Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" (1898)

I'm riding the train to New York City, and I've just finished reading (and listening to) The Turn of the Screw.

Of the three classics I've read this summer, this was the densest and most challenging. Henry James writes extremely long sentences. Clauses are embedded within clauses, and it's a real process to suss out the verbs and follow the train of thought. One essay aptly describes James's writing style as Rococo.

The narrator is "the governess", who is hired to care for two children (Miles, age 10 and Flora, age 8) by their guardian uncle. The story takes place at a country manor called Bly, where the previous governess (Miss Jessel) and valet (Peter Quint) engaged in some kind of illicit or inappropriate activity (what they did is not specifically described).

Quint and Miss Jessel both died before the governess's arrival, but they appear as ghosts and continue to interact with the children.

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The central mystery of The Turn of the Screw is whether the ghosts are real or merely imagined by the governess. Mrs. Grose (a fellow servant) never sees them, and neither child acknowledges their reality. Even the governess is less concerned about the ghosts physically harming the children and more worried about the possibility of "corruption". James leaves the meaning of corruption ambiguous; the commentary I've read says that the term is probably a stand-in for knowledge of sexual acts.

My hunch is that James intended his readers to interpret the ghosts as the psychological invention/imagining of the governess. However, I will need to learn more about him in order to understand what he believed about the supernatural and whether he may have believed in the reality of ghosts.

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When I selected The Turn of the Screw as my third book for the summer, I had no idea that ghosts played a major role in the story. Just a few weeks ago, I made the point (about Hamlet, here) that writers don't explore the idea of ghosts as much as they should. Now, I'm quickly proven wrong!

The ghosts in Turn are definitely more foreboding than the ghost of Hamlet's father. They are more within the mold of "haunted" or "evil" souls.

However, it is an interesting plot point to have Miles's death come at the hands of the governess (as she tries to protect him from Quint's ghost). Perhaps James is aiming to tell us that our fear of ghosts (rather than ghosts themselves) is the true problem.

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A final ghost connection: I recently started to read Sonia Sotomayor's autobiography, My Beloved World. Sotomayor describes parties at her grandmother's house during which, after the children have gone to sleep, the adults partake in a ritual in which they communicate with spirits of the deceased (Sotomayor is curious and tries to watch and listen from a neighboring room).

Ghosts, ghosts everywhere, in the literary world of 2019!!

Here's a photo I just took, as the train departed Washington's Union Station.