For Tuesday: James, The Turn of the Screw, Chapters 1-10 (more or less)

The Netflix series loosely based on James' novel

For Tuedsay's class (after Fall Break), we're going to start discussing James' The Turn of the Screw, a short Gothic novel about a governess who arrives at a remote estate in England to take charge of two very extraordinary young children who seem haunted by the secret history of the place. The governess takes it upon herself to uncover this history, though soon becomes aware that she's being watched a mysterious presence, as well as by the children themselves. Can she save the children and uncover the mystery? Or is her entire presence at the manor suspect and a danger to the children? Find out...

NO QUESTIONS this time, though we will do an IN-CLASS response when you arrive to get us started. Some ideas you might want to consider are:

* James wrote this story after many personal tragedies and after the failure of a play that was meant to make his name as a playwright. He wrote this as a quick 'potboiler,' a way to make money with a popular genre--the ghost story. When people asked him about the story, he said it was nothing, not one of his serious works, and not worth the effort to examine closely. Why might we not take this statement at face value (intentional fallacy)? Why might many authors even today be hesitant to stand behind stories of ghosts and the supernatural? 

* Since this is a ghost story, and draws upon popular conceptions of hauntings, the supernatural, etc., what might be James' “horizon of expectations” (Culler, p.63) for the story? What elements of the story might be less frightening or disturbing to us, but were obviously meant to be disturbing and frightening? Or, you might also consider what Gothic elements have aged well, and why we might still be his 'ideal audience'.

* This is a story that really draws distinctions between the story (what happens) and the plot (how it happens). How does the Governess/Narrator purposely confuse the two for the reader? How much of what happens is what she says is happening, and not necessarily the actual events that others might see? 

* Based on her language, what kind of person is the Governess? How does she reveal her own values, biases, and ideas of gender in her narration? In other words, how does her storytelling shape herself as well as the story?

* This story also uses a classic Gothic device which we see in Frankenstein, Dracula, and so many other horror stories: the discovered manuscript which a frame narrator merely reads or translates for the reader. Why do you think this kind of distancing is useful in a ghost story? How does it seem to function in this story, since we quickly forget that we're actually hearing one narrator read another? 

* How are Miles and Flora performing their roles as children and as male and female? Why might James focus a horror story on two children (one of each sex) as they reach the age where identity--and gender identity--becomes important? How does this also play into the language of the ghost story?