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The Turn of the Screw Reading Thread - Chapters VI to XV (Patreon)

Published:
2021-11-30 17:16:17
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Welcome to our second group reading thread for 'The Turn of the Screw' by Henry James.

We are discussing from chapter six to fifteen (and no further).

Pull up a chair around the crackling fire with your fellow book club members, and share your experience at Bly Manor thus far.

The audio above will involve my offering you some aesthetic thought experiments, questions to sharpen your appreciation of the tale, my response to your thoughts from the last discussion, and my impression of these ghastly chapters.

Muse aloud. Ask questions. Unravel secrets. And share anything that has struck you so far.

The first reading thread for 'The Turn of the Screw' is here.

Video Timestamps:

  • 0:00 reading in serial form
  • 5:15 aesthetic thought experiments/questions to consider
  • 9:00 two poems that compliment the tale (Dickinson & Stevens)
  • 12:00 more literary appreciation exercises for you
  • 20:15 reading your comments from the first group thread
  • 34:00 my reaction to chapters 6-15
  • 1:05:00 preparing for the final leg of the story

After sharing our impressions, we must fortify ourselves for the conclusion to the tale - it is drawing closer and closer.

Happy reading, everybody!

Let us know your thoughts about 'The Turn of the Screw' below.

Files

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Comments

Tom Pearsall

Initially I treated TOS as a typical ghost story but now I am reading it as the governess’ descent into madness. I completely agree with Ben’s point that each chapter seems to “turn the screw” a little further in the direction of the governess losing her mind. So naturally the question is why? It would be interesting to hear what a psychiatrist or psychologist thinks about the governess. We know so little about her background which makes it difficult to see where her insecurities originate. I think there is an element of Impostor syndrome in that she seems constantly worried that she will be exposed as a phony, failing to uphold the uncle’s expectations. But, as is typically the case with Impostor syndrome, she appears to be actually doing a good job managing the children, who seem happy, intelligent, and emotionally well-adjusted in every respect. One does wonder whether the social isolation at Bly is eating at her. Also, I wonder whether she is so smitten by the uncle that she is subconsciously trying to prove to him that she is the perfect mother and by extension would be a perfect wife. James just hints at these possibilities. As the story proceeds she becomes more and more neurotic, perhaps genuinely manic, with her hallucinations, insomnia, and compulsive need to corner poor Ms Grose and scrutinize every “event”. Initially she seems to have some insight that she may be misinterpreting the children’s behavior but ultimately she becomes convinced that her morbid suspicions are right and that only she can see it all. At first she wishes to protect the children’s innocence from the depraved ghost, but increasingly perceives this innocence as proof of the children’s own corruption. It is interesting how James gradually reverses the adult/child relationship. The children go from innocent and naive to corrupt and knowing more than the governess (at least in the eyes of the governess). Typically adults ask young children questions but by Ch 13 it seems that they are the ones questioning the governess about her past experiences. Also, Miles is described as dressed up as an adult and then talks like one too while walking to church, calling the governess “my dear”. I think the story gets increasingly uncomfortable the more the governess starts attributing sinister (adult) motives to the children. As others have commented above, at times James’ writing seems to be difficult to read. I think though, that this is intentional. After all it is the governess telling the story and she is likely going mad. The writing I think reflects this. Everything is left ambiguous. The reader is forced to decide whether she is a reliable narrator or not but James does an excellent job balancing potential interpretations and leaving your head spinning. Normally rereading helps to clarify the meaning but with this novel the more I reread the less sure I am about my interpretations.

Sergey Taranenko

I initially approached this novella as a diverting Autumn read which might be a little spooky perhaps, but ultimately nothing more than entertainment. Since I haven’t read Henry James previously, I didn’t immediately understand how mistaken I was. Now I have been pleasantly surprised with its depth and the intellectual challenge that it offers. Like many other HLBC members I found the prose very difficult to comprehend and had to read a significant portion of the text several times in order to truly understand. At a first glance, I attributed this solely to the prose. The governess’ account of the events is indeed very convoluted, seemingly without a single concisely formulated thought; an endless amount of interjections and superfluous detail. These two sentences are good examples: “It took of course more than that particular passage to place us together in presence of what we had now to live with as we could—my dreadful liability to impressions of the order so vividly exemplified, and my companion’s knowledge, henceforth—a knowledge half consternation and half compassion—of that liability.” “There had been, this evening, after the revelation left me, for an hour, so prostrate—there had been, for either of us, no attendance on any service but a little service of tears and vows, of prayers and promises, a climax to the series of mutual challenges and pledges that had straightaway ensued on our retreating together to the schoolroom and shutting ourselves up there to have everything out.” It’s not that any of the vocabulary is particularly difficult, but the sentences get so stretched out that it becomes a challenge to keep the main idea in mind without 100% concentration. This effect is amplified the more your read in one sitting, or at least it seems to be that way for me. None of this detail is truly superfluous of course. James’ convoluted style permeates the book with the neuroticism of the protagonist. Those long sentences with countless interjections are like the thought process of a hectic mind. However, the origin of the difficulty does not lie solely in the prose. As Ben pointed out, there’s little redundancy in the way James’s weaves the narrative. Each and every sentence is a reflection of the mind of the governess and is loaded with information. I often found myself rereading a seemingly irrelevant paragraph because I found it oddly arranged, and then accidentally discovering a new insight which I missed at first. Once again, the more you read in one sitting the more all this detail weighs down on your mind. Although it is not that central to the main themes of the story, I enjoyed this exchange especially: *It happens after Mrs. Grose tells the governess about Mile’s excessively friendly relationship with Quint and how she thought it was necessary to admonish him for it. * “ ‘If Quint—on your remonstrance at the time you speak of—was a base menial, one of the things Miles said to you, I find myself guessing, was that you were another.’ Again her admission was so adequate that I continued: ‘And you forgave him that?’ ‘Wouldn’t you?’ ‘Oh, yes!’ And we exchanged there, in the stillness, a sound of the oddest amusement.” And “It made me blush, the next minute, to see in my friend’s face how much more unreservedly she had forgiven him than her anecdote struck me as presenting to my own tenderness an occasion for doing.” Maybe I am overanalyzing a bit here, but I think this wonderfully and subtly exposes one of the many elements of governess’ character. How in the middle of a conversation about Mile’s inappropriate friendship with the odious Quint, she finds it necessary to bring up the little detail about class hierarchy (which seems excessively concerned with) and Mrs. Grose being slightly humiliated by the child (which she naturally assumes without it being explicitly mentioned), finding this situation oddly amusing. Doesn’t this just feel so real? Especially if we consider reality as seen through the unique prism of the individual. The discussion on Henry James’ approach to realism and verisimilitude reminded me of something I’ve read in James Wood’s ‘How Fiction Works’. In the book, the author mentions how literary critic Roland Barthes believed that all realistic detail is an artificial collection of mere arbitrary signs, calling it the ‘referential illusion.’ In his opinion, the addition of gratuitous detail is a mere stylistic convention, in the way that flares, or the miniskirt have meaning only as part of a system of signification established by the fashion industry itself. When I read this, I remember thinking that this critique implies an existence of perceptible objective reality which includes this truly ‘real’ detail’. This is simply not the case, as all views of reality that exist are in one way or another subjective. Thus, the most realistic and meaningful depiction of detail is that which is most congruent with the character’s nature. Well, turns out I came to the same conclusion as Henry James, which feels rather nice, I am not going to lie. In regard to the idea that fiction competes with life or even makes life, I can’t help but think of Don Quixote. The Knight of the Sorrowful face is the ultimate example of art winning this competition. Not only is his life created by art, but he also continues creating art with its every moment. The intermingling between fiction and reality seems endless. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza who are both creations of Cervantes’ mind enter Spanish culture, making every slightly skinny horse a Rocinante. From the culture, these lovable characters then return back into the second part of the book, where they reflect on their popularity before taking the final step of becoming forever entrenched in our collective memory. And after hundreds of years, now and then, they still enter back into fiction, even if for only a brief moment, as we can see with Kafka’s short piece. Although he might be an extreme example, Don Quixote is certainly not alone since all of us share with him at least a little bit of quixotism. We can look at such widely ranging topics as romantic love or 19th century nationalism and see how works of imagination have altered human history and created previously non-existent behaviors. So yes, I can’t help but agree with Henry James on everything. To finally touch upon the main question of this novella, I think I can pretty confidently say that no ghosts exist at Bly. Personally, I didn’t have this experience of constantly doubting the governesses’ sanity from one chapter to the next that you describe. When I began reading, I was at first unnerved by how the events unfolded but after I got to know the governess, and by the time she began suspecting the children of colluding with the apparitions, I had no doubt that it is all a fantasy. I don’t necessarily agree that the governess is externalizing her own bad thoughts/intention towards the children by creating Quint and Miss Jessel. Instead, I think that she is so jealously possessive of the children—perhaps due to her attraction to the uncle—that she needs to create an external boogeyman which would serve as a target for this jealousy that otherwise would have no outlet. For this reason, she continuously scorns both Quint and the previous governess as utterly despicable, even though she never met them. I also don’t think that Mrs. Grose is particularly afraid of the governess. Perhaps she just enjoys a bit of supernatural drama which alleviates her boredom, thus easily playing into governesses’ delusions. It reminds me of a little anecdote from my childhood. I was a very imaginative kid with an unsatiable appetite for making things up. One day, after playing a video game which featured a protagonist who could converse with a creature from the underworld, I decided to make up my own story in similar fashion. The first thing I did, of course, was share my alleged conversation with ghosts with my family. To my surprise, my superstitious grandma actually gave me the benefit of the doubt and considered the possibility that evil spirits might indeed be at play here. The power of boredom made my grandma briefly believe a child’s fantasy, while I became so immersed in my own story that I soon forgot that it was all a lie. Unfortunately, my mom soon came back home and cleared everything up, pulling both of us out of this engaging little world. Perhaps a similar inclination towards the supernatural is at play when it comes to Mrs. Grose? In addition to the jealousy, an obsessive fascination with innocence seems to preoccupy the governess. As Ben pointed out, although she relishes the innocence of the children, she also sees it as a proof of corruption, simultaneously imagining herself as the savior of said innocence. If we follow through with that logic, doesn’t she then also contribute to their corruption? This mental pattern reminds me of similar societal obsession with women’s sexual purity or ‘innocence’ which I think is in many ways biological in origin. Historically, there seems to be a subconscious desire among many men to elevate and idealize the ‘pure’ woman for her virtue while simultaneously wanting to corrupt her, or at least implicate her in being impure. A similar idea was expressed in ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’, which I read on Ben’s recommendation. Joseph Campbell proposed that women are a subject of fascination and praise for their life-giving powers and as a symbol for earthly pleasures. Yet, if in the course of life one becomes disillusioned with the earthly realm, this dissatisfaction is projected onto the woman who symbolize the despised life. “She is the womb and the tomb: the sow that eats her farrow. Thus she unites the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ exhibiting the two modes of the remembered mother, not as personal only, but as universal.” Thus, there emerges this sadomasochistic preoccupation with innocence and corruption, one second a woman is a highly esteemed virgin and another second she is a despicable wh**e. Apologies for this lengthy digression, what I am saying is that the governess seems to be possessed by the same mental pattern. On the one hand, the children’s innocence and perfect behavior is symbolic of all that is good and beautiful in life. On the other hand, she has a subconscious distaste for life and an inclination towards the dark (perhaps due to her problems at home which are largely left out). Therefore, she must corrupt the children to express her dissatisfaction with the human condition. I hope I explained this well enough. Anyways, can’t wait to finish the novella, I have been really enjoying the process of unpicking it so far.