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| Victorian Memento Mori |
Henry James’ famous ghost story has that peculiar effect, that whether you believe in Ghosts or not, it is scary, really scary.
Indeed, the story of
the governess who tries to protect two innocent children against demonic ghouls
is so ambiguous that it can be read in two mutual excluding ways. Either you
accept the governess as a trustworthy narrator and you believe her story of how
she stands up against the Ghosts who haunt the children or you conclude that the
governess is a seriously disturbed woman and then you can only shudder at the
realization of the sheer hell the kids are going through.
I have been reading
James most famous of short stories in the Peter G. Beidler edition, and I strongly
recommend it. Besides the complete authoritative text, which makes up no more than 100 pages of the total
425, this edition comes with a complete information on the biographical, the historical
and the cultural context from which the “Turn of the screw” was created. The
Beidler’s edition is part of the series “Case studies in contemporary
criticism”, organized and edited in cooperation with the Southern Methodist
University. It includes a very interesting critical history of how people
understood “The turn of the screw” over the last decades and includes five essays
from different contemporary critical perspectives: Reader Response criticism
with an example by Wayne C. Booth; Psycho analytic criticism with an example by
Greg W. Zacharias;
Gender criticism with
an example by Priscilla L. Walton; Marxist criticism with an example by Bruce
Robbins and finally a combination of perspectives as shown by Sheila
Teahan
It is especially the
critical part of this edition that I found most interesting. It depicts criticism
“in action” so to say, explaining what it means to “understand” a novel, what
your role is as a reader and even why a lifetime of studying books and reading
criticism in the end makes you a better person.
