative source and therefore lends to the ambiguity of the governess's story.4 Overall, then, current attention to the frame works to support the con- sensus view that the text poses an interpretive dilemma, and enlists the frame as a corroborating point of evidence. While these readings have a certain cogency and explanatory force-The Turn of the Screw and its vexed history of reception no doubt speak to the problematics of interpre- tation as well as the workings of the critical institution-they tacitly as- sume a particular model of the text and of textual representation. That is, they judge the text under the criteria of realism, a criteria that assigns pri- ority to the plausibility of actual occurrence. Whether or not one believes the governess, the criticism prescribes verisimilitude: if the governess is reliable, the ghosts "exist" and the tale portrays the characters in a realistic This content downloaded from 198.246.186.26 on Fri, 17 Feb 2017 14:29:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 46 1 N T scenario reacting in plausible ways to the disturbing intrusion of what we would now call paranormal activity. As on The X Files, the paranormal ac- tivity is coded in realistic terms, that it might actually happen in the midst of otherwise normal everyday life. The ghost story is effective and fright- ening insofar as that context is believable and within the realm of plausi- ble expectation. But even if one determines the governess is not reliable, then the criticism assigns plausible explanations for her seeing the ghosts-her delusion, her hysteria, her manipulation, and so on. Halluci- nation occurs under the code of realism, since it assigns non-realistic events to psychosis, explaining their aberration from normal and believ- able everyday events as a depiction of psychological disturbance. The frame, by the dictates of this code of realism, is deemed relevant insofar as it "transmits" the embedded narrative with fidelity and implicitly supports its status, giving further testimony to the reliability or unreliability of the governess's story. The frustration of the frame of The Turn of the Screw- as evidenced by the extant criticism-is that it does not provide this sup- port or definitively figure verifying testimony, one way or the other. However, contrary to this normative assumption of realism, I would pose that the governess's story, or more precisely the story that Douglas recounts, conspicuously draws on codes of narrative fantasy-motifs from the fairy tale, as well as gothic romance-and evokes a heightened story- world.