Faculty of Arts and Education David Persson The Reader as Co-Author Uses of Indeterminacy in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw English C-level thesis Term: Autumn 2009 Supervisor: Magnus Ullén Examiner: Johan Wijkmark Karlstads universitet 651 88 Karlstad Tfn 054-700 10 00 Fax 054-700 14 60 [email protected] www.kau.se Persson 2 Abstract The purpose of this essay is to explore how different means are used to create indeterminate meaning in Henry James‘s novella The Turn of the Screw. It suggests that the indeterminacy creates gaps in the text which the reader is required to fill in during the reading process, and that this indeterminacy is achieved chiefly through the use of an unreliable narrator and of ambiguity in the way the narrator relates the events that take place. The reliability of the narrator is called into question by her personal qualities as well as by narrative factors. Personal qualities that undermine the narrator‘s reliability are youth, inexperience, nervousness, excitability and vanity. Narrative factors that damage the narrator‘s reliability concern the story as manuscript, the narrator‘s role in the story she narrates, and her line of argumentation. The ambiguity in the way events are reported is produced by ambiguous words, dismissed propositions and omissions. The essay demonstrates how the unreliable narrator and the ambiguity combine to make the reader question the narrator‘s account and supply his or her own interpretation of key elements in the story, that is, how they invite the reader to ―co-author‖ the text. Persson 3 I. Introduction As the governess and the housekeeper in Henry James‘s The Turn of the Screw go looking for the little girl, Flora, who is missing, the moment finally seems to arrive when there are witnesses present who can confirm the actual existence of the ghosts that the governess claims are haunting the children in her care: ―Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she had stood the other time, and I remember, strangely, as the first feeling now produced in me, my thrill of joy at having brought on a proof. She was there, so I was justified; she was there, so I was neither cruel nor mad. She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there most for Flora‖ (James, ―The Turn of the Screw‖ 83). As it turns out, neither Mrs Grose nor Flora admit to seeing the ghost of Miss Jessel, and the alternatives which the governess though denying them yet formulates – that the ghosts could in fact be products of cruelty or madness on the governess‘s part – suggest themselves as possible explanations to the apparitions in the story, undercutting the governess‘s authority as a reliable narrator of the events taking place. On a literal level, Henry James‘s novella The Turn of the Screw can be read as an ordinary ghost story in which a young governess at an estate in the English countryside tries to free the children in her care from the evil influence of ghosts and to explore the nature of this influence. While it is quite possible to read the story in this way, the author employs a range of literary devices that create a great degree of indeterminacy. The indeterminacy requires the reader to fill in the gaps it creates with his or her own interpretations, making him or her an active contributor to the meaning of the story. My paper will examine how different literary devices are used in the story to create indeterminate meaning. This indeterminacy, I suggest, calls the narrator‘s version of events into question and opens the story to alternative readings. In the story at hand, the indeterminacy – that is, the gaps in the narrative that enable multiple interpretations – is created primarily in two ways: firstly, by an unreliable narrator, and secondly, by ambiguity in the way the narrator relates the events of the story. This paper is divided into two sections. In the first section I will explore some of the techniques used in the story to create indeterminacy, and in the second I will look at what effects the indeterminacy has on the interpretation of the text. Before examining the novella, however, I will give an introduction to the critical controversy that James‘s short novel has given rise to and a brief theoretical background to the concept of indeterminacy and explain how it will be used in this paper. Persson 4 II. The Critical Controversy The Turn of the Screw has been the center of a critical controversy ever since the publication of Edna Kenton‘s article ―Henry James and the Ruminant Reader‖ in 1924 and Edmund Wilson‘s essay ―The Ambiguity of Henry James‖, first published in 1934 (Heilman 433; Wilson 115). At issue is whether the novella should be read as a ghost story where the children are subjected to the supernatural evil of ghosts, or as a psychological study of insanity, where the ghosts are hallucinations produced by the sexually repressed mind of the narrator-protagonist. In her article, Edna Kenton points to the irony that The Turn of the Screw was received by James‘s contemporary admirers as a return to clarity, that ―for once at least, and during his lifetime, he was understandable and understood‖ (Kenton 103), while at the time no one discovered the meaning that in her view lies beneath the surface story of the children haunted by ghosts; that the ghosts are hallucinations, ―dummy figures‖ made from the ―shades of [the governess‘s] recurring fevers‖, ―figures for the ebb and flow of troubled thought within her mind‖ (Kenton 112f). Kenton describes how her first reading set her on the scent of a non-literal interpretation of the novella as it elicited questions about the ghosts, the governess‘s reactions to what takes place, and the nature of the horror that the story evokes, and how these questions ―blurred any serene certainty […] of what the story was about‖ (Kenton 107). According to her, the interpretation of the ghosts as hallucinations is the reading that James intended. No critic, however, had explored ―any possible story behind the ‗story‘‖ (Kenton 107), a tribute to the success of James‘s intention of writing the story as a challenge for the reader to contribute his or her own meaning to the story and as a ―supreme test‖ to the reader‘s attentiveness (Kenton 108). The interpretation of the story as a ghost story where the children are hounded by ghosts is the ―lazy version‖ of the tale (Kenton 112) arrived at by readers not attentive enough to avoid the ―traps‖ and ―lures‖ set up by the author (Kenton 108). While Kenton was the first to publish a hallucination interpretation of the story, Edmund Wilson provided the ―scholarly foundation‖ (Heilman 434) as he formulates it in Freudian terms. The governess, he argues, ―is a neurotic case of sex repression‖ and the ghosts ―are not real ghosts but hallucinations of the governess‖ (Wilson 115). To support his interpretation, Wilson points to the governess‘s infatuation with her employer, the fact that no one but the governess seems to be able to see the ghosts, and to imagery that quite easily lends itself to a Freudian interpretation (Wilson 116f). He dismisses a major obstacle to a hallucination interpretation – the identification of the masculine ghost as the late valet Peter Quint – in a rather unconvincing recourse to the Freudian censor, an interpretation he regrets Persson 5 and amends in afterwords to subsequent editions of his essay (in 1948 and 1959; Wilson 145, 153). According to Wilson, the hallucination reading was missed for such a long period of time since almost everything in the story can be ―read equally in either of two senses‖ (Wilson 120). It is only a close reading of James‘s preface to the story and the placement of the novella in James‘s collected works that provide the clues to the story as a characterization of the governess rather than a ghost story, which Wilson suggests is its intended meaning (Wilson 120f). In an afterword to his essay written in 1948, in the light of James‘s then recently published notebooks, Wilson retracts this proposition (Wilson 145), a retraction which he however takes back in a second afterword, written in 1959, where he is again convinced that James ―intended the governess to be suffering from delusions‖ (Wilson 153). Kenton‘s and Wilson‘s interpretation of The Turn of the Screw was criticized by Robert B. Heilman in an article in Modern Language Notes, ―The Freudian Reading of The Turn of the Screw‖, in 1947. Heilman takes Kenton to task for not providing much evidence for her hallucination reading; instead she is reveling ―in the conviction that James […] has utterly fooled all the other readers of the story‖ (Heilman 433). Wilson, in Heilman‘s view, misreads the preface. His interpretation of the governess‘s ―authority‖ is described by Heilman as an ―emotional spasm‖ by an ―unwary liberal‖ which results in a ―hysterical blindness‖ (Heilman 434), and Wilson is censured for ignoring parts of the preface and parts of James‘s correspondence that conflict with his reading of the story (Heilman 435). As regards the story, Heilman admits that there are ambiguous passages but criticizes Wilson for treating them as if they unambiguously support a Freudian reading (Heilman 436). According to Heilman, Kenton‘s and Wilson‘s Freudian reading ―does violence‖ both to the story and to the author‘s preface to it (Heilman 433). Wilson is turning the story into a ―commonplace clinical record‖, a fate from which the story is worth saving, and the debate raised by the Freudian interpretation points to the danger of a ―facile, doctrinaire application of formulae‖ resulting in a disregard or ―gross distortion‖ of the text (Heilman 443).