The Turn of The Screw

I never in my wildest dreams thought it would be feasible to narrate a ghost story in such a dull and unemotional way, yet here we are. Henry James has truly accomplished this feat. The governess, who seems to be a duplicate of Jane Eyre, dreams about the master of the house while looking after his nephew and niece. She gets embroiled in a web of poltergeist activity. Or does she? Do these spirits really exist, or is she simply going mad? Well, we can safely assert that she is crazy. She goes berserk over a letter yet calmly encounters the phantom of the dead governess. Her reactions are so hysterical and childishly absurd that I was left dumbfounded for most of the time. The only truly horrifying aspect of the house is the children. Their overly mature manners and the way they speak scared the living daylights out of me. It's as if they are possessed by a 35-year-old auntie. But what do I know? I have absolutely no clue what is happening inside the house, where the "good-looking" gentleman of the house, haunted by spirits, resides. Our strange governess is attempting to prove she's not insane by passively aggressively compelling the kids to admit that they also see the "ghosts." I have no idea what kind of madness is rampant in this asylum of a house. Additionally, James's tiresome narration and style were yet another twist of the screw for this uninteresting story. - 2 stars

The Aspern Papers

To what extremes are you willing to go for the relics of your favorite author? The narrator is in pursuit of the letters of Jeffrey Aspern, a renowned but deceased poet. He travels to Venice in search of the poet's lover, an elderly widow living with her niece. In an attempt to gain their trust and get his hands on the precious papers, this cunning man utilizes his social skills to achieve his objective. However, his conscience often weighs heavily on him as he questions the morality and ethics behind his purpose. Nevertheless, this does not stop him from shattering the once peaceful life of the two women. Instead, he finds it increasingly difficult to obtain the letters he has dreamed of. Henry James undertakes an intriguing story with a passionate protagonist, but his usual dry style overshadows its potential. - 3 stars.

You can read my full review of The Turn Of The Screw at Keeping Up With The Penguins.

Henry James was a writer who could never be accused of being concise. His work, The Turn Of The Screw, he described as a “tale” - a fictional story with a single plot that was too long to be considered a “short story” (in modern times, we refer to such works as novellas). James had a great love for ghost stories and wrote quite a few of them. However, he grew bored with the common tropes of the genre. Instead, he preferred stories that, as he himself put it, “embroidered the strange and sinister onto the very type of the normal and easy”. In other words, he liked it better when the “ghosts” could be easily mistaken for tricks of the mind or something equally ordinary in day-to-day life, leaving the reader to wonder... what if? This unique approach to storytelling made James' works stand out and continue to be studied and analyzed to this day.

Trigger warnings: death, death of a child, manipulation.

3.5 stars.

I have to admit that I don't have an abundance of thoughts regarding this, which comes as a bit of a surprise to me. This is because I've repeatedly heard about how eerie The Turn of the Screw is. And yet, here I am.

I believe that in both cases, these are tales that I would have held in higher regard if two conditions were met. Firstly, if I had studied them in great detail. Secondly, if I hadn't been reading them consistently at around 10.45 pm when I was half asleep. You see, I just went ahead and read the Wikipedia pages for both of them. And in the case of The Turn of the Screw, the various interpretations - is the protagonist crazy or are there truly ghosts? and so on - are far more captivating to ponder upon than the story itself.

Anyway. The Aspern Papers is a fascinating story about a conniving white man attempting to take advantage of naïve women and ultimately failing. And The Turn of the Screw is a gothic horror story that can be seen as either about ghosts or insanity, depending on one's interpretation. In the end, I'm not sure if I would read either of these again, but I'm still glad that I picked them up in the first place.

I'm reading this for work. I have read numerous works by James, but his portrayal of women, particularly in "Portrait of a Lady" where he kept rewriting and worsening the ending for poor Isabel Archer, made me decide that enough was enough. However, I chose this novella for a discussion group. I read "The Turn of the Screw" too long ago to remember much more than that it didn't persuade me to attempt more scary stories.

I couldn't help but think of Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" as an influence, although of course that came later.

Venice is described as a large apartment: St. Mark's square being the most ornamented; palaces and churches as the "divans of repose." I wonder if he had a specific palazzo in mind for Miss Tina and Juliana?

The unnamed narrator, which I truly hate, is an editor, biographer, critic, antiquarian, and a general pain. (See page 79 when he's glad he doesn't have to be so absurd as to be kind to the woman he's deceiving. He's a hunter and views his project in terms of conquest and spoils. He even says they act as if hunted, but he is the one hunting them.)

On pages 124 - 125, he's caught, a "publishing scoundrel."

On page 139, he stands before the statue of the condottiere as he endures the failure of his plan. Did Miss Tina outwit him or did she truly wish to marry him? She suggests it, but doesn't she know he'll decline? He questions her putting reasons before feelings. One would think he would praise that.

Juliana has a thin, weak voice but is agreeable, cultivated, pale, a "wasted antiquity," with "esoteric knowledge," a "flicker of impertinence," and is "not resigned to life" (page 68). On page 69, Tina says, "I don't know how the days pass. We've no life."

This is a story of obsession, failure. Is it unrequited love? I don't think so. Miss Juliana and Miss Tina seem incomplete to me. His gondolier is a more fully developed character. On page 73, Aspern's voice seems more real.

Miss Tina is not young, not fresh but clear, blank, gentle, a "tremulous spinster," with a "deeply futile" shyness combined with straightness. On page 138, it says, "the most fatal of human follies, our not having known when to stop." He ended up paying a very high price to keep the miniature portrait of Aspern.

Holy #spinsterlit, Henry James!

The Turn of the Screw is definitely not the frightening story I expected it to be. However, it was disquieting and troubling in many aspects. Victorian morality, childhood innocence, claustrophobia, hysteria, and displaced feelings all converge in this deliberately cryptic and ambiguous tale.

James' ornate, labyrinthine sentences have a powerful impact. They will either drive you nuts or make you ignore your phone and read with rapt attention. Fortunately for me, I had the latter experience. Having read Washington Square, I had some idea of what to expect regarding his language. Nevertheless, I'm still nervous about tackling one of his bigger books.

Underlying this story is a strong sense of irony. It is a parody of gothic literature, which somehow turned into its own weird and hysterical thing.

I'm not rating this edition since I only read The Turn of the Screw. I give it 4 stars. I'll get to The Aspern Papers at some point, once I've recovered from this intense reading experience.

The Aspern Papers was truly pointless. It was placed before Turn of the Screw in the book, and by the time I reached the second page of Turn of the Screw, I had already forgotten the ending of The Aspern Papers, if there even was one, which is highly questionable.

Let me just state that I really like the way Henry James writes. His writing makes me think deeply and it is such elegant English. I had been meaning to read this book for a while, but I suddenly had to after seeing a screenshot of a conversation on a dating app from one of my friends. The English of a grown man in that conversation was extremely bad. It felt like someone had defiled my brain, so I had to read this book next. Maybe that makes me a snob, but seriously! It's so irritating. It's as if some people think it's cute to have bad English. How about being proud of being educated and trying to pass that on to your kids? If my son grows up to talk to a woman like that on a dating app, I will be so disappointed that I might as well cry myself into a fiery cremation furnace.

However, there is one thing that drives me crazy about Henry James' stories, and that is that no one will actually speak plainly about what is on everyone's minds. Here is a sample conversation from Turn of the Screw:

A: Did you see that?!
B: Oh I see EVERYTHING!
A: Everything?
B: Well not all THAT!

So, what the heck are we all discussing here? It seems like some very dangerous misunderstandings could occur.

But having said that, I do not like ghost stories. I'm not into horror at all. This book certainly wasn't horror in the traditional sense, but it most definitely scared me, especially right at the end. This book is the perfect definition of a cliffhanger.

All I got from this book is the answer to the following questions:

1. Which author used so many commas, colons, semi-colons, full stops, hyphens and exclamation marks that his over-long sentences became impossible to comprehend? It's truly a mystery. One wonders if the author was trying to convey some complex and convoluted ideas, but in the process, made the text a jumble of punctuation.

2. Which fictional character would you most like to push down a long flight of stairs? This is a rather interesting and perhaps a bit mischievous question. There are so many fictional characters out there, some of them truly despicable. Maybe it's that one character who always gets away with everything, or the one who is constantly causing trouble for the protagonist.

All I need now is for someone to ask..... What will that question be? Will it be another thought-provoking one like the ones above, or something completely different? Only time will tell.

This review is associated with The Aspern Papers.

The Aspern Papers is a remarkable novella penned by Henry James and serialized in the Atlantic in 1888. In essence, it tells the story of an academic researcher, the narrator of the novella, who is in pursuit of bundles of personal letters and writings of a long-departed American poet, 'Jeffrey Aspern'. Evidently, these precious papers are in the hands of a very elderly woman, Miss Juliana Bordereau, who resides with her middle-aged niece in an old, sprawling palazzo in a more dilapidated part of Venice. Our narrator rents a room from the women under false pretenses and attempts to enlist the niece's help in uncovering the location of the papers. He stops at nothing, using deceit and artifice to win the women over. It is clear from the beginning that he is completely obsessed and consumed by the desire to obtain the papers, which he refers to as his "spoils", and he shows little regard for the old woman's privacy or the memories of her lost love.

This is a spine-chilling read, and one can't help but feel sympathy for the poor, lonely middle-aged niece, Miss Tina, and even for the ancient Miss Juliana, who lives for the memories of her love affair with Aspern. It becomes increasingly uncomfortable for the reader as the narrator emotionally and psychologically manipulates the niece into becoming his accomplice in the search for and acquisition of the papers. Frankly, the ending of the tale is extremely satisfying in my opinion.

I believe that the point James is attempting to convey in this novella is that there is indeed a significant moral dilemma when it comes to personal privacy and the pursuit of information for intellectual or commercial purposes. In other words, when an author or poet achieves fame and popularity, the question arises as to how much of their life becomes fair game for future biographers, researchers, and the like. It is undoubtedly a difficult question to answer.

As I read The Aspern Papers, I realized that other authors have also explored this dilemma. For instance, Edith Wharton's excellent novella, The Touchstone, written in 1900, centers around a man who sells bundles of highly intimate personal letters he received from a former lover who was also a very famous author. A.S. Byatt also touches on this theme with the correspondence between two fictional Victorian poets in her Booker Prize-winning novel, Possession (1990). Therefore, if you read The Aspern Papers, I highly recommend that you immediately follow it up with a reading of Wharton's The Touchstone. It is a wonderful way to connect the two novellas, and it is made even more meaningful by the fact that Henry James and Edith Wharton spent a great deal of time together and became very good friends.

**Original Article**: The movie was good. The story was interesting and the acting was great. I enjoyed it a lot.

**Expanded Article**:

The movie that I watched recently was truly remarkable. The story it presented was not only engaging but also filled with unexpected twists and turns that kept me on the edge of my seat throughout. The plot was well-developed, with each character having their own unique arc and motivation.

The acting in the movie was outstanding. The actors brought the characters to life with their精湛的表演 skills. Their expressions, gestures, and dialogue delivery were all on point, making it easy for the audience to connect with the characters and feel their emotions.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. It was a great entertainment experience that left me feeling satisfied and wanting more. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is a fan of good movies.

Review to follow.

Introduction
Preface

The works of Henry James, such as "The Aspern Papers" and "The Turn of the Screw," are renowned for their psychological depth and intricate narratives.

"The Aspern Papers" delves into the complex relationship between an unnamed narrator and the mysterious Miss Bordereau. The story unfolds as the narrator becomes obsessed with obtaining a set of papers written by the late Aspern. This pursuit leads to a web of deceit and manipulation, revealing the darker side of human nature.

"The Turn of the Screw" is a chilling tale of a governess who is convinced that the children in her care are being haunted by malevolent spirits. As she tries to protect the children, her own sanity is called into question. The story's ambiguity and psychological tension make it a classic of the horror genre.

Notes

The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers by Henry James

The Turn of the Screw is a captivating work that begins with an unnamed narrator's account of a Christmas Eve party in England. At the party, Douglas shares a sinister ghost story about a governess at a haunted country estate. The governess initially loves the estate and its inhabitants but soon discovers strange happenings. She sees the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel and believes they pose a threat to the children. The story builds tension as the governess tries to protect the children from the ghosts.

The Aspern Papers, on the other hand, is a novella set in Venice. The narrator, an American scholar, arrives in Venice hoping to find a collection of love letters written by the fictional poet Jeffrey Aspern. He deceives Juliana, who lives with her niece Tita, into renting him rooms in their mansion. The narrator befriends Tita and tries to convince her to save the letters. As Juliana nears death, the narrator searches for the letters but is caught. Juliana passes away, and Tita keeps the papers. She offers to give the letters to the narrator if he marries her, but he is disgusted at the idea. When he returns, Tita tells him she has burned the letters. The novella ends with the narrator paying for a small portrait of Aspern as a consolation prize.

Both works showcase Henry James's mastery of suspense and character development. The Turn of the Screw builds tension through the governess's encounters with the ghosts, while The Aspern Papers uses the narrator's pursuit of the letters to create a sense of mystery. James's writing style is detailed and nuanced, allowing readers to fully immerse themselves in the stories.

I read this two-story combination several years ago and can only relay what my notes from that time stated. Unfortunately, I said nothing about the second of the two works. It's truly a pity regarding 'The Turn of the Screw' because the concept in that story, as expressed in numerous film and TV adaptations, is one of the eeriest ever conceived in fiction. The malevolent ghosts of a governess and a manservant haunt two children, pulling them deeper into a web of corruption - a process that had commenced when the two adults were still alive.

Although 'The Turn of the Screw' is a classic and the character does not seem like an hysteric, as she does in one of the film adaptations I've witnessed, the prose is so obscurely and convolutedly presented that you can get a bit confused. Of course, the author was writing during a time when things were extremely restrictive, so he couldn't openly state that the children were being corrupted by participating in adult sex games or whatever is actually supposed to be happening. However, the children's new governess and the housekeeper discuss what they believe occurred in the past to account for the evil ghostly manifestations in the present. And the governess, who is the one who has written the entire thing down, 'speaks' in such impenetrable terms that it diminishes the impact for me of the fundamental creepy idea.