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"He's like nobody.... He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale face, long in shape, with straight good features and little rather queer whiskers that are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are somehow darker; they look particularly arched and as if they might move a good deal. His eyes are sharp, strange--awfully; but I only know clearly that they're rather small and very fixed. His mouth's wide, and his lips are thin, except for his little whiskers he's quite clean-shaven. He gives me a sort of sense of looking like an actor."
"An actor!" ...
"I've never seen one, but so I suppose them." (1)
Thus the governess in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) describes a man she has seen, later identified as Peter Quint. Why should he call to mind an actor? The strongly marked features and bold eyes suggest it, perhaps, as might the somehow showy contrast of fiery hair and whitish skin. There are his clothes, which appear to her a costume: certainly, though indefinably, not his own. Yet it is also more than this. The sighting of Quint on the tower lasts only one "unspeakable minute"; nonetheless, his image fairly leaps out at her, sharply defined as "a picture in a frame" (16). An actor out of context, he has somehow too much presence, is too intense, too able to fix her with his eye. But for all this force he lacks substance, since he is "like nobody" Nobody she has ever met, for sure--but the words hint that "nobody" is what he is like. He is surface without center, impact without a weight behind it. He fascinates yet repels, commands the gaze but alienates; like an actor, he deceives.
In the first part of this essay, I examine the theatricality of The Turn of the Screw, considering the presence of performance as metaphor within the tale, and the ways in which James's fascination with the contemporary stage pervades the text. In this period of his career, James wrote several works that made self-conscious attempts to embody "dramatic" or "scenic" principles. What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Awkward Age (1899) are perhaps his most fully realized examples of the "play-as-novel," to use Peter Brooks's phrase (2): each case, a central situation is explored through a series of presented episodes "with no going behind, no telling about the figures save by their own appearance and action." (3) The Turn of the Screw belongs to this period, but my concern is less to examine its dramatic structure--an ambition that has been realized already by other critics (4)--than to draw attention to more elusive qualities of theatricality: to ideas of acting and role-play that produce, for reader as well as protagonist, a conflicted sense of what is "real"; to qualities of shadow and stillness that heighten anticipation and create a focus for action and speech that is shockingly compelling; to the way in which the theater auditorium itself--a space marked literally and figuratively with the traces of past performance--becomes a powerful and unsettling metaphor through which we can read the haunted scene of Bly.
This story achieves its effect as much by suggestion and the deliberate withholding of information as by direct revelation. Famously, James claimed his intention was to make the reader "think the evil, make him think it for himself." (5) The second part of my discussion considers how reception is altered when the tale comes ready equipped with "visuals": here, in the form of theatrical adaptation. I examine William Archibald's 1950 stage play The Innocents, a dramatization of The Turn of the Screw that later became the basis for Jack Clayton's better-known film. I argue that The Innocents is more than the "fairly straightforward dramatic reconstruction" Val Wilson terms it; (6) rather, Archibald's play undermines its own apparatus of realism, drawing on uniquely theatrical qualities to provoke a sense of profound disquiet in its spectators. My second example is more recent. Jeffrey Hatcher's The Turn of the Screw (first produced in 1996) aims to stay "true to the essence" of James's story and themes, yet rejects virtually all the resources conventionally used to make the stage world resemble a fictional one. (7) Thus, his adaptation looks elsewhere to forge connections with the original and to achieve its own dramatic power: into spaces and silences, in play of light and shade, and to the infinitely arresting, problematized presence of the actor himself, and herself. The distinctive characteristics of theatrical performance--its taut balance of spontaneity and repetition, presence and absence, its complex layerings of person, place, time, and narrative--hint at its special potency as art of the uncanny: Hatcher's text draws directly upon these, to achieve a peculiarly contemporary rearticulation of James's tale. (8)
I
To be read 200 years after your death is something, but to be acted is better. (9)
--Henry James
James's lifelong fascination with drama and the theater is well known. A persistent playgoer in America and later in Paris and London, he published a quantity of reviews and extended articles on the subject, and wrote several plays (only a few of which achieved professional production). Deeply attracted to the potential of the dramatic, he recoiled, at times, from the harsh realities of the commercial stage. The disastrous opening night of his play Guy Domville--an event that provides the starting point for Colm Toibin's recent novel The Master (10)--has been frequently cited as evidence of James's disenchantment with both the theatergoing public and the values of theater as an institution. (11) However, to reduce James's engagement with the art in this way is, as Christopher Greenwood explains, fundamentally "to misrepresent the complexity of his thinking." (12)
In an 1879 essay, James remarks upon an appetite for theater among the English that "almost reaches the proportions of a mania": "it pervades society--it breaks down barriers.... Plays and actors are perpetually talked about, private theatricals are incessant, and members of the dramatic profession are 'received' without restriction. They appear in society, and the people of society appear on the stage; it is as if the great gate which formerly divided the theatre from the world had been lifted off its hinges." (13) James did not condemn this phenomenon of mutual interfusion. On the contrary, he saw it as a kind of "democrat[ization]" likely to prove "better for the world"; his fear was that it might not be better for the arts. (14) In an earlier essay, he compared English spectators unfavorably with the French, viewing the former as "intellectually much less appreciative," less discriminating, than their Parisian counterparts. (15) James found London audiences frustratingly motivated by social rather than artistic necessity; the occasion of going seemingly mattered more to most than the drama itself. As for the latter, the more "continuity and simplicity" provided, the more favorably it appeared the play would be received. (16) James was equally impatient with the actor-managers, actors, and designers he considered too willing to submit to the laws of the marketplace. New plays struggled to achieve production on a late-nineteenth-century stage dominated by second-rate imports. The classics of English drama still found an audience, but here too he complained that emphasis on crowd-pleasing spectacle obscured any deeper meaning. Thus, Henry Irving's Romeo and Juliet at the Lyceum (1882) fell prey to "the danger of smothering a piece in its accessories." (17) Faust (1887), also produced by Irving, denied its audience a considered interpretation of the text, offering only mechanical artifice in its stead: "That blue vapours should attend on the steps of Mephistopheles is a very poor substitute for his giving us a moral shudder." (18)
But there was one playwright, James considered, who had begun to breathe new life into this stale theatrical climate. In 1891, he attended a London production of Ibsen's A Doll's House, having previously read other work by him in translation. Initially finding them dreary and mediocre, he gradually became convinced that the plays of the "northern Henry" brought a harsh beauty and power of ideas that exposed and cut through the superficial values that marred the English stage. (19) Ibsen's drama provoked precisely the "moral shudders" James found lacking in Faust, perhaps most directly with Ghosts--a work with intriguing parallels to The Turn of the Screw, as Michael Egan has discussed--but also with later plays such as Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck, and The Master Builder. (20) James watched Elizabeth Robins's and Marion Lea's production of Hedda Gabler at the Independent Theatre three times before publishing a lengthy article that established him as one of Ibsen's staunchest advocates. What James found to admire above all was Ibsen's "talent for producing an intensity of interest by means incorruptibly quiet." (21) This drama pointed the way to a revitalized realism, stripped of merely "life-like" detail, pared down to its very essence and touched by the symbolic: no wholehearted embrace of fin-de-siecle Symbolism, with that movement's love of the fantastic and excess, but an expression of "soul" voiced through the apparently mundane. It was a quality "difficult to catch as its presence is impossible to overlook," wrote James, and "the whole thing throbs and flushes with it." (22)
If James appreciated Ibsen's ability to create impact by means both "deep and delicate," (23) the same skills were noted by contemporary critics in The Turn of the Screw....
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