The Turn of the Screw: Bewildered Vision (review)

Book Reviews 193 symbols: first, die tree may be read as Juliana, and the doorway as her dark past into which we cannot gain entrance; second, we may also read the tree as Juliana's niece, Tina, and die doorway as Juliana, her dark past. ... In both readings, die tree . . . shields die doorway, and although we can see part of it, we cannot get past the tree and penetrate die secrets diat the doorway leads to" (194). Or consider "Portland Place," the frontispiece to the second volume of The Golden Bowl, the final volume on which James and Cobum would collaborate: "Shortly after the Prince and Charlotte have returned from a trip to the country, Maggie finds herself alone. The quality of the relationships among Adam Verver, Charlotte, die Prince, and Maggie have just been described. The family is compared to a four-wheeled coach" (196). Now in the photograph itself, "A two-wheeled coach is pictured from behind as it is leaving Portland Place. We immediately understand that the famUy cannot remain as a single four-wheeled coach; it must divide itself and ride in separate two-wheeled coaches, each going its separate way.... So it is with the two marriages .... We are only left with the recognition that new knowledge has been acquired and that, like the haze the coach is moving toward ... there are unknown possibilities ahead" (197). And, on a further level, it is "an utterly appropriate image with which to end the edition. A stunning black coach, hiding its passengers from our view, moving away not only from the reader's view but also from the streets that gave Henry James so much material for his fictions.... The artist, James, with his masterwork completed, being carried out of his Edition, his collection of his Ufe's work, into an ambiguous future" (197). For those of us employing post-structural methodologies, diese readings may seem to border on the "phantastic." Bogardus himself issues a cautionary note: "It is entirely possible that my explications of the pictures and texts have occasionally been pushed too hard, culling implausible meanings from die visual-verbal relationships that James called into being" (197). Nevertheless, I have greater reservations about this book. Bogardus raises many more issues than he cares to address, touching them merely in passing . For example, what is the relation between a photograph with captions, as in the New York Edition, and tiie text it accompanies? Bogardus sidesteps any serious discussion: "By appearing alongside verbal texts and being expUcitly related to those texts through captions (their titles do work as captions), tiie frontispiece pictures are given contexts that help guide us in our interpretation of their meanings" (198). This raises even larger questions regarding the visual image: Bogardus at least impUes that photographs, by themselves, are non-narrative in nature. I question this position. If it can mean, must not die photographic image (or, for that matter, any image) have a narrative sense in and of itself? How might this affect or infect the very narrative of the literary text? Given die scope of die book, however, primarily structured in the historical-biographical dimension, Bogardus does provide a certain insight into that "wedding of photographs and texts" (201) that constitutes James's final artistic monument, the New York Edition. John Dolis Pennsylvania State University, Scranton Terry Heller. The Turn of the Screw: Bewildered Vision. Boston: Twayne, 1989. 151 pp. $21.95. $7.95 pb. For the last fifty years scholars have concerned themselves with the central critical question raised by Henry James's most widely read work, The Turn of the Screw. That question is usually expressed as a choice that every reader must make: Is it that the ghosts are real and the governess is sane and reliable, or that the governess is insane and the ghosts are mere figments of her unstable imagination? Terry HeUer has a modem answer to that question: yes. According to Heller, the ghosts are both real and imaginary, and the governess is both sane and insane. 194 The Henry James Review Can the same story yield two opposite and mutuaUy exclusive readings, yet sustain them both? Most previous scholars have said no...