The Sundowners

Henry James was never satisfied with The Turn of the Screw, having fiddled around with several facets of the parlor game in subsequent print editions. His writer’s ethical instincts cautioned that his threesome—Giddens, Miles and Flora—could as compromise stand alone as hysterics through indeterminate sexual psychology, using words like “evil” and “passion” having “safer” multiple meanings. He uses a safe distant device too—an opening informing we’re about to read a “dreadful” as well as “delicious” story from a governess in love and then writing her account, telling us he’s straddling and cagey about the territory he’s treading—ghosts in sexual possession of the kids, a governess tipping over into maddening swirls of inchoate emotions and motives. What he accomplishes, eventually, is that his principals are innocents (a word he uses) as real or imagined pawns of ghosts in “visitation” to continue the destructive diversions they played when alive. Readers and/or viewers wanting a clearheaded manifestation of dispossession by a ghost to clarify Miles’ expiring, are asking for something James isn’t going to give them. All the way through, the governess’s account is the only viewpoint; no other witnesses are brought forth. There’s much that is inconclusive: we never know what the school scandal was (though we guess), never know what happens to Flora after being packed off to her uncle, not at sure what specifically kills Miles. Is it exhausting fright? Quint himself? Giddens’ exorcized demands for Miles to confront Quint? (Maybe all and anything else you’d want to throw in.) The only explicitness in James is the last line of the governess explaining Miles was at last dispossessed at the price of his heart stopping. What else could he say in defense of her frenzied actions? While The Innocents is more hysterically articulated than James’ text, its last act is incorrigibly open to interpretation: foreshadowed by Miles’ audacity, we’re given the shock of the kiss. This is where James wouldn’t dare go but where the movie makers, with great trepidation from movie execs, had the guts—another turn of the screw. The clasped hands suggest she’s praying not only for Miles’ soul but also for her own. If there were definitive resolutions instead of ambiguity, what on-going interest would there be in what may be the best ghost story ever made?