Henry James

 The Turn of the Screw and Daisy Miller: A Study

In Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, readers are obsessed with the vagueness James leaves for the readers to interpret. I think that is what sets Henry James apart from other writers. I understand why people love to talk about how he structures his sentences but I think most of the time the sentence is so poetically put together that it doesn’t matter if you read half a page worth of a sentence. I’m not saying I loved reading so much of nothing because at times I believed it to be completely pointless. For example, when the governess sees the intruder for the first time, there is a sentence that goes on forever just detailing the tower and how marvelous it looked and how it was exactly how Mile’s sister described it earlier that day. I felt like, “is this girl going to ask the intruder anything? Is she going to run?” but nothing happened she just stared into his eyes and he suddenly walked away and vanished.

Is the governess a lunatic or does Henry James provide something to save her sanity? I think James plays with our minds and throws the governess under the bus when he makes her look crazy, "...instead of returning as I had come, went to the window. It was confusedly present to me that I that I ought to place myself where he had stood. I did so; I applied my face to the pane and looked, as he had looked, into the room. As if, at this moment, to show me exactly what his range had been, Mrs Grose, as I had done for himself just before, came in from the hall. With this I had the full image of a repetition of what had already occurred. She saw me as I had seen my own visitant; she pulled up short as I had done; I gave her something of the shock that I had received. She turned white, and this made me ask myself if I had blanched as much. She stared, in short, and retreated just on my lines and I knew she had then passed out and come round to me and that I should presently meet her. I remained where I was, and while I waited I thought of more things than one. But there's only one I take space to mention. I wondered why she should scared." I think this has loony written all over it! She doesn't remember how long she waited for the visitor to reappear so it is certainly for a long while, "I gave him time to reappear. I call it time, but how long was it? I can't speak to the purpose to-day of the duration of these things...” Even after she stared right into Mrs Grose's eyes from outside of the window, she stayed watching her like the visitor had stared at her.

It is exactly like the chapter prior where she just stays staring at the visitor for a long while instead of screaming for help or asking anyone if they knew who he was, "He did stand there! - but high up, beyond the lawn and at the very top of the tower to which, on that first morning little Flora had conducted me... An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred; and the figure that faced me was - a few more seconds assured me - as little anyone else I knew as it was the image that had been in my mind... We were confronted across our distance quite long enough for me to ask myself with intensity who then he was and to feel, as an effect of my inability to say, a wonder that in a few seconds more became intense... Well, this matter of mine, think what you will of it, lasted while I caught at a dozen possibilities, none of which made a difference for the better, that I could see, in there having been in the house - and for how long, above all..." James goes on and on about how she doesn't know how long she stared at this figure but it was long enough for her to think about every possibility of who he could be. I think its scarier to look at someone claiming to see someone than actually seeing a ghost. Imagine this twenty year old governess just staring up at the gothic tower, just creepy.

Certainly, Henry James throws her under the bus by the following writing entry, "I somehow measured the importance of what I had seen by my thus finding myself hesitate to mention it. Scarce anything in the whole history seems to me so odd as this fact that my real beginning of fear was one, as I may say, with the instinct of sparing my companion... Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was." Henry James makes our only source to the story, the governess, have doubt of what she has seen and then he also implies that she is just out of it. James is just brilliant. He obviously knew what he was doing (House of Fiction) when he creates this super unreliable narrator. Which is the same "problem" with Daisy Miller, Winterbourne cannot tell us whether Daisy is or isn't as pure as her name tries to tell us. This "window" that James talks about in the House of Fiction, is what allows us to have so much fun interpreting his work he says there are millions of other windows but he provides just one and I enjoy it.

In Daisy Miller, thinks about the young American girls confidence, "He thought it very possible that Master Randolph's sister was a coquette; he was sure she had a spirit of her own; but in her bright, sweet, superficial little visage there was no mockery, no irony... He had known, here in Europe, two or three women - persons older than Miss Daisy Miller, and provided, for respectability's sake, with husbands - who were great coquettes - dangerous, terrible women, with whom one's relations were liable to take a very serious turn. But this young girl was not a coquette in that sense; she was very unsophisticated; she was only a pretty American flirt." So Winterbourne comes to the conclusion for a while that she is only a flirt but I don't know if James did that so that it could be okay for Winterbourne to pursue this girl. The whole story is about the innocence of Daisy and many question her purity because James kills her at the end of the story but I believe he only kills her because she was a brave young girl who wasn't afraid to stare into the eyes of European men.