What He Rightly Is: King Lear as King and Man, Parent and Child

The Tragedie of King Lear, by William Shakespeare, 1606.

Woodcut illustration for "The Tragedy of King Lear" by Claire Van Vliet

Come, sir.
I would you would make use of your good wisdom,
Whereof I know you are fraught, and put away
These dispositions, which of late transport you
From what you rightly are. (1.4.213-17)

Of the many themes King Lear encompasses, perhaps the most essential is that of the disintegration of order. Natural order, familial order, political order, even finally in the psyche, language, and the body: all fall prey to a process of test and failure that almost, but not completely, destroys the settled world found at the play’s outset. Most fundamental is the fateful fall of Lear himself, both representative and singular man, a confluence of social and metaphysical orders. This fall, whilst foreshadowed from the outset, commences proper in the lengthy, subtle, crucial Act I, Scene iv, as the forces that will destroy Lear and his legacy begin to resolve. In the course of this scene, the breach between Lear and his daughter Goneril properly manifests, and the course of the subsequent drama takes on, from this point, a quality of inevitability, diving towards a nadir of human behaviour in which a handful of exemplary characters labour and largely fail to save each-other from oblivion. What Lear “rightly” is, as king and patriarch, gives way to the vagaries of old age and the insidious potency of the inheriting generation, and small acts of offence and betrayal snowball into calamity. This scene therefore presents the dramatic fulcrum of the first part of the play, whilst raising the question of just what Lear rightly is, pivotal to comprehending a vast moral drama, with subsequent dramas foreshadowed in the characters’ words and attitudes in this early scene.

Detail from "Cordelia Disinherited" by John Rogers Herbert

At the outset, one settled order is concluding, and the order that will replace it is the crucial question. Lear’s famous solution, to divide his kingdom for each of his three daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, immediately begins to go awry when Cordelia fails to play the game Lear has made an unstated condition of his settlement. In Scene iv, the cracks in Lear’s solution truly begin to show. Characters are now polarising according to the sides they will now take, with Kent, appearing for the first time in disguise, ingratiating himself for the purpose of protecting the king. His opposite, Oswald, the archetypal venal courtier, is introduced. So too is the Fool, a voice of honesty strained through songs and jokes, meditating upon Lear’s ill-wisdom. Goneril, offended by her father’s retinue, plots to create a crisis that will enable her to lay down the law. Albany, as he will continue to, equivocates, pleads innocence, and lets others fight for him. Lear rejects his daughter’s presumptions, and storms out. On the level of exposition, this scene sees much that could go wrong in the opening’s settlement begin to do so, whilst fundamental ironies rise to the surface. Kent, ill-treated and stripped of all that is his, nonetheless proves himself peerlessly loyal. The Fool offers telling sense, making explicit that Lear is the real fool for putting himself at his daughter’ mercy. Goneril, having mouthed pretty speeches as required of her, now reveals herself as manipulative and disrespectful. By the scene’s end Lear is beating his own head, realising his folly (1.4.272-3), and the monarch of supreme power is literally on the road to becoming a semi-crazed vagabond.

Scene from Grigori Kozintsev's Korol Lear (1971): Jüri Järvet as Lear, Valentina Shendrikova as Cordelia

King Lear is defined by its relative abstractness and remoteness from all but the broadest political references, based as it is in the accepted conventions of folk-tale-derived material (Bradbrook, 1935: 40). This quality however gives the play scope to explore notions like royalty, loyalty, duty, family, and hierarchy in a less hampered context. This is the Tragedy of King Lear above all. The disparity between Lear the man and Lear the king is apparent, and a certain alienation of one from the other is an aspect of Lear’s character, as Regan notes his lack of self-knowledge (1.1.293-4), and yet their simultaneous unity cannot be ignored. Even in his now aged and intemperate state, Lear is at the outset still a vessel of great power: voice of law, partitioner of the natural and social worlds, a dragon, a father-god, “the summum of all that culture is” (Long, 1976: 170). A fundamental discrepancy, of the mortality of the man and the immutable nature of his role, leads to an ultimate crisis in this culture: we have the “spectacle of a king who overthrows his own kingdom” (Epstein, 1993: 6). The lone voice of tolerated dissent is his Fool, who counters Lear’s misapprehensions through metaphoric jests and allusive mockery, and his concise description of the lot of the honest: “Truth’s a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out.” (1.4.114-15) Lear’s power, however, cannot do much to prevent him from walking into Goneril’s design, or avoid justifying her subsequent acts, with his aggression towards Oswald and his knights’ general intransigence. When Goneril upbraids Lear for his “dispositions”, taking precedent over his “good wisdom”, it is already clear what these dispositions entail, after Lear’s summary fury in exiling Cordelia and Kent. These are not wise acts, and the lack of wisdom will reverberate throughout the play.

Romola Garai as Cordelia and Ian McKellen as Lear, in a 2007 RSC production

Lear compounds his mistakes in I, iv. Kent ingratiates himself with the king by indulging his prejudices and participating in his sufficiently offensive antics. Lear would not have tolerated them; Goneril does not, either. Lear is no longer, as Goneril’s words indicate what he once was, a man of sound strategic wit, now irascible and tetchy. He has pinned his fate on what is essentially an act of faith, that his daughters’ words and actions must accord. Lear is here inseparable from his self-concept as king and the way meaning and form flows out from his person, and his mistake is to believe this is felt by all others to be incumbent upon them. Even his contradictions and switches of mood are inviolate: “I have sworn; I am firm” (1.1.245). His idea of what his daughters are for is made clear to Cordelia: “Better thou / Hadst not been born than not to have pleased me better.” Lear’s heirs are extensions of his own unbounded ego, and his power is a cultural maxim. “Lear is (a) character who…asks us to think about the psyche of a ruler from the inside out, of what it must be like to consider yourself godlike even as your body and your children betray you” (McEachern, 2010: 192). Good and evil in the play are subsequently defined by individuals’ relationship with that maxim, even as it is tested and found wanting. The heroic characters, Cordelia, Kent, and Edgar, display unswerving fealty even when mistreated. Goneril, Regan, Edmund, and Cornwall see value in wresting such power for themselves, and are willing to ignore sentiment to do so. And yet in that act they annihilate the very purpose of this leadership caste, which is to define and uphold certain faiths. All that is left otherwise is mere power. In I. iv, Goneril begins this process of disentangling the legal and moral shape of a world, much as the bastard Edmund has already vowed (1.2) to accomplish, which Lear has been the guardian and definer of.

Scene from Peter Brook's King Lear (1971): Alan Webb as Gloucester, Paul Scofield as Lear

The irony of Goneril’s request for Lear’s “good wisdom” is then clear, in that she has no desire for Lear to return to what he “rightly” is, or rather, her definition of that is not one he would recognise. She wants him to behave in a becoming fashion, and adapt to her regime. She is quick to put his anger down to a man giving way to senility: “Let his disposition have that scope / as dotage gives it” (1.4.295-6). Lear has no wish to adapt. For one thing, it is virtually incompatible with the role he is defined by: the king is still the king, a fact which betrays a false assumption in his settlement. His exiling of Cordelia and Kent is the act of a man used to no limits on his power. But Lear is subsequently a reactive rather than decisive force. “The King himself destroys his own kingship, and the remainder of the play shows the restoration of that kingship in him” (Epstein, 1993: 4). Lear’s motives for the division of his kingdom are unstated beyond simply making provision for his inevitably brief future, and yet implicit in it is awareness of his own failing capacity to govern. That he will be alive, and yet no longer an omnicompetent ruler, presents an inevitable tension, which he exacerbates in his insistence on maintaining the privileges of overlordship. Lear’s legacy can be seen as an attempt to avoid making painful choices. He gives up power, but not the form of it; he gives away his country, but instead of favouring either of the most powerful lords in his realm, Albany and Cornwall, connected with his eldest two daughters, he divides it between the three daughters, a balanced act immediately undone because of Lear’s rash temper. From one perspective, Goneril’s sentiments about the behaviour of Lear and his retinue are entirely understandable. And yet she capably avoids the one real price she had to pay for gaining half a kingdom. The breach of this condition is the germ for a tragedy that destroys a governing class.

"King Lear" by Benjamin West

The roles of family are here irreducibly linked with those of royalty. Lear’s betrayed prestige is both political and patriarchal; likewise his exile. For daughters to cause their elderly father to wander off in the rainy night would be seen as a failure of care, no matter the era and reason. It is also in this context an act of treason, albeit one Lear’s own lapses have allowed. Lear is at least canny enough to recognise Goneril’s game almost immediately: his riposte to her entreaty, “Are you our daughter?”, comes well after he has sensed the wane of deference and respect for his party amongst her retinue, which he has resisted interpreting until now as purposeful aggression (1.4.68-72). His question recognises the distance between this Goneril and her earlier, fawning filial piety. Lear makes it plain that he was bargaining for a kind of treatment that he now sees he will not receive. Father and daughter now talk past one-another. Goneril has engineered a situation to stoke her father’s anger and justify her own; he refuses to reply to her according to “good wisdom” and instead will not recognise her. These stances can only have one outcome, and Lear is the clearer loser. His savage invocation to nature (1.4.278-292) for barrenness to be visited upon Goneril, concludes with the most telling phrase that “sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / to have a thankless child.” Here Lear’s pathos as both father and king is clear. Lear, as a lawmaker and supreme figure, sees his own fall as a fall for all humanity, invoking the wrath of gods on his daughter’s womb, and then at mankind in general (3.2.1-24), before, in his “mental fragmentation” (Brailowsky, 2009: 208), giving way to a complete dissolution of moral and sexual propriety which is, by his standards, an embrace of total nihilism even before the cast begins to die like flies. That development may in fact, considering the potency of Lear’s relationship as king with the metaphysical order, be rooted in his nihilistic curses: his invocations on mankind carry weight with the gods he and others see working behind human actions.

"Cordelia's Farewell" by Edwin Austin Abbey

In I, iv, the Fool teases Lear with his mixture of wit and astringent truth, perhaps most enlightening in this screed: “Thou mad’st thy daughters thy mothers; for when thou gav’st them the rod, and put’st down thine own breeches” (1.4.174-76). The inversion of the power relationship of parent and child that is an effect of aging is here given new urgency as a more severe inversion, that of master and supplicant, looms. The threat that Lear will essentially be a child, coddled and scolded by daughter-mothers and reduced to dependence, is a fate he rejects with self-destructive fury. Lear’s settlement again tried to avoid this, but instead he loses all support. The king, defined by his office and power, completely stripped of all trappings of rank and power, returns to a state of childishness, garbing himself in flowers, and rejecting previous moral maxims, newly instilled with “compassion for sin as well as suffering” (Granville-Barker, 1970: 43). When he is finally rescued and awakens before Cordelia, he is both a very old man and a young child, Cordelia both true daughter and mother-blesser, the only force who can restore him to sanity, sanctity, and kingliness. Captured by their enemies, Lear looks forward to sharing childhood with Cordelia in jail, a rebirth in being relieved of all responsibility and laughing at the courtly world he so recently headed. Yet the next-to-final image of him is almost motherly now in himself, “a reversal of the mother-son axis in the imagery of the Deposition as depicted in countless paintings and statues of the Italian Renaissance” (Riemer, 1994: 16), carrying Cordelia in his arms, now a vessel of world-sorrow. Moreover, the plot completes the inversion of the natural in the fashion that Goneril and Regan, having failed in their responsibilities towards a male patriarch, destroy each-other rather in competition for a male pretender, Edmund. Edmund, the anti-social force, is a perfect fetish object for the two daughters.

Scene from King Lear, 1982 Granada TV production: Laurence Olivier as Lear, John Hurt as The Fool

Lear’s rhetorical failure to recognise his daughter elucidates how sight, and its corollaries recognition and discernment, becomes a crucial motif. Lear has already failed to recognise Kent as an honest friend and then at all. The same with Cordelia, whilst the borrowed verbal facades of Goneril and Regan have entirely fooled him. Coming after Goneril’s entreaty, this failure of recognition highlights the constant alteration and alternation of roles throughout the play. King to vagabond, earl to exile, bastard son to almost-prince, beloved offspring to hated enemies: characters remain constant and yet their roles and apparels are in flux, a dangerous state for a society defined by roles. Whilst disguise is an art of the wicked, it’s also a survival tool and weapon for the wronged, as it is for Kent and Edgar, and these disguises both increase the intrigue and the emotional complexity of the play (Bradbrook, 1935: 67). In such a world, the notion that anyone is rightly something seems almost absurd, when identities can so easily be blurred, usurped, stolen, adopted. Gloucester’s eyes, instruments which he abuses himself for failing to tell the difference between good son and bad, are the targets of grim punishment, in a scene where “the emphasis immediately shifts from blinding to things which must not be seen” (Peat, 1985: 104), redolent of crossing the boundaries of taboo, things that are against the shape of the human and world. Gloucester is then given a redemption by his son Edgar in a play-act contrivance, as the loss of physical sight gives way to a clearer vision of the truth. Lear’s own prescription in the midst of his derangement: “A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears” (4.6.151-2). The Fool’s constant wordplay dresses and undresses the truth, and he gets whipped for all possible interpretations of his words, for “his philosophy demands of him that he tell the truth and abolish myths,” (Kott, 1967: 129) in a role that is at odds with Lear’s as the proponent of form over truth. “These are biblical parables. The blind see clearly, madmen tell the truth.” (Kott, 1967: 127)

There are bonds and feelings that finally do not break, between Lear and Cordelia, Lear and Kent, Edgar and Gloucester, and the servants who aid Gloucester, and these confirm the strength of deeper links between humans in the face of nihilistic forces. These bonds, as well as the cleansing process of his alienation and madness, partly redeem Lear from his foolishness and obstinacy, and yet the play finally refuses to depict a world put right. Instead, like a broken gear, the initial mutual lapses of wisdom and respect smash the entire mechanism. Justice catches up with the wrongdoers, but the innocent and the misguided are also victims, and therefore the meaning of the tale moves out of the stage of the morality play and into a more urgent consideration of the ties and responsibilities that construct a civilised world. The mighty, the guiltless, the villainous: all become victims of a form of blindness that fails to perceive the authentic and the sustaining. By the otherwise desolate finale, Lear’s own life has undergone a simultaneous evolution and devolution, sifting the ages and states of man in a desperate process of attempting to find just what he rightly is, what any human then rightly is, attempting to bear the burden of crushing sorrows and still, indeed, remain human.

Bibliography
Bradbrook, M. C. 1935, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy, C.U.P., Cambridge.

Brailowsky, Yan 2009, ‘“The Lusty Stealth Of Nature”: Desire And Bastardry In King Lear’, And that’s true too: New Essays on King Lear, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle, UK.

Epstein, Paul 1998, ‘The purgation of the Shakespearean hero’, in Animus: The Canadian Journal of Philosophy and Humanities, Vol. 3, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Corner Brook, Newfoundland.

Granville-Barker, Harley 1970, ‘King Lear’, in Prefaces to Shakespeare: King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, B.T. Batsford, London.

Kott, Jan (trans. Taborski, B.) 1967, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 2nd Edition, Methuen and Co, London.

Long, Michael 1976, The Unnatural Scene: A Study in Shakespearean Tragedy, Methuen and Co, London. 

McEachern, Claire 2010, ‘Shakespeare, religion, and politics’, in The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, eds Margareta de Grazia & Stanley Wells, 2nd edition, C.U.P., Cambridge.

Peat, Derek 1985, ‘Responding Blindly? A Reading of a scene in King Lear’, Sydney Studies, Vol. 20, University of Sydney, Sydney.

Reimer, A. P. 1994, ‘The Promised End: Some Last Words on King Lear’, Sydney Studies, Vol. 10, University of Sydney, Sydney.

Watching the Screw Turn: Henry James, Narrative Ambiguity, and the Battlefield of Interpretation

‘The Turn of the Screw’, by Henry James, originally published serially in Colliers Weekly. Edition I read: The Turn of the Screw: A Norton Critical Edition, Norton, New York, 1966.

Henry James, in a 1913 charcoal sketch by John Singer Sargent.

Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw, presents, on the face of it, an eerie ghost story. It recounts the experience of an unnamed young Governess, commissioned by a blithe young gentleman to take care of his orphaned nephew and niece, who finds herself the sole apparent observer of manifestations of a haunting around the two children and the large house of Bly they inhabit. The ghosts, she comes to believe, are those of Mr Quint and Miss Jessel, two former employees, who the Governess comes to believe wants to keep a grip on the children. This story, perhaps the most famous James ever wrote, has become since its publication the subject of argument as to whether it is a tale of psychological disintegration, or a plain tale of supernatural haunting. This argument is complicated by James’ own pronouncements on the subject, displaying his evident intent to write a literal ghost story, and, therefore, the legitimacy of the psychological interpretation has been forcibly denied. And yet it persists, partly because of questions of James’ motives for writing the story, but chiefly because of the ambiguity of James’ chosen writing style, the depth of his engagement with the problem of point of view, and the nature of the genre he was working in. Tales of the supernatural are all, arguably, metaphorical adventures into the realm of the psyche and the irrational, and therefore by working in the genre James invited such reinterpretation. James’s own announced intentions, to return vitality to the ghost story by minimising the fantastic, also concedes to an age in which credulity is best achieved through minimisation of the fantastic.

“In matters like this the work itself and not the author that is the ultimate authority,” Harold Goddard, one of the first to take up the psychological argument for interpreting the book, declared. Here arises one of the recurring problems of intention versus interpretation, which is central to so much contemporary literary study. “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash,” as Roland Barthes stated, and the idea that an author can have a grasp of every conceivable interpretation of a work is disputed. But so can the notion that an author is fixated on and aware of only one interpretation. James’ story is in itself an interpretation, of a ghost story he said was told to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury, no less. James synthesised characters to act out the roles in such a fashion that pleased him and his opinion of how to make such a story believable and dramatic. One of James’ first decisions was to utilise a layered authorial voice, and reception of the story depends on this. James uses three levels of storytelling: that of the authorial “I”, recounting the gathering of people listening to ghost stories; the reading by Douglas, one of that group; and the memoir he reads, of the memoir by the Governess herself.

The Turn of the Screw takes its name from a metaphor used by the second of three narrators for the tale, Douglas, meaning the desired effect of intensification of drama and suspense. The story calls attention not merely to its own designed effect, but to the effects behind its literariness: the object of The Turn of the Screw is not merely to turn the screw, but to observe how it is turned. The object of The Turn of the Screw is not merely to turn the screw, but to make others see it being turned. This was not so uncommon in fantastic genre writing of its era: the controlled reportage and viewpoint in “found” material such as diaries, letters, and journalistic accounts was a common method of affecting a kind of realism that would give grounding to the incredible, not far, indeed, from the method of contemporary horror movies like The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007) in imitating documentary and home movie techniques. The fantastic genre can be defined as one that “oblige(s) the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and supernatural explanation of events...the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work”, as Tzvetan Todorov describes it.

Supernatural phenomena were largely, even at the time of James’ writing, improbable if not ludicrous for most; therefore the construction of a mood of credulity became the important task in a supernatural tale. James wrote his novella in this generic mould, and this genre is distinct from the realistic, albeit highly psychological, morally searching novels James was best known for. Unlike such works, which are indebted for at least a certain amount of their creation to grounded observance, the representative nature of a ghost story is easier to suggest. James’ preoccupation, whilst engaging this technique, as he himself acknowledged the start of this tendency as being Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, was to move beyond pseudo-realism into something more penetrating. He moves sideways from this; despite the first-person narrative, the Governess writes like Henry James with long, endlessly qualified and subjunctive sentences, and she even jumps over key pieces of her own experience contrary to the nature of most first-person reportage where the precision of description afforded by observation might be expected. Such leaps include her observations of Miss Jessel, when she appears close to herself and Flora, just like a writer delaying narrative pay-off for the sake of suspense, but also because it is only in the later recounting to Mrs Grose that this incident and the Governess’s instinctual observations take on reality – in the act of communicating them.

How one interprets such a story depends on individual point of view. Especially following Edmund Wilson’s essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James”, the psychological view became important in regarding The Turn of the Screw. People predisposed to belief in spirituality and other concepts that resist purely rational reduction will possibly retain at least credulity for spiritual emanation and thus be sympathetic to the substance of the ghosts. An arch rationalist, with a scientific mindset or an awareness of psychological theory, will probably interpret any ghost story as essentially a psychological one, investigating it for coherence of metaphor and the intelligibility of its codification of psychological concepts. Such attitudes are not necessarily automatic, but there is still a choice of viewpoint involved. James’ story presents, in its images, characters, and narrative processes, much material that resembles psychological symbolism. James’ brother William was a pioneering psychologist, although such symbolism as the phallic tower on which Quint appears whilst Miss Jessel appears by the equally suggestive lake is more distinctly Freudian. The possibility that James was writing a disguised meditation on the illness of his sister Alice has been floated, including by Oliver Cargill, and that this was his reason for now being explicit about his intention, instead preferring to call it, in a letter to H.G. Wells, “essentially a potboiler.” A problem here is not just the disparity between the intention and effect of an author’s labours, but also how reception of a work evolves: just because later readers and critics regarded James’ story as a great work that might encompass deeply personal reflections and acute thinking on psychological viewpoint, that nonetheless he still didn’t think it really was a potboiler compared to his more elaborate, realistic novels. Nonetheless James’ determination, as stated in his preface, to “improvise with extreme freedom”, indicates his intent to explore new territory in the ghost story. And how to achieve this? To recharge its effect by deemphasising the spectres as much as possible and rendering them secondary in controlling effect to the viewpoint of the heroine, working on the theory that what is not seen, explained, literalised, is the most effective. James is therefore demonstrating how perspective is inseparable from reality, and that credulity is perhaps ironically best serviced by ambiguity. If the traditional manifestations of ghost are, as James argues, “little expressive…little dramatic,” then the only thing that can give them substance, threat, drama, is to make their nature undecidable.

Rebecca Evans and Timothy Robinson in an English National Opera production of Benjamin Britten’s operatic adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, composed in 1953.

Throughout the narrative, events, statements, and curiosities of expression in the testament of the Governess suggest an authorial awareness of the nature of hysteria, projection, and sublimation, constantly in evidence throughout the tale. These are seen in the behaviour and attitudes of its heroine, enforced by the subjective nature of the telling, where things are only seen and reported, albeit with curious elisions and apparent distortions, through her eyes. The Governess, barely out of adolescence herself, can be seen to invent bogeyman projections of gross male sexuality in Quint, displacing a desire stoked by her employer, and a wretched self-projection in Miss Jessel as a fallen woman, a duality hinted when the Governess recognises herself as having taken the place of Miss Jessel as the wretched woman at the foot of the stairs. She then displaces her fearful emblems onto her two young charges, whose very lack of obvious maliciousness and minor faults become a blank screen onto which the Governess can project her neurotic obsessions. The most famous film version of the story, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), exacerbates the theory of sexual repression by casting not a young woman but the middle-aged Deborah Kerr as the Governess, and, accordingly, transforms the tale into “precisely the psychological narrative which James’ writing painstakingly invalidated and avoided,” as it was put in Phil Hardy’s Encyclopedia of the Horror Film. At one point, referring specifically to a boat, but in a way to the entire substance of her narrative, the Governess cries, “Our not seeing it is the strongest of proofs.” Such a line can seem a precise portrait of a paranoid schizophrenic mindset, where elaborate fantasies are constructed, where everything is infused with meaning due to a private logic.

Therefore aspects of the tale can be used to argue against a literal haunting. The fact that no-one else sees the ghosts is perhaps the most significant, with Mrs Grose’s and Flora’s apparent inability to see Miss Jessel when the Governess can. Whether by the design of the ghosts or the illness of the narrator, they do not share their appearance with anyone else. Yet this does not mean they are not there, or, as Desmond Manderson recently put it: “This nothing is what is most troubling about James’ ghosts; ironically, it establishes their presence and their menace.” The Governess has explicated how the children always readily acquiesced to her scenarios to act out, and it might be argued that the moment of truth with both children sees them stricken with cognitive dissonance at this new scenario, in which their perpetual companion and mentor suddenly starts seeing dead people, and wants them to do the same. The children therefore respond, unconsciously, to the Governess’s desires for them to enact her fantasies. Simultaneously, incidents which allow the possibility of the Governess’s convictions include the fact that Mrs Grose seems to recognise Quint from the Governess’s description, the inexplicable nature of Miles’s expulsion from school (“for that was really but the question of the horrors gathered behind”), the eventually revealed cause of it, his collusion with Flora to defy the Governess at several junctures, and his apparent anxiety and inexplicable death when the Governess tries to break her hold over him. Yet none of these on their own constitute solid proof. The Governess’s description of the man could simply have given Mrs Grose a slate on which to inscribe the face of Quint, a man who offended her. Miles’ rude language might have been picked up from Henry Fielding, whose Amelia even the Governess, whose experience has before Bly not even encompassed such an act, reads, or indeed from other sources. Mrs Grose surrenders to credulity thanks to her conviction in what she “heard” the children say, and to the persuasiveness of the Governess’s conviction.

Deborah Kerr as the Governess and Peter Wyngarde as Quint in The Innocents, Jack Clayton’s 1961 film version.

The Governess’s preoccupation eventually narrows to the moments in which she tries to confirm that the children are aware of the spectres too. The result in one instance is for Flora to not want to speak with or see the Governess again, and for Miles to drop dead. Only in this last case does a real, undeniable event linking the Governess’s fixations with undeniable physical truth occur, and even here, what causes his death, whilst she attributes it to his being “dispossessed”, is hardly inarguable. Throughout the story, key aspects retain an ambiguity that is hard to dismiss, particularly in the Governess’s encounters with Miss Jessel in Chapters VI and XV, where the information she gives to Mrs Grose in subsequent chapters seems at odds with what she herself describes. The observations and certainties that the Governess expresses to Mrs Grose in Chapter VII seems to have no basis in what can have been observe by her, but a chain of inferences based either in preternatural or paranoid sensitivity. The limitations, and the advantages, of the viewpoint James chose for telling his story here become apparent. The peculiar elision at the end of Chapter VI, which concludes with the Governess resolving to observe the shade of Miss Jessel watching her and Flora: “My apprehension of what she was doing sustained me so that after some seconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I again shifted my eyes—I faced what I had to face.” The narrative voice then jumps to the subsequent conversation where the gap between what seems substantiated by her earlier observations and what the Governess now proposes is difficult to account for.

Nonetheless, whether the apparitions are real or imagined, the story can still be observed to work, at least on a mechanical level, in the same fashion. Apparitions appear to the heroine; they make her concerned for the safety of her position and the children entrusted to her care; she sees the apparitions as attaching themselves to the children and fears their corruption; this drives her to assert more and more rigorous control over the situation, which instead causes her command to completely unravel. This attempt, to assert control over the irrational, be it spectral or psychological in nature, is the lynchpin of the story. The Governess is entrusted with a position of great nominal power, especially by the standards of a young woman in her profession, far beyond the normal in fact. Her commission from the employer is “that she should never trouble him…take the whole thing over and let him alone,” far beyond the usual limits of a Governess, especially one of the protagonist’s age and level of experience. Into her hands is thrust not only the task of teaching the children but in taking proxy responsibility for them in all things, and the stake of the drama, the end which the Governess dreads most of all, is being forced to appeal to the masculine employer who excised himself from the situation.

Equally central to the Governess’s threatened failure is the possibility of her losing control over the education of the children, the infiltration of their minds and worldviews by Quint and Jessel and the forbidden values associated with them, the bad language which caused the expulsion, as the Governess finally teases out from Miles. This merely accentuates the problem of child-rearing, for which the Governess is unequipped, and the anxiety of exposure to corrupting influences that rupture the boundaries of the acceptable, the ordered, and the controllable. In both the psychological and literal readings, the ghosts still perform this function, of perverting the course of learning for the children, or at least the Governess fears they will, away from the accepted norm which she has been charged to shape them to; the ghosts literally and figuratively embody the threat of sexuality, amorality, and disobedience assaulting the settled order the Governess must maintain. As the Governess’s anxiety mounts, even their seeming perfect behaviour becomes, becomes a pretence through which she professes to discern a great play-act designed to fool her. Later, particularly in Chapter XVII, Miles’ own precocity, with his pronounced desire to “see more life” and suggestions of adult sexuality beginning to grow in him, or, as the Governess would have, being instilled in him by Quint, responds to the attention of the Governess herself, whom he calls “dear” like an adult. This is increasingly complicated by the fact that the Governess projects an adult sexuality onto the boy, that of Quint, rather than an emerging form, and her own incapacity to differentiate the two, exacerbates the problem, leading to the moment in which Miles blows out the candle like a lover. Here, the gap between the interpretations is so great yet so close, as the choice is between an external, malevolent force, drawing them both in through deception and advantage, or an internal force in both violating a social and psychological barrier.

There is therefore an implicit disparity between the conclusions offered by the literal and psychological interpretations. If Mr Quint and Miss Jessel really have come from beyond to claim the children, then the things they embody are designated as Other, as evil, corrupting, and corrosive as the Governess fears, dispersing the anxiety generated by the personal ramifications of the story, and partly justifying the Governess’ push into a “war” that ends in an innocent’s death. If, however, they are manifestations of her mind, they are the opposite, representing the inescapable human-ness of sexuality and its perversion, through lack of self-awareness, by a repressive social order that tries to restrain it. Miles’ death is the product of the failure of the paradigm the Governess tries to enforce, but which is failing inside her already. Yet if ghosts are automatically symbols, then either way, they embody a primal truth unanswerable to reason. Michael Scofield argues that James left his story so much implied because of three reasons: to rouse the reader’s imagination, because the subject matter of his story was too shocking to treat overtly, and because he himself did not want to face its implications. Yet studies of “evil…of a sexual nature” were a familiar James preoccupation. As with the question of point of view, therefore, a consistent authorial interest has been invested in the work, which, then, enriches it, intentionally or not, beyond generic limits: it becomes instead a study in the way the individual human deals with reality and subliminal drives. James’ desire to avoid writing a ghost story as a “mere modern psychical case, washed clean of all queerness as by exposure to a flowing laboratory trap,” as he described it, indicates a need not only to preserve mystery, but to respect the things he was invoking, suggesting their power and vitality even in their monstrousness. Therefore, part of the beauty of The Turn of the Screw is that it never forces a definite conclusion.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, R (trans. S. Heath) 1977, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text, Hill and Wang, New York.

Cargill, O. 1963, ‘“The Turn of the Screw” and Alice James’, in The Turn of the Screw: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. R. Kimbrough, Norton, New York.

Kimbrough, R (ed) 1966, The Turn of the Screw: A Norton Critical Edition, Norton, New York.

Gelder, K (ed.) 2000, The Horror Reader, Routledge, London.

Hardy, P (ed) 1985, The Encyclopedia of the Horror Film, Aurum Press Ltd, London.

James, H. 1898, ‘To H.G. Wells’, in The Turn of the Screw: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. R. Kimbrough, Norton, New York.

James, H. 1908 ‘The New York Preface to Volume XII of “The Novels and Tales of Henry James”’, in The Turn of the Screw: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. R. Kimbrough, Norton, New York.

Manderson, D. 2010, ‘Two Turns of the Screw’, in The Hart Fuller Debate – 50 Years On, ed. Peter Cane, Hart Publishing, Oxford, p. 197-217.

Scofield, M. 2003, ‘Implied stories: implication, moral panic and The Turn Of The Screw’, Journal of the Short Story in English (Online), 40, Online since 29 July 2008,

Spilka, M. 1963, ‘Turning the Freudian Screw’, in The Turn of the Screw: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. R. Kimbrough, Norton, New York.

Seymour-Smith, M (ed.) 1980, Novels and Novelists, W. H. Smith and Son, London.

Todorov, T. 1975, ‘Definition of the Fantastic’, in The Horror Reader, ed. Ken Gelder, Routledge, London, 2000.

Film

The Innocents (motion picture), 1961. 20th Century Fox, Achilles. Director, Producer: Jack Clayton. Writers: William Archibald, Truman Capote.

Inconceivable: The Princess Bride

The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The “Good Parts” Version, Abridged, by William Goldman, 1973. Edition I read: Bloomsbury 2008.

William Goldman’s novel The Princess Bride describes itself as the “Good Parts Version”, whittled down from a purported “classic tale of true love and high adventure” by one Samuel Morgenstern. It is in fact a tongue-in-cheek and multi-layered game evoking and exposing not only the mystique of classic writing and the fantastical novel tradition, but also the conflicting impulses of a contemporary commercial writer. Goldman commences with an account of why he edited Morgenstern to reconfigure his book, his “favourite” novel even though he has never “read” it, from the political satire it was originally intended as. A hive of ironic elements is soon found lurking within the novel, waiting to sting the reader. These ironies include the fact that Goldman is responsible as author for the entire work. The text’s sardonic approach also reflects seriously on the nature and purpose of reading and writing, and permeating the novel is Goldman’s sarcastic, knowing, even obnoxious authorial voice. This voice mediates the investigation of narrative and the underpinning values of the kind of storybook tale his novel reproduces.


In the Introduction, Goldman explains how Morgenstern’s novel was first read to him by his father during a childhood bout of pneumonia. This was a transformative experience for a sports-mad boy and future author, and also a key moment in his relationship with his father, a barely literate immigrant barber who gives to his son the gift of a canonical work of literature from his homeland, the country of Florin. Of course, there is no such country as Florin, and the “real” William Goldman cannot have roots there. Goldman nonetheless presents this detail, as well as his relationship with characters encountered on the page, including his favourite teacher, Miss Roginski, whom he recalls having once tried in vain to develop a literary streak in him, and to whom he sent his first novel upon publishing it, hoping she would still remember him and appreciate her part in his success. The sentimentality of this aspect, the student paying tribute to the inspirational teacher, is offset by the obnoxiousness with which Goldman endows himself, as a kid and as a man. We also meet his wife and son, agent and producer, in the Introduction, which plays as ostensible autobiography, making reference to his real-life work, including not only his first novel, The Temple of Gold, but also his works as a screenwriter. Goldman credits Morgenstern’s The Princess Bride as an inspiration for a famous scene in his script for the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and also imbuing him with a sense of the power of storytelling, as opposed to the analytical values of elevated literature. And yet this is truly due to his father’s selective reading of Morgenstern’s work.

William Goldman, drawn by Bo Hampton, with Westley as the Man in Black and Buttercup.

“Life imitating art, art imitating life; I really get those two confused,” as Goldman confesses, yet The Princess Bride is about the tension between the two. Goldman’s literary voice delivers a gruff, worldly perspective on a fantasy that nonetheless still packs a still-vital punch for him, all the more attractive when life lets him down. The Introduction, whilst technically a minor part of the novel, nonetheless tempers reception of all that follows, as Goldman recounts how, frustrated and lonely in Los Angeles, far from his New York home, dealing the problematic and painful exigencies of negotiating with Hollywood big shots, meets the beautiful starlet Sandy Sterling, who makes an obvious come on to him, hoping he can help her career. Goldman, panicked, diverts his desire into an increasingly desperate attempt to track down Morgenstern’s book. He wants to get his own son, Jason,, to read it, but he finally does get hold of it, he discovers its true, discursive form, and sets out to reedit it according to his father’s model. Goldman is driven to do so because he feels alienated from his son and seeks the kind of catharsis it once offered in his own youth. The vignette of Goldman’s dinner table, with the author frustrated at every turn by his wife and son, sees his anxieties over health, sexuality, parenting styles, and class all revealed incidentally in the dialogue, giving a picture of Goldman suspended uneasily between worlds. Whilst this, and Goldman’s subsequent fury at his son giving up on reading The Princess Bride, is played out as comedy in which Goldman willing casts himself as an aggressive, but actually powerless, patriarch at the centre of the family unit, nonetheless the emotions mooted here radiate through the book.


The Princess Bride, that is, Morgenstern’s work, is a presumptive satire of the decline of European feudalism into arbitrary authoritarianism, played out in the form of a hyper-clever, Ruritanian chivalric adventure. A young woman named Buttercup, living on a remote farm with her mutually loathing parents, and their young farmhand known only as Boy at first, although his name proves to be Wesley, comes to the attention of one the most powerful man in Florin, Count Rugen, who travels with his wife and entourage to take a look. Whilst Rugen finds the stories of Buttercup’s beauty unexaggerated, his wife finds Wesley her male equal. Buttercup, who had relentlessly bossed and degraded Wesley, now, hanks to the Countess, recognises his quality to, and when she confesses it clumsily to him, learns that he willingly acquiesced to all her commands, always with his signature statement, “As you wish,” because that phrase actually meant, “I love you.” Wesley decides to go to America and make his fortune so that he can return and marry Buttercup, and departs, but Buttercup soon learns that Wesley’s ship was captured by the Dread Pirate Roberts, the one who never takes prisoners. Buttercup is heartbroken, and attains a persistent melancholia that serves only to make her the world’s beautiful woman.


Two years later, Buttercup agrees to marry Florin’s crown prince, Prince Humperdinck, although she knows she will never love anyone else. Which is fair enough, as Humperdinck loves nothing but hunting. He looked for a local bride, and accepted Count Rugen’s suggestion, after his parents, the king and queen, tried to arrange a marriage between him and a princess of Guilder, the country neighbouring Florin, who was unfortunately, accidentally revealed to be bald during a state banquet in her honour. Shortly before the wedding is to take place, Buttercup is kidnapped by a trio of criminals, led by the hunchback Sicilian Vizzini, so clever he seems to be psychic in anticipating the thoughts of others. His team is rounded out by Inigo Montoya, the world’s greatest swordsman, who became such in his determination to track down and kill in combat his father’s murderer, and the colossal Turk Fezzik, who can crush many men with his bare hands. They plan to murder Buttercup on the Florin-Guilder frontier, thus sparking a war between the nations. But they find they are being pursued by a mysterious man in black, and in spite of Vizzini’s belief that it is “inconceivable” anyone could catch up with them and prove a problem, the man in black succeeds at both. Vizzini, to outpace this masked rival, has his two henchmen wait in turn for him, bringing to bear their specific gifts with the blade and the fist, whereupon the narrative digresses to explain the backstory for each man – how they got to be the men they are, and why they, as good men, are working for the dastardly Vezzini.

“Morgenstern” had thus written a pastiche of a romantic adventure novel, and used it to examine the evils of feudal aristocracy and Old World corruption through sarcastic metaphors like bridal luggage and marriage rites. “Goldman” uses the Morgenstern narrative to cast an eye on the anxieties of a successful second-generation immigrant and family man, and also on the business he works in, the creation of fiction in novels and Hollywood movies. “Barber’s sons, if they hustled, maybe got to be IBM salesmen, but writers? No way,” Goldman says in nurturing that ambition and his awareness of its improbability. The veneer of gruffness he maintains in surviving this alien world, just as his father survived in a new world, is a survival mechanism. Goldman identifies himself with Morgenstern in defending a mutual fondness for anachronistic-seeming dialogue and dislike for critics. When Goldman makes overt reference to Morgenstern’s Jewishness and the quality of shtick which infuses the Miracle Max portions, the basis of Goldman’s style in Jewish humour also presents itself. Part of the novel’s intent is not merely to pay homage to adventure stories, of which films starring Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks Snr seem unavoidable inspirations. Such films represent a genre that Brian Taves boiled down to being about “the valiant fight for freedom and a just form of government, set in exotic locales and the historical past”. But Goldman also reveals his debt to the reflexes of Jewish comedians from the Marx Brothers to Mel Brooks, and more “serious” writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer, who, as Morgenstern supposedly did, immigrated to the US.

Map of Guilder and Florin, with the locations of the novel's incidents marked.

For one thing, the business of family, and especially that between fathers and sons, echoes throughout both the meta-narrative and the “proper” story. Swordsman Inigo, dedicated to avenging his father, elucidates a simple, purified version of family responsibility, just as Westley’s love of Buttercup and Humperdinck’s malevolence present vividly polarised versions of emotions that are usually more mixed and peculiar in lifelong relationships. Goldman’s encounter with Sandy Sterling, the beautiful and tempting starlet, echoes but also contrasts the passive beauty of Buttercup, who in the story’s latter stages comically embodies the lady fair patiently awating the arrival and victory of her true love. Count Rugen, in planting his assessing eye on Buttercup of acting as a kind of Hollywood casting agent for the role of potential Queen. Sterling’s presence, and threat, stirs Goldman’s frantic effort to find Morgenstern’s book and its promise of becalming fantasy, a fantasy which the Goldman whose voice we hear throughout the book needs all too badly. The central imbalance of strength (Fezzik), skill (Inigo), and brains (Vizzini), evokes the imbalance of sporty young Goldman’s personality, and his ignorance of the imaginative. Goldman makes fun of the true love found in Morgenstern novel by referring snidely to his own true love being porterhouse and enchiladas, just as Miracle Max favours cough drops. These story elements are both mocked but also given new urgency by the pathos in Goldman’s self-castigating vignettes.


The Princess Bride is more than a funny, exciting book: it’s the sort of work that can serve as a perfect introduction to some of the thornier aspects of modern literary theory, in a fashion that barely makes you conscious of it. Goldman considers the moral problem of believing in literature, which can construct worlds where life is fair and things turn out well, in high contrast to the world he actually lives in. Yet what values are authentically preserved and transmitted? If, as Michel Foucault said, “the notion of author constitutes the privileged moment of individualisation in the history of ideas, (and) knowledge, literature,” Goldman stretches the limits of the writer’s role to make the reader aware of the limits of that individualisation. He pays heed to the common pool of elements a writer can access, in the father’s recounting of juicy elements in the novel (“Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies.”) and in his own use of one in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In his way, Goldman confirms that the text is what Roland Barthes described as “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” What such cultural heritage means, to anyone engaged in the act of passing heritage on through family, and to the writer, mediating agreed storytelling elements to the audience, is part of the texture of The Princess Bride. The way in which Goldman’s father gives a national classic to his son, and which Goldman then tries to give to his own offspring, makes this aspect specific and personal. The pertinent element of Morgenstern’s novel as a cultural article is cut out first by Goldman’s father and then by Goldman himself in reconstructing The Princess Bride as an idealised genre tale which is an encomium to the pure love of “what happens next”. Whilst the satire of Morgenstern’s novel was relevant to some other place, in the entertainment industry only the story retains its interest. “Everything is about story,” Goldman said himself, in an interview in 2001.

Whilst of course what Goldman is doing is not self-conscious in an academic sense, he is still exploring not only the way texts transmit ideas and questioning what ideas and ideals retain validity as time passes, but also the nature of his job as a commercial writer, as an entertainer who must reduce his concerns to provoke immediate, personal sensations and maintain a grip on the audience. Throughout the novel, his digressive inserts explain where and what he’s cut material out from Morgenstern’s novel. He is, then, demonstrating the screenwriter-adaptor’s job, slicing out anything that stalls pace, distorts plot impetus, and frustrates the broad audience. Goldman argues this is always an aspect of reading, pointing to the way readers skip pedantic chapters in Melville’s Moby-Dick. The nominal audience of the edited The Princess Bride is Jason Goldman. Now, of course, we come to the crux: Goldman in fact has no son, but two daughters. So perhaps he means everyone’s son. “There is one place where this multiplicity (of writings) is focused and that place is the reader, not as was hitherto said, the author,” as Barthes said, and Goldman is concerned with both how the author is also a reader, and a conduit of ideas. And yet he also revels in his complete control over those ideas within the limits of his work, even when hiding behind the guise of another writer and a false persona.

André "The Giant" Roussimoff as Fezzik, Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya, Wallace Shawn as Vizzini, and the hand of Robin Wright as Buttercup, in Rob Reiner's 1987 film of The Princess Bride.

The uneasy relationship between Hollywood and literary custom is similarly exposed here in a fashion that reveals through Goldman’s father’s experience the cultural problem of popularly coherent narrative. The father takes on a role not dissimilar to a Hollywood mogul, searching for the good story and the way to sell it. William Goldman’s prickly adopted persona, on the other hand, is that of a seasoned player, used to his love of pure creation and story diluted and assaulted by the collaborative, commercialised nature of both big publishing and cinema. He is the survivor of such unromantic, ideal-stripping processes, just as he is disillusioned with family life. He uses inserted comments to not only explain how the book made him understand that life is not always fair, but also to play games with narrative expectation, even threatening to violate the cardinal rule of the happy ending, to pinpoint the disparity between art and life. Yet he also validates the power of such stories to create a sense of a receptivity and shared experience. Goldman repeatedly states he does not believe in the novel’s principles, and yet wants to, and to share that credulity with his audience. Genre works, as Leo Braudy formulated it, “essentially ask the audience, ‘Do you still want to believe this?’ Popularity is the audience answering, ‘Yes.’” Goldman’s novel then asks a further question, what and why do we believe in such stories? Here the whole art of the storyteller is both turned inside-out, yet validated. The final irony is that Goldman creates a highly critical work out of the building blocks of pure entertainment.


The most remarkable aspect of what Goldman pulls off is that he manages to be so sarcastic and satiric, and yet achieves the trickiest feat that he set for himself, managing to build to the expected emotional and storytelling crescendos of a great adventure yarn. Goldman both exaggerates and delights in recreating the beautifully, absurdly elaborate set-pieces of the adventure story, in the hilarious, riveting passages in the Fire Swamp and the Zoo of Death, and most of all in the long sequence in which the Man in Black – who is Westley, of course, and also the Dread Pirate Roberts, but that’s a long story – has to surmount the formidable yet incomplete strengths of Inigo, Fezzik, and Vizzini. That leads to the epic piece of pseudo-logic that Vizzini employs in trying to outwit Westley, only to fall foul of a double-bluff he’s too single-minded to escape. Inigo’s final battle with the Count counts as a classic genre scene regardless of the context, evoking a meta-textual will from the reader to the character in overcoming his wounds to defeat the villain in the same way that kids cheer from the audience for Tinkerbell to live, and indeed Goldman's method serves to make this all the more palpable. The open-ended finish is a little less persuasive, convincing less as a final ironic deconstruction of the genre than of a reticence on Goldman’s part as to what point he finally wanted to make. For the rather lacklustre, skit-like film version by Rob Reiner, Goldman at least solved that fault, by transplanting his spiel about the world’s most perfect kisses from early in the book to towards the end.

Bibliography

Altman, R. Film/Genre, London, BFI Publishing, 1999.

‘A chat with William Goldman’ 2001, CNN.com, Cable News Network

Barthes, R. (trans. S. Heath) 1977 ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text, Hill and Wang, New York.

Foucault, M. 1984 ‘What is an Author?’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow, Pantheon, New York.

Taves, B. 1993 The Romance of Adventure: The Genre of Historical Adventure Movies, Jackson, University of Mississippi Press.

Possession and the Possessed

Possession: A Romance, 1990, by A. S. Byatt, Chatto and Windus. Pictured: first American edition.

Possession: A Romance, the 1990 Booker Prize winner (oops, sorry, the, er, Man Booker Prize), is one of those relatively few modern novels to command respect from both an avid general readership, and critical and academic elites. It was also the breakthrough success for Oxford-schooled Professor Antonia Susan Duffy, for whom Byatt is a pen name, inherited from her first husband. Byatt for a long time lived, as a writer, in obscurity compared to her younger sister, Margaret Drabble, but finally made her academic experience and comprehension of the buzzwords of literary theory work for her in composing Possession, a novel which cunningly invokes and utilises much of the contemporary panoply of academic paradigms. It’s also a sneaky revenge on these notions, in celebrating the traditions of the good old fashioned yarn and the still-towering authority of the Victorian English cultural firmament, and offering a swathe of artful pastiche, but also interrogating these forms, breaking them into fragments and turning them over, provoking questions relevant to the English faculty and also to general readers. How well do we know our great artists? Do we do them any favours with our contemporary obsession with biography and life circumstance, in an age in which, ironically, the celebrity of the artist and an industry of grubbing biographers and scholars has reached fever pitch, long after literary theorists had tried to cast biography out the window when it comes to understanding writing? How are heroes created, and are alterations in our picture of them damaging to their art? Are the new voices of the post-modern, post-colonial, post-patriarchal culture doomed to repeat crimes of the old? Is romantic passion a liberation or a distraction, especially for female artists and intellectuals, when it comes to achieving lives of creativity? Is life without creativity worth living, and is creativity worth anything when constantly subordinated to the effort to reduce it to coherent theories?

Possession succeeds then in being a genuinely, intellectually rich and thought-provoking novel, as well as one that plays out with a thriller’s verve and a Shakespearean comedy’s sense of mirth and human frailty. It has limitations, for the omnipresence of Byatt’s technique and layering renders her main characters, both contemporary and period, more than a little opaque, and leaves the admirably multi-levelled plot’s progression frustratingly jerky. And yet Possession is as much about those layers, or more, as its story. The framework is a scholarly detective story: one day in the mid-1980s, young researcher Roland Michell makes an unexpected discovery with the potential to unbalance whole literary universes. Having failed to advance into the major teaching posts his academic efforts have been aimed towards, Roland is working part-time for James Blackadder, a crusty senior don at Oxford who’s also the editor of an official complete volume of the works of Randolph Henry Ash, a famous, idolised (and reviled) poet of the mid-1800s, chiefly modelled on Robert Browning with dashes of Tennyson and other major figures of the period. Roland himself, a dedicated Ash fan, is a man quietly suffocating in his ignominious job, and his relationship with his partner Val, a romance that commenced at college but is slowly foundering as she takes on all the pressure of breadwinning in working as a legal secretary, to keep them in their dingy basement flat, located under a house owned by an eccentric old lady whose army of pet cats infects the place with the eternal odour of feline urine.

When in the course of a minor research errand for Blackadder, inspecting a book owned by Ash, kept by the British Museum and not apparently opened since being placed there over a century before, in search of some ephemeral point, Roland discovers what appears to be the drafts of a love letter that Ash started writing to some woman he had met at a literary luncheon. Tantalised and comprehending a mystery that no-one else seems privy to, Roland steals the drafts and begins a hunt to find who these letters were intended for. Roland’s investigations, conducted with some guilt behind Blackadder’s back, produce a definite candidate: one Christabel LaMotte, an Anglo-Breton poetess whose own oeuvre has only recently begun finding fame and favour thanks to feminist efforts to expand the literary canon. Roland presents his discovery to Maud Bailey, a descendent of LaMotte’s sister who is herself an academic, a teacher of Women’s Studies at Lincoln University and an expert on LaMotte. Maud’s a talent and a beauty, but reputed to be a bit of an ice queen, as Roland is informed by Fergus Wolfe, a former classmate of Roland’s who beat him out for a prestigious position, and who had an affair with Maud a couple of years before. Maud is highly sceptical of Roland, both of his claims and of his relevance as a human, but he captures her attention sufficiently, so that they set out to visit the house in which Christabel lived her final few years and poke around for clues. Through a series of fortuitous accidents, Roland and Maud befriend the house’s highly cranky old holder, Sir George Bailey, a distant relative of Maud’s, and his wheelchair bound wife, whom Roland gallantly saves from a sticky wicket.

Allowed to stay the night in the house, Maud decodes one of Christabel’s poems as directions to finding a stashed secret, and uncovers a trove of letters which prove, indeed to be the collected correspondence of Ash and LaMotte, establishing that they did embark on a romantic affair, in spite of the fact that Ash was married and that Christabel has been assumed to have been a lesbian, having lived for many years with another female artist, the painter Blanche Glover. Learning the sometimes exhilarating, often sad twists of this ill-starred romance, then, become an obsession for Roland and Maude, whilst they try to keep a few steps ahead of other interested parties, of whom Blackadder is the least threatening. Most problematic is Mortimer Cropper, a wealthy Midwestern American, an Ash aficionado and author of a popular but pompous biography of the poet, who uses his vast family capital to buy anything and everything relating to the man, and places them in the mordantly named Stant Collection back in his home town’s university. Maud also declines to share the information with her fellow in LaMotte scholarship and tough-minded feminism, the pushy, garrulous American scholar Leonora Stern. It soon becomes apparent that Ash and Christabel’s affair, fired by real intellectual, sexual, and artistic kinship, nonetheless swiftly foundered as a distraught Blanche tried to interfere by bringing the affair’s attention to Ash’s wife, before committing suicide. Christabel fell pregnant to Ash, fled England to have her baby whilst living with her cousins in Brittany, wracked with guilt and shame, and caused Ash to eventually think she might have killed the child. Whilst divining this tale, the edgy, uncertain, romantically disinclined Maud and Roland, in spite of many barriers and misgivings, seem themselves to be forming an attachment.

A.S. Byatt

The title of Possession: A Romance is a fruitful nexus of polysemy, from which the novel’s story and themes spread like limbs on a tree. Both “possession” and “romance” have multifarious meanings which entwine and threaten to choke one-another throughout. The journey of Roland and Maud, in echoing that of their mutual idols Ash and LaMotte, dovetails several definitions of, as well as objects of, possession: that of lovers, that of social and cultural institutions, of knowledge, of lineage and heritage, and even of the innermost self. Throughout the novel, the manifestations of possession, as well as attending ambiguities, are interrogated, as Byatt’s narrative calls into question the ownership that individuals and institutions can claim over art and artists, language and discourse, even private emotions and sexual instincts. Roland’s stealing the draft letters is a breach of law, and of the rules of scholarly trust and hierarchy, and yet the arbitrary revelation stimulates impulses within Roland as both scholar and aficionado, and he feels this dictates his action. He will later describe himself as possessed by the urge to pursue the mystery to its solution. His act suggests, initially, motives of worldly self-interest, for such a discovery might revolutionise his career. Roland is presented as a man of no status, peripheral to the people and institutions in his life, except for Val, the woman to whom he is tethered in a relationship failing, ironically, partly because of a successful inversion of traditional gender roles. His grasp at possession seems sourced in desperation to escape this rut. And yet his choice of career is bound up with his admiration of Ash, and provides a personal impetus subtler.

Possessions are a measure of status, wealth, and power, expressed through many properties in the novel, from Cropper’s grasping at any object relating to Ash, an acquisitiveness that approaches a fetish, to the basement flat where Roland and Val live, which seems to belong more to the landlady’s cats than to the tenants. Roland’s recompense, his muse and joy and millstone, is the commonwealth of words offered by poets like Ash, who rebuild worlds out of nothingness. Cropper is armed with money and unscrupulousness that dwarfs Roland: he will literally rob a grave to complete his quest. The desire to possess a totem of obsession, to commune in tactile, erotic immediacy with that object of affection, is inherent in both the romantic and scholarly travails of the main characters. And yet to possess is to be possessed, as Roland learns, and as Ash himself puts it in his love letter to his future wife Ellen, where his “most ardent desire is to be possessed entirely by the pure thought of you.” This contradiction is the central enigma of the novel, apparent in many forms.

Cropper’s ultra-modern stasis for the objects he places in the Stant Collection contrasts the mess of the English scholars’ workplaces. His method is, in a way, more caring for the material he takes ownership of, and yet he is removing it from a living tradition, the realm of accumulated cultural immediacy. A certain thematic kinship here is found not only with the isolated, closed-off state of Victorian femininity that Byatt attempts to elucidate and also to subvert, but also with the unfeeling stasis that Maud asserts on herself which is beyond physical and emotional intimacy, thus beyond potential damage, and yet rendering Maud alienated from herself within an emotional vacuum. Sexual politics, their evolution and perpetual agonies, are part of both the plot and texture of the novel to an inextricable extent. A key irony Byatt explores throughout is her passion for feminist ideas and ideals, and her mild but urgent dismay as to some of their joyless interpretations. Her celebration of the great worlds those ideals opened up in the reclamation of hidden histories and artistic produce, the exploding possibilities and hugely expanded freedoms, is matched by frustration with the more censorial, reductive attitudes in merely human adherents, which she presents as being potentially as forbidding and restrictive as the patriarchal oppression it replaced. Maud is emotionally drained and rendered rigidly uncomfortable in being squeezed between a sisterhood that had once hissed her en masse for her physical attributes, and aggressive sexual conquest on the other, the casual masculine-skewed licentiousness that was second-wave feminism’s death-dance partner in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. That is partly embodied by the coolly manipulative predations of Fergus Wolfe, who used his knowledge of deconstructive theory and nose for sexual insecurity to first bed Maud and then keep her on a kind of short rhetorical leash, so that even though the affair ended long ago, Fergus still retains a kind of power over Maud in presenting himself as the only man worthy of her, the only one comprehending her inner nature. Maud’s memory of the affair then is encapsulated in the image-totem of a soiled, despoiled bed. But the alternative, the kind of wilfully political lesbianism that Leonora has embraced, builds only to a kind of bedroom farce in which Maud dodges her fellow scholar’s efforts to seduce her. Roland, for his part, feels perpetually dizzied and invaded by the pretentious sexualisation of all language and expression by so much modern theory, as particularly exemplified by Leonora’s writing, an inspired satire on Lacan-esque psychological symbolism mated in ungainly fashion with feminist ballyhoo.

Another major irony is the notion that art – here, chiefly, poetry – is a public possession, one which can inspire a deeply personal desire to take custody of the art and artist, and yet which is ethereal in nature, communicated by signifiers that possess a life of their own. Just as, in its own way, romantic love does. Roland’s act late in the novel of listing words that he can’t reduce to an academic meaning, as the basis for creative endeavour, is his attempt at mediation: a deliberate dispossession of concept, and an attempt grasp the entirely suggestive texture of words, in an embrace of fluidity, for fluidity is Byatt’s own Eden. His act is a purposeful one in as far as the problems of cultural possession, ownership of language, institutions, and artistic figureheads and heroes, encage all the characters. Christabel and Blanche Glover’s effort to create a space in which female artists can work, shared by LaMotte’s cousin Sabine de Kercoz, mirrors the achievement of an independent space by Maud and her “sisters” a hundred and twenty years later. LaMotte’s efforts, like Byatt’s own, attempts to restore the centrality of the female voice of folk mythology in her writing, as a key to subverting rigid structures within artistic discourse. The war between camps of theory and scholarship, Roland and Blackadder with their passion for Ash, Maud and Leonora for LaMotte, each determined to foist their hero, and the mutual hostility highlights how possession of the literary canon is at stake. Moreover, the designation of the poets according to various dogmatic identities – the feminist camp is compelled to regard Ash as a stolid, misogynist Victorian establishment figure, whilst celebrating LaMotte as lesbian and proto-feminist. The shock of revelations entailed by the discovered affair blurs firm battlelines and generates new dialogue, as the personal impetus behind much of both poets’ writings becomes clearer. The uncomfortable atmosphere of ‘80s academia, struggling to keep alive the radical questions of ‘60s and ‘70s movements in a time that is nonetheless swiftly going out of tune, is evoked with grim accuracy throughout the novel.

The notion of the kinds of traps and truths that social position presents another type of possession also recurs. Maud’s membership of a privileged class has given her life and career lustre, contrasts middle-class Roland’s frustrated efforts to ascend, becoming a device that further inverts the balance of apparent power between this man and woman. Sir George Bailey, in his fraying Tory disdain, is a more extreme figure of that fading pre-eminence. His possession of LaMotte’s legacy, for which he has nothing but contempt, is a by-product of his class’s retention of power in terms of property, if no longer possessing social and financial clout, and cultural heritage becomes a commodity to relieve waning fortunes. Byatt tempers her semi-comic portrait of the aggressive, irascible Sir George with awareness of his feeling of being assailed, and tethered to a property and a wife that are both crumbling. Roland’s discomfort at failing in the traditional masculine value of being a breadwinner, and Maud’s with her physical beauty, pinion them, in a way, as firmly as Ash’s unfulfilled married life pinioned him. Roland’s embrace of art, a dynamic process, offers a better grasp on himself, as a man and lover, in an act of self-possession. At the same time, he has abandoned any claim on the worldly consequences of his discovery of the letters. Maud echoes the necessity of self-possession in her admiration of LaMotte’s “self-possession, her autonomy”, and her own journey leads to discovering that her nature is the genetic product of a transgressive act rather than a stultifying heritage. She too gains a deeper awareness, a new self-possession, than she had before.

We learn that Ash’s affair with LaMotte was at least partly the result of the fact Ellen, having been forced to wait many years to marry Ash, finds intercourse unbearable and so they have never had a sexual relationship, an interesting mitigation in Ash’s actions: Ellen tolerates his affair because he has tolerated her. Ellen seems therefore locked entirely into the surface role of the Victorian wife. And yet she’s a subtle kind of rebel, too, in both her permissiveness and her actions as guardian of legacies and privacy. The process of women taking command of language and lives, just commencing in the time of LaMotte, Blanche, and Sabine, has advanced since into a freer yet still uncomfortable place, where the need to avoid the patriarchal role as enthralled and suppressed females, has been supplanted by Maud’s estrangement from emotional immediacy and Leonora Stern’s liberated, essentially good-natured bisexuality. A recurring, persecuting disparity manifests between the desire for autonomy in both LaMotte’s and Maud’s lives, and the nature of romance, the act of being possessed, the corny trope of masculine sexual prowess in “taking” a woman, alchemised into the final, purposeful passage in which Roland takes “possession of all her white coolness that grew warm against him”. Sexualised possession is also apparent in Cropper’s purchasing of Ash ephemera, a proof on a kind of impotence, of his inability to come close to his love-object. The risk of possession is, naturally, loss of possession, and the destructive potential of possessiveness is most tragically present in the fate of LaMotte’s probable lover Blanche, in which self-destruction is also an eternal wound against her spurning former partner. LaMotte’s final self-reprehending exile is partly in repudiation of her failure in her responsibility in the mutual possession of love. Simultaneously, LaMotte’s failure of self-possession degrades her as an artist and a person, in spite her own intentions and that of her lover Ash.

LaMotte refers to her obedience to love with words like “necessity”, binding herself to a course of action in full awareness of the likely consequences; it is as if she is possessed, just as surely as Roland later feels possessed by the urge to uncover her and Ash’s story, by an instinct that courts chaos. Although Roland, Maud and their confederates set out to catch Cropper in the act of defiling Ash’s grave for ostensibly punitive reasons, they, in turn, possess him, by using him as their instrument to perform the grubby last act in uncovering the story’s end. The twofold nature of possession is both one in which some kind of ownership is presumed, but also includes a responsibility, one of protection and guardianship, encapsulated in Roland’s final vow, “I’ll take care of you, Maud,” and yet also inherent in other actions in the novel, such as LaMotte’s preservation of hers’ and Ash’s correspondence, and, it is suggested, Blanche’s art trove too, and even, in his way, Cropper’s collection. And yet there is danger perceived here, the danger of entrapping things, be it potential and talent, emotional and intellectual fecundity, or the right to common access that scholars thrive on. The threat of stasis and entropy, of the removal of self-will, is the constant refrain, especially for the female characters. Maud’s problematic relationship with her own beauty, and her fear of becoming “a property or an idol” of men for whom the possession of beauty is a boon of status, is a clear personal correlation. Self-possession is a vital aspect of the journey of Roland and Blanche as well as mutual possession, as each in essence discovers a new identity for themselves by the end that allows them to reconcile their heretofore conflicted inner natures.

Jennifer Ehle as Christabel LaMotte and Jeremy Northam as Randolph Henry Ash in Neil LaBute's 2002 film of Possession.

The artistic voice, too, is beholden to possession. Ash, dubbed by Cropper as “the Great Ventriloquist” for his ability to mimic many voices, has his consequential effect on LaMotte’s poetry – Roland swiftly recognises the impact of his voice on hers as he familiarises himself with her work – and vice versa. The advance of plot and story is itself a form of possession, the expression of the author’s intention for their characters. Passages late in the novel that describe Roland’s, Maud’s, and Leonora’s awareness of the different genres and archetypes that the investigation has invoked draws attention to how the figures on the page are being controlled – possessed – and driven towards a certain end, and the novel in particular reproduces the format of the quest narrative, always defined by a transfer, of a power, a totem, or status. Roland’s name, tethered to his modest person, evokes the heroic tradition of western poetry, and the status of romantic hero claims Roland, like many classical heroes, thanks to his initial transgression. In a similar way, LaMotte’s tale “The Glass Coffin” invokes, in the most naïf fashion, the roles which Roland, Maud, and Cropper play out. Such are “the kind of device that effectively conveys the author's claim to total control over his/her work”, as P. C. Domínguez put it in her 1995 essay on the novel. The notion of actual spiritual possession, an undercurrent found not only in the language of the characters but also in the subplot of Ash and LaMotte’s discussions of spirituality, and climactic encounter at a séance, becomes conflated with this sense of outwardly directing influences on Byatt’s protagonists. The protagonists relate to the narrative of Ash and LaMotte as readers of the novel do, with vicarious pleasure, but where the elder poets’ crucial acts and inner truths are often unknowable, in a profoundly frustrating fashion, Maud and Roland are accessible to the readers of the novel, and yet hardly at all to each other. The inner lives of those heady poets cannot be possessed, only inferred intuitively and therefore vulnerable to misinterpretation. The incapacity to grasp these remote love objects is confirmed.

By revealing much of this narrative through many texts, the poems, letters, diaries and essays supposedly composed by the characters, Byatt mimics a kind of post-modern coup in trying to explore past and present through various voices that create a textured perspective. Some of this gets a bit strained – there’s a couple of proto-feminists too many in the historical context – but she tries to authentically encapsulate, through this narrative style, the very real processes of scholarship, and to fragment the story and the perspectives contained within it, according to modern principles, producing a kind of cultural map of the evolution of feminism and the devolution of expressive literate culture as a central social force. Ash’s wife Ellen, within the story, performs an equal, opposite function of withholding information, hiding private truths from public analysis: if Byatt’s narrative deliberately synthesises the reader’s possession, Ellen within it obfuscates and removes facts from public grasp, writing a diary she knows, as the writings of the wife of a famous writer, will be turned over by scholars, and so is composed in the most frustratingly opaque terms. Such is a subversive act that gives her a unique kind of power over the truth, and a cunning inversion of her status as the archetypal dutiful, suffering, asexual Victorian hausfrau. Ellen repudiates all inquisitors, even her own author, and acts like a sphinx in guarding the secret from all but the bravest inquirers.

And yet, simultaneously, Byatt makes mischievous sport of all these variegations, drawing attention to the way her characters are aware of their own themes and their shifts between genres. Roland and Maud disdain the idea of romance, partly because they’re aware of how it’s been constructed, and then deconstructed, as a story form. Roland and Maud’s subjugation by an emotional reflex that is pointedly not under their control, is an ironic end of a journey that has ransacked their lives and presuppositions: their dread of the mess of passion, which has ruined so many lives before theirs, is nonetheless an irresistible force, and one not worth resisting. Byatt defends her own pretences to classical authorship with wit, for in the last chapter of the novel she makes a gift of knowledge to the reader cheated of the novel’s characters, in an epilogue that confirms Ash learned his daughter’s identity and assured himself of her security. Byatt is overt here in her defiance, in the same sort of way Roland learns to defy academic reduction of art, and her reasons for this are intuitively honourable. She finally stands to defend the right of the author to synthesise resolutions of dichotomous, sparring ideas and to be a creator of new paradigms. Thus her finally bringing Maud and Roland together isn’t merely a sop to romantic expectation; it’s a way-station in the search for a new harmony and a way of living.

Both Maud and Roland remain, in spite of all the detail about them, nonetheless remain somehow ill-focused, as if standing in for principles Byatt wants to animate but never quite imbues with self-animation: in spite of its thematic appropriateness as noted above, Roland’s inner life, beyond his perpetual queasiness about his situation, is never presented with the kind of immediacy that lends credibility to his eventual transformation into a poet (one of the few good ideas of Neil LaBute’s sloppy film of the novel was to put this aspect of Roland more up-front). He feels, on occasions, more like a fantasy sketch of a Sensitive New-Age Guy. Considering that one of the novel’s most riveting passages is the direct flashback that confirms Roland and Maud’s theory about a trip Ash and LaMotte took together – the interior perspective used to convey Ash’s fascination with the guarded and altogether mysterious LaMotte, especially when he contemplates how it seems he’s taken the virginity of a woman who is nonetheless very sensually experienced – it’s odd that she’s so choosy about what she flashes back to. The dark central tragedy of the period romance, Blanche’s death, remains problematically out of reach, feeling not so much purposefully as conveniently elusive. The story never quite recovers the impetus of the first quarter when it’s happy to be a realistic novel where the rush of discovery, the everyday grubbiness of Roland and Val’s life, and the oppressiveness of the major characters’ circumstances, are outlaid with keen, occasionally beautiful writing. The clashing textures of romanticised historicism and contemporary drear, all but suffocating in their irreconcilable natures, are excellently conveyed. But a lot of the subsequent pastiche, whilst technically brilliant, nevertheless often defies penetration in lacking the essential musicality of their models, and Byatt to a certain extent proves her own sneaking preference for the old-fashioned novel. Nonetheless, Byatt pulls off the novel’s last segment with a magician's touch, revealing many of the oppressive qualities to be shadows Roland and Maud have been boxing, as characters who seem threatening and one-dimensional blossom into contradictory, likable creatures, like the amusing, accidental partnering of chalk-and-cheese couple Blackadder and Leonora as they chase after Roland and Maud.

Possession is still finally an excellent book, and one with a strong final meaning, looking beyond both the cordoned-off repressions of Victorian patriarchal society and the stifling culture wars of ‘80s academia, but also rifling those eras for their worthy aspects, in searching for a life that treasures the sensual and the intellectual, the immediate and the ageless, the male and female. Byatt’s interests and arguments finally lead to an interesting and revitalising place, in her desire to return magic, passion, force, immediacy, and empathy to the modern novel, whilst not abandoning the critical, rebellious, and awareness-raising aspects of contemporary permutations of literary theory. Possession, as a word, initially seems to be a word that indicates clasping greed, ownership’s prerogatives, and battlefields between the many camps. And yet finally it comes to mean something more respectful and honourable, the role of the custodian, lover, nurturer, and artist. The limitations of possession, the inviolability of some mysteries and experiences, are also firmly underlined, in suggesting that nothing can be truly possessed.