Cursed Kids or Psych-Au Pair? “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James

The story begins and ends with two variations on the meaning of the title. On the one hand, to give another turn of the screw is to ratchet up the horror of a good ghost story, in this case by involving children in it. On the other, it’s to treat the cause of that horror as if it were just another of life’s many obstacles, to be overcome both by screwing one’s courage to the sticking place, and by suppressing awareness of what is revoltingly unnatural in it. Whose screw turns out to be looser—the audience that enjoys such stories (and sometimes believes them), or the teller who manufactures them? Wes & Erin analyze Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:08 Wes: The story begins and ends with two variations on the meaning of the title. On the one hand, to give another turn of the screws to ratchet up the horror of a good ghost story, in this case by involving children in it. On the other, it's to treat the cause of that horror as if it were just another of life's many obstacles to be overcome, both by screwing one's courage to the sticking place and by suppressing awareness of what is revoltingly unnatural in it. Whose screw turns out to be looser, the audience that enjoys such stories and sometimes believes them, or the teller who manufactures them. Today we're discussing Henry James, the Turn of the Screw. This is Wes Alwan, and this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I always found the title of this to be odd. And this is the first time I've read the Turn of the Screw. And I was looking forward to figuring out why he titled it in this way, what that meant. And it's still a bit obscure to me. There's two places in which this phrase, turn of the screw, turns up in the novella, but it's used in quite different ways in each of those cases. So I think one of the things we could do today is try to figure out what the point of the title is, because I think that ends up saying a lot about what's going on in the story. 1:34 Erin: Isn't it that the Turn of the Screw in the preface involves the emotional effect of a ghost story? 1:42 Wes: Yeah. 1:43 Erin: So they're listening to some ghost story, and they say the fact that this ghost appears first to a little boy, some little boy in the story at a tender age, adds a particular touch. But it's not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children? We say, of course, somebody exclaimed that they give two turns. 2:07 Wes: So it sounds like it ratchets up 2:09 Erin: the suspense or it's even creepier or something. But there's some effect that these children seem to be having that is not quite so clearly spelled out. 2:19 Wes: I took the turn of the screws having something to do with suspense. But, you know, you're making me see that. Yeah, the creepiness might be the better word. They use some words as we go forward. The words that are used are dreadfulness, uncanny ugliness and horror and pain, which one woman describes as. Well, in response to dreadfulness, a woman says, oh, how delicious. So there's an emphasis in the beginning of the story, on the idea that ghost stories like this involve our getting satisfaction out of horrible things, on the one hand, and then associated with this idea is the notion that if you really want to make it as horrible as possible, get children involved. So you have this creepy insinuation all by itself that adults are sitting around gratifying themselves with tales of the torture of children. And one of the interesting things about the way this begins is that the tale that is the point of departure for the primary story in the book, the one that involves just one child, here's the way it's put. I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to note it as the only case he had met with which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case I may mention was that of an apparition in just such an old house as had gathered us for the occasion. An appearance of a dreadful kind to a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the terror of it, waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to encounter also herself, before she had succeeded in doing so, the same sight that had shocked him. So one of the really interesting things about that is that is what we expect out of the parent, right? In general, we think of ghost stories as the fancies of children. They're made up, they're in a child's imagination. Unless we're superstitious adults and it's the role of the adult to tell the child, no, there isn't a monster under your bed, or, no, that was just a dream, there aren't really ghosts. You were just imagining that. And to provide a kind of soothing maternal function in that case that breaks down, the child doesn't get that you have an adult who actually also sees the apparition. So whether you chalk that up to. Within the context of the ghost story, of course ghosts are real. You can chalk it up to the internal consistency of that fantasy world, if you like. But you could also chalk it up to, you know, if you transfer that into our frame, that's just a psychotic parent or a failed parent who can't do their job and who can't alleviate the fanciful fears of the child. And of course, that's a foreshadowing of what actually happens in the turn of the screw in which you have a governess. So in the turn of the screw, the children don't even see the apparitions. Only the governess does, only the parental figure. So it's not just that they're seeing them and she can't soothe them. She's introducing, unless her account is correct, which I take her as being deluded, we'll discuss that. But unless her account is correct, she's introducing her own fears and fancies and psychosis into the situation and trying to, in a way convince everyone else of it, including the children. Of course, the alternate reading, if we were to treat it as a true ghost story, is that she, you know, the ghosts really are there and she does see them. And all the other evidence, psychological evidence that we get in the story, that we should ignore that and conclude that the ghosts are real. 5:52 Erin: The other part of that second reading would be that the children also see them and are just not being forthcoming about that. So there's a reading where the children, of course, know exactly what's going on. And I do think that these children are, at least in the way that we're getting the information from the governess. There is something extremely creepy about these children, which we could also talk about. But I like what you're saying about the frame narrative, which really stuck out to me during this reading. Just this morning I happened to find. I love Virginia Woolf's commentary on people, which can sometimes be very mean. But she wrote this great essay about James and I just found it in bits and pieces on somebody's blog. I couldn't even. I was trying desperately to find the whole thing and it's behind a paywall somewhere. So she was writing about James's ghost stories and she writes they have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts, the blood stained sea captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons. And she says that these old fashioned ghost stories, these things that people would tell over long hours that they had to spend sitting over the fire, drinking wine by the light of half a dozen candles, those things can't appeal to us anymore because of the fact that we have newspapers, basically that over breakfast we could read about more horrors than what people in the olden days could imagine in an entire year. And so I like the point that you're making about these people over the fire on Christmas Eve, getting their jollies out of hearing these tales of horror, because it seems to me like that's the old fashioned kind of ghost story, you know, which maybe is this experience is trotted out on Christmas Eves. Now. It was a particularly creepy time and traditionally a time when people would tell ghost stories, oddly enough. But I like that distinction because then what we actually get, as I think you're Also suggesting is a story that's very different from that kind of old fashioned ghost story, as Woolf herself also makes this distinction. His story is, I think, more about psychological realism than any kind of horror. Though maybe the two overlap quite a bit. Because the psychological realism that we see of the governess might have some horrifying elements to it. But the ghost story becomes a kind of a commentary. I don't know, storytelling itself or narrative itself, because it calls so much attention to itself, because it's a first person narration handed down as a quote, unquote, real account. And that narration itself is being transcribed by the guy we get in the frame narrative who's listening to and commenting on this guy Douglas's account because he knows this woman and the story within a story element. And then the mirroring effects that happen a lot within the story were just making me reflect that. The whole story seems to be a commentary on the limits of storytelling itself and the extremes to which one can push psychological realism almost to a breaking point where you can't really understand anyone or anything because everything becomes opaque or abstruse and you can't ultimately penetrate other people's perspectives with your own mind. It's like where writing ends, where the novel as a concept ends almost. I don't know if that's going too far. 9:05 Wes: You said it gets at the limits of psychological realism. 9:08 Erin: I think so, because we're getting this story told by this woman from the first person perspective. And basically everything that she's trying to do is to read her surroundings and read things that are actually extremely opaque and project onto them what she thinks is actually going on. And I suppose what I'm trying to say is that in effect is what we all do. But it's especially what artists, what writers do. They try to read stories into things, or they try to, especially realist novelists or novelists that are, like James, trying to get inside the head of people. They're trying to interpret how someone would act in certain situations and transcribe those thoughts. I suppose what I'm saying is that by the governess's failure, or what we might interpret as her failure of interpretation throughout the book, both in terms of things that she may or may not see and thoughts and motivations that other people may or may not be having, it ends in death and it ends in terror and horror. So to me, it almost seems to be like an indictment of just the process of trying to read and understand other people, which is in itself kind of an indictment of storytelling. So it becomes something very Hyper meta. Even though it's presumably a ghost story told by a fire in this innocent, old fashioned jump scare way. It takes that classical storytelling conceit, which is very straightforward, and turns it into something that's actually very. As a vehicle for something that's very bizarre. 10:33 Wes: So it's a parody or a satire of a ghost story. 10:36 Erin: Right. 10:37 Wes: I hadn't thought of the way you could see it as a satirization of storytelling itself, but that makes sense to me. I mean, my general reaction to the book, in all honesty, I didn't enjoy it reading it the first time, really I enjoyed it more just going through the second time and taking notes on it. But I also enjoyed a lot. I watched this 1999 TV movie version of the Turn of the Screw. I think it was done on pbs. It's very, very good. And it genuinely actually does have creepy and terrifying moments. And not because it tries to play up the supernatural part, it doesn't. You know, it treats it entirely as a matter of her. Her psychology. And yet it is. It's very effective. So my dissatisfaction with the story is a product of. So there's no ambiguity for me. She's a psychotic, hysterical person, very paranoid. And so basically you're in the mind of a paranoid person for 80 something pages, which I find very unpleasant. And there's lots of evidence from very early on in the story not just that she's an unreliable narrator, but that she's extremely paranoid. I don't know if disturbed is the word, that may be too pejorative in a way, but she's delusional in many ways. And probably there's hints that she's an inappropriate figure. I mean, I think ultimately she plays the role of the ghost in the story. She is the ghost. And that's a very original, in a way, take on this. I think it's not until we M. Night Shyamalan. Right. Success. Until the protagonist becomes the unwitting ghost in a ghost story again. And I say that she plays the role of the ghost. If we side with the children, which I do, or side with the idea that they're not seeing apparitions aren't really ghosts. More psychological reading then? Yeah. She is the one there being scary and being, to use her word and I think Flora's word at a certain point, cruel. So the idea of that is very interesting. But James's ornate prose, which I don't get the same satisfactions out of that prose as I do out of, say, Melville having to decipher a sentence. They should Use this for sentence diagramming in schools. How many subordinate clauses or triple, quadruple negations or whatever is going on that makes it so hard to read a sentence. The sheer complexity of it. That is not as rewarding to me and James. But the main thing is, psychologically, it's brilliant. It's incredible. But it's precisely for that reason that I find it unpleasant. So in a way, it's accomplishing. Right. It's accomplishing the objective of a ghost story, which is to induce discomfort, but it's psychological discomfort. And that happens to be something that in this case. And I could think about it some more. I don't get that meta pleasure out of it. Right. That people seem to get out of ghost stories or horror movies. I actually don't like horror movies either. But anyway, I don't think that answers the question very well of my dissatisfaction with it. 13:43 Erin: But I think that's really interesting because I also was thinking about James in contrast to Melville, simply because when we read Billy Bud, we both had that resistance at the beginning that sort of gave way to something that we both really enjoyed. As far as James goes, this is a pretty easy one to read compared to some of his other books. So I'm used to James. I'm used to the syntactic complexity being ratcheted up even higher, like, particularly in his late trilogy of great novels like the Ambassadors is really, really difficult to get through. And that has an entire page is just one sentence. 14:21 Wes: Jesus. 14:22 Erin: Yeah, it gets really crazy. But I guess you would agree with. There's this famous H.G. wells quote where the two of them kind of went back and forth like they sort of admired certain elements of each other's work. But James was dissatisfied that Welles was so disconnected from reality, and Welles was dissatisfied that James was so tied up in his own wordiness, basically. And so he famously characterized James as like a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea. Like that was his. 14:51 Wes: That's great. 14:52 Erin: And I know Virginia Woolf said something about how when she reads James, she feels like she's entombed in a block of amber or something. In other words, you're not alone in your characterization. I adore him despite everything. And I think that turn of the screw and everything earlier than that is on the easier side in the sliding scale of James prose style. So I think there's evidence to the reading that you give of the governess being the ghost, the governess being the one who's actually haunting the children or hurting the children. I think that comes Pretty early on, when she puts herself in the place of Quint during his second. When she goes outside and looks through the window and then scares Mrs. Grose. Yeah, but I also think that you're coming down on one side. I think maybe you're being a little too harsh for my sense of the story. Because though we don't really know who this Douglas is, there's a little bit of lubricant at the beginning of the story. This is a woman who this Douglas knows and greatly admires and, in fact, is in love with. 15:54 Wes: He's accused of being in love with her. 15:56 Erin: Of being in love with her. Right. But he doesn't really reject that assumption on their part. He says, yes, you may grin or something like that. Or like, go ahead and grin. That turns out to be not such a great look, actually, because he would roughly be, I think, the same distance and age from her as she was from Miles, only it was then 10 years later. So if we take Miles to be 10 years old and the governess to be 20, then if this guy fell in love with the governess while he was in college, so let's say roughly 20, then she would have been 30 anyway, or around there, who knows? So this Douglas guy thinking highly of the governess is really our first impression of her. And I think that carries us over the first pages. I don't know how many pages we can say scientifically of her account of things and gets us a little bit more on her side than we would be from the beginning saying, whoa, this is a crazy person. A few things do happen in the beginning of the narrative that are very odd and very suggestive. And I think one of the most mysterious characters is Mrs. Grose. And certainly her lack of information that she divulges and her sort of odd secrecy can be interpreted in many ways, too. But I think that certain readings that the governess is giving to her surroundings do make sense, even as they're extremely heightened and really extremely immature. I mean, everything is kind of mediated through her emotions she can't seem to see in a straightforward and kind of logical way. But anyway, I do have some sympathy for her at the beginning. And I am a little bit more questioning of the motives of the people around her, I think, than you sound like you are. 17:35 Wes: I don't think there's any ambiguity about whether the ghosts are real, even though that was a big. I was looking at early critical commentary. A lot of early critics seemed to take for granted that the ghosts were real. And then it seemed to occur to people maybe they weren't real. 17:50 Erin: Oh, wow. 17:51 Wes: And then that became a subject of critical controversy. And I thought, these critics are seeing ghosts if they think this is in any way ambiguous. 18:01 Erin: Hmm. 18:02 Wes: I think what James does at the end is he provides us with a twist. Because Miles dies, he provides us with a twist that makes the possibility that the ghosts are real a defensible position. But that I take to be a joke. And of course, some commentators have interpreted that ending, and there is evidence for her actually suffocating him after he faints, so doing a Mice and Men on him, loving him to death. And even if there were that ambiguity, it wouldn't interest me. I wouldn't find that very interesting. Her state of mind, to me, is over the top. And I think James takes a lot of labors to make his point. Right. It's not all that subtle, his portrayal of her as a crazy person, in my opinion. I think it's subtle enough that early critics maybe could have missed it or some readers might miss it. But if you're reading between the lines, he's trying to include as much evidence as possible that she is not fully in touch with reality. I mean, the first thing that we get is her over the top reaction to Flora. And I think you're right. In the beginning, it takes a while to catch on to her, because I think the impression is in the beginning that she's just, wow, there's these two angelic, amazing kids, or at least with Flora in the beginning, you know, the way she describes Flora, the most beautiful child I've ever seen, her radiant, angelic beauty is something that she says leads to an immediate restlessness in her. So in retrospect, as the story develops, you can see that, yes, she idealizes these children in a very over the top way, in a way to the point where we begin to doubt that idealization just as much as we doubt the flip side of that idealization, which is the appearance of the sinister forces that are supposed to corrupt this purity. Right. Those two things are. Those are just two sides of the same coin of her kind of split reality between all good and all bad. And the appearance of those apparitions is just the other shoe dropping. And of course, the other thing that James does is he takes labors to associate her relationship to the children with her relationship to their uncle, right, to her employer, who, when she meets him, is arguably flirtatious. Or at least he's describing his bachelor lifestyle in a very compelling way. So he charms her, he pawns off these two children on Her. And then he says, don't ever contact me. So in very quick succession, it's as if you get this whole relationship right. You get a seduction, you get reproduction implicitly. And then you get complete abandonment. 21:01 Erin: Yeah, that is really good. I never thought of that. 21:04 Wes: And so part of what's unfolding in the story is her reaction to that abandonment, which she hints at in various ways, that that's part of it. 21:12 Erin: I hate to stand up for a weirdly pedophilic and obviously disturbed governess. You allow that there's at least a little bit of getting used to her perspective at the beginning. 21:23 Wes: But don't you think I fully admit, by the way, a lot of this is my own prejudice? So let me put that up front. My prejudice in this story is very amplifying. But go ahead. 21:35 Erin: I suppose this is why my attention was immediately called to the contrast between this classical ghost story and this psychological realism, as I'm gonna call it. Just because I can't think of a better term which is such a hallmark of James writing. So I suppose my prejudice would be in favor of that in which you have this waffling all the time, right, Where James so accurately reproduces the minutiae of people's thoughts that in the revolution of just one minute, you might have lots of contradictory thoughts about the same thing that'll just float into your mind and then go away. And so I interpret this as being very much in the vein of how James typically is able to capture people's thoughts. In fact, let me refer to this, too, this Virginia Woolf essay. Just one little thread in it that she mentions, which I think is particularly good about his story. The friends of the friends, his characters, with their extreme fineness of perception, are already halfway out of the body. That is kind of a hallmark of all of his characters, I think. And it's also something that I really identify with. I mean, maybe that's because I'm halfway out of the body myself. I don't know. But the extreme fluctuations in her perception of her environment when she first comes in, it kind of tracks for me. I mean, we realize after a while how unhinged she is. And I believe she becomes more and more unhinged, of course, over the course of the book. And we can argue about why that is or try to speculate about why that is and what's causing her to become more and more unraveled. But I do think that, at least at the beginning, when she's describing these bumps and jumps, these highs and lows of perception about the house and about her circumstance, I can understand it. I mean, I think that when we are confronted with a new environment in which we have to spend some time and about which we have some oddly contradictory emotions, maybe, like her, we've had to take the position whether we feel like it's a great thing for us or not. Maybe we have all these ambivalent and differing perceptions of what our life is going to be like there. And so when she first comes in, there's in hindsight, an unhinged element, a sort of immaturity. But on the other hand, to me, it's at least just a sort of heightened account of what would go through anybody's mind when they come into this place. There are hints that her preoccupations with power are something that's kind of troubling. When she first comes in, she seems to be very happy that she's going to be. You know, she's happy that Mrs. Grose curtsies to her when she comes in and that she feels like a very important person in this house, which is understandable, too, in a way. She's 20 years old, she's come from poverty, and now she gets to be in charge of everything with nobody over her. 24:17 Wes: And she's excited by the opportunity to form Flora. She says this opportunity to be a formative influence on someone. 24:25 Erin: Yeah, it reminds me very much of Hedda Gabler, which will obviously also end in death and destruction. And then certainly her waxing poetic over the virtues of the children is a bit much, But I guess I'm willing to give her a little bit more leeway in the beginning, because it does just seem like a natural extension of James, usual tact. 24:45 Wes: She arrives, she as that very idealized description of Flora. Then she has her first hallucination, which is the faint far cry of a child. She talks about her excitement over the opportunity to form Flora. And then there's that discussion of Miles, where Mrs. Grose says, you will be carried away by the little gentleman. And then the governess says, I'm rather easily carried away and that she was carried away in London. So you get this immediate association between her feelings for Miles or for the children and her feelings for the uncle. And this idea that she's been carried away, that she has a romantic interest in the uncle. Which, of course, is a repetition of the moment in which Douglas is said to have a romantic interest in her. Right. You get all sorts of doublings like that, by the way, in this. Yeah, you pointed out one of them. When she takes Quint's place outside the window. And then she gets Mrs. Gross to agree to her idea that she's gonna go and greet Miles as he arrives. When the coach lets him out, he's under the care of the male guard or something like that. Little do they know they should have. If they were really guarding him, they would not let him get out. And then she takes that as a sign that they are gonna be in total agreement about everything. She uses this phrase. Never falsified, she basically says. And that turned out to, you know, I saw that as a sign that we would always be in agreement, and we always were. Which, of course, they weren't. The critical moment. Mrs. Grose, who tries very hard to back her up and can't, in fact, can't because she doesn't see Ms. Jessel at the critical moment that the governess points that ghost out to Mrs. Grose. And then Flora gives her that tour of the tower. And you see the structure. In the very first chapter, James is carefully working on establishing her as unreliable. Working on establishing her as someone who's very idealized and carried away easily. And, you know, as you point out, it's not over the top in the beginning. It gradually ratchets up. He gradually turns the screw, let's say he does that very effectively. So I think you're right that he's not beating us over the head with this from the very beginning. It's easy for me to go in with hindsight now and pick out all of these things, but clearly, once you go back through and analyze the story, he's very careful in the psychological construction here. All of which, in my opinion, is designed to undermine the narrative and to undermine the idea that there are any ghosts, except for her proverbial fulfillment of that role. And so therefore, to satirize the ghost story. And I think ultimately, as you point out, it's a commentary on the meaning of ghost stories, which we'll get to some more. And then, as you point out, the commentary on what it means to tell a story at all. It seems clear now that those, in a way, are the themes, the subjects. 27:42 Erin: Now, I wanted to ask you more about Mrs. Gross, but maybe we should talk about the meaning of ghost stories before we move on. 27:50 Wes: Absolutely. Yeah. 27:51 Erin: Yeah. 27:51 Wes: I was hoping we'd do that pretty early so that I can get out all my state, all my biases up front, but. 27:59 Erin: No, I'm very interested. No, I want you to. I don't know what to say about it, except I suspect that I have my mind about to be Made up for me by whatever you're going to say. 28:12 Wes: Okay. I'm glad. 28:14 Erin: Sorry, sorry. 28:15 Wes: I'm glad to be able to have such a formative role in the life of an impression. 28:21 Erin: Yes, my dear. 28:22 Wes: Innocent. Oh, God, he just gave me shivers. Yes, my dear. 28:27 Erin: Kind of creeped me out. 28:28 Wes: That is creepy. You're right. Now that you say it that way, the way the story starts off with this connection between children and ghost stories, it made me want to think about that connection further because in a way there is an association. Right. Ghost stories are, in a way, the way that we actually entertain children, I think. Right. I mean, a fairy tale, in a way. A Grimm's fairy tale with its horror elements. So you could call them horror stories or ghost stories and you could say they're about ghosts or monsters. I think they all go together. And I think it used to be the case that we didn't shield children from that fascination because it does seem to be a fascination of children. I remember it being one of my fascinations as a kid. And I remember my mom soothing me after having a bad dream. Actually, I have a memory of an out of body experience while my mom was soothing me. So. 29:22 Erin: Wow. 29:23 Wes: I had a weird paranormal. I had a weird dream, she was soothing me and then I remember just a weird paranormal experience. So the ghost story sort of continued through the maternal soothing phase. Say what you want about that psychologically, but I was sort of hovering over the bed, looking down and watching us. And my first dream, I turn into a witch and fly out of a window and there's a monster. This is when I was five, by the way. There's a monster trying to kill a damsel in distress and I'm supposed to save her, but I can't because I'm stuck, bound down on the ground on this rotating platform. Anyway, first remembered dream. Really weird, I know, for a five year old. But I remember those fascinations and I do think they're a fascination for children. And the more obvious explanation is that they reflect an attempt by children to come to terms with death and also everything else horrible that goes on in life. It's this sort of, you know, I was going to say introductory course. Right. Speaking of giving children formative experiences. This is part of the education, this is part of what we have to introduce them to in life, which is how terrible it's all gonna be. Sorry, it's a pretty pessimistic thing to say, but all the horrible things that can happen and ultimately death, which is inevitable. I think there's something More. I've thought about this a little bit, just because Frankenstein was an obsession for me, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And I thought a lot about this and wrote about it because I think she was connecting the concept of a ghost story with the concept of rearing up a child or a creature and giving a creature formed of experiences and relating that to the ambition of a writer and what it meant to be a writer. One of the ideas I draw from that, from the thinking that I did about that is that ghost stories, in a way, I think are about. It's a way for children to process the danger represented by adults. Adult desire, for instance, the kind of desire that the governess has for Flora and Miles. It doesn't have to be overtly pedophilic. Right. All of us get pleasure. I think most adults can get a lot of pleasure out of interacting with children. And they're very lovable. And you want to squeeze their cheeks and you want to eat them up, so to speak. Right. It gets confusing. You quickly start having reactions which initially affectionate, if gone too far, would put you in that role of the monster. Right. That whole eating, I'm going to eat you up thing. Right. Just like a monster. So I think part of what ghost stories are about is the danger of the adult world and adult desires. Some of that is desires in the direction of children. Some of it is just the ways in which children can be collateral damage to those desires. But ultimately, it is about formative influence. It comes back to what this governess was saying about the opportunity to form Flora. Because I think ultimately, what ghosts represent for all of us is the persistence of previous generations in the present. And in our own character. We are formed by it. Right? We identify with culture, we follow laws and speak a language. And all these things were invented by the dead. These are the legacies of the dead that live with us, and they essentially haunt us and they curtail our freedom to the extent that they form us, which. Right. This is something that Miles talks about wanting his freedom. So this is my preliminary thesis that ghost stories do have something to do with children and the formative role that adults have in the lives of children and the way that that formative role can go wrong, the way in which adults can be monstrous to children, the way adults can make monsters out of children. Right. The governess is concerned about the evil influence that Jessel and Quint have had on the children, the idea that they've corrupted the children. 33:20 Erin: I completely agree. And this idea of, oh, for instance, you know, popular fairy tales Being watered down in animated Disney adaptations is something that I talk about frequently, or how sequestered from death we are in modern American culture. Just the idea that less than a hundred years ago, if someone in your family died, you were very often living in the same house with him or her, and very often the body would lie in state in your house. So in a multi generation house, that means that the child would have a much greater acquaintance with death and with the reality of that than we do today. And I think that that was integral to forming a consciousness of what life means in light of the threat of death in front of you in a much more real way than it is now. So curiously, the governess is kind of this modern figure in that way, where she is trying to keep from the children both the idea of death and the idea of sex. I mean, she's trying to keep them from maturing. She even says this. She talks about how gentle the children are and how extraordinary they are. She says, I used to speculate, but even this, with a dim disconnectedness, as to how the rough future for all futures are rough, would handle them and might bruise them. They had the bloom of health and happiness. And yet, as if I had been in charge of a pair of little grandees, of princes of the blood, for whom everything, to be right, would have to be enclosed and protected. The only form that in my fantasy, the after years could take for them was that of a romantic, a really royal extension of the garden and the park. It may be, of course, above all that what suddenly broke into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness, that hush in which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of a beast. She wants to keep them in the sort of perpetual quarantine, if you will, of the park and the garden, the enclosed space of childhood, which she imagines to be a place in which maturity, you know, an awareness of sex and death has no place at all. The tamed nature of this extension of the house. And of course, lurking within that, she imagines, is this beast, this untamed nature, this force of evil that's going to pounce on them, which, as you've already suggested, would possibly be the governess herself, like she's already been this evil force that's come into the house. I think there's an interesting idea at the heart of this, which is, I think what you're saying is then, that these ghost stories are an important means of maturation for young people, that they can serve as kind of vehicles for maturation and Healthy maturation. But at the same time, there's a kind of exposure to things that are dangerous and that are extremely disturbing, that, if gone too far, can be damaging to children. And I suppose the story is grappling with that distinction. I mean, how much can we expose children to. The actual horror within this story isn't that there are ghosts. Right. It's the suggestion that there has been something evil in the relationship between Quint and Ms. Jessel and the children. And there's the suggestion of something, possibly pedophilia. Yeah, right. And that, of course, would be the truly heinous thing at the center of this story and that exposure. So you have, like the drip by drip exposure of children to the reality of the world through stories, through fantasy, through monsters, and all these things that you're suggesting. And then there's the criminal stripping of innocence of a child, which is then at the other end of that scale. Extreme end of that scale. 37:02 Wes: Right. That's a good point. 37:05 Erin: So all of these things kind of come to bear in this story in a strange way. And whether or not the children have been exposed to anything untoward From Quint and Ms. Jessel, however, to whatever degree that might be, it seems that the governess herself, simply by assuming that they have been tainted or assuming a kind of higher maturity on their part than they're capable of, is also being the one who's then introducing that if we take the reading that she's the evil one, she is actually speeding their maturation and ultimately, you know, speeding their death by both trying to shelter them and by being suspicious that they may not be the little angelic creatures that she hopes they are. It's a strange combination. 37:48 Wes: It is. There's a lot of twists and turns and ironies. Like she becomes the ghost by. And in a sense, introduces the ghosts by trying to ward off the ghosts, trying to shelter them from the ghost. So it's a sort of return of the repressed. Right. Because arguably, she's suppressing any awareness of naughtiness in the kids. Right. Because, I mean, later on, Miles is going to arrange it. So she catches him doing something bad and says, I just. I wanted you to know that I could be. I wanted you to know that I could be naughty. Which is an important communication from a child that suggests that there's something stifling about her idealization of him and her attempt to deny the existence of anything but their purity and their goodness. But, I mean, what you bring up is the way the novella begins is with this idea of a Child seeing an apparition, a mother waking up and not being able to soothe the child because the mother saw the same apparition. And here, of course, we could say, well, the governess is trying to soothe them. Right. She is trying to be that good mother who keeps the apparitions away from them, when, in fact, she's doing the very opposite in her attempt to shelter children. Which goes to show this whole idea. You know, I was treating ghost stories as being about the adult exploitation of children, but also just about being creatures in general. As in, children are creatures in the sense of they are creatures in relation to their parents being their creators. And then they're also creatures in relation to all the creative forces of education and culture and language and everything else and those sorts of influences. Right. They can be benevolent and they make us who we are. They give us a conscience, they give us abilities. But they can also be sinister and exploitative, and at the very, very extreme is violence and pedophilia and abuse and things like that. But there's a whole range of things that are ambiguous, which just falls within the category of parental love. So a child could be traumatized by a parent that is too smothering, for instance. 40:12 Erin: Well, and throughout, the governess is extremely physically affectionate with the children. 40:17 Wes: Yes, exactly. 40:19 Erin: To the point of. Not that there's anything wrong on her part necessarily, but it seems to be coming from an extremely insecure place in the governess. 40:28 Wes: And she gets physical a lot with Mrs. Grose. 40:31 Erin: Yes. 40:32 Wes: There are scenes in her grabbing her arm or snuggling into her breast, or she talks in this very physical language about pressing people or having them up against the wall. Yeah, there's a lot of physical stuff. The reader's attention is definitely drawn to it by James. Her physicality, her intensity, which is benevolent, but can still be damaging or unwanted. And obviously, by the end of it, you do find out. I think Flora's reaction to her at the very end is probably something that is not limited to the governess asking her, tell me where Ms. Jessel is. It's probably a reaction to the entire trajectory of the relationship in which she has been probably dissatisfied with a lot of what the governess has been doing. We can't see that. Right. Cause we get a very unreliable narrator. It's ingeniously hinted in all of this. 41:27 Erin: Before we move on, I just wanted to say that you took a kind of surprising direction for me because I thought you were gonna talk about the presence of children within ghost stories and what function they serve as Being a kind of a trope, you know, the creepy child. 41:42 Wes: Yeah. 41:42 Erin: I'm glad for the direction that you did go in. But that's just the angle at which I was kind of examining the story. You know, there's a point in a child's maturation, I think, where they become extremely opaque to adults after they're toddlers, when they've learned to express themselves to a certain degree, but not with a kind of complex ability to make clear their emotions. I'm just sort of speculating about this, by the way. I'm not saying, like, this is an actual phase of development. I just mean that, you know, I think there's a point where a child becomes, you could say, the victim of more complex emotions, but is not yet able to express them very well. And I think it's around the ages that Miles and Flora are. You know, they're old enough to have more mature thoughts and to have their own fancies and inclinations and their own sort of complex feelings about things. But they're also at this age where they're not really forthcoming about them, maybe because they're not capable of expressing them fully. And I think at this particular age, there are a lot of ghost stories. I think this is a common age in which children appear in ghost stories. Maybe for that reason. This is entirely supposition on my part because of the opacity that that represents and the idea of the unknown being the thing we're most afraid of. And children at this age are particularly unknowable, and therefore they can be particularly creepy or sinister in the way that they withhold information or suddenly change the subject because they're involved in their own thoughts. But it can look, especially to someone who's paranoid. It can look evasive. It can look somehow as though they're withholding critical pieces of information. And I think that is done really well here. The fact that we never know really anything about these children and their past relationship with Quint and Ms. Jessel, I think, is really creepy. It's as though their children, I suppose you could say, are people without any past history. And it seems as though Miles and Flora are particularly lacking in history because they're not forthcoming about it at all. And even Miles and his reason for his expulsion from school, which we should really talk about, because that is evidence that the governess is not entirely to blame here. I mean, that's a very, very odd thing, that it never gets explained. And that is something that's, you know, he gets kicked out of school. It really happened. And we never learn what happened. And he never even talks about what life was like at school. They say almost nothing. 44:17 Wes: You had me thinking, as you were talking about the fact that they're in what Freud would call the latency period between infantile perversity, what Freud thinks of as perversity because it involves erogenous zones like, you know, anality, for instance, or wanting to suck. There are quasi sexual components to early experience that are there just so they can help us survive, you know, pleasure and defecation or sucking or something like that. And then that once we get to the latency period, it's a kind of asexual period in a way, right? And maybe there's also something uncanny. If you want to talk about the creepiness of children in horror films, I think maybe you were getting at something about the uncanny quality of there being little adults, right, which is kind of very played up in this with Miles calling her dear and all that stuff and being so smart. But on the other hand, of course, they're not really adults. But I think the whole thing with Miles in school, right, there's a strong suggestion that something sexual happened. And what we get out of him at the end, shortly before he's crushed to death, sorry to give a very prejudiced interpretation of the ending, what we get out of him is that he said things. So he says, then what did you do? I said things. Who did you say them to? Miles says he doesn't know, she says. The governess says to everyone. He says only to. He doesn't remember the names, but only to the people he liked. And then she says, did they repeat what you said? And he says, only to the people they liked. So very interesting. And you know. And then it gets back to the masters, but it's too horrible to put into the letter, right? The masters from the school don't put in the letter what he's getting expelled for. Which, of course, if it were violence, as we know, violence is perfectly fine. You can put that in movies, you can put that in letters, but if it's sexual, you can't. So there are strong suggestions here. So maybe it was perfectly normal, innocent. What is he, nine or ten? The kind of sexual experimentation that kids in that age sometimes engage in. Or it sounds like he was just saying things, right? So he may have been as innocuous as him saying naughty things to girls in school or to boys, or it could be something much worse, of course. And there's a huge. You could drive a truck through the gap, right, that James leaves and he leaves the same gap with Quint and Jessel about what has gone on here. We simply don't know. It could be that with Quint and Jessel, for instance, it's just the fact that they had an inappropriate relationship and that she was a lady and he was a commoner and they were vaguely not a good influence because they were fooling around out of wedlock and shouldn't be consorting with the children in that way. Maybe Quint was giving Miles beers or something. Who knows? And then there's the other extreme, which is possibility of pedophilia, and then there's everything in between that. But regardless of how extreme it is, there's definitely a suggestion of some sort of sexual component to all of this. 47:23 Erin: The fact that Mrs. Grose is, like the governess, very obsessed with impropriety. They both seem to be products of this hyper, Victorian, provincial attitude about who can mix with whom. And that leads me to want to talk more about Mrs. Gross, because I do think there's a reading of this book where Mrs. Grose can be the villain. She also really doesn't say anything about anything. 47:49 Wes: Oh, poor Mrs. Grose. You're gonna. 47:51 Erin: I know. I'm gonna go after her. 47:53 Wes: All right, let's do it. 47:55 Erin: I don't know why this stuck out to me. Weird things stick out to me at different readings. Right at the beginning, when the governess first comes to the house and she's describing it, she describes seeing rooks circling the house. And I have in my backyard, there's this baby hawk that won't stop making noise, and it's screaming day and night. So I've just become extremely aware of birds. So I decided to go to Wikipedia and just look up the significance of rooks. And I found this little nugget, which was interesting. Farmers have observed rooks in their fields and thought of them as vermin. Rookeries were often perceived as nuisances in rural Britain, and it was previously the practice to hold rook shots where the juvenile birds, known as branchers, were shot before they were able to fly. 48:37 Wes: Jesus. 48:38 Erin: Interesting. So, anyway, I see this thing about rooks, and then Mrs. Grose comes in, and I always misread her name as grouse, Right. Which is like a game bird, and thus a victim, perhaps, of the governess and of the circumstances that are about to happen. But then, of course, there's a reading that, at least visually, her name can look like a corrupted rose, Right? Like a rose turned gross and thus sinister. And I think probably this reading only occurred to me because I'm really familiar with the 61 adaptation of this, the Innocents, in which roses visually figure really, really heavily in that adaptation. I wonder if this is part of the reason why. But, you know, it's just sort of a little visual rhyme. Obviously not an auditory one. 49:29 Wes: Interesting. 49:31 Erin: So Mrs. Grose's leaving things unsaid often leaves the governess to fill in the gaps. Did you notice when you read, it really stuck out to me this time how many times Mrs. Grose leaves off with a dash and then the governess sort of finishes the sentence? 49:51 Wes: I did notice that, but I was blaming the governess for that, I thought. I took that as part of her characterization as being so intrusive and finishing people's sentences. But, yes, I see how this could go the other way. 50:03 Erin: Right. That was my first reading, too. But then I realized, oh, it could also be that Mrs. Grose isn't really saying anything and it's giving the governess the opportunity to fill in her own impression. Then you can argue, okay, Grose is either her intentions are actually being read correctly by the governess because she doesn't correct the governess's reading of what she was going to say. So the governess is actually more perceptive than we're currently giving her credit for, if she's accurately interpreting Grose's thoughts. Or Gross is simply choosing not to correct her out of deference for her station or out of a kind of disinterest in whatever the governess is choosing to interpret from her first half of her sentences. 50:45 Wes: It's a mixture, maybe, of deference, and she thinks that there may be something off about the governess and is humoring her. 50:54 Erin: Mrs. Grose is not. Oh, like Mrs. Danvers, for instance, from Rebecca. You could get the trope here. I mean, James could have put in the trope of a housekeeper who is deliberately mean or deliberately withholding and mysterious and somehow in love with the master. And seeing this intrusive governess as a kind of a threat, as a sexual competition or whatever the case may be. Instead, we have this older woman who's more matronly. We could interpret that she does see the governess, perhaps as a threat to, I don't know, Mrs. Grose's affections for the children. Maybe because she's been taking care of Flora. She resents the governess coming in and intruding on that. But we have this benign figure, and she does become a kind of a confirmation of all of the governess's worst fears. Except to that point that you referenced when she can't say that she sees Ms. Jessel, but otherwise the two of them are kind of winding each other up. I guess I just don't know how willing a participant Mrs. Grose is in that winding up of the governess. And though it's unlikely based on her characterization, I wonder if she could be read as the puppet master behind it all, Especially in this idea that she identifies Quint from the governess's description. 52:25 Wes: She does. She plays the role. She does nothing to calm down the governess. She definitely feeds into her fears. At the first point at which she does that is by identifying that the first apparition as Quint. And then later on in chapter seven, when the governess is describing the experience of seeing Ms. Jessel at the lake, the governess says, they know Flora saw. And Gross will ask questions like, how do you know? And the governess interestingly says, I saw it with my own eyes. When we see that other people are seeing, we don't see that with our own eyes. We see it with their eyes. And we know that we're seeing it with their eyes. We know that we are inferring. And it's a paranoid person who thinks that they see what other people are thinking with their own eyes. They have no doubt about it. There's no space in between the other person's thoughts and their own. This time it's not Ms. Gross who says, oh, the woman must be Ms. Jessel, the way she did with Quint. The governess fills that in for herself. And then Ms. Gross will say, how can you be sure? And so she is expressing some pushback, let's say. But by the time she gets to the question of the relationship between Jessel and Quint, what you get out of Mrs. Grose is, oh, they were infamous. She was a lady. The implication is that she's corrupted by a lower class man. And that's where, interestingly enough, the governess puts herself in the position of evaluating Ms. Gross's reliability and says, well, you know, there's no reason to doubt her. There's enough evidence to say, you know, she talks of our employer's late, clever, good looking, quote unquote, own man, impudent, assured, spoiled, depraved. I think Ms. Gro says the fellow was a hound. He did what he wished. He did that with them all. When the governess says it must have been what she wished, Gross says, well, she paid for it. She implies that there was a pregnancy and a death and childbirth, although she never says it. And when she's kind of put to the test by the governess. She says she doesn't really know. So my point is that I think you're right. She provides a little bit of resistance to the governess's point of view, but not much. And usually by the end of one of these interactions, it's almost like Ms. Gross gets into the intrigue of it. Right. She gets into the tabloid equality, what's going on, and is, in a way, enjoying gossiping about it, implying things or saying things about people's relationships that are. Saying they're seedy or whatever, but you don't get any details whether that's because of propriety or whether she actually doesn't know as much as she pretends to know, you know, what was going on between Jessal and Quint. Sure, there's gossip around the house and they're hanging out a lot, but what does someone like Gross really know about that relationship except the same servant's gossip that everyone is involved in? And what is the truth in that situation? So Quint and Jessel may have been infamous, right? But what is the truth of their relationship? We really don't know. They're hanging out with the kids, hanging out with each other. Was it really all that bad? 55:46 Erin: Right. 55:47 Wes: Maybe it was much less bad than the governess's influence. 55:52 Erin: Well, the first time that the governess sees Quint, and this really stuck out to me this time, she said, I saw him as I see the letters I form on this page, and Mrs. Grose can't read, you know, So, I mean, in a way, I wonder if, as I think we've already suggested, like, there are a lot of explanations for Grose's being withholding, and I wonder if one of them is merely that she's at a real intellectual disadvantage. She sees the governess as being superior to her, and she's really trusting her reading of the situation and feels constantly understood by the governess and feels as though she doesn't have to spell things out or that it's below her station to spell things out or that she's afraid to, whatever the case may be. But it just strikes me that the fact that Mrs. Grose can't read and then the fact that the governess is reading everything into this situation and into what everyone is saying to her, I mean, it kind of. It must take an extremely high level of intelligence to be as off the beam as the governess is. It's as though her ability, the governess's ability to see the ghosts is actually a function of her intelligence and a function of her craft. If she sees him like she sees her words on the page. And this whole story is very masterfully constructed and everything else. And her reading into everyone's opacity takes a tremendous amount of interpretive power. I wonder if Mrs. Gross can't see the ghost because she's not intelligent enough to see the ghosts or something like that. 57:32 Wes: I mean, it makes sense. If you wanted to go the true ghost story reading, then that's one of the ways you would have to fill that in, I think. Right? 57:40 Erin: I think so. I think also maybe this is just tying back into this idea of the narrator of the story as the storymaker, as the artist, which would put the governess in that position. And therefore the governess can see things that other people can't. 57:54 Wes: Yeah. 57:55 Erin: She could see a world unavailable to others. 57:57 Wes: The implication is that there's something paranoid about storytelling because you presume to be in the heads of others. It can make sense as a writer because, of course, they're your own fictional creations and you really are in their heads. But you could think of it as involving the same mechanism. And so paranoia, at the very least, is storytelling gone wrong. Right. 58:19 Erin: Yeah. 58:19 Wes: And misapplication to the real world. You know, things do unfold as a relationship between Mrs. Gross and. Is it Mrs. Gross and I was calling her Ms. Gross for a lot of this. Whoops. But okay, you have me thinking about that the way it is a relationship. You know, it's not the engine of the story is not just the governess. It's their. The interaction between her and Mrs. Gross. And maybe things would have unfolded much differently. They may have been involved in unhealthy dynamic. They may have been the wrong couple, so to speak. You know, you get the really interesting interaction in chapter 21. And so much of what goes on in the story. Right. Is just between Mrs. Gross and the governess. 59:06 Erin: Mm. 59:06 Wes: It's a lot of the story. But there's an interesting part in chapter 21 where Gross is telling the governess that Flora is saying shocking things about the governess. She uses the word horrors, and she drops on the sofa and cries. And you think, holy wow, what is Flora accusing the governess of? So we get more hints of abuse or pedophilia or whatever, something really bad, but Gross is unwilling to say it. The name Gross does make sense if you think of it in terms of not detailed. Right. Gross, as in, you know, a big lump, as opposed to the fine details. But she gives that information, drops on the sofa, and cries. And then what kind of distracts you is that the governess says, thank God, that justifies me. And laughing when Gro says it's about you laughing and saying, you know, I know where she picked up that appalling language about me. It was from Jessel and Quint. And then at the end of it when the governess says, do you believe me? Do you believe all this stuff Gros says she does? I do believe in such doings. So you get this really odd dynamic of resistance and then affirmation. And it's hard for me to describe that more fully except to say I think those interactions are actually the engine of the story. It's not just the governess by herself. 1:00:23 Erin: So I agree. I think that the environment just between Mrs. Grose and the governess is like a boarding school atmosphere. It's a very suffocated kind of hothouse atmosphere. And at one point I think that the governess says that it's like they're on a ship or something. And it is like they're shipwrecked because they can receive no outside aid. Because the governess is insistent on the fact that she's not gonna break the terms of her employment, really, because she just doesn't wanna look bad in front of the guy that she has the hots for and have him, you know, degrade her in his esteem or whatever. But I don't know if this reading really bears out because it would require minimizing Flora's role and everything. But I do feel as though once Miles comes on the scene, the focus really goes to him and Flora kind of falls away a little bit. 1:01:12 Wes: Yep. Okay, I made a note of that. 1:01:15 Erin: And what's really interesting about that is that if he was at boarding school, he would have had to have been only with other boys. I mean, I don't think that co ed boarding schools existed at this time. 1:01:23 Wes: Good point. 1:01:24 Erin: And then there was also this sort of gender selected oddity of the fact that Quint was only with Miles and Ms. Jessel was only with Flora, which also, it now occurs to me, couldn't have allowed for a lot of hanky panky between Quint and Ms. Jessel in front of the kids if they were in their little sex selected sort of categories. So the interesting thing about Miles becoming the focus of the governess and Mrs. Gross's ministrations or whatever, this whole idea then that they're lying to the governess, that they become really the villains of the story in the governess's mind, and then the Remedy for Miles is going to be his confession to having stolen a letter that the governess was going to finally write to the uncle. It's very strange. So she interprets his desire to want to leave and to not just be with a bunch of women as being really sinister. And yet we might say that a more natural environment for a young boy would be to be with his schoolmates, you know, to be with a bunch of. At least at this time, you know, to be with a bunch of boys at the boarding school or even to have a male role model in someone like Quint, who we don't really know what kind of role model he was. According to Mrs. Grose, he was terrible. But it seems like his greatest crime in terms of his dalliance with Ms. Jessel is simply the fact that she was higher born than him. So who knows what the reality of that is. So the intrusion of men into the space, like the intrusion of Quint into the space, becomes immediately extremely sexualized for the governess. What I'm trying to do is tie together what keeping Miles around a bunch of women is supposed to do for his safety, for his sort of stalling his maturation in like a positive way, you know, according to the governess's own definition. And how exactly Quint is supposed to be such a danger to him or indeed how these ghosts are supposed to be such a danger to them. What are they doing with the ghosts? And what can you physically do with a ghost? 1:03:28 Wes: Right. I think Mrs. Gross asked that of her and she says, well, they can destroy them or be a bad influence on them. They can corrupt them. That word corrupt actually comes up earlier in the context of Miles, too. The idea that, yes, we like men who aren't always good. You know, if a man is going to be spirited, he should be somewhat naughty, but not to the point where he's going to corrupt. That's what she's talking about, Miles. At that point, early on, the idea seems to be that the ghosts are going to be the wrong sorts of teachers for the children and raise them up in a wicked way. 1:04:02 Erin: When Miles is first sent home from school and she's overwhelmed by his charms and his incredible beauty and all this other stuff, she says he must have been too fine and fair for the little horrid unclean school world. 1:04:15 Wes: Yep. 1:04:16 Erin: And then what she seems to be disturbed by in Quint's appearance to her is the liberty that he takes by not wearing a hat and to stare at her in a way that challenges her authority or to stare at her in such a way that makes her the intruder rather than him. Like she doesn't belong there. His familiarity in wearing no hat and his boldness in scrutinizing her ties together this class distinction and this sexual threat. 1:04:49 Wes: And obviously he's a double to some extent for the uncle. He's wearing the uncle's clothes, so it couldn't be more obvious than that. 1:04:58 Erin: Right. 1:04:58 Wes: And he's a representative to some extent, of the sexuality of the uncle. And of course, she's just responded positively to that. And now it's showing up as something persecutory. 1:05:10 Erin: The idea of her authority being challenged by someone who is beneath her, who's of a lower station than her, seems tied up with this idea of her being carried away sexually, like taken in by a brute force like sexuality, which is of a lower order than this kind of restrained gentility. So it's like the beast in the garden. So really, Quint is a sexual threat to her because he is of the opposite sex and she is of the opposite sex to Miles. So it seems like heterosexuality is the threat here. And yet she's concerned that Miles is with Quint and Flora is with Ms. Jessel. Right. I'm trying to say something about that, but I don't quite know what there is to say about it except the oddity of the whole thing and the obvious nature of the fact that she's the one who's going after Miles in this sexual way. 1:06:00 Wes: Yeah. That's at least suggested in the kinds of things that Miles ends up saying to her about, do you think this is appropriate for to be a fellow who's with a lady always. And does my uncle know about this? So what's interesting about that is when you get Miles's dialogue, when you get some of that dialogue out of him, it doesn't fit in a way. And there are two ways to interpret that. Not fitting. It doesn't fit because it's precocious. Right. But there's something weird about it and it's possibly sinister. So it doesn't fit with his angelicness because he gets quite cheeky with her. Right. So there's a reason why it doesn't fit. And it can be interpreted in two ways. One is that, you know, he's been hanging out with ghosts and he's got some of the devil in him. The other is just that there's something to the story that we don't know because she's an unreliable narrator. So that when he's making these remarks about whether what she's doing is appropriate. We don't know the full extent of what he's talking about. Cause it seems odd. Miles knows he's been expelled from school. So he knows why he's not going back to school. He's pretending not to know why he's not going back to school, but really, of course, what he wants is to be sent back to some school. Why doesn't he just say, hey, why am I not going back to school? Instead, he's making these odd remarks about the inappropriateness of their relationship. And there's a point in chapter 17 where she's listening at his door. She starts writing to the uncle. She ends up listening at his door. He says, why don't you come in? How did you know I was there? You're like a troop of cavalry. She notes that he's not asleep. She says, I lie awake and I think. And she asks of what? What in the world, my dear, but you and this queer business of yours, the way you bring me up and all the rest. She asks him what he means by all the rest. And he says, you know, so what the hell is all of that about, right? This queer business of yours, the way you bring me up. Nominally, it's about just her not sending him back to school and educating him herself. But it's a really, really odd way, in my opinion, for him to talk about that when he could just say, please send me back to school. And she makes a note that he never said anything. He's never mentioned school before, you know, I thought you wanted to go on as you are. And he says, I actually want to get away. Not from Bly. He likes Bly, but. And so she says, well, what? And he's like, oh, well, you know, what a boy wants. What? What is he talking about? We don't know. We don't learn directly. It's odd, it's weird. And it can cut either way. It can cut in the creepy, been hanging out with ghosts way, or it can cut in the creepy the governess isn't telling us the whole story about what's been going on way. 1:08:58 Erin: That's the other thing too, which we haven't even addressed, which is the odd way that she. Because there are certain instances, and I know that this novella was first serialized, and so there are some cliffhanger moments which maybe account for this, but there are some times where she sort of leaves off in the middle of an important moment, goes back afterwards, and then fills in information after the fact. But a couple of times she just leaves it and we don't really know for sure what happened. I don't know if you can really get away with that. 1:09:28 Wes: Yep, I think that happens with the sighting of Quint. For instance, it's in chapter three that at the very end, she sees Quint after fantasizing about meeting someone, possibly the uncle. Right. Wanting to meet some charming young man, seeing Quint. And we don't get the whole story until she discloses it to Gross later on. Or at the very least, we get the description of him at that point in Chapter five. And there are a few more instances of things like that where there's a lot of waiting in between. The primary. The primary event is described in a vague way, and then it's only retrospectively that the details are filled in. 1:10:06 Erin: So many instances in the novella make us put us in the position that she's in. There are several perspectives through which to view what Miles says in that odd moment. One of them is the fact that he's been observing how strangely she's behaving and finds what she's doing to be extremely disturbing. And that's what he's alluding to. There's also a suggestion toward the beginning of the story that I think on the first day of teaching Flora, she decides that she's been too knocked around by all of her varying impressions of the house, that she doesn't want to start her lessons with Flora. So instead she creates this pretext of, well, let's just get to know each other and you can take me around the house and show me everything. So, one wonders, I suppose, just on the basis of that, perhaps other parts of the story that I can't recall right now, one wonders how much actual teaching she's doing of these children. And if that is meant to suggest that because she's being so paranoid and behaving so oddly, she's being derelict in her duty to them and perhaps smothering them and hugging them too much and being odd with them and not letting them just play and do their own thing. There's also the suggestion she interprets it as they're trying to distract her so one of them will entertain her while the other one sort of slips out of. She doesn't know what's going on. 1:11:28 Wes: Yeah. 1:11:29 Erin: And she obviously thinks that this is very sinister. Or that one of them is communing with a ghost while the other one distracts her and that they're both in league with each other. 1:11:37 Wes: Or that she interprets like if they're playing extra hard and they're extra Animated. That's in order to distract her lots of very, very paranoid thoughts like that. 1:11:48 Erin: From this perspective of her falling apart mentally in view of the children. And that the children are aware of this. It could be that they would rather just go off and play. But they feel a kind of duty to watch her and to make sure that she's all right. You can interpret it in any number of ways. And I think we have the job of the governess. Where we're trying to look at all this stuff and see how it adds up. And it could really be in any of a thousand ways in which we can interpret any of this. But I don't know. I mean, that's just a potential reading for what Miles is saying. If you want to read it as giving Miles's statements a lot of credence. There's an odd dynamic in which when you're a governess, you're neither, you know, below stairs nor above stairs. So in a strange way, the governess is lower than the people that she has authority over. And so it could be that Miles has these odd turns of phrase that he's picked up by this various succession of help that's been brought in to try and raise him. And he has this odd little flourish that he might have picked up from the way that an adult addresses other people. Or that he might have picked up as an affectation from his uncle addressing people as my dear. And it serves to highlight, first of all, how oddly adult the children are. Which is a creepy thing. But also the class distinction between the two of them. Where it's in the back of your mind. Reinforcing for me this idea that Miles is the governess's superior. And that, I think is played up at various times in the novel. 1:13:24 Wes: Before we wrap up, let's discuss the other appearance of this phrase. Turn of the screw. 1:13:30 Erin: Yeah, where is it? 1:13:31 Wes: Which is in chapter 22. It's page 77 in my edition. But this is after things have gone down with Flora and Mrs. Gross not seeing Ms. Jessel at the lake. And Flora saying, I don't want to see the governess anymore. I'm becoming feverish. And this plan of taking Flora to see the uncle. After that, it's just going to be Miles and the governess, basically. I mean, I don't think Flora leaves immediately, but essentially they're on their own together for the rest of the novella. So she wants to have it out with Miles or to bring things to a head. The exorcism. Supposed exorcism. That's Going to happen at the end, which is probably really a murder. But she's gonna save Miles by figuring out what happened at school. And also getting him to, I guess, confess to some. Whatever relationship he has with Quint or something like that. It's a little bit unclear, so. Chapter 22. To mark for the house the high state I cultivated. I decreed that my meals with the boys should be served, as we called it downstairs. So that I had been awaiting him in the ponderous pomp of the room Outside the window of which I had from Mrs. Grose that first scared Sunday. My flash of something it would scarce have done to call light here at present, I felt afresh. For I had felt it again and again. How my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will. The will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with Was revoltingly against nature. I could only get on at all by taking nature into my confidence. And my account. By treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding. After all, for a fair front only. Another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require more tact. Than just this attempt to supply oneself all the nature. How could I put even a little of that article into a suppression of reference to what had occurred? How, on the other hand, could I make a reference. Without a new plunge into the hideous obscure? And then her answer to that last question is going to be something to the effect that she's going to use Miles intelligence to save him. But before we get to that, the idea here is that the meaning of turn of the screw that we got at the beginning of the novella. Has been transformed. Right at the beginning, it was either about suspense or creepiness. Or whatever one can do to ratchet up the interest of the story for an audience. And here she's confronted with monstrousness. The idea is that she can somehow treat what is truly unnatural and monstrous. As if it were just an ordinary difficulty. And that it doesn't require of her some sort of feat of heroism. That is qualitatively different. Than the way she would deal with some other difficulty. It just happens to be more unpleasant. It happens to be harder. It's a degree of quantity, not quality, that she's dealing with. So that if she can just ratchet things up, Deliver another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. That'll be enough to deal with what's going on. And then the way she describes what that means is odd. She talks about a suppression of reference to what had occurred. The idea that it seems to be that she needs to avoid thinking or talking about whatever monstrous thing has occurred. Do you get this? 1:17:13 Erin: I do. I must have this image in my head because of Gone with the Wind from last week. But it's as if she's both like the horse that's being blinded to take herself through the uncomfortable thing and the person blinding the horse. Yeah, it doesn't really make any sense. Or maybe it does on a level that I can't comprehend. 1:17:32 Wes: These two different meanings for turn of the screw, they kind of pit the interests of the audience against the interests of the protagonist. Right. So for the audience, the turn of the screw means supplying the horror. For her, the turn of the screw means coping with the horror by means of ordinary human measures. So it's a really interesting conflict. And I think it goes to your earlier point about this being about storytelling because it suggests that there's something unnatural about storytelling or about being part of the story. So that in a way, what she is fighting, the horror that she's fighting is just the fact of being part of a narrative. Which, again, speaks to my hypothesis about what ghost stories are about, which is the horror of being subject to formative influences, of being a creature. Right. Subject to the powers of creators. Whether we think of those creators as parental figures or culture or whatever, not just because they can abuse us or take advantage of us sexually, but because they can malform us, they can be a bad educational influence on us. Right. Which is Miles's accusation against the governess. They can confine us, confine our freedom. That's another thing that Miles wanted. And they can give us lots of hangups. You know, we can internalize too harsh a conscience because of those influences, too harsh a superego. All of those things I take to be hauntings. So the turn of the screw, you can see that as the interest created by ratcheting up those forces, by amplifying those forces. Right. Those horrors. Or as what it takes to resist those things. So maybe maturational forces, you know, in the governess, it's warped because she thinks she has to do an exorcism, basically. But if she had really taken her own advice and seen this more about ordinary human virtue, then one can think of that in terms of more and more practical action or maturation or resistance to bad influences or something like that. 1:19:40 Erin: I don't know. The more I think about this, the more confused I'm getting. But what is she literally talking about? What point is this metaphor trying to Serve this idea that virtue itself is like a turning of the screw. It's screwing one's courage to the sticking place or stealing oneself. 1:19:57 Wes: So one of the associations is, I think, is with courage. Like, you know, as you say, screwing courage to the sticking place. And here she associates that with repression, I think, or in some way ignoring the horrors around her. Right. This idea of a suppression of reference. She's saying, I basically, I have to ignore the fact that this is revoltingly against nature if I'm going to cope with it. Because if I acknowledge that fact, I'm going to fall apart. So it's a variation on courage, right? To say that the turn of the screw is a repressive function. Because that's what ordinary human virtue, right. Does. We don't act on our impulses. We inhibit ourselves. That's one flavor of this inhibiting action. The other flavor is actual repression, inhibiting thoughts or feelings, which we do as well. And in her mind, this is about, you know, I think your horse blinders thing is a good metaphor. This is the idea that courage in this case simply requires not thinking about it so that she can move forward and cope with the situation. 1:21:02 Erin: This also has to speak to a grandiosity on her part that is really, truly insane and also kind of malformed for someone who's supposed to be a parson's daughter. Right. Though curiously, she continually avoids going to church. If the idea is that, in her opinion, that virtue involves, like, shutting out the thing that will violate us. Right, that's what you're saying. It's like building a wall. Then she's ignoring the fact that, okay, you can build a wall around the thing that's going to violate you by way of keeping out the corrupting or contaminating influence. But you're also still stuck with yourself. And what she should know by being a parson's daughter, at least according to Christian theology, is that ignores the part of yourself that you're left with that is evil that is fallen. It also doesn't allow for grace. It's the idea that only your exertion of will is what it takes to have virtue. So basically, how she's portraying herself in this moment is as like a Christ figure. So if she shuts everything out, she doesn't have that evil part of herself that she would be left with because she is the pure savior. Nor does she require grace from an outside source. She can just exert her will and produce virtue out of that. And I think from here we get the moment of the exorcism opened up to us a little bit, where she is transformed in her own mind to being the Christ figure. Maybe we should just read the last paragraph of the story. This is when she has him in her arms. She's trying to get him to see the ghost, but he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again and seen. But the quiet day, with the stroke of the loss I was so proud of, he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss. And the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him. It may be imagined, with what a passion. But at the end of a minute, I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped. So she says she's trying to catch him in his fall. So again, it's this idea that she is saving him from. I think we can read this as the capital F. Fall. She's saving him from sin. And I think ultimately that's. 1:23:19 Wes: Yeah, dispossessed. 1:23:21 Erin: Right, right. She's exorcised the demon from his soul. 1:23:25 Wes: Dispossessed of life. 1:23:27 Erin: Right, right. 1:23:28 Wes: It actually takes more than a minute to suffocate someone. So I think Henry James should have looked in that a little more. But 1:23:38 Erin: she held him for three minutes and 14 seconds, which is the exact time it takes to suffocate someone. 1:23:46 Wes: FYI, I held him, maybe imagine what a passion. Pretty strongly. 1:23:53 Erin: And her passion, you know, there's also the passion of the idea of suffering and. Yeah, so maybe this is where things really get crazy. Because she should be aware, like I say, as a parson's daughter, she should be more conscious of the actual Christian theology to which she supposedly subscribes and understand that this has now achieved new heights of grandiosity and it's all kind of downhill from there. 1:24:16 Wes: It's a great representation of the suffocating parent and the convergence of protectiveness with murderousness. Right. Because that's what she's. You wanted to fence in the children and be a wall between them and the world and protect their purity in that, in the end, it has a murderous effect. But we also, in that, see the convergence of the two meanings of the turn of the screw. Right. Because the repressive one meaning is the production of horrors. The other is the repressive force. And of course, the latter, even though it's supposed to be virtuous, leads to the emergence of the horrors, the repression and psychoanalytic parlance leads to sickness, leads to a return of the repressed. And I think what you're saying is that there's a religious way to talk about that as well. Or there's a way to talk about that in the context of religion, which is that you don't leave behind your tell me if I'm right, but you don't simply leave your fallenness behind. Right. You don't become God or you don't become pure, but you're always, you know. How would you put it? What are you doing instead? You're seeking forgiveness. 1:25:29 Erin: Yeah. Grappling with the fact that in everyone is the potential for both good and evil. No one is wholly good or wholly bad. 1:25:37 Wes: Okay. Shall we? Sorry, I'm trying to think of something funny to say. 1:25:42 Erin: Screw the cap on this. 1:25:44 Wes: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's good. 1:25:48 Erin: I think we'll be screwed if we go on for any longer. 1:25:51 Wes: Drumroll Insert. Insert a drum roll there, please. 1:25:56 Erin: I think we're both tired. We need to dispossess ourselves. 1:26:01 Wes: We have stripped the screw. 1:26:03 Erin: That's good. 1:26:06 Wes: All right. Thank you. 1:26:08 Erin: Thank you. 1:26:09 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. I just wanted to say that if you're listening to this on the feed for the Partial Examined Life, you're not yet subscribed. And if you like us, a rating or review would help a lot. You can also find [email protected] [email protected] Sometimes we'll continue talking about the topic for that week. Sometimes we'll discuss what else we've been reading, writing, and thinking about. When the time comes, we'll be responding to listener emails, and sometimes we'll talk a little bit about ourselves. Subscribing will also get you the occasional full bonus show and several prequel episodes that I did with various guests. 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