The Turn of the Screw
Most of them [the critics] argue that the governess, in James tale, is neurotic or insane and sees no apparitions: she merely records her own hallucinations and thier damaging effect on two innocent children (Spilka 245). Like the children, she lives in a culture where sexual "horrors" are invested with religious dread, and the term "horror" connects natural with infernal realms (Spilka 248). But in doing so she enables James to establish sometimes more important: the inevitable failure of Victorian domestic sainthood in coping with erotic horror (Spilka 249). The governess was raised in a Victorian society, which were believed by many critics to be her problem. A Victorian child lived a very sheltered life away from all sexual encounters, which would soon catch up with them later in life. Henry James uses conflict, character, and symbolism to express repression and romanticism in a Victorian society in "The Turn of the Screw."Most of the governess' in the Victorian ages were said to live the loneliest lives in this time and could lead them into insanity. The life of a governess was to take care of the children and that was all, there is no room for friends or a sexual companion. The situation
The affects of this type of confinement towards sex can only make it worse because God gave us the ability to have sexual feelings and keeping kids from that will make them very interested when they are confronted with those feelings. The Victorian home may be seen, in this light, as a defensive reaction against those inroads on family life which later produced our own domestic freeways (Spilka 250). Unfortunately, their normal affections were intensified by close confinement and overstimulation (Spilka 250). When you do this to someone they will eventually be confronted with these feelings and they will not know how to react to them because no one taught them about them and they can react either way. The result was a hot house atmosphere of intense domestic feelings: and within that hot house certain exaggerated values flourished (Spilka 250). But sometimes it did not, an example would be the governess: she feel in love right away once she got out of the house and that caused her to hallucinate. The results of this confinement could be good for some but for others it led to problems that are not easy to fix. The Victorian background explains a lot of the governess' problems because of the way they raise their children. Victorian Middle-class homes were by contrast, domestic sanctuaries, sacred castles or fortified temples, protective bulwarks against an increasingly hostile world of ruthless commerce poverty and industrial blight, child and sweatshop labor, prostitution and crime (Spilka 250). And evil, in the Victorian Age, tended to be largely identified with sex: the home might tolerate commercial hardness and impiety in the world outside, but it could not accommodate sexual license (Spilka 250). Domestic affections were cooked up to a high pitch; on the other, sexual feeling was severely repressed and talked about sex forbidden, the whole matter kept under strict taboo ( Spilka 251). The Victorian adults did not want their kids exposed to sex and they were extremely strict about it. For evil existed outside the house, and children had to be preserved from it by feminine example and paternal sternness (Spilka 250). The Victorian home so intensified that normal conflict as to thwart or impede its eventual resolution (Spilka 251). The Victorian home-life is very sheltered and confined from immoral things that will later turn out for the worst. The governess does hallucinate these ghosts she sees because we have all the reason to beli
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Approximate Word count = 1664
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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