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

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

Finally, all of this brings us to Freud's late essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Here he speculates on the nature of psychic trauma, connecting it to both hysteria and the persistence of fantasies as survival mechanisms in all human beings. We might conclude, in fact, that trauma is the outgrowth of one particularly virulent fantasy, the persecutory or beating fantasy that stems, for Freud, out of unresolved incestuous feelings toward the father. But Freud did not attempt to explain trauma merely as an outgrowth of castration anxieties. Instead he complicated the issue by introducing a particularly literary example of his theory, Tasso's Jerusalem Liberated. When Freud chose to relate the story of Tancred and Clorinda, derived from Tasso's epic, he did so in order to illustrate the peculiar tendency of some people to wound and be wounded over and over again by the same agents, through a sort of fate that appears to be entirely beyond their own control (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Freud writes that Tasso's hero Tancred

   unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in
   the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a
   strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders' army with terror. He
   slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and
   the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard
   complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again. (Freud 18: 3)

By using this particular narrative to illustrate his theory of trauma, Freud highlights the paradoxical nature of psychic woundings, that the experience of trauma repeats itself over and over again through the unconsciously motivated acts of the survivor. In other words, if a psychic trauma is experienced too suddenly or unexpectedly, it cannot be fully known or available to the consciousness until it imposes itself yet again, in fact, repeatedly in the nightmares and compulsively repetitive actions of the traumatized and traumatizer. Cathy Caruth summarizes Freud on this point, noting that it is the second wounding that finally allows the trauma to be located on the body of the victim: "trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual's past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature--the way it was precisely not known in the first instance--returns to haunt the survivor later on" (Caruth 4).

With these theories in mind I would suggest that the original childhood traumas for the governess were the emotional eccentricity of her father (code for sexual abuse?), the complete absence of her mother (never once mentioned during the governess's narrative of her childhood), and the presence of numerous siblings vying with her for scant attention and resources. But the second wounding, the "adult" version of the same trauma--rejection by the Master and the sudden appearance of sexually active "ghosts"--was even more psychologically devastating, a trauma so severe that she was compelled to replay her own childhood, this time with orphaned children surrounded by four dead "parents." It is no surprise that the tale could only end in disaster and death; one initially wonders, in fact, why only one of the children (the boy) dies. But then one realizes that Miles is the only living male within reach, the unfortunate sacrifice. The wounds that one detects while reading The Turn of the Screw are the scars left by desertion, betrayal, and abandonment. Like scabs lightly covering a deep gash, both tales dissect this particular wound--sexual betrayal and abandonment--over and over again.