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New to Netflix, The Haunting of Bly Manor is the latest in a long series of adaptations of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898), which began in 1954 with Benjamin Britten’s opera, and since then there have been more than 25. The persistent fascination of adapters with James’ “irresponsible little fiction” can be summed up in one word: ambiguity.
It is the story of a young housekeeper who becomes suspicious that her former predecessor, Miss Jessel, and valet Peter Quint, are exerting uninterrupted influence over her accusations of orphans, Miles and Flora. This influence is not only spectral, but of a sexual nature.
As James’s opening sentence predicts, “history . . . He retained us,” and his readers temporarily divided into two main fields: metaphysical readers chose “the governess” and ghosts, while mind readers, the most prominent American editor Edmund Wilson in his 1934 essay – argued that “ghosts are not genuine ghosts. . . however, only the keywife’s hallucinations. ” She, in turn, was a “neurotic case of sexual repression,” perhaps acting on sublimated preference by her employer, the children’s uncle.
However, neither metaphysical nor mental readings have been able to contain this story, whose main points stubbornly refuse to be explained. If the Quint camera aid is a hallucination, how can the housekeeper identify her from the housekeeper’s description?But also, if she has an independent existence, why, as literature researcher Sheila Teahan pointed out, does the governess associate it with the act of writing?The housekeeper suggests that Quint is as genuine as “the letters I shape on this page”, implying that it is his artistic construction.
James’s short story requires a third approach, of which Turning the Screw of Interpretation (1977), literary critic Shoshana Felman, is one of the most productive examples. Instead of seeking to scare the narrative into making it consistent, this reading recognizes that its ambiguity is basic to its effect.
With this in mind, The Turn of the Screw’s appeal to adapters might seem paradoxical How can the objective truth of ghosts remain in doubt when we see them walking, talking and, in Britten’s case, making a song a 12-tone opera?, adapters have used a variety of cutting-edge methods for text ambiguity. The term is usefully explained in a cinematic context through director Alexander Mackendrick, not as “a lack of clarity” but as a contrast between “alternative meanings, each of them clear. “
Director Jack Clayton recruited Stanley Kubrick to rework the original screenplay for The Innocents (1961) with a transparent mission: to maximize the ambiguity of the story. In the resulting film, the lakeside scene gives at least two meanings for miss Jessel’s appearance.
It is noticeable that the housekeeper (Deborah Kerr) reacts to a character state among the reeds, however, a few photographs later, Jessel disafied. Did she look and then de-approve or did the housekeeper just believe her?agitation of his governess at any appearance.
In The Others (2001), an indirect adaptation, author Alejandro Amerbar takes a cutting-edge position on the truth of ghosts. Drowning in a secluded space in post-World War II Jersey, Grace (Nicole Kidman), a convinced Catholic, resists her sons’ claims to hear ghosts. Turns out they listen to the new owners of the space and it’s the young men and their mom who are the ghosts. Overwhelmed by the pain of her husband’s death, Grace, it is yet learned, suffocated the young before shooting himself.
The Others thus combine metaphysical and mental readings of their source. The ghosts are, in a sense, “real” (but what we are led to believe), while at the same time, the figure of the “governor” Grace is also established as unreliable.
In Tim Fywell’s 2009 BBC adaptation, the housekeeper (Michelle Dockery) is a patient in a post-World War I psychiatric facility, a framework narrative that invites the public to question the legitimacy of their testimony. death, she is taken to a criminal van to be executed, her psychologist briefly hallucinating that the guard is Peter Quint. Such main points made me wonder, as the psychologist appeared to be, whether the housekeeper was to blame or whether he was premature and irrevocably silenced.
The teaser from The Haunting of Bly Manor features O Willow Waly’s bizarre song from The Innocents, which pays homage to this basic adaptation. The word “Me and my love, under the weeping willow”, sung in flora’s treble (Amelia Bea Smith), terrifyingly captures the news’ concern for the innocence of the formative years exposed to adult sexuality. In many adaptations, these chills are compounded by our inability to fully accept what we see as true, generating unanswered questions that spin the adaptive wheel.
We will probably see many more on-screen translations and more literary appropriations than I speak in my book, of which A Jealous Ghost (2005) through AN Wilson and Florence and Giles (2010) through John Harding are examples. Look at what Virginia Woolf noticed in 1921: it’s a tale that “can still scare us from the dark. “
Bethany Layne, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, De Montfort University
This article has been republished from The Conversation, a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.