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A review by schenkelberg
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
4.0
(cross-posted from my blog)
I decided to reread The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. Its a tremendous novella, and reading it has driven me to return to my old class notes and materials that I've wisely kept. I always felt weird, sorting through my school notes and finding that there were large portions I wanted to hold onto, without knowing why. Its great to go back through them, for sure, and I hope that I'll be able to continue doing that and working both on this blog and into my new notes, to reach new understandings and developments in response to literature, and so on.
This post is mostly derived from lecture notes about the book, but I'll fill it out with my own reflections, as the book is again fresh in my mind.
To start: Henry James wrote The Turn of the Screw in what's called his late prose style. Its characterized by long, convoluted sentences in thick paragraphs, and this is why an 80 page text took me about two weeks to work through, albeit I wasn't working very steadily on it. James was dictating the book, and that's part of why its written this way, but his long winded prose also tends toward obfuscation, an unusual quality for a book in any other genre than the one that this rests in. The writing seems to withhold information at times – it never really settles down, as Edmund Wilson notes (I'll get to him more later), and decides to present an objective truth to the images presented. This suspension creates, further, a murky atmosphere of anxiety, which is built right into the narration.
The main character of the text (and the narrator of it for the frame story as her story is read aloud) is the governess, also the only central character who does not have a name. She's sent to the house at Bly to care for two children, Flora and Miles. She quickly becomes quite possessive of them, and almost constantly anxious, repeating in her narration that she worries for their sake. She's an outsider, literally to the people of Bly as well as in terms of class – a detail that notes this is how before arriving she had never before seen herself in a mirror. (I should note that a lot of these points are from a lecture giving by one of my very favorite teachers while at Cal - Professor Serpell. This class was called the Literary Theory Monster, and if you happen to be a Cal student I'd say that class was easily among the best I've taken, although I'm sure any class taught by her would be superb)
The governess frames herself as a heroine, protecting the children from spiritual evil, even when such claims stretch to their limits. She sees herself as a martyr and sets herself up to be one.
I'm excited to be getting back into this fascinating world of Henry James, and I'd recommend this book for anyone interested in literary theory, getting muddled up in seemingly endless cyclical complexities, or simply a good story that has an uncanny way of sticking around in one's mind.
I decided to reread The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. Its a tremendous novella, and reading it has driven me to return to my old class notes and materials that I've wisely kept. I always felt weird, sorting through my school notes and finding that there were large portions I wanted to hold onto, without knowing why. Its great to go back through them, for sure, and I hope that I'll be able to continue doing that and working both on this blog and into my new notes, to reach new understandings and developments in response to literature, and so on.
This post is mostly derived from lecture notes about the book, but I'll fill it out with my own reflections, as the book is again fresh in my mind.
To start: Henry James wrote The Turn of the Screw in what's called his late prose style. Its characterized by long, convoluted sentences in thick paragraphs, and this is why an 80 page text took me about two weeks to work through, albeit I wasn't working very steadily on it. James was dictating the book, and that's part of why its written this way, but his long winded prose also tends toward obfuscation, an unusual quality for a book in any other genre than the one that this rests in. The writing seems to withhold information at times – it never really settles down, as Edmund Wilson notes (I'll get to him more later), and decides to present an objective truth to the images presented. This suspension creates, further, a murky atmosphere of anxiety, which is built right into the narration.
The main character of the text (and the narrator of it for the frame story as her story is read aloud) is the governess, also the only central character who does not have a name. She's sent to the house at Bly to care for two children, Flora and Miles. She quickly becomes quite possessive of them, and almost constantly anxious, repeating in her narration that she worries for their sake. She's an outsider, literally to the people of Bly as well as in terms of class – a detail that notes this is how before arriving she had never before seen herself in a mirror. (I should note that a lot of these points are from a lecture giving by one of my very favorite teachers while at Cal - Professor Serpell. This class was called the Literary Theory Monster, and if you happen to be a Cal student I'd say that class was easily among the best I've taken, although I'm sure any class taught by her would be superb)
The governess frames herself as a heroine, protecting the children from spiritual evil, even when such claims stretch to their limits. She sees herself as a martyr and sets herself up to be one.
I'm excited to be getting back into this fascinating world of Henry James, and I'd recommend this book for anyone interested in literary theory, getting muddled up in seemingly endless cyclical complexities, or simply a good story that has an uncanny way of sticking around in one's mind.