sir_guinglain (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sir_guinglain) wrote2011-03-30 04:03 am
sir_guinglain) wrote2011-03-30 04:03 am
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The Turn of the Screw
Insomniac reading in the last few days has centred (when I realise that picking up a book would be a good idea) on The Turn of the Screw, which I bought in an early 1970s Penguin edition in the secondhand bookshop in Woodstock, with one of Atkinson Grimshaw's dour suburbanised mansions on the cover.
I knew nothing of the critical battle which has raged over The Turn of the Screw in the century and more since it was first published in 1898. The narration is a narration within a narration, a nod towards the many possible interpretations events offer. The governess herself is unreliable, self-deceiving, and possessive of her charges, though her skills in relating to children beyond the sentimental are questionable. She can be read as sexually jealous of her predecessor, Miss Jessel, and her affair with Peter Quint, which (if so) the governesss seems to map on to the boy Miles, perhaps part-possessed by Quint's ghost, or perhaps not. Even if the story is the delusion of a murderess, it's still evocative of the closed hierarchical universe a rural estate could be when the master was away and thus the apex of power was absent, and how thin the membrane separating the disciplined rationalism of the machine age from the superstition and prevailing disorder of mind, physicality and time which is perhaps more representative of human experience as a whole.
I knew nothing of the critical battle which has raged over The Turn of the Screw in the century and more since it was first published in 1898. The narration is a narration within a narration, a nod towards the many possible interpretations events offer. The governess herself is unreliable, self-deceiving, and possessive of her charges, though her skills in relating to children beyond the sentimental are questionable. She can be read as sexually jealous of her predecessor, Miss Jessel, and her affair with Peter Quint, which (if so) the governesss seems to map on to the boy Miles, perhaps part-possessed by Quint's ghost, or perhaps not. Even if the story is the delusion of a murderess, it's still evocative of the closed hierarchical universe a rural estate could be when the master was away and thus the apex of power was absent, and how thin the membrane separating the disciplined rationalism of the machine age from the superstition and prevailing disorder of mind, physicality and time which is perhaps more representative of human experience as a whole.