The Victorian Gothic with Henry James: Summary & Discussion
It’s a double feature this week!
Welcome to week two of Victober, the time of year where we celebrate Victorian literature throughout the month of October.
This week we’ll be discussing two very iconic Gothic stories: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.
Now of course the point is not to stress you out by making you read as many books as you can. Victober is about discovering the wonders of Victorian literature if you’re new to it, or maybe revisiting some timeless classics you’ve already read. Or something in between. And keep in mind- there are spoilers for both of these in the following posts… proceed with caution.
So maybe you’ve read one or even both of these. Either way, have fun and as always, feel free to comment below any thoughts or questions you have, as well as suggestions for next year!
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James:
Now, if you’re like me, you may have had a rough time with some of James’… writing decisions. He is notoriously not the easiest author to get through, and even though this is a novella, it takes some time. You have to really work with the text, and it doesn’t help that The Turn of the Screw is frustratingly ambiguous. But we’ll get to that in a second…
We start in a parlour by the fire, with a group of friends telling each other ghost stories. (Sound familiar?) It sounds like the ideal October evening, and I can only imagine the outfits they were wearing… Anyways, one of the group says “Guys, have I got a story for you, and it’s totally, 100% true, but crap, I don’t have it on me, so you’ll have to wait.” What a dick. After making them wait a day or so, he finally gets the manuscript and reads it out loud to them.
Now we establish quite early on that the governess (who interestingly remains nameless throughout, as if she is merely a stand in for the literary gothic trope of “the governess”) is an unreliable narrator. She remains decidedly unobjective throughout, and there is evidence of editing throughout the text as well. We are reading her memory turned manuscript; a highly romanticised/ dramatised version of events that transpired in what amounted to a shitty job. She’s clearly obsessed with her employer, and with the children by proxy ( or maybe there is some kind of lingering trauma that attaches her so immediately to these horrible children). We, as the reader, are forced to ask ourselves: Is any of this even happening? Does she sees ghosts because the manor is haunted, or is this in her head? Ah, classic Gothic fiction. Is the supernatural a psychological manifestation of underlying trauma, or are ghosts real? And ultimately, does it matter? Alternately, on a meta level, is this story even to be believed, or are we a victim of the parenthetical scene at the beginning? Is this all just a hoax set up by the dinner party guest, Douglas, to get a rise from his audience? We are his audience, too after all. It is sensationalism at its finest, and at the core, a young woman’s real or made- up trauma. How could we not be intrigued?
The ending is a notorious one as well, and has been speculated on since its publication. Driven mad by her “hallucinations”, the narrator is convinced the apparitions are after Miles and Flora, her two charges. She convinces the housekeeper to get Flora away by any means necessary, and she will take care of Miles….an unfortunate turn of phrase in this case. The very last few lines are quite a plot twist, and the fact that they are not elaborated on is quite frustrating: “I caught him, yes I held him- it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.” Ok, so aside from acknowledging that Mr. James certainly knew how to construct a sentence (even if sometimes you want to roll your eyes at the performance of it all), what an ending. And we, of course, ask ourselves: Did she kill him? Did she accidentally smother him in her passions? Or was it deliberate, because she felt she was saving him, in turn making her the evil entity in the house? Or was he possessed by Mr. Quint, and when the ghost left his body, he died? I think one is more plausible than the other.
So, how did you like it? Did the writing style appeal to you, or was it too much?
Did you like the ambiguity of it all, or were you just frustrated?
If you think the ghosts were real, why were they haunting the children? Did they come back to live out their dysfunctional family they had established before they died/ were murdered? Because really, at the heart of this story, we find grief. These children are incredible lonely. They have their own trauma, and Mr. Quint and Miss Jessel are merely stand -in parental figures, offering the children a life of being wanted. Conversely, if the ghosts were the imaginings of the governess, was it because she herself felt threatened by the closeness between the children and the dead couple? Were they manifestations of her own shortcomings as a woman/caretaker?
What did you think about the ending, and do you think it was an accident or deliberate?
Does this ghost story hold up in today’s media, with all the horror movies and shows we have? Because to me, it is still very bonechilling.
It’s interesting that the trope of the governess in the Gothic and horror genres still persists to this day. It has even morphed into babysitters who find themselves in horrifying situations. If this interested you, you could also read/watch:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware (very good and very eery)
When a Stranger Calls (Not possessed kids, but babysitter forced to deal with external circumstances.)
The Haunting of Bly Manor (really anything by Mike Flanagan)
I hope you enjoyed this short novella, and at some point in the future, I will be tackling The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, if anyone is interested in going on that journey with me…
Happy Reading!