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Ayn Rand: Anthem

I read this book in high school, but remembered nothing but the last line. The vivid memory of that line fit so poorly with my beliefs at the time that I developed a distaste for Rand, although I never read any of her longer works. Some of my students have picked it up, to my delight, as their choice for independent reading, so I decided to revisit it with a view to saying something intelligent about it. That something intelligent is to the effect that it is far better crafted than I could give it credit for when I read it 15 years ago. It's succinct, sound, fluid, transparent and engaging, all of the things a high school student appreciates in a novel. While I still don't even understand objectivism, let alone subscribe to it, I plan on recommending this to several other students, and even teaching it at some point.

Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais: The Barber of Seville

This brief number offered little surprise, so familiar am I with the opera--which was, interestingly, written in Beaumarchais' own lifetime. What was shocking to me was the terrible quality of the edition I read. I found two typos just in the introduction, and they were peppered just as liberally throughout the play. How disappointing. As much as I love the Modern Library editions of classics, with their smooth, coppery bindings, the selection leaves something to be desired. I had high hopes for the Oxford Press editions as a replacement, but this one was so terrible I have such hopes no longer. Oh yeah: it was a good play.

Henry James: The Turn of the Screw

My book club has become so saturated with English majors that I didn't really expect to be the only one with a novel (teehee) approach to this book. In fact, I was rather more surprised that anybody took it at face value, which a few did. On the surface, The Turn of the Screw is a fairly mediocre ghost story exhibiting a certain panache at creating suspense. Most of my book club compatriots and I, however, chose to see it as more of a psychological study. It is not too much of a stretch to say that James is, in his own way, doing the same thing for which his brother William is famous: analyzing the psychological roots of supernatural experience.

This is not the first thing one notices about the book, however. James has a way with sentence structure that is at best confusing, and at worst criminal. His relationship with the dash and the semicolon is not unlike Ike's relationship with Tina: abusive and opportunistic. It is not explicitly for The Turn of the Screw that he adopts this style either, as a quick look at The Lesson of the Master will reveal. Some of these sentences have to be read thrice or more to yield their significance, and even then there remains some doubt, some ambiguity. Although likely not done purposefully for the story, that ambiguity allows--even encourages--the reader to leaf through the sentences for hidden meanings.

Once so encouraged, the reader is blessed with a clue as to James' possible intent. The first hint that he is trying to do more than set the reader on edge is the constant conflation of the young governess with the phantasms she claims to see. The first time he really tips his hand at this is when the governess--the book club decided to name her Mary--see Peter Quint at the window. She rushes out to where she had seen him, and "applied my face to the pane and looked, as he had looked, into the room" (31). Not a startling structure, but signifcant to the extent that James continues doing it. Every time Mary sees a "horror", as she calls them, at some point she is found in the horror's same place and with its same perspective. She looks down on young Miles from the window, as she saw Quint look down her at first. She sees Miss Jessel across the lake, and later finds herself standing in the same spot the horror had occupied. As she sits on the stair, she starts "with a revulsion, recalling that it was exactly where more than a month before . . . I had seen the spectre of the most horrible of women" (89). The reader is thus alerted to the possibility that the connection between the ghosts and the narrator may be more than thematic, that she may in fact be imagining them.

Of course, the idea that the horrors are in the governess' head presents certain problems, most of which are resolvable. What about the other characters, for instance? Mrs. Grose is just as troubled by the spirits as Mary. But does she ever see them? She does not. At one point, Mary is driven into something resembling a hysteria by the spirit, but Grose protests, "Where on earth do you see anything?" (109). In fact, it could not be said for sure whether any other character ever sees the spirits. At the end of the narrative, Miles seems to see the image of Quint in the window, but James oblique sentence structure makes it arguable which lines are spoken by whom. The only line attributable with absolute certainty to Miles in that final scene is "Is she here?" (133). Everything else is not specifically attributed. And no matter who speaks the lines there, the spectre of Quint disappears as Miles turns toward the window, and reappears when Mary presses his face to her breast.

Although certain other of the difficulties with this reading are rather difficult to explain--Mary's description of Quint, for instance--all can be dismissed as the mistakes of an unreliable narrator, which Mary undoubtedly is. What could have driven her to such mental extremes? What little we know about her certainly lends itself to a Freudian diagnosis. We know basically two things about her: that she was "the youngest of several daughters of a poor country parson" who was of an "eccentric nature", and that she and Douglas, the metanarrator of the story, had a fondness for each other (6,77). As the story progresses, we learn a little about her character, if not her history: namely that she has a certain almost excessive fondness for Miles that mirrors, if not presages, hers for Douglas. The sentiment seems to be mutual, as seen from Miles labeling her his "dear", a rather questionable title for a governess. It is not uncommon for an Electra complex, such as it would be easy for the youngest of many daughters to develop, to evolve into something of a Jocasta complex. Seen in this light, her ascription of a terrible haunting to Miles can be seen as a metaphysical Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome, by which she needs Miles to need her so much that she invents for him a reason. James' title thereby takes on a new meaning, for the "Screw" could well be  Mary herself.  This gives her line "It was a tighter place yet that I was turned round in" a delightful new twist (120). The usage of "screw" to refer to a crazy person is traceable as far back as 1887, so it is not a stretch to imagine that James chose his words to that effect.

What is to be thought of the ending, then? Does it represent some mental break? Does Miles actually die, or does the ambiguity allow for another conclusion to be drawn? Perhaps even that Miles lived, and had some other name? Douglas, perhaps? Such questions are enticing, but mostly unsupportable. What is clear is that James was doing more than just trying to scare his reader. His heroine, whether due to supernatural visitation or something more internal, was an unbalanced woman, and his believably inventive portrayal of her inner workings well deserves its place in the Western Canon.

BTD: 17ish