Postgothic fiction: Joyce Carol Oates turns the screw on Henry James - Critical Essay

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1998 by Diane Long Hoeveler

I: "Suffering is infinite and will not diminish."--Oates

Readers of James's classic gothic conundrum, "The Turn of the Screw," have been asking themselves essentially the same questions since the tale appeared in 1898. That is, the central puzzle has been to understand the psyche of the governess, and, if she is insane, as the reader increasingly suspects, then how does one read a text that is completely occluded, inseparable from her self-serving strategies of deception and paranoia? (1) Certainly critical opinion has focused on the governess, or the children, or Douglas and the narrator--the living, in other words--in order to comprehend the meaning and significance of the events in the story. But focusing on the living alone has led these same critics to the proverbial dead-end of interpretation: how can one interpret a text that is riddled with suppressed hysteria, perhaps insanity so profound that it appears as a manifestation of normative behavior? Or, as Oates would claim, is there any such thing as "normative" behavior? How does one understand a narrative voice when it is so clear that it is actually impenetrable while all the time appearing completely penetrable? And so we are back at the beginning; it would appear that we cannot understand the events in this story if we attend only to the living. There is, in fact, an entire layer of meaning to the tale that is buffed in the dead lives whose ghostly presence continues to motivate the actions of the living.

Another way of approaching the mysteries of the story has been taken by Joyce Carol Oates, who has rewritten the tale twice. The first time was in a story entitled "The Turn of the Screw," published in 1972 in her collection of stories Marriages and Infidelities. In this early rewrite of James she writes in a double-column format and essentially puts the main characters from Mann's Death in Venice in something like a homosocial nexus of obsession. The story is not particularly successful, nor is it an important rewrite of its source in James. Twenty years passed, however, and Oates must have felt the need to revisit the issue. In 1992, she published a rewrite of both James and herself from the point of view of the ghosts and entitled it "The Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly" (1992; rpt. 1995). This story attempts to answer the conundrums that have plagued critics for generations. Is the governess insane and imagining the ghosts? What happened between the children and their dead governess and valet? And what force is so strong that it can draw the dead back to the living? What haunts the living and the dead? This essay will place James and the second Oates text in some sort of juxtaposition in an attempt to answer the first questions by posing a second set of questions: in reading Oates's story, what does the reader see from the point of view of the dead that one did not see in James's text? And in reading Oates's rewriting of James, what does it mean to read from a postmodern position that acknowledges the architectonic nature of the narrative voice? What, in short, constitutes what I would call the "postgothic position"? Can one write from beyond genre the same way one can speak from beyond the grave? Can one read either text with both tales simultaneously in one's head and see, not a partial vision of the "screw," but the whole perspective? This essay will attempt to answer these questions, all the while recognizing the fictiveness of the critic's position, the self-reflexive futility of trying to decipher the indecipherable.

James's tale is notoriously subtle on one level, or hopelessly transparent on another. That is, the governess is either insane or she is not. (2) The governess--the only major character who is unnamed in the story--is either hysterical, sexually perverse and repressed in her attraction to the Master and the children, or she is not. The ghosts have to be manifestations of her madness, her repressed and oedipally inflected sexuality writ large for only her to see, because there are no such things as ghosts, no one else sees them after all, and therefore she cannot be seeing anything except her own psychotic projections. And so she is insane, you see. But she has told the tale to a family friend, Douglas, who passes the story on to a narrator (gender unspecified), who in turn regales a group of women with the events as a Christmas time fireside chat. And the governess, unlike the majority of insane people who insist that they have seen ghosts and who are believed to be responsible for the death of a child in their charge, has lived out her life in respectability and credibility. These are the basic problems in reading James's "Turn," a work that has puzzled, baffled, annoyed, and enraged its readers since its publication in 1898. (3) If the governess is mad, then somehow the patriarchal system that has propped her up and placed her in charge of innocent lives is also perverse and corrupt. Somehow that aloof "Master," living in splendid isolation in London and untouched by the tragedies occurring in his family, stands finally as a representative of Empire, or a clockmaker God or, most damning of all, the omniscient author who sees all but fails to intervene with a moral or a lesson.