The turn of the screw
The Turn of the Screw (German title: The Turn of the Screw , The Turn of the Screw , The last rotation of the screw , screw turns , until the extremes , the secret of Bly ) is a novella by Henry James , published for the first time 1,898th
action
The unnamed narrator of the story tells a ghost story that a certain Douglas reads by the fireplace of an English country house. It is the recording of a governess charged with looking after two children, Miles and Flora, who grow up as orphans on the Bly estate. The governess, a pastor's daughter with no fortune or marriage prospects, is interested in the client, the uncle and guardian of the children, and devotes herself to the task. The boy Miles has been expelled from boarding school for an unspecified offense. Over time, the narrator repeatedly observes ghost apparitions in the country estate , in which she finally believes she recognizes her own predecessor and a former servant, who both perished under unspecified circumstances. She learns that the two were apparently close and strongly influenced the children. Miles, in particular, was guided by the only man in the house, the house servant, who often took liberties with the higher-ups. The governess is convinced that the children also see these apparitions and are in contact with the spirits, but do not tell her about them. She believes that the ghosts still have a bad influence on the children. To save the children from the threat, she climbs into compulsive surveillance that eventually results in Miles' death and a nervous fever in Flora.
History of origin
The Turn of the Screw was first published as a serialized story in Collier’s weekly from January to April 1898, with illustrations by Eric Pape . A book was first published in 1908. At the time he was writing the novella, Henry James was unable to write because of a wrist disease. He couldn't handle the then new invention of the typewriter , so he had to rely on a secretary to dictate the story to.
"The next night, by the corner of the hearth, in the best chair ... Douglas began to read"
"He did stand there! —But high up, beyond the lawn and at the very top of the tower"
"Holding my candle high, till I came within sight of the tall window"
"He presently produced something that made me drop straight down on the stone slab"
"I must have thrown myself, on my face, on the ground"
During the time of its creation, there was great public interest in ghost apparitions, which was reflected in many journalistic and scientific works on the subject. Henry James' own circle of acquaintances included people who collected reports from those affected. How exactly James himself stood on this subject is not known; In any case, however, he showed great interest in it and is said to have attended meetings of the Society for Psychical Research himself . Some of the ghost descriptions in The Turn of the Screw bear strong similarities to eyewitness accounts of the time.
reception
The Turn of the Screw is considered one of the best-received books by Henry James. Literary scholars from practically every school have studied this work.
A question that arises particularly frequently in critical controversies is that of the reality of the ghost apparitions. Due to the unreliable narrative situation with a narrator to whom another person reads a story, which in turn is written by the (potentially mentally ill) main person in the first person, it is not clear whether the ghost appearances must be viewed as real or whether they are hallucinated by the main character. Practically since the novella was published, there has been controversy between critics who clearly prefer one or the other reading and try to prove their accuracy in the text. A third tendency developed relatively late, which assumes that both readings are laid out equally in history.
The assumption that the spirits are being hallucinated led many critics to see The Turn of the Screw as a psychological study. A particularly influential essay based on this approach was published by Edmund Wilson in 1934 and analyzes the novella from a Freudian point of view, addressing certain motifs very specifically. Countless later interpreters followed this reading.
Criticism of this approach came from various directions. On the one hand, the figure of the nanny is consistently described positively in the framework plot, which from the point of view of some interpreters cannot be reconciled with the figure of a mentally ill person, who represents a danger to the children. On the other hand, using an author-centered reading, it can be assumed that Henry James was not familiar with Freudian symbolism. It is said of James himself that he was much more interested in ghosts than in the figure of the nanny.
It was only in the 1970s that the thesis became more and more accepted that both interpretations are deliberately created in the novella at the same time. Its first representatives were Tzvetan Todorov and Shoshana Felman , who pursued deconstructivist approaches. This interpretation is now widely accepted in literary studies .
Further interpretations emerged at the end of the 1970s from the perspective of Marxist literary theory and gender studies . Thus, The Turn of the Screw read as a discussion of the moral decay of the upper class, which is represented by the children. According to this reading, the ghosts become the oppressed of the past, who see their chance to penetrate into the life of the upper class and to gain the upper hand. The failure of the nanny in the rescue thus becomes an image of the hopelessness of this rescue. Examples of such interpretations were Edwin Fussell and Heath Moon .
From the perspective of gender studies, there are different evaluations. Patricia N. Klingenberg, for example, accuses James of banning the female perspective from his novella by breaking the nanny's narrative with two male narrators. Other interpreters, however, emphasize the fact that James' novel creates a picture of women who are equal to men as novelists, or even point to the fact that the gender of the narrator of the framework itself is unclear and also represent a woman's point of view could.
Meaning of the title
A comprehensive interpretation of the title The Turn of the Screw comes from Shoshana Felman. It creates a direct link to a scene in which the nanny watches Flora build a wooden ship by trying to screw a mast into a hull - which the nanny is determined to keep her from doing. Many critics have read an explicitly phallic connotation in this scene . Felman agrees and extends this interpretation to the screw itself. Mastering the mast or turning the screw are not only phallic symbols for her, but also represent the mastery of the narrative by the unreliable first-person narrator , who tries to control all levels of meaning just as much as the lives of children. The by turning the screw, which eventually leads to the last act in the disaster that 'expresses itself on the level of action in Miles's death - the only real event that is certainly not hallucinating. The handle that the nanny uses to suffocate Miles becomes a fatal twisting of the screw.
Adaptations
theatre
- 1950: The Innocents by W. Archibald, New York
- 1997: "The Turn Of The Screw" by Jeffrey Hatcher
Opera
- 1954: The Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Britten
Film adaptations (selection)
- 1959: The Turn of the Screw (TV movie) - Director: John Frankenheimer , with Ingrid Bergman
- 1961: The Innocents (The Innocents) - Director: Jack Clayton , with Deborah Kerr
- 1971: The Hole in the Door (The Nightcomers) - Director: Michael Winner , with Stephanie Beacham
- 1999: Presence of Mind - Director: Antoni Aloy, with Sadie Frost
- 1999: The Turn of the Screw - BBC TV movie, directed by Ben Bolt, with Jodhi May and Colin Firth
- 2006: In a Dark Place - Director: Donato Rotunno, with Leelee Sobieski
- 2009: Castle of Terror (The Turn of the Screw) (TV movie) - Director: Tim Fywell, with Michelle Dockery
- 2020: The Possessed (The Turning) - Director: Floria Sigismondi , with Mackenzie Davis
Individual evidence
- ↑ Peter G. Beidler: Introduction: Biographical and Historical Contexts , in Henry James: The Turn of the Screw Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press (1995), p. 15 ff.
- ^ Peter G. Beidler: A Critical History of "The Turn of the Screw" , in Henry James: The Turn of the Screw , Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press (1995), p. 127 f.
- ↑ Walter Jens (ed.): Kindlers new literature dictionary, Kindler: München (1990), vol. 8, p. 597 f.
- ^ Peter G. Beidler: A Critical History of "The Turn of the Screw" , in Henry James: The Turn of the Screw , Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press (1995), pp. 130 ff.
- ^ Peter G. Beidler: A Critical History of "The Turn of the Screw" , in Henry James: The Turn of the Screw , Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press (1995), p. 135 f.
- ^ Peter G. Beidler: A Critical History of "The Turn of the Screw" , in Henry James: The Turn of the Screw , Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press (1995), p. 17 f.
- ^ Peter G. Beidler: A Critical History of "The Turn of the Screw" , in Henry James: The Turn of the Screw , Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press (1995), p. 139
- ^ Peter G. Beidler: A Critical History of "The Turn of the Screw" , in Henry James: The Turn of the Screw , Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press (1995), p. 177
- ↑ Shoshana Felman: "The grasp with which I recovered him": A Child is Killed in The Turn of the Screw, in Henry James: The Turn of the Screw , Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press (1995), p. 202
literature
expenditure
- Henry James: The Sinful Angels. Narrative. Transferred from Luise Laporte u. Peter Gan. Afterword by Hans Hennecke. Munich: Biederstein, 1954; again under: To the extreme. The turn of the screw. Transferred by Luise Laporte and Peter Gan. With an afterword by Hans-Joachim Lang. Frankfurt am Main; Hamburg: Fischer Bücherei, 1962 (exempla classica, 67).
- Henry James: Screwdrivers . Translated from the American by Alice Seiffert. With an afterword by Rudolf Sühnel. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1970 (RUB 8366/8367).
- Henry James: The ordeal . From the American by Christian Grote. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972 (BS 321).
- Henry James: The Secret of Bly . Novella. Translated into German by Ingrid Rein. Cadolzburg: Ars-Vivendi, 2000; various reprints in other publishers.
- Henry James: The rotation of the screw. Narrative. Translated from English by Harry Kahn. Afterword by Henry Lüdeke. Munich: dtv, 1993 (dtv 24017).
- Henry James: Slipping the screw . A ghost story. Newly translated from the American and with an afterword by Karl Ludwig Nicol. Munich: dtv, 2001. ( ISBN 3-423-12898-4 )
- Henry James: The devil ones . Narrative. Translated from the English by Dieter Martus. Munich: Martus, 2004.
- Henry James: The final turn of the screw . Newly translated from the American by Hannelore Eisenhofer. Hamburg: Nikol, 2012.
- Henry James: The Turn of the Screw . Boston, Mass .: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1995 ( ISBN 0-312-08083-2 )
- Henry James: Screwdrivers . Novel. Read by Bettina Gätje. 5 CDs, Daun: Radioropa, 2006 ( ISBN 3-86667-222-5 ) (audio book)
Secondary literature
- Peter G. Beidler: Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James: "The Turn of the Screw" at the turn of the century , University of Missouri Press: Columbia 1989. ISBN 0-8262-0684-0
- Peter G. Beidler: A Critical History of The Turn of the Screw. In: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Pp. 127-151. London: Macmillan 1995. ISBN 978-1-349-13713-8
- Claire E. Bender, Todd K. Bender: A Concordance to Henry James's The Turn of the Screw . Garland: New York 1988. ISBN 0-8240-4147-X
- Thomas M. Cranfill: An Anatomy of The Turn of the Screw . University of Texas Press: Austin 1965.
- Shoshana Felman : Writing and Madness. From Henry James Madness and the Risks of Practice (Turning the Screw of Interpretation) . In: The Claims of Literature. A Shoshana Felman Reader. New York: Fordham Univ. Press 2007.
- Elizabet A. Sheppard: Henry James and the Turn of the Screw . Auckland University Press: Auckland (1974) ISBN 0-19-647810-3
