Out James-ing Henry

 Over the last week or so, my wife and I watched the new Netflix series The Haunting of Bly Manner. Or rather, we watched 7ish of the 9 episodes.

This show started off well as an adaptation of Henry James' excellent novella The Turn of the Screw, but it goes off the rails and undoes a lot of what makes James' story spooky and interesting.

From the very opening, the source material is obvious for anyone familiar with James' novella as a group of people sit around a fire telling ghost stories. One participant opens the story exactly the way that James does, even invoking James' phrase, “turn of the screw.” So far so good.

Once the frame narrative is out of the way and the main narrative begins, we see that it is a period piece, set in the 1980s. This is fine and it doesn't end up being as much of a big deal as it seems at first. The set up is good and works well for a tv format. All is good until the story really starts to get rolling. I have four main complaints about the whole show that eventually led to us deciding to throw in the towel and give up on finishing it.

First, (oh yeah, I am gonna spoil the fuck outta this dumb show) everything is supernatural. All of the careful ambiguity that James builds into his novella, all of the psychological tension and unreliability that he slowly reveals over the course of the story is gone. At the end of the novella, the reader is not really sure what happened. It is possible that the governess made everything up or went mad or maybe there is a ghost. There is sufficient evidence to support each of these readings of the novella. This is actually James' gift. He makes the interpretation of the story track back onto the reader's personality and predilections. Here, not so much. There are ghosts.

Second, the characters talk so goddam much. The precious, precocious Flora utters the sickly phrase “perfectly splendid” to no end throughout the series. Yes, this is meant to be a character tic for a child repeating a phrase she had heard an adult she admires speak. Well enough for what it is, but it keeps coming back. The gardener Jamie is a tough-as-nails misanthrope who promises Dani (the governess in the novella) that people aren't worth knowing because they always let you down. And she repeats this again and again. She makes the longest speeches to others around her trying to demonstrate how much she doesn't need them when not talking to them at all would be a much more efficient and effective way of doing the same. The other characters make similarly long-winded speeches. I like talky movies and shows, but this seemed to me to be directorial distrust of the viewer. It seemed to me that someone decided that I was too dumb to get what was going on and needed to have the whole thing spoon-fed to me. Thus:

Third, subtext is made text. Did Quint and Miss Jessel have an affair in The Turn of the Screw? Did Quint abuse Miles? Did the governess actually see any of this? Are the kids making shit up? No solid answers are provided for any of these by James. Again, my position is that this is what makes the ghost story great and this is a staple of Gothic literature. We don't know. And not knowing is better because it is scarier. The Haunting of Bly Manor not only answers all of these questions, it provides even more backstory and answers even more questions than the reader/viewer ever really had.

And finally, the whole thing is too damn long. This would have been a fantastic 4 or 5-part show if it had continued in the same vein as the first few episodes. Too much unneeded backstory, too much re-narration (several plot segments are replayed multiple times with slight variations), too much talking. This could have been so much tighter and it would have generated so much tension.

To conclude, this show had a lot of promise from the first few episodes and I really was hoping for an adaptation that would do justice to the source material. But this just can't deliver. I could perhaps see past some of the above points if it weren't for the fact that the explanation at the end just doesn't hold together. There is a whole plot in which dead Quint kills Miss Jessel and then ropes the kids into becoming vessels for the dead souls of these lovers and it just couldn't keep me. The explanation just felt needlessly convoluted and tacked on. So watch the first few episodes and keep it up until you can't take it anymore. That's what I did. Or you can watch and enjoy the whole thing like it seems a lot of other folks did.

Return of the Screw

This post is a continuation of my analysis of ambiguity in Henry James' The Turn of the Screw.  I will pick up with some textual analysis here.  Please refer back to part one of this analysis for introductory material and context.

In the governess' second encounter with the ghost James uses  triangulated lines of sight to create confusion and disrupt straightforward narrative.  This scene needs a bit more set-up, so please bear with me for a moment.  On a rainy day, the governess enters a room to pick up her gloves when she sees someone standing outside of the window looking in.  She recognizes this as the same person she had seen earlier.  Shocked at the sight, she rushes out of the house and around to the same window to, apparently, try to confront the man but she is unable to find him.  Outside the window, she has the urge to position herself where she had seen the man and peers back into the house.  As she does so, Mrs. Grose enters the room and sees here exactly where she herself had seen the man moments before.
This scene has always been puzzling to me because of the governess' reaction.  There are several things going on.  First, she sees the apparition and immediately attributes motives to it that she cannot know.  She also admits that she cannot clearly see the face but she is convinced that it is the same person she had seen on top of the house, even though she could not clearly see the face then, either.  Her impulse to run outside and then stand where the man stood is unexplained, and then, after this, she wonders why Mrs. Grose should be so startled by a similar image.
James uses the scene to continue to develop the governess' in/credibility.  She provides detail with great confidence that the reader may be prepared to accept on an initial reading, but that is really unsupported in the text.  For example, she claims: "On the spot there came to me the added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come there.  He had come for someone else."  She also admits that though she is seeing the man just through a pane of glass, his appearance to her is not with "greater distinctness" than her view from the garden when he was on the roof.  In the following chapter in conversation with Mrs. Grose, the governess calls the apparition a "horror" and expresses her belief that the children are in danger.  Again, these assertions that she makes are not supported by what actually happens in the text.  James uses dense, overwrought language to mask what is actually happening.  The governess seems to be purposefully abstracting her descriptions, so much so that it can take several readings through a passage to make sense of what she is trying to express.  I believe that the difficulty of the text is a deliberate choice that James makes to develop ambiguity in what is actually going on.

The third encounter that the governess has with the ghost is, again outside in the garden near a pond.  This time, though, the little girl Flora is with her.  James plays the similar trick of providing some narrative exposition from the governess' perspective, but he turns on his technique.  Instead of just relying on the reader's interpretation, James produces a second witness-of-a-sort.  James suggests, via the governess, that Flora also saw the ghost.  However, we have only the governess' word on this as we never hear directly from Flora.

The governess describes a few more encounters with the ghost that are similar to those already described.  In the meantime, the governess learns the story of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, two servants who were involved with each other and had died premature deaths.  She becomes convinced that the ghosts that she has seen are these two and that they have been interacting with the children Miles and Flora.  Further, she believes that the children are lying to her about their interactions.

This all culminates in the final scene.  The governess has sent away Mrs. Grose and Flora.  She is alone in the house with Miles when she has her final encounter with Quint.  The ending passages are filled with the same sort of confusing text as the rest of the novella.  The governess uses elaborate description to create distance between action and narration.  For example, "I seized, stupefied, his supposition--some sequel to what we had done to Flora, but this made me only want to show him that it was better still than that."  Every action is qualified and described ornately.
The governess believes that she sees either Miss Jessel or Quint outside of the window and clutches Miles to her chest.  Here is the final paragraph:
"But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day.  With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall.  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 that I held.  We were alone with the quiet day, and his little hear, dispossessed, had stopped."

The governess wants the reader to believe that she saw either Quint of Miss Jessel outside of the window, there is some disagreement in the text which it is.  She intimates that Miles also sees the apparition.  This struggle, is meant to be her wresting Miles from the ghost's grasp, but he dies in her arms.  It is possible that he has died of fright, that he has been taken by the ghost, of that he has been smothered by the governess in her own panic.  The text leaves open the question of what actually happens.  Are there ghosts or does the governess just imagine them?  We don't know.  Do others actually see the ghosts or does the governess merely believe that others see them and are hiding this knowledge from her?  Again, we don't know.
The point of the story is not to solve the story but to create these moments of confusion.  The reader is confronted with deciding what can and cannot be known in the narrative.  This, like much of James' other work, points back to reliability and individual perception.  Whatever happens, the governess has her perceptions of what is going on and we are only able to base our judgments of the events on this version.  The construct of her narrative will always mediate our perception of those events.
To extrapolate from this: even if it is possible to have an objective view of events (something I do not believe is possible), the retelling, or narrativizing, of these events will always be colored by individual perception.  The reader cannot know what happens in the story and this is not just because the governess may or may not be telling the truth.  My own interpretation of the story is that the governess purposefully dissembles and describes events in a roundabout way for some reason of her own.  I don't believe hat there is enough in the text even to determine why she may be doing this.  I also believe that James does this purposefully be focalizing the narrative through the governess and by creating levels of mediation from the action.  He abstracts events from narrative through the frame and through the governess' own language.  This is an exercise to demonstrate the fundamental unknowability that is at the center of the story.

Spooky, spooky Henry James

I have found myself defending Henry James on many occasions in my life.  His work is subtle and often delves deeply into the inner lives of his characters, working to suss out the intricacies of who knows what and how characters perceive one another.  His work is generally profoundly psychological in the sense that he can recreate thought processes on the page: a rare talent for any writer, but something that James does consistently throughout his fiction.  I have taught The Turn of the Screw and Daisy Miller in a handful of classes in my teaching career because they are both shorter works that still convey the breadth of James' talents (Edith Wharton's short story "Roman Fever" pairs well with Daisy Miller for anyone interested).  Both of these stories can be hard sells, but I have always been able to convert a few students to seeing their merits.
The Turn of the Screw stands out from James' other work because, as far as I know, it is the only ghost story he ever wrote.  But it is typical in the way that he uses triangulated perception to create ambiguity in the text.  That is, James funnels characters' observations of one another through one another.  He nearly always shies away from providing exposition on a character's actions, preferring instead to allow one character to describe or think about the actions.  This means that the reader always gets these perceptions second- or third-hand, creating a distance between the action of the story and the reader's interpretations.  Each distancing creates greater ambiguity that the reader must wade through in order to put together the narrative or to make judgements about characters and actions.
In The Turn of the Screw, James uses a series of techniques to distance the action of the narrative from the reader and, thus, to create ambiguity in the text.  The greatest question that is left is whether or not there is actually a haunting.  From here spawn several other questions that James refuses to answer.
Here is a basic plot outline: James uses a frame narrative to introduce the main story.  In the frame, a group of people are sharing ghosts stories on Christmas Eve when Douglas reveals that he knows of a story involving two children and a ghost.  Douglas defers telling the story by claiming it is someone else's story and that he must send for a manuscript containing the story.  Douglas builds suspense on James' behalf.  After acquiring the manuscript, Douglas tells the story of the governess of Bly.
The governess is charged with caring for Miles and Flora.  At Bly she sees a couple of ghosts and then hears the story of Quint and Miss Jessel's deaths, two former servants at Bly, and reasons that they must be the ghosts that she sees.  The governess freaks out Mrs. Grose - another servant at Bly - and the two work each other up about the haunting.  Things continue to escalate until Miles eventually dies in the governess' arms, whether he dies of fright at the sight of the ghost or because the governess smothers him is left unknown.
What I want to focus on here are the encounters that the governess has with the ghosts and how she attributes these sightings to others around her as well.  In each of these encounters James builds tension in the story by creating doubt as to what is going on.  He does this by subtly leaving out certain attributions and by strategically ending scenes so as to give the impression of conveying one perspective, but that actually relies on the reader completing the idea on his/her own and believing that it is in the story.
Early in the novella, the governess walks through the gardens surrounding Bly thinking, "One of the thoughts that, as I don't in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with me in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet someone."  She continues to imagine a sort of meet-cute with a handsome stranger in the garden.  While in this reverie, she is surprised to actually see someone: "What arrested me on the spot -- and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed for -- was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real.  He did stand there!"  But rather than meeting someone face-to-face, the governess reveals that the stranger she "meets" is standing far off on the top one of the house's towers.
This scene begs a bit of analysis because it is a good encapsulation of what James does throughout the story.  First is the odd sentence construction.  The governess perpetually writes in these circuitous sentences that are filled with subordinated clauses and digressions.  These sentences serve to distance the reader from the action because they are filled with reflection.  They keep reminding the reader that they are not reading a progressive narrative (one that develops in time with the action of the characters), but a retroactive narrative in which the narrator has the ability to layer in their own take.  The phrase, "as charming as a charming story," builds on this same premise; the governess is distanced from the immediate action that she narrates.  The next bit is more telling, she has a sense that her imagination has become real.  However, she had just described the circumstances of her imagination and the reality does not match it at all.  She imagines turning a corner and running into a handsome stranger face-to-face, but in reality she sees someone very far off and cannot see his face.  So, the governess describes a scene in this halting manner, but is distanced from it by time and her own memory.  She then tells the reader that what she imagines seems to become real, even though the reality is quite different from what she experiences.  This has the potential to leave the reader taking the governess' word while still keeping the knowledge of the description of what is actually in the text.  These are the seeds of confusion that James plants early on.  The control over his prose is so masterful that he uses details, down to sentence structure, to sow the beginnings of ambiguity throughout the story.

This is getting to be a bit long, so I am going to leave off here and continue in a second post.  I have two more passages to analyze, so be sure to tune in next week for the spooky continuation of my analysis of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw.