Final Blog Post

      Henry James’ novel “The Turn of the Screw” leaves a lot up for interpretation at the end, but after I traced and connected all the symbols they all seemed to point towards a theme about repression. I found that James said more in his character’s refusal to talk than in what they actually said.  This is part of the reason that he used eyes as a motif in the story. When no one would tell the governess anything about what was going on, she had to guess by reading people’s eyes. On top of that, James uses light to symbolize knowing, or lack of light to symbolize confusion. I used Fosters advice about not reading with your own eyes in order to understand this story better. I had to think like a Victorian would, because a reader today would have a harder time understanding why the character’s kept so many things repressed.

            The descriptions of eyes, light and silence all helped me come to my conclusion about the real meaning of this story, which I think could be that any society that forces repression of feelings is dangerous and unhealthy. These symbols are most important in the situation with Miles’ expulsion from school. The governess looks into his eyes to determine his innocence, since no one will explain what really happened and she is left to guess. Near the end Miles says,

            After I traced the symbols and motifs that I found most important (eyes/ vision, silence, and light) I found that they were all connected. While light provided answers to the governess’ questions, her eyes seemed to cause more problems for her and add to the confusion, then the silence of other characters created an air of mystery and confused her more. All of these things plus the governess’ own repressed feelings make her go insane. Her repressed feelings about her own sexuality spark the whole situation with the ghosts. The governess “was in love” (James 3) according to the storyteller. She is in love with the children’s uncle, whom she describes as having “placid heavenly eyes,” (James 11).  She also thinks very fondly of Miles, the ten-year old boy that she takes care of, often calling him beautiful and thinking he is not capable of doing any wrong. I found it interesting how much she admired Miles, especially because of the repressed feelings she had for his uncle.

I interpreted the ghosts as a consequence of the governesses repressed desires, and not actual ghosts. Some people who read “The Turn of the Screw” disagree though. The major argument for the ghosts being real is that the governess saw the ghost of Quint before she had even heard that he existed. I thought about this and considered the possibility that the governess was in fact sane, but one situation stuck out in my mind. Before the she sees the ghost for the first time the governess is thinking about running into a man. She writes, “One of the thoughts that [...] used to be with me in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story to meet someone. Someone would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me,” (James 18). For me, this showed that the governess wanted so badly to run into a man her own age, that she unknowingly created one, Quint’s ghost. She must have heard about him before or seen a picture and not remembered it. 

It was hard to interpret the story, because the whole time I couldn’t tell how reliable the narrator was. On top of having a possibly unreliable narrator, this story was written and then read by another narrator, giving it more opportunity to be changed. In the end, although the reader doesn’t know how much they can believe the governess’ story, James gets his point across better than if he had told the story from a third person point of view, because then there would be no mystery to the story. I think that with “The Turn of the Screw” James was trying to explain that repression of anything leads to problems and danger.