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.

2: "that turn, and turn, and turn upon the hope"--Oates

So Jessel was expecting, according to the structure of her well-studied fantasy narrative, the sudden appearance of the Master, his love, marriage, and an instant family of children that she would not have to soil her body to bear. Instead she was easily seduced and impregnated by the Master's valet, Quint, and destroyed, not redeemed by her body. According to Oates, the fantasy of marrying the Master leads not to the happy ending that Bronte provided, but a much more ordinary and typical narrative closure, the suicide of the pregnant and disgraced young woman. And, in an uncanny bit of repetitive turning, Oates presents the current governess as yet another clone in the grip of the Jane Eyre saga, blatantly comparing her to Jane: "[she was] a skinny broomstick of a girl, in a gray bonnet that does not flatter her, and a badly wrinkled gray traveling cloak; her small, pale, homely face is lit from within by a hope, a prayer, of `succeeding'" (266). But Quint is now dead, perhaps murdered, perhaps accidentally drowned in a drunken rip, and so he is forced to turn again to the same scenario, the seduction of a virginal governess, but this time it cannot be in the flesh, but through the spirit. And hoping for a sudden visit from the Master, the new governess instead receives a full frontal of Quint, who stages his haunting as a display of masculine preening. Appearing to her on the battlements of Bly, Quint feels nothing but "bliss" at the governess's shock and terror: "The poor thing takes an involuntary step backward. She presses a tremulous hand to her throat. Quint gives her the full, full impact of his gaze--he holds her fast there below on the path, he wills her to stand as if paralyzed.... You do not know me, my dear girl, but you can guess who I am. You have been forewarned" (269; Oates's italics). Forewarned, that is, by the saga that is operating in lieu of the Jane Eyre narrative: the seduced maiden tradition. In the latter narrative, the woman is victim, not victor. Seduction can never be avoided, and the body is fate or doomed or a stinking tomb from which women can never escape. Oates's version of this scene concludes on a highly literary and allusive note, reminding her readers not simply that she is rewriting James, but that she is a woman author rewriting a male author's turn on a distinctly female literary tradition.

3: "How otherwise to know what power we wield, except to see it in another's eyes?"--Oates

And how, we might ask, could the governess have known the man "always"? The standard critical explanation is that the man in the window is a manifestation of her oedipal fixation on her "whimsical" or "eccentric" (1898 text) curate-father (shades of Bronte pere). (5) She sees, that is, her frustrated oedipal longings diverted first from her father, then from the substitutive Master, and then fixed murderously on Miles as the ultimate and unlucky love/death object. This interpretation has led many critics to see the hauntings as a form of self-haunting, a descent into insanity. But the face in the window can also be read as an image of one form that narcissism can take. In her construction of Quint the governess sees herself because she reads in him her own interest in the children. Because she experiences this interest as unnatural, she projects onto Quint her own anxious evasions and her fear of perversion. Despite her best efforts, however, we sense in the unnamed governess a perverse sexual interest in the children, in their activities, in their secrets. As Milton notes, "nocent" is buried in "innocent," and "nocent," a nonce latinate pun, literally means "(guilty) knowledge." The governess, like Eve, wants this "guilty knowledge," with Quint as the tempter she must invent in order to obtain vicariously and perversely.

In Oates's version, however, we are brought face to face with the dark and hidden acts that bound Jessel and Quint to the children: group sex. And we are confronted with this scene, not directly, but filtered as a particularly delicious memory of Quint. It is the sex, the need to touch and fondle both children's bodies as the two adults engaged in sex themselves, that holds Jessel and Quint to them. While Quint amuses himself with his startling appearances to the new governess, Jessel is revealing herself to Flora across the lake, compelled to make herself known to the little girl, whom she considers "my soul, I will not give her up" (258). In James this incident is muted, with the governess only vaguely aware that there is "a third person" present in her dyadic rambles with Flora (28). Later the governess tells Mrs. Grose that the woman appeared to them as "a figure of quite an unmistakable horror and evil: a woman in black, pale and dreadful--with such an air also, and such a face!" (30).

In Oates's tale Jessel's facial contortions and desperation are explained by her frantic attempts to get at Flora, and equally explicit is Flora's longing to be reunited with her dead governess: "Jessel appears to little Flora in emboldened daylight, daring to `materialize' on the farther shore of the placid Sea of Azouf ... is not little Flora in her innocence, as in her need, necessary to the vision?" (275). For Oates, Flora and Jessel feed each other in their excessive and mutual need for each other, just as Miles and Quint do. But where does that leave the governess? She is the third wheel in every configuration, the screen onto which both frustrated pairs project their longings. As the term that signifies excess as well as lack, the governess must be eliminated for the two pairs to reunite, and yet the governess refuses to go quietly. She refuses to erase herself because in James's text--at least, this is her story.

By this time in both tales, however, Quint also recognizes that he is connected with Miles in the same sort of intense manner. In Oates's story, when Quint remembers Miles it is as a "child starved for affection," a child who hugged and kissed Quint, "seizing him around the hips, burrowing his flushed little face into the elder man as a kitten or puppy might, blindly seeking its mother's teats" (262). And it is her mother that Flora seeks in her infatuation with Jessel: "Flora must have seen, yes, here was her lost young mother restored to her, at last!" (259). The visual dimensions of seeing and being seen form the dominant motif in both tales, but in Oates the visual is blatantly intertwined with the question of sex and power. So there are two levels of ghosts haunting both tales: Jessel and Quint, the substitute love objects, as well as the earlier, dead biological parents, abruptly swept away by disease in India two years before the events in the story began. The originating wound for the children is the death of their parents, but then they are traumatized again by the sudden and violent deaths of their parent substitutes. The unnamed governess steps into this morass of unresolved mourning, of grief so intense that it swerves away from thanatos to eros in a desperate bid to deny its power and existence.

4: "Is there Another whose face we cannot see and whose voice we cannot hear, except as it echoes in our own thoughts?"--Oates

Voyeurism, exhibitionism, as well as oedipal desire and mourning are operating in both tales, but Oates chooses in her story to make these compulsions blatant. That is, what was implied in James is spoken in Oates. And what was whispered in James was the narcissistic basis of all human affections. We love in others what we project onto them, hence the heavy use of glass, mirrors, eyes, lake surfaces, and polished wood in which we see ourselves, not anything else. When Oates's Miss Jessel says that Flora is her "soul," that she cannot live without possession of the girl, what she is actually saying is that she sees in Flora her younger, pure self. She loves herself as an unspoiled beautiful girl; hence her "love" for Flora is simply a manifestation of her narcissism. And the same can be said of Quint's attraction to Miles, in his eyes ultimately a younger and more innocent version of himself: And so when Jessel and Quint involve the two children in their sexual acts, they are not so much seducing others as making love to split-off manifestations of idealized aspects of themselves. The fact that they had easy access to these orphaned and unprotected children constitutes the horror of their crime, a perversion of the trust that was placed in them by the uninvolved "Master."

In James's tale we are teased, as it were, with hints and innuendos. When the governess tells Mrs. Grose that she is certain the apparition had come with the purpose of finding Miles, she is then told by Mrs. Grose that yes, the two were "great friends": "It was Quint's own fancy. To play with him, I mean--to spoil him.... Quint was much too free" (25). The governess does not need to hear anymore; she is sufficiently disgusted and determines at that moment to function as a "screen--I was to stand before them. The more I saw the less they would" (27). And so while appearing to position herself as a sacrifice, the one who will take the suffering on herself in lieu of the children, the governess actually positions herself at the keyhole, peeping, peering, blocking the views of others so that she can see it all. A visual mania, a scopophilia possesses this woman, who ultimately represents every reader who has wanted to seen the unseeable, who has wanted to invade the primal scene of textuality/sexuality.

What we learn from this description is that the children are active participants with their parent-substitutes in sexual acts. They do not simply fantasize the primal scene: they live it. Eyes enlarged and reflecting their desire, the children "burrow" into the adults, as if in a futile attempt to return to the womb. The description is sad as well as horrible, and yet the reader of Oates who has also read James's cryptic story now has the sensation that yes, the crime has finally been uncovered. There surely could be nothing worse that we could imagine. What the unnamed governess wanted so much to uncover and have confessed is here, these acts of desperate erotic grief. All of this, of course, leads us to Freud's theories about the interrelation of fantasy and trauma. In his Interpretations of Dreams, Freud claims that a dream is not a phantasmagoria, but a text to be deciphered, and he observes that it is in the very nature of sexuality to have a traumatic effect on the ego; therefore, he justifies the connection between sexuality, trauma, and defense. For Freud, fantasies are the conscious articulations of a lack, a loss of the psychic plentitude we experienced in childhood, while in both fantasies and dreams the Ego dominates and determines all the actions and consequences so that the lack is denied. Most fantasies, therefore, center on scenarios of self-aggrandizement and are structured around a narrative in which the ego regains a protective home, loving parents, and autoerotic objects suitable for affection. James's governess does struggle toward establishing an idealized family of her own, but she spectacularly fails in the attempt--not giving birth to a son, but instead costing him his life.

Freud would later in his career resort to an explanation of fantasy that he called "primal fantasies of phylogenetic endowment," claiming that all fantasies are not individual, but traces of racial or primeval experiences. For Freud the primal fantasies that recur in all individuals--and by extension, the human race--are all narratives of origin: the primal scene and voyeuristic fantasies, fantasies of seduction and the upsurge of sexuality, and the origin of the difference between the sexes and its manifestation in the fantasy of castration. (6) In both versions these primal fantasies are revisited in more or less explicit terms: seduction (Quint and Jessel; the governess and the children), sexual difference (the children's sexual interest in the adults), castration (the suspect deaths of both Quint and Miles), and the attempt to recreate a family of origins (the governess's futile gestures toward "mothering" the children). Both authors' persistent recourse to fantasy formations alerts us to the residual presence of trauma in the text, and as the research on trauma makes clear, there is no final resolution or successful rationalization of trauma. Its effects linger like scars on a body, like markings on a blank page.

We can also, however, examine the governess's conduct in light of Freud's definition of hysteria: the hysteric suffers from a psychic trauma whose origin she does not know or has repressed, yet which has remained as a memory trace in her psyche. Freud labels these memories "parthogenic," and he notes that hysterical patients suffer from incompletely abreacted psychical traumas. Secondly, the gap in conscious knowledge between the trauma and the partial memory of it causes what Freud calls the "hysterical conversion": that is, the somatization of conflictual unconscious representations. According to Freud, "hysterical symptoms are nothing other than unconscious fantasies brought into view through `conversion.'" All of which is another way of saying that the body is compelled to act out its psychic overload either through excitation (tears, fits, hallucinations) or various forms of inhibitions (melancholy, paralysis, catatonic depressions). The gap, then, between knowledge about the trauma and the ability to process it consciously, constitutes the very origin of hysteria. (7) But that same gap between the experience of a trauma and our ability to work through and out of it can also be seen as the very impetus of the need to write. By writing a literary text we transform the trauma, but we never process it to the point that the trauma can or ever will disappear. The residue of trauma as the origin of a literary work persists in repeated imagery patterns that we begin to recognize as excessive, obsessive, delusional, hyperbolic, indeed, hysterical. In both versions, the governess appears to swing between excessive emotional overload and catatonic melancholia. The narrative oscillations in the text can be explained largely through the struggle to both act out the trauma and at the same time to attempt futilely to understand or rationalize the memories of the pain.

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.

As the memories of their shared intimacies increase and actually haunt the dead, Jessel is ever more anxious to claim Flora, who she sees now as not simply her soul, but as "her own little gift, the babe cruelly drowned in her womb, hers and Quint's, in this very pond" (275). As she silently communes with Flora, drawing her closer to her and into the world of death, the new governess, called "St. Ottery" in mockery by Jessel and the Quint, suddenly leaps up and saves Flora, snatching her from the imploring arms of what she sees as a ghoul: "`My God, what a--horror! Hide your eyes, child! Shield yourself!.... Don't look at her, Flora! The horrid, obscene thing! You're safe now" (276). Death and insatiable longing have turned Jessel into a ghoul, a cravening thing with "hard-shelled beetles" infesting her pubic hair. Salvation for her can only arrive through her capture of Flora, because in seducing Flora and gaining her love, Jessel redeems herself, returns symbolically to her virginal and pure self, her "flower" of femininity restored to what it was before she was deflowered by Quint.

The love Jessel has for Flora has held her to the catacombs of the dead that encircle the house of Bly. Jessel cannot claim Flora as her own because of the vigilant and obsessive surveillance of St. Ottery, a "terrier" of a woman, as dogged in her pursuit of the ghosts as the ghosts are determined in their pursuit of the children. In such a struggle, one is tempted to label it a life or death struggle, someone has to lose, and, unfortunately, it is the weakest who will crack "when a bubble bursts at last in Flora's brain" (278). Driven by St. Ottery to confess about the ghostly appearances of the woman at the lake, Flora disintegrates and is taken away to London, and, according to Oates, she is accompanied there by Jessel, who no longer has any need to continue to haunt the house of Bly. Jessel's disappearance allows Quint to come to terms with his prey, Miles. And the story of Quint and Miles is not shrouded in any soothing mother-daughter imagery. Nor is it presented as the quest of one soul for another. The tie between the two is purely sexual and physical, making it all the more dangerous for Miles.

6: "We must have imagined that, if Evil could be made to exist, Good might exist as rightfully."--Oates

Why, we might ask, is the word "deception" used twice? Because all of the moral categories we construct in order to explain our lives' events are for Oates ultimately built on necessary self- deceptions. No one, in other words, thinks that he or she is evil. All of us are capable of vast amounts of rationalization, of deception, without which we would not be able to function. For Oates, it is not evil to give or receive any of love's comforts. It is only human. In the world of Bly, all of the inhabitants--those living as well as the dead--are accursed by their longings and their persistent need for love's "comforts." In the catacombs of the dead, where Jessel and Quint rattle around, plucking beetles from their bodies and preening before the shards of broken mirrors, the same emotions play out. They are just as jealous, needy, narcissistic, and perverse as are the living. There is, in other words, no peace in death, only a continuation in a higher key of the same psychology, the same deceptive emotions. In Oates's tale the climactic scene occurs in the family library, where Miles has curled up one evening to read a particularly appropriate volume, the Directorium Inquisitorium, an inventory in Latin of sins that are unforgivable in the eyes of the Church. (8) St. Ottery confronts him, demanding a confession, and Miles denies all. St. Ottery goes so far as to point to Quint, who is pressing his "yearning face" against the glass, but Miles still demurs, claiming that he is unable to see Quint: "`There, I say--there!' In a fury, the governess taps against the glass, as if to break it. Quint shrinks away." As Miles flees the room, St. Ottery and Quint are left to "regard each other through the win-dow, passionless now, spent as lovers who have been tortured to ecstasy in each other's arms" (282). Oates concludes her tale with Miles's suicide in the lake, and the eerie rationalization: "We must have imagined that, if Evil could be made to exist, Good might exist as rightfully" (282). The postmodern morality of Oates positions both the living and the dead as victims. Her ideology goes something like this: in James's moral universe, the unnamed governess needed to believe that those who had died were "Evil" so she created its manifestations in order to convince herself that she inhabited a wholly different world, the world of the living that was by its very nature "Good." A tremendous anxiety toward death actually motivates James's text, as well as an almost pathological fear of sex in any of its forms. Oates makes plain the forces driving James's text; at the same time she puts forward her own alternative view of morality--there is no sharp demarcation between "good" and "evil." They exist, if they exist at all, on a continuum where we will all at some time in our lives find ourselves. Oates does not mystify nor does she coddle her readers. She slaps them in the face with the realization that at some point all of us will be prey to obsession, to an erotic mania and nostalgia that is so intense and irrational in its object-choice that will wish ourselves dead.

James's tale has famously persisted to enthrall and puzzle readers who are drawn to its glossy surface and its unspoken depths. Oates, on the other hand, begins her story in those depths. She forces her readers to confront the polymorphous perversity that is implicit in human relationships, and she portrays a world that has no neat boundaries, either in morality or mortality. In an essay in which she attempted to define "The Short Story," Oates observes that years earlier she believed that "art was rational, at bottom, that it could be seen to `make sense,' that it had a definite relationship with philosophical inquiry, though its aim was not necessarily to resolve philosophical doubt." Now, however, she thinks such is not the case: "the short story is a dream verbalized, arranged in space and presented to the world, imagined as a sympathetic audience; the dream is said to be some kind of manifestation of desire, so the short story must also represent a desire, perhaps only partly expressed, but the most interesting thing about it is its mystery" (Oates, "Short Story" 214). "Postgothic" fiction brings us precisely to this point, the place where the reader is forced to realize--like Oates--that there is no reality outside the fictional, no truth beyond the constructions, no death, and finally no life apart from the pain. Postmodern gothicists like Poppy Z. Brite take us just to the edge of life. Oates takes us over the edge so that the dead speak and feel and yearn and we postgothic readers, in turn, know that there will be no final escape for any of us--only more texts.

(1) Readers who have struggled with the vexed and vexing narrative and thematic issues in James's tale are legion. Shoshana Felman has summed up the "trap" that the reader of James's text falls into quite succinctly: "The reader can choose either to believe the governess, and thus to behave like Mrs. Grose, or not to believe the governess, and thus to behave precisely like the governess. Since it is the governess, who, within the text, plays the role of the suspicious reader, occupies the place of the interpreter, to suspect that place and that position is, thereby, to take it" (190; original italics).

(2) The governess's insanity or psychic problems have been discussed by numerous critics, including Paula Marantz Cohen and Stanley Renner. Lacanian readings of the causes of the governess's neuroses have included those by Christine Brooke-Rose and Beth Newman.

(5) William Veeder discusses the revision of "whimsical" for "eccentric" and also analyzes the governess's case as one of arrested emotional development caused by the absence of her mother and the "whimsical" presence of her oedipally-desired father.

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