“The Turn of the Screw” is considered by many – including Stephen King – to be the exemplar of the ghost story: a tale of haunted children, demonic possession, sexual frustration, and psychological terror. And yet, for all his love of manners, whit, upper middle class malaise, and psychological realism, James returned time and time again throughout his career to a genre which seemed so at odds with his oeuvre: the Gothic ghost story. Henry James has long been heralded as a master of transatlantic realism, a cosmopolitan observer of human nature, and a bone-dry contributor to the novel of manners – a blue-blooded chronicler of polite society’s stifled human dramas. The terror of exposure, of reality and confrontation. His fiction is impressionistic, psychological, and "courtly," but it has one pervasive emotion to it: unease - discomfort, awkwardness, and a lurking shame buried in intentional secrecy.
He was not one for terror, or even horror. His ghost stories – like “The Shining” or “The Witch” or “The Bobadook” are today – receive a great deal of shade from the mainstream horror community for being too intellectual, too abstract, and too psychological. And this is as far as most people go with James. Deeply infatuated with their uncle, the governess hopes to save their souls, but each effort seems to drive them further away into the waiting arms of evil.
His most famous spook story followed a naïve (and possibly insane) young woman who was the governess to two children who were probably molested by their previous servants, and who may or may not be haunted by the ghosts of those libidinous menials. The very first literary ghost story that I ever read was “The Turn of the Screw.” I had loads of books about hauntings, phantom hitchhikers, cryptozoology, and supernatural folklore, but Henry James was the first writer who engaged my intellect as well as my imagination.
0 kommentar(er)
