Identity and Boundary --Inter-textual, Interpersonal and Psychological

“The Turn of the Screw”

By Joyce Carol Oates

Your Interpretation First!!!

How do you read the story with two columns?

Who are the two narrators? Where do you get the clues? How are these two stories connected?

How is the first narrator related to his uncle, a young girl and “old men”?

What can the story mean?

Outline

Jigsaw puzzle pieced together Factual Details Clues of cross-linking

Interpersonal level: Patrick’s desire The Writer’s desire

Intersections and incommunicability Textual level Joyce Carol Oates & the Modern Masters Intertextuality as Boundary-Crossing References

Factual Details

Names: 1. The young man: Patrick Quarles (401, 407), fro

m US (“young American” 397, his father in Boston 400), about to be 30.

2. An old man, idle for 1.5 months Place:

Bournemouth ( 波恩茅斯 p. 404 ) in the south coast of England

Time: Queen Victoria's Jubilee ( 五十週年 1887) 399

Clues for the Connections

Between the two columns: 397 – the old man bumped into a young

man with an old man; sees the young girl beckons Patricks

P. 398 –the girl screams; must have seen me.

Patrick and the old men (Uncle Wallace, Father and the writer)

Takes care of the uncle; imagines his death (396); the latter’s “son” and heir (400, 404)

Father behind him 400 P. 401 – the two old men talking Desire to run away

P. 402 –cannot ‘shake’ them; has to run away. p. 404 –suffocated, but still afraid that uncle will

get angry.

Patrick’s Desire

For the death of the uncle (money) and for freedom;

Sexually stimulated For a girl (397), whose eyes gleaming

sensually excited (“my blood drowned her out” pp. 397, 98) thicket she scared away

For a young woman and her mother p. 406 somebody watching 399

The Writer’s Desire

In a dowdy room, surrounded by ‘dust of sorrow”; idle.

The young man 397 – something heraldic about him, a figure for art. Confused his own face with that of the young

man. 398. Patrick’s face 400; imagines what it’s like to be

his father. Approaches the old gentleman 401 Write letters (next page) Approaches the chambermaid to go to his

room pp. 404-06

Letter

1st one (403): sees him as innocent and noble, asks him to be free. torn “Caution” 405

3 letters (406) 1st -- wish you well 2nd -- see a terrible need; fear for you; ask to

accept gifts of words and prophecies. “a secret Self” 407 3rd – You are free of history; be cautious; I

reach out for, let go of and abandon you ghosts; thought of “killing” the uncle or letting

him die.

Patrick vs. the Writer: Intersections & incommunicability

401-402: Sees the Writer as only an old man

His heir 404 405 Letter torn but

remembering the word “Caution” hell (his uncle’s death)

401 –sees him as a man marked by strange destiny.

402 Sees ahead to his future and backward to their family graveyard

403 “disinherited son” 404 feverish –

approaches further

Patrick vs. the Writer: Intersections & incommunicability

406 3 letters “dark demanding hand”

407 Who is watching? Yes, I accept.

409—”caution”--Will kill or outlive the old men

Thinks of nothing but him.

407 Sees him reading the letters

407 – he seems to bless me.

409 – He has understood my love, my message; only he is with me

Textual level – foregrounding one aspect of the original texts –”The Turn of the Screw”

Frustrated Anglo-Saxon spinsters frustrated American celibates

the governess pressured by ghosts (putting the screw on her) the old man turns the screw on the young; the old writer’s life – “turned over and over” like a paperweight.

the two characters --driven by their own desires

Death in Venice + Henry James own life An old man’s homoerotic desire + aestheticism James: a lonely writer, unmarried, haunted by

the past history of his family (cases of nervous breakdown).

Textual level – foregrounding one aspect of the original texts

–”The Turn of the Screw” psychological drama

Death in Venice + Henry James own life Frustration of an artist

Joyce Carol Oates –and the Modern Master

”The Turn of the Screw” – from Marriages and Infidelities (which also has revisions of “The Dead” and Kafka’s Metamorphosis)

“The symbolism of Marriages and Infidelities . . .is the ‘marriage’ of the writer of male consciousness with the writer of female consciousness.” (Loeb 17) Different from the male-centered metafictionists

such as John Barth and Robert Coover, she is not anxious about the influences of the modern masters, nor feels “exhausted.”

Joyce Carol Oates –and the Modern Master (2)

Re. Virginia Woolf and Henry James – “Not only do they see their characters as ‘spirits without personal bodies; they inhabit time and space in a ghostly manner,’ . . .To Oates these two writers suggest that man gains an ‘identity’ or lives his “life” only through the relationship with others. reality is a subjective phenomenon. (Loeb 166)

Her creativity – two columns; the speaking tone (with exclamation, dashes, dots, etc.)

Intertextuality as Boundary-Crossing

Intertextuality –in different senses: Influence Parody and Revision (edited, transformed, and even distor

ted) All the texts and humans are in network of textuality (with

criss-crossing intersections, parallel, contradictions and influences)

Intertextuality means “boundary-crossing” and “disrespectfully traversing terrains of genre, time period, authors, subjects, art forms and nations.

Oatesian intertextuality – titular, generic and biographical. (Ref. Loeb)

Still revealing our psychological boundaries.

References

Loeb, Monica Literary marriages : a study of intertextuality in a series of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates / Monica Loeb Bern : Oxford : Peter Lang, 2002.