Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Sorry to Plague You Again

I've revised (a bit) my new take on The Turn of the Screw based on the following passage from Chapter III:

I learned something -- at first, certainly -- that had not been one of the teachings of my small, smothered life; learned to be amused, and even amusing, and not to think for the morrow. It was the first time, in a manner, that I had known space and air and freedom, all the music of summer and all the mystery of nature. And then there was consideration -- and consideration was sweet. Oh, it was a trap -- not designed, but deep -- to my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my vanity; to whatever, in me, was most excitable. The best way to picture it all is to say that I was off my guard.


and this passage from Chapter XI:

I had wondered -- oh, how I had wondered! -- if he were groping about in his little mind for something plausible and not too grotesque. It would tax his invention, certainly, and I felt, this time, over his real embarrassment, a curious thrill of triumph. It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable! He couldn't play any longer at innocence; so how the deuce would he get out of it? There beat in me indeed, with the passionate throb of this question, an equal dumb appeal as to how the deuce I should. I was confronted at last, as never yet, with all the risk attached even now to sounding my own horrid note. I remember in fact that as we pushed into his little chamber, where the bed had not been slept in at all and the window, uncovered to the moonlight, made the place so clear that there was no need of striking a match -- I remember how I suddenly dropped, sank upon the edge of the bed from the force of the idea that he must know how he really, as they say, "had" me. He could do what he liked, with all his cleverness to help him, so long as I should continue to defer to the old tradition of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who minister to superstitions and fears. He "had" me indeed, and in a cleft stick; for who would ever absolve me, who would consent that I should go unhung, if, by the faintest tremor of an overture, I were the first to introduce into our perfect intercourse an element so dire?


and again, from Chapter XI, the Governess thinks:

It was I who fell into the trap!


The novel is not only a crafty representation of an author filling in gaps with a corrupt sort of intuition--it's a particularly devious sort of literary Rorschach blotch upon which James invites us to spew our own filthy thoughts. He's caught us in his net, much as the Governess feels herself trapped into leaping to astonishing conclusions about her situation, the reader of Turn is forced to create details because of what James doesn't say.

E-texts, by the way, make for really easy finding of vaguely remembered details which occur to one long after they've been overlooked: Full Text.

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