Tea at Trianon: On the Most Adapted Ghost Story of All Time

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, January 30, 2022

On the Most Adapted Ghost Story of All Time

From LitHub:

The Turn of the Screw has the sort of ambiguous ghostly heritage expected of such a celebrated tale. James was acquainted with another noted exponent of the English ghost story, E.F. Benson. Benson’s father Edward White Benson was the Archbishop of Canterbury and, on a visit to his house in 1895, the archbishop purportedly told James a story. The story was one vaguely similar to the narrative he was soon to produce, in which two children were left in the care of ill-suited servants, both of whom died and haunted the children, corrupting them even from the grave.

Roger Clarke, the author of The Natural History of Ghosts, has researched the story’s history thoroughly and highlighted the murky contradictions within its possible inspirations. “The general scholarly view is that The Turn of the Screw is not based on any known story but,” he writes, “in fact, the story recounted one January evening at the archbishop’s house in Addington…” Clarke sees some connection to the famous haunting of Hinton Ampner and its occupant Mary Ricketts, perhaps passed down through the upper echelons of society to the archbishop. He does stress, however, that E.F. Benson, along with the archbishop’s wife, could never recall the man recounting such a ghost story.

The novella was originally published by Collier’s Weekly in a 12-part serial form in 1898 between January and April. Tellingly, the visual potential of the narrative was already understood by the publishers who commissioned several pieces of artwork for each instalment, with title illustrations by John La Farge and episode illustrations by Eric Pape. Looking back on the visual culture surrounding James’s story, it’s easy to see the influence these drawings had on future adaptations. One illustration by Pape, entitled “I must have thrown myself, on my face, on the ground” looks like a possible piece of storyboard for Clayton’s later film.

James’s story quickly garnered critical interpretation. In particular, the deeply disturbing undertones of sexuality, as well as possible psychological implications of the ghosts’ presence, came to the fore in a number of well known analyses.

Virginia Woolf was particularly intrigued, and aptly turned to James’s investigation of perception to explore the undertones of his story and its fine line between inner demons and the physical body. In an essay for The Times Literary Supplement she wrote that James’s characters “…with their extreme fineness of perception are already half-way out of the body.”

The horror of James’s story is that seeing ghosts doesn’t necessarily mean a visitation of them to our world, but of the perceiver into theirs. We are midway towards death in seeing a ghost, within a momentary halfway house which we can either step back from or descend into.

Similarly to Woolf, in one of the most famous analyses of James’s story, the critic Edmund Wilson went further in determining the ghosts to be of the governess’ own psyche. Wilson was far less positive in his mildly infamous critique of James in a 1934 issue of Hound and Horn. “Observe that there is never any evidence that anybody but the governess sees the ghosts,” he wrote. The irony within his turn of phrase is that it exemplifies James’s skill. Look, the critic suggests, at the lack of evidence. He is playing James’s game without realizing. Woolf suggested something similar, albeit more positively, in that James’s ghosts “…have their origin within us.” (Read more.)