I'm afraid he kind of does, though I don't think he stresses the point.Does Frayling really say that?
Moral: never trust a man with a moustache.
Honestly, I thought it was just me. The show has its moments; I'd always creep into the wings (it's a floor-level thrust stage) to watch the audience jump when Miles barks "AM I?", and the ghost effects were fun. The whole show's just so damn blunt and surface-level, there's really nothing you can get from the characters that isn't presented to the audience.tryavna wrote:By the way, the play that Magic and others are referring to is pretty dreadful. As I recall, the play basically accepts the existence of the ghosts from the outset and thus completely jettisons ambiguity altogether. (Why bother adapting James if you're not going to incorporate his ambiguity?!)
Well, I have to admit that I've only read the play -- not seen it performed. So I can imagine that some scenes/moments might work well with an imaginative director and enthusiastic cast. But as you say, everything about the play (as written) is on the surface, which is certainly NOT what you go to Henry James for in the first place. (By way of contrast, Ruth and Augustus Goetz's play The Heiress, which is based on James' Washington Square and was used as the basis for William Wyler's film, really "gets" what James was all about. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that The Heiress is actually an improvement on Washington Square, which may be James' weakest novel.)Magic Hate Ball wrote:Honestly, I thought it was just me. The show has its moments; I'd always creep into the wings (it's a floor-level thrust stage) to watch the audience jump when Miles barks "AM I?", and the ghost effects were fun. The whole show's just so damn blunt and surface-level, there's really nothing you can get from the characters that isn't presented to the audience.tryavna wrote:By the way, the play that Magic and others are referring to is pretty dreadful. As I recall, the play basically accepts the existence of the ghosts from the outset and thus completely jettisons ambiguity altogether. (Why bother adapting James if you're not going to incorporate his ambiguity?!)
I agree with both your points here, Sloper: The Freudian reading is by a wide margin the dominant reading of Screw (and by extension The Innocents), which means that other (equally justifiable) readings are sometimes marginalized. We do well to remember that the first two generations of readers almost unanimously viewed the story as a "literal ghost story." In fact, when Edmund Wilson proposed the "it's all in her head" interpretation, he was criticized so severely that he softened his essay for a time -- only to revise it back to its original form when his argument (not to mention Freudian-inspired literary analysis in general) gained more currency. So although I think Wilson's contribution was important (we wouldn't have the film The Innocents otherwise), his is not the only way to read the story.Sloper wrote:I get the impression people sometimes over-emphasise the degree to which the 'Freudian' reading of Screw dominates in The Innocents; to me, like the book, it works simultaneously as a literal ghost story, and the two sides to the reading are (almost) equally weighted.
I remember that years ago, when I was studying English literature, the James novella was used as a prime example in a course about ambiguity in literature. I don't remember neither the course nor the book too well now but got the distinctive impression that no reading that declares that the ghosts EXIST or do NOT EXIST does justice to the text. But it's interesting to see how the pendulum apparently has swung from one side to the other.tryavna wrote:I agree with both your points here, Sloper: The Freudian reading is by a wide margin the dominant reading of Screw (and by extension The Innocents), which means that other (equally justifiable) readings are sometimes marginalized. We do well to remember that the first two generations of readers almost unanimously viewed the story as a "literal ghost story."
I seem to (vaguely) remember reading somewhere that there were a couple of published articles suggesting somthing along the lines of "it's all in her head" in the 1920s or 30s, but which just didn't have as much impact as Wilson's. Although the Freudian reading obviously did introduce a lot of new ideas, I think anyone familiar with James's approach to the supernatural would have been inclined to read the ghosts in Screw as far more than just 'literal'. It's ages since I read the other ghost stories, but certainly in Sir Edmund Orme, Owen Wingrave, The Jolly Corner and so on, the supernatural is always a manifestation of something already present in the minds of the characters.Tryavna wrote:We do well to remember that the first two generations of readers almost unanimously viewed the story as a "literal ghost story."
I've never really got into opera, but I did quite like this one, especially the parts for Quint and Miles - the first appearance of the ghosts, where they summon the children, is genuinely creepy. The only (not very good) production I've seen was a filmed version in which there did seem to be some implication that the governess might be dreaming up all the scenes in which the ghosts act 'independently' - but mostly they seemed to be quite real.Tommaso wrote:I'd definitely recommend Benjamin Britten's opera version (1954). If I remember that one correctly, the ghosts are definitely real there, and Britten wrote some of his most haunting music for their parts. An incredible showpiece for his partner, Peter Pears, in any case. Check out the old Decca recording of it. It's mono, but still sounds good, and I never heard any other version that comes close in expressiveness.
Really? Because when you think about it a twenty-year-old's sex drive is going to be working at intense levels. When one's denied any outlet for those urges, due to societal, religious, or family constrictions, I'd say the frustration would be equally intense, and would have the energy of youth behind it. A middle aged woman is going to have a decreased sex drive, so while her frustration is no doubt compounded by time, it would be the result of less intense urges. Not to mention that for a young girl in the time period--especially if she is brought up to value chastity above just about all else, and likely has no recourse to information concerning it anyway--sex is going to seem strange and frightening, and have a nasty aura about it. So you get a push and pull between biological drives dimly understood, and psychological revulsion also dimly understood, compounded by a lack of experience.Sloper wrote:A 20-year-old woman is, after all, a little young to be all that sexually frustrated
A twenty-year-old man, certainly - but many women don't reach their peak until much later.Mr_sausage wrote:Really? Because when you think about it a twenty-year-old's sex drive is going to be working at intense levels.
If she's around forty, the urges may actually be the strongest she's ever experienced, especially if her biological clock is about to run out.A middle aged woman is going to have a decreased sex drive, so while her frustration is no doubt compounded by time, it would be the result of less intense urges.
Yes, the average peak is usually around thirty. But no one is going to convince me that a twenty year old girl's sex drive is any less intense because of that.MichaelB wrote:A twenty-year-old man, certainly - but many women don't reach their peak until much later.Mr_sausage wrote:Really? Because when you think about it a twenty-year-old's sex drive is going to be working at intense levels.
Can't answer to that one. We're going beyond acceptable generalization and would have to deal with specific bodies. Anyway, I think my point was that both are capable of being sexually frustrated to the degree required by the Freudian reading of the story/movie.MichaelB wrote:If she's around forty, the urges may actually be the strongest she's ever experienced, especially if her biological clock is about to run out.Mt_sausage wrote:A middle aged woman is going to have a decreased sex drive, so while her frustration is no doubt compounded by time, it would be the result of less intense urges.
The fact that the governess is able to describe the (somewhat peculiar-looking) Peter Quint without having seen him is the big stumbling block to the Freudian reading of the story, and I'm not sure how it could be overcome (does Wilson address this point?) I think they put this detail of the miniature into the film in order to make the Freudian reading possible, but they also put in the teardrop which seems to indicate that Miss Jessel is real, and various other hints. For instance, Frayling argues (in his intro to the BFI dvd) that the governess almost always sees the ghosts before we do, suggesting they might be in her head; but even as he says this, he shows a clip in which Quint clearly appears outside the window behind her before she turns to see him; which of course is a far more effective horror film technique. Also, at the end (sorry for the amateurish spoilerising - how do you do that?):Tryavna wrote:doesn't Kerr actually look at the miniature of Quint before she sees his ghost? If so, then that's a subtle but crucial difference from the story, where her sighting of Quint's ghost precedes her knowledge of the man. (And that would seem to be a key piece of evidence that Clayton's interpretation is indeed that it's in her head -- since she "imagines" Quint only after she's seen an image of him.)
This is what I love about this film: it is aware of the Freudian reading of the story, and presents that as an option for the viewer; but it also works to subvert that reading and keep us in doubt as to the 'truth' (an idea Mrs Grose struggles with in her last scene with Miss Giddens) or otherwise of what we are seeing.Spoiler wrote:The governess is not holding Miles in her arms when he dies (in the story you could argue that she smothers him to death), and there is no prior indication that he has a heart problem; plus we see (I think when Miss Giddens is not looking) Peter Quint standing above them, passing his hand over the scene as Miles dies. All of which might be taken to suggest that he dies of supernatural causes, rather than because of what the governess has done to him.
Oh, yes, I totally agree with you, Sloper. The fact that we're still able to entertain so many different views on the original story after more than a century is perhaps the clearest evidence of the story's complexity and James' genius. And I guess I should point out that James' original audience -- or at least the first professional reviewers -- appreciated that complexity and placed the story in a tradition of more "serious" horror stories. For instance, the reviewers from the New York Times and the New York Tribune compared the story favorably with Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde and the works of Hawthorne, respectively. So I didn't mean to imply that the earliest readers were unsophisticated because they took the supernatural aspects literally.Sloper wrote:It sometimes feels as though there is an implication, in discussions of this story, that taking the ghosts as 'literal' makes it less complex - it's 'just a ghost story'.
But aren't ghost stories (good ones, anyway) always interesting on some deeper level than the literal one? And aren't all ghosts metaphors for something that exists in our own heads, just as all stories about 'the future' are really about the present?
It was exactly that point for which Wilson was originally lambasted by the critics who disagreed with his argument. Wilson's basic argument is that, since the Uncle is never described in the story, there "must" be enough of a similarity between the Uncle and Quint that their images are more or less interchangeable in the Governess' own mind:The fact that the governess is able to describe the (somewhat peculiar-looking) Peter Quint without having seen him is the big stumbling block to the Freudian reading of the story, and I'm not sure how it could be overcome (does Wilson address this point?)
Edmund Wilson wrote:There seems to be only a single circumstance which does not fit into the hypothesis that the ghosts are hallucinations of the governess: the fact that the governess' description of the first ghost at a time when she has never heard of the valet should be identifiable by the housekeeper. But when we look back, we see that even this has been left open to a double interpretation. The governess has never heard of the valet, but it has been suggested to her in a conversation with the housekeeper that there has been some other male somewhere about who "liked every one young and pretty," and the idea of this other person has been ambiguously confused with the master and with the master's interest in her, the present governess. The master has never been described;we have merely been told that he was "handsome." Of the ghost, who is described in detail, we are told that he has "straight, good features," and he is wearing the master's clothes.