preview

Turn Of The Screw Ambiguity

Decent Essays
Open Document

Ambiguous Framing When Henry James’s novella, The Turn of the Screw was adapted into Jack Clayton’s 1961 film, The Innocents, the frame story was conspicuously missing. Francesco Casetti’s “Adaptation and Mis-adaptations” says the reappearance of a story creates an area of discourse between the two stories (Casetti 82-83.) Both The Turn of the Screw and The Innocents are successful and entertaining stories only The Innocents has a much lower level of ambiguity. Much of the loss of ambiguity comes from the difficulty in translating Henry James’s famously complex syntax to the screen. However, if the film was framed by the story of Douglas’s narration, it could have maintained some of the ambiguity that was lost. Douglas’s story creates another …show more content…

Both the climax of the governess’s story and the fame story revolve around the sending of a letter. The governess’s letter to the master mysteriously disappears before it can be mailed out (James 76,) and later in the confrontation with Miles, the fact comes out that the letter never had anything in it to begin with (James 84.) And just to reinforce the fact that there was nothing in the letter, the governess and Miles repeat the word ‘nothing’ two more times each (James 84.) Going back to Casetti’s argument that a reappearance creates a discursive field, the letter that Douglas plans to send becomes suspect. Yet, unlike the governess’s letter the novella never discloses whether or not Douglas’s letter is sent, or whether or not he actually receives the manuscript book in the mail. All the novella says is that Douglas produces the manuscript book on the third day and it is not even opened and read from until the fourth day (James 4, 6.) If Douglas did receive the manuscript in the mail, his postponement from the day of the third, when he claimed to receive the manuscript, and the night of the fourth gave him plenty of time to transcribe the story into the manuscript book, and even more time if he had the manuscript book in his possession all along. But up until this point, all of the ambiguity is delivered through the narrative …show more content…

The narrator of the frame story says, “But Douglas… had begun to read with a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of the beauty of his author’s hand (James 6.) This quote makes very clear that Douglas is a skilled orator if not an author outright. The phrases ‘fine clearness’ and ‘rendering to the ear of beauty’ as well as his earlier ability to draw out the suspense of the promised story for four days show that excels in at least two of the skills that would be required of a writer: the ability to sell a work and a knack for grabbing the audience through the skilled reading of a story. But the three most important words in the quote for drumming up ambiguity are contained in the phrase, ‘his author’s hand.’ Because the phrase does not say the governess’s hand or even more simply the author’s hand, this phrase could either mean that Douglas is the author of the manuscript or that the governess is the author of the manuscript depending on one’s reading of this line of the frame story. Since the last mention of the governess as the pronoun, ‘she’ was two full paragraphs before the word, ‘author’ and the mention of Douglas using the possessive pronoun, ‘his’ is right next to it, most of the evidence points to Douglas being the author. However strong the evidence is that Douglas is the author, the ambiguity remains.

Get Access
Related
Get Access