I suppose I could mention The Turn of the Screw again. I’m still reading it very slowly so as to be sure that I grasp the meaning of every sentence, however long it might be and however maddeningly convoluted the clauses. (I feel a duty to understand it intimately, you see, which is a mystery in itself.) But at least I’m now sure that the dispute over whether it’s a ghost story or a psychological one is easily addressed.
There’s a point quite early in the plot at which the governess sees a man watching her through the windows when she’s in the library. She describes the man’s appearance in the minutest detail to the housekeeper, Mrs Grosse, who confirms without doubt that it is the late Peter Quint. At that point in the story the governess has no knowledge of the existence of Peter Quint, much less be able to describe him so precisely. The idea that his apparition is a figment of her sexually repressed imagination is surely, therefore, irrational, and I see no reason to doubt that James intended this to be a ghost story.
And so I’m led to wonder whether the alternative explanation was imagined by the critics and academics because they were uneasy with the notion that the reputation of one of their beloved literary giants could be polluted by association with the ‘inferior’ genre, speculative fiction. Academics do seem to make a habit of needing to defend the ‘rational explanation’, even when the evidence doesn’t support it. But, as ever, how can I know? And does it matter?
Meanwhile, I wrote this in a recent post:
The weather had turned a little stormy by the time I went to bed that night, with frequent blustery gusts hurling squally rattles of rain against the windows.
It was prophetic. Seems we have the depleted remnants of some damn Atlantic hurricane skirting our western shoreline tonight, and it’s making the Shire irritatingly (or maybe atmospherically) noisy.
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