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Compare And Contrast The Turn Of The Screw And Death By Landscape

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Although The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James is a century older than Margaret Atwood’s “Death by Landscape” (1990), it is not impossible to connect the stories to each other. The stories’ contents are different – The Turn of the Screw is a Gothic ghost story, whereas “Death by Landscape” is a more psychological story of a woman who tries to deal with a childhood trauma, namely the death of her friend –, but there are some aspects in which the stories are similar. Both texts have an open ending, which is particularly interesting in terms of building up the ‘unresolved’ suspense of the story. The suspense created in the narration is not only achieved by the open ending, but also by literary techniques and the ambiguous readings of the …show more content…

In The Turn of the Screw, this narrative frame is obvious: an unnamed narrator describes a Christmas evening on which a group of people are gathered together and telling ghost stories. Douglas suddenly wants to contribute to these ghost stories as well: he knows a story which he had not shared with anyone until then because it is “quite too horrible”. He then gives the origin of the story: it was written down by a woman he had known some years ago, and who had experienced all the events of the story. This technique allows James to build up the suspense in two ways. On the one hand, the use of this frame narrative gives the embedded story some kind of authenticity, because Douglas claims that it is a true story and that he had personally known the protagonist. On the other, it already foreshadows the gruesome events which are about to be revealed. The narrative frame in “Death by Landscape” is not as obvious as is the case in The Turn of the Screw. Here, the story starts in the present: Lois, the protagonist of this story, is sitting in her new condominium apartment and is looking at the paintings on the wall. The paintings are a trigger for her to remember something unpleasant that had happened in her childhood: the story then continues with a flashback of that event. This way, the traumatic event of Lois’s childhood is already …show more content…

The Turn of the Screw can be read as a real ghost story: in this case, the ghosts are real and the story really is about good and evil. This does not particularly mean that the governess is mentally stable, because she still has her issues (like the fact that she falls in love easily), but it would explain her protecting behavior towards the children. In this reading, Miles’s death is interpreted as a consequence of the governess’s failure of protecting the children: she was unable to shield him from Peter Quint’s evil. In the psychological reading, the governess is mentally unstable and hallucinates the appearance of the ghosts. In fact, this seems to be a plausible reading of the story, taking all the arguments of the governess’s unreliability in account. That way, the hallucinations are a consequence of her isolation and sexual frustration. Miles’s death is then interpreted as the governess (accidentally?) choking the boy to death. “Death by Landscape” can be interpreted in the same ways: the one in which the narrator is reliable and Lois innocent, or the one in which the narrator is unreliable and Lois killed Lucy. The story does contain some arguments that Lois killed Lucy: the gap at the moment of Lucy’s disappearance, Lois being jealous of

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