For my independent reading book, I chose “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James. It’s a story about a woman who accepts a job taking care of two children, Flora and Miles, but soon starts seeing the ghosts of two former employees of the family. After the governess starts seeing the ghosts, she suspects they are out to corrupt the children and she makes it her mission to protect them. However, she is the only one who sees the ghosts, or at least admits to seeing them, so the whole story the reader is left wondering if she is going crazy, or if the ghosts are real. I noticed that a lot of the imagery in the story was related to light and vision. Fire, candles, lights, windows, eyes, and sight are all described often, so I traced these throughout the novel.
An account of what happened at Bly (the home of the children and the governess) is written down and read by a man to his house guests, which is how the story begins. James begins the first chapter by saying, “the story held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless,” (James 1). Fire is used again later in the story when the governess senses “there being something undefinably astir in the house” (James 53) and leaves her room to find the source of the disturbance, taking a candle with her. She finally finds the thing that was disturbing her when “the moon made the night extraordinarily penetrable and showed me on the lawn a person [...] it was poor little Miles himself” (James 58). In all of these cases the light provides the characters with or helps them find answers. Therefore, I think that James uses light as a symbol for knowledge and the truth.
After I realized that James was probably using light to symbolize knowledge, moments when the governess’ candle suddenly went out seemed more significant. One night when the governess gets up with her candle, again looking for the ghosts, she says, “I had left a light burning, but it was now out, and I felt an instant certainty that Flora had extinguished it,” (James 57). The lack of light here not only shows that the situation in unclear, but that the governess’ is not as right about the situation as she thinks she is. There is a turning point here, when the governess first accuses Flora of doing something bad. Previously, although she seemed to adore Miles even more, she thought highly of Flora. She goes from thinking “the children [...] I should thus fence about and absolutely save [from the ghosts]” (James 34) to believing that they are somehow causing the ones trouble for her. The uncertainty of the governess and her constantly changing feelings about the situation and those around her all point to her insanity. I would guess that the ghosts aren’t real at all, but are figments of the governesses imagination, created to explain things that she cannot. I think this all stems from Miles expulsion from school. No one will explain why he was expelled, and the governess can’t imagine him doing anything wrong, so she could have created the ghost of Quint to explain the boy’s misbehavior.
This first post was done really well. It could have used a little more background information at the very beginning (setting or time period or some character history), but other than that, well done. I really liked the personal parts integrated in, like when you mention that once you realized that they light meant knowledge, you were able to extract more from the book. I liked how the whole post really stuck to that one motif, and I'm interested in reading more about your analysis of this motif and how it all plays out.
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