Copyright © 2004 Louis Suárez-Potts

 

This paper began with a proposal focusing on mourning; it has since evolved to deal more with trauma, specifically a sexualized sort of trauma and its narrative consequences. Both mourning and trauma are closely related in The Turn of the Screw--think of the losses and deaths and odd repetitions--and to discuss one--mourning--leads inevitably to consider the other, trauma. If the first deals with a persistent loss, the other deals with a persistent present, the past reiterated, and both deal with the problematic of mimesis and identity. This paper will focus on the mimetic logic of a distinctly sexualized trauma in The Turn of the Screw, less to show how story reflects fin-de-siècle conceptions of identity, mimesis, and trauma than, in the brief time allotted me, to suggest the story's relation of the identificatory functions of traumatic narrative, of which The Turn of the Screw is my example. Indeed, as I argue, "trauma" is but an extreme instance of a prevailing logic of mimetic identification and desire that courses through the story. Its importance lies in its function as staging an initiation into a narrative of mimesis and desire and to highlighting the problematic of reading the story given the unstable field of trauma and its effects. I will first address the theories of trauma, and then relate the prevailing traditions of reading The Turn of the Screw to those theories. I'll next suggest that our reading of the story replicates the identificatory logic of the initiating trauma, but it does so not in traumatic terms but by suggestion and recognition. Put another way, "trauma" here is an instance of subjugation that sets in motion further subjugations. But what is traumatic about The Turn of the Screw? Most obviously, it is Quint, or rather the Governess's initial encounter with him. But trauma should not be understood as a sharply delimited field; rather, it situates the debate and suggests a way of reading the story that takes into account its historically fraught instability.

As defined by Ruth Leys, the scholar who has done the most to trace trauma's genealogy since its birth as a psychological category in the 1890s and to analyze its defining career in the 20^th century, trauma was defined by Charcot and others as

Trauma was therefore understood as an experience of hypnotic imitation or identification--what I call mimesis--an experience because it appeared to shatter the victim's cognitive-perceptual capacities, made the traumatic scene unavailable for a certain kind of recollection.

(8-9)

The traumatized subject is in this account of mimetic trauma like the hypnotized subject and to an extent subjugated by the aggressor or event.

Leys' work draws significantly upon Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's deconstruction of Freud, in particular his early reading of the foundational role played by mimesis in the formation of the subject. Briefly, Borch-Jacobsen argues that the subject is rather constituted according to a principle of mimetic identification. In blunt terms, the subject can only come in to being by identifying first with an other. This model of the birth of the subject is strongest in hypnosis, where "the subject of hypnosis becomes the other, comes to be like the other, who is thus no longer an other, but 'himself.'" (Borch-Jacobsen 229, quoted in Leys, 39). The subject is thus labile and uncannily subject to others; (and one might well wonder at the borders defining the subjugating state of hypnosis). And, as Borch-Jacobsen explains, the process of identification produces a desire in the subject.

   But if on the one hand trauma was seen by Charcot and others as mimetic, and even examined as such by Freud, it has also been seen as precisely its opposite, and antimimetic. In this reading, which has gained recent currency from both scientistic researchers and critics like Cathy Carruth, and which also dates to the fin-de-siècle, trauma is external to the subject and stays in the consciousness like shrapnel, undigested and unintegrated into the consciousness of the individual (quote from conclusion). To be sure, this "antimimetic" theory

also tends to make imitation basic to the traumatic experience, but it understands imitation differently. The antimimetic theory is compatible with, and often gives way to, the idea that trauma is a purely external event that befalls a fully constituted subject. And in contrast to the mimetic theory's assumption of an identification with the aggressor, the antimimetic theory depicts violence as purely and simply an assault from without. This has the advantage of portraying the victim of trauma as in no way mimetically complicitous with the violence directed against her, even as the absence of complication as regards the reliability of her testimony shores up the notion of the unproblematic actuality of the traumatic event.

(299)

In contrast to the labile subject of mimetic trauma, the subject here remains intact and removed from the scene, a spectator. These two models of trauma correspond to the traditional way of reading the story: either the Governess is imagining things or she isn't. The former represents the Governess as complicit in her representations, the other as not, and essentially innocent. My own take, if it is relevant, is more to understand James to be positing these possibilities and playing out the problematic of trauma, mimesis, and desire. For it is understood that the characteristic traumatic event for women deployed by fin-de-siècle psychologists such as Freud and Charcot was the scene of sexual aggression, and that some of the consequences of that trauma was an hysteria. That said, time does not permit me to explore both possibilities, and I will confine myself to the former structure of mimetic identification.

I'd like to turn now to the scene of the Governess's first encounter with Quint and draw it out a little. The scene and the effects James represents is a typically a traumatic one. The Governess, who finds herself "strangely at the helm" of the household, has gone out for a stroll one afternoon; the children are tucked away. And she recalls her desire for approval from the Master, whose "handsome face" she imagines before her when she encounters Quint:

What arrested me on the spot--and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed for--was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real.

16

Expecting the Master, she gets Quint; expecting approval tinged with admiration for a job well done, she gets instead someone who brazenly challenges propriety. What is more, Quint's uncanny presence directly challenges that desire and turns it into something horrible; the twilight garden becomes "a solitude." What is more, in terms that echo typical accounts of traumatic experience, in which the past is iterated as present,

To me, at least, making my statement here with a deliberation with which I have never made it, the whole feeling of the moment returns. It was as if ... the scene had been stricken with death. I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped.

16

She doesn't just remember the scene, she re-experiences it. And the consequence of this original seeing that is then restaged (as is everything in the novel) is an unconscious movement .

The Governess, after her terrifying shock of first seeing Quint ("An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred" [16]), finds that she has improbably, incredibly, stayed out of doors, in the dark where a strange man is quite possibly lurking: "Agitation, in the interval [since seeing Quint and re-entering the house], certainly had held me and driven me, for I must, in circling about the place, have walked three miles" (17). Quint induces what seems like an, hysterical tropism.[1] And this remarkable effect has seemingly less to do with her belief that he's a fearsome ghost (she doesn't at first know he is and when she does, that datum only seems to make her more volatile), but because he is an unknown man who might threaten a "privately bred" woman and, perhaps most important, who implicitly presents a threat to her "supreme authority" at Bly (5). The trauma that he stages produces her unconscious effects and even movement; it also decidedly reminds her that she is not unlike Quint, in being but removed from being a nobody by the grace of her position at Bly.

For, from the Governess's perspective, to be like Quint is to be the opposite of somebody; Quint, as the Governess describes to Mrs. Grose before she knows about him, but after she has seen him, is "like nobody" (23). By this, she means, presumably, that Quint doesn't look like anybody at Bly or in the village (he's "very much" a "stranger" [22]); but she quickly goes on to define being "like nobody" as being something like a tramp, certainly no "gentleman," and more like a red-haired "actor" dressed in "somebody's clothes" (22, 23-24).[2] Quint takes on identity, meaning he steals it; he has only his "queer" looks (he's also "remarkably" "handsome" [24]). Being like Quint, in short, implies losing that which makes us "somebody" and gaining an uncanny familiarity (as a "nobody" looking in). It means, that is, to be a lot like the Governess herself, who is herself a nobody, lacking even a name. But the difference lies in that the Governess can claim a fixed gentility (she is "privately bred" [16]); Quint, on the other hand, is, in death as in life, nearly a tramp ("so dreadfully below" [33]) and, as it were, breeds publicly. It is this crucial difference that enables the Governess to authorize her narrative, and it is this difference that is threatened by the silent communion between the children and the ghosts, or, to put it more simply, by the figure of Quint, who never speaks (the reader speaks for him, as James hints in his Preface), but whom the Governess can nevertheless call "The author of our woe" (89).

It's an authorship that she directly challenges. If Quint excites an hysterical tropism in her, she responds, decades later, with a writing that brings Quint before her. Quint exists in the ceaseless present of a trauma: In her writing of the event, the Governess can see him, "as I see the letters I form on this page" (17). But her statement also suggests that the mobilizing effects of Quint--his subjugating effects--are still present, contained in the letters she writes. This is as much to suggest that the narrative, which is an accounting of Quint's doings and her battling them, embodies Quint's effects, the automatism and nervousness, that he induces in her and subjugates the complicit reader.[3]

    In other words, and to return to the language with which I began, "Quint" comes to be understood as a figure for a combination of uncanny desire and mimetic identification that is disruptive of the normal. At stake is the lure of coming to be like and to like Quint. Thus, the narrative, rather than controlling Quint's hystericizing effects, only seems to continue them by a process of mimetic identification: by enabling Quint to be personified by the readers. The Governess's story works antiphonally to Quint's silent effects.

But, why does she write? She need not write. The Governess could, like the Master, and like the schoolmaster, say and write nothing at all about the matter of corruption. Yet she turns the events into a narrative of control, of government, and does so in a manner that reproduces the uncanny desire and mimetic identifications Quint figures. The Governess speaks, writes, and transmits her narrative as a gesture, even proof, of liking, even love. The Governess, we recall, tells her narrative to Douglas only, and she does so, he concludes, as a gesture of her "liking" him:

I liked her extremely and am glad to this day to think she liked me too. If she had n't she would n't have told me. She had never told any one. It was n't simply that she said so, but that I knew she had n't. I was sure; I could see. You'll easily judge why when you hear.

"Because the thing had been such a scare?"

He continued to fix me. "You'll easily judge," he repeated; "you will."

I fixed him too. "I see. She was in love."

(2)

The story is both a thing of love and a thing of fright, and these two are merged, in the act of relation. The Governess gives her handwritten narrative to Douglas as an index of her liking for him. It is also an "unspoken" sign of her love for the Master--and, in lieu of him, for Douglas.[4]

The text functions as a sign of affection--liking--and, I want to argue, as a likening: it induces a kind of uncanny liking that suggests a complicitous identity. I want briefly to touch on Miles's "likes," which, I suggest, are as much evidence of Quint's uncanny effects as the Governess's narrative, in that both articulate the uncanny desire let loose by Quint. In the Governess's case, I have been arguing that that sets in motion a writing that continues an erotically colored mimetic identification. And from the Governess's perspective, as we are all familiar, the liking Miles' voices is also more than a little tainted by an unstated trauma affecting him and which she fatally strives to have him speak.

But, what do I mean by the Miles's "liking"? As everyone surely recalls, Miles doesn't get expelled from school for stealing, as the Governess long suspects. Rather, he gets expelled for saying "things" to his friends, or at least "[t]hose [he] liked," who evidently repeat them to "[t]o those they liked," and who must tell them, ultimately to the school masters (87). A serial linkage (or, in the language of the story, a "circle")[5] of boys who like each other is thus formed, connected by the "things" repeated. What I find interesting here, however, is not only that it is the serially repeated speech act that conjoins the boys into a circle of defined by their shared likes, but that "like" takes on a quality that at once suggests identity and is identificatory. What the boys tell the ones they like makes them like them; affection becomes identity, becomes a way of identifying. Like implies a likening, and vice versa. The boys, in effect, form what Miles, elsewhere in the story, desires: "my own sort," a circle of his own kind animated and constructed by the mimetic logic of "likes" (56).

But where do these likes come from? According to the Governess, Quint. If the Governess first thinks of Miles, before she has met him, as being "really bad," an "injury to the others," with those others being "his poor little innocent mates!" (11), and a corrupter and contaminator, she later changes her mind, and holds it until the end, that Miles (and Flora, and Miss Jessel) has been himself contaminated, corrupted--possessed--by Quint, who is, for the Governess, the real source of the contagion. As we come to understand, the corruption proceeds from Quint to Miles and from there to the boys via the double mechanism of liking, which is also a likening: as much as Quint likes Miles, Miles becomes like Quint; as much as Miles likes the boys, they become like him, which is to say, like Quint. In this sense, we might follow the Governess and think of Quint as the author of their woe.

But Quint isn't really the "author" of the woe; following Felman, we might think of the Master as the real author. That would be a mistake; as Douglas, who initiates the retelling of the story in the framing prologue, informs his audience, the Master was but a "type" that "never, happily, dies out. He was handsome and bold and pleasant, off-hand and gay and kind" (4). A bachelor, his type never dies out but not because his type produces families and children. Rather, the Master stands as one (if a defining one) in a series of male identifications that are also desires (like/likening) that The Turn of the Screw plays out in the woman's narrative.

The Governess's linear narrative of control effects the circles of desire, only places them within the logic of the uncanny. Douglas reads the story--and violates the privacy of the Governess by allowing the story to be subsequently read--in a way that almost literally continues the phenomenology of the Governess's writing: "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" (6; emphasis added).[6] His voice is like the Governess's hand ("letters on the page"), and it is the Governess who is "his" "author." In voicing the material writing, he continues the subjugating work of the uncanny authoring, or Quint.

The story means something different for the men of the circle than for the women; it in fact seems to pass the women over (who feel the thrill of the horror but that is all). But it includes both "James" and Douglas in its judgmental scope. In Douglas's telling, the story becomes a thing that he uses to affirm an understanding with "James," whom he "fixes" with his gaze (and who returns that fixity of gaze), but whom, as we see above, he substitutes in his sight with what he has seen, a vision granted him by the Governess's narrative. In a sense, the process of uncanny substitutions has begun already.

 The exchange of looks, which is enabled by the promise of the Governess's uncanny narrative, stages a scene revolving around the logic of "It takes one to know one" that tends to the homoerotic and certainly homosocial.[7] The men, seemingly bachelors like the Master himself, identify each other. The looks, the identifications, come as prelude (but also conclusion: the prologue enacts both in its circular logic) to the telling of the Governess's authorizing tale, as if the tale itself only confirmed what was already known, and as if the significance of the tale were only available to those men already possessed of that knowledge.[8] So, when Douglas, "before his death--when it was in sight--commit[s] to [James] the manuscript" (4), he expands the circular logic of serial identifications and desires as well as the extending the mechanism for the authoring of the queer subject as already within the anxiogenic field of the uncanny. The woman's text that is the Governess's narrative embodies what is otherwise silent between the men--a secret knowledge. The text as it is authored by the Governess (recording the doings of the author of her woe) and bequeathed by her to Douglas to James figures a reiterable trauma whose origins begin with an absence that traumatically perpetuates itself both as an uncanny negation of identity (a nobody, an absence) and as a desire: a likening, a like.

The narrative suggests a desire that is now seen to be tending toward a homoeroticism; but more directly, it is a desire that passes into identity, and in so doing, it articulates a mimetic logic. At every moment, however, James plays with the question of complicity: that the subject of trauma is somehow available to that trauma; the trauma is never fully external to the subject, it rather reads the latent subject of trauma into being.

James's play of complicity in the telling of trauma and the problem of understanding this complicity or more accurately, the relation of trauma to the subject, has directly affected the way The Turn of the Screw has been understood and debated in the 20^th century: to what extent is the Governess complicit in the production of the ghosts. And that debate, as Leys's genealogy suggests, is the debate over trauma's nature, which, as the story suggests, is also a debate over the reader's own complicitous relation to the text.

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Notes