Jim and I just returned from Santa Fe where we attended the opera. We saw three great operas in great productions: Die Walkure, Le Nozze di Figaro, and Benjamin Britten’s opera from 1954 based on Henry James’ novella from 1898, The Turn of the Screw. We also saw Puccini’s La Boheme, which disappointed me. I had seen it once before, In Vienna, at the State Opera House in 1993 and remembered it as a very enjoyable evening. But seeing it again, I realize it’s not a great opera, although it’s much beloved. The music is lovely but not special. The story is very slight and in this production the singing was only middling.

But I loved The Turn of the Screw, as I had before when I saw it many years ago in a production of the LA Opera. Seeing Britten’s interpretation of this famously ambiguous story (libretto by Myfanwy Piper) made me want to re-read James’ original and see if I had a different take on what was really going on.

Both the novella and the opera begin with a Prologue. In Santa Fe the prologue was sung by the same performer who sang the Peter Quint role, which somewhat confused things as the two characters are entirely distinct. The novella begins with a group of friends sharing ghost stories at a country house over the Christmas holidays. One man, Douglas, has a copy of a manuscript, written by a woman, that was given to him when she died twenty years earlier, telling the story of an earlier experience .

He explains, when one of the group surmises that she had been a lover of his:

“She was a most charming person, but she was ten years older than I. She was my sister’s governess,” he quietly said. “She was the most agreeable woman I’ve ever known in her position; she would have been worthy of any whatever. It was long ago, and this episode was long before. I was at Trinity, and I found her at home on my coming down the second summer. I was much there that year–it was a beautiful one; and we had, in her off-hours, some strolls and talks in the garden–talks in which she struck me as awfully clever and nice. Oh yes; don’t grin: I liked her extremely and am glad to this day to think she liked me, too.”

I quote that paragraph because the rest of the novella consists of the man reading the manuscript to his friends over the next several nights, which is to say, the rest of the novel is entirely in the voice of the woman, and thus we have no other objective report of her character. And her character, whether she’s “charming” and “clever” and “nice” and most of all believable, very much colors what we think of the events she relates. We’re told, still by Douglas, that she was “the youngest of several daughters of a poor country parson,” who, at age twenty had answered an advertisement from a gentleman in London looking for a governess to care for two children living at his home in Essex. These were the children of his younger brother and wife who had died in India. He had no interest in children in his own life so one of the requirements of the job is that the governess agree not to bother him, indeed, not to contact him at all. That the governess (she is never named) is young, and charmed by the handsome gentleman and determined to please him is essential background for the story.

So the manuscript begins with the governess traveling to the country house. There is a small staff, but the only person named who appears as a character in the story is the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. (No Mr. Grose ever appears.) The governess and the simple, illiterate, Mrs. Grose quickly make friends. The governess loves the young girl she is to care for: Flora, aged eight. The other child, a boy, Miles, aged ten, arrives a few days later, home from school for the summer holidays. It’s June. Miles is equally well-mannered and intelligent. But soon after he arrives, a letter from school arrives informing the governess that the school will not allow Miles to return after holiday for some unspecified misbehavior. The governess doesn’t ask the school for details, nor asks Miles about it, and decides not to notify the children’s uncle, either.

She begins her duties. She learns that the previous governess, Miss Jessel, also “young and pretty” like herself, had left the house and then died. And then, out walking alone one afternoon, she sees a man standing on the parapet of one of the towers of the house. She confirms over the next few days that it isn’t any man of the staff and concludes that it was an intruder, but says nothing. Then, on a Sunday afternoon when the group are about to walk to the church for an evening service she sees the man again, peering in at her through a window. She runs outside to confront him but he has disappeared. This time she tells Mrs. Grose and from her description Mrs. Grose recognizes him. It’s Peter Quint, the valet that the uncle had brought up to the house with him when he visited some time ago and who had been left to run things. Mrs. Grose hadn’t liked him, accusing him of being “free” with the children and the former governess, Miss Jessel. It’s implied that Quint had gotten the governess pregnant and she died giving birth. But if the governess has seen Quint, she saw a ghost, because Peter Quint is also dead: died months earlier when he slipped and fell on an ice-covered road walking home drunk one evening.

Soon the governess sees Miss Jessel as well. The governess is sitting by a small lake on the property doing needlework while Flora plays nearby, when she sees Miss Jessel staring at them from the opposite side of the lake. The governess is sure Flora sees her, too, but Flora doesn’t speak of it. The governess begins to be certain that Quint and Miss Jessel want something from the children, and when the children say nothing about it she suspects that they are deliberately hiding something from her.

The ghosts continue to appear, but only to the governess: Quint on the staircase, then Miss Jessel on the staircase. Summer fades into Autumn. Miles stages a scene where he steals outside in the middle of the night wanting the governess to discover him so that he can demonstrate his independence. The governess becomes increasingly paranoid about the intentions of the ghosts and suspicious of Miles and Flora. Finally Miles asks her when he will be returning to school and the governess realizes that she can no longer care from him, that the maturing boy needs, and is asking for, peers and a male role model and proper schooling. Miss Jessel appears again, sitting at the governess’ writing desk. The governess writes to the children’s uncle. Then, while Miles and the governess are in the house while the boy plays the piano, Flora goes missing. The governess and Mrs. Grose run to find her and discover her by the lake. Miss Jessel appears again, but neither Mrs. Grose nor Flora see her despite the governess pointing. Now Flora, too, frightened by the governess’ behavior, wants nothing more to do with her. Mrs. Grose takes Flora away from the house leaving the governess and Miles alone (save for the other servants). They have a final scene over lunch in the dining room where Miles confesses the mild misbehavior at the school that got him expelled (he used some bad language speaking playfully to his friends, who repeated the language until it got relayed to the Masters). Quint appears again in the window. The governess believes that Miles’ honesty has at last vanquished the malevolent presence, but as she hugs the boy to her, she realizes that his heart has stopped. The boy is dead.

The ending is weak. There is no cause, either physical or thematic, for Miles to die. It comes across as an unnecessary attempt to provide a shock. Nor does the story come across as ambiguous as readers have made it out to be. The ghosts only appear to the governess. The motivations she assigns to the ghosts of harming the children is entirely her invention. Mrs. Grose is willing to believe the governess and encourages her negative judgements of Quint and Miss Jessel but Mrs. Grose is presented as unsophisticated and gullible. The governess is young, away from home for the first time, placed in a position of responsibility, working for a man she wishes to please but who offers no support. No wonder she would be anxious. And when a precocious ten-year old boy begins to assert his incipient manhood, she is at a loss. There’s no further psychologizing, or spiritualizing, required.

But what might be all in her head in the novel (and clearly is, to me) has to be put on the stage in the opera. Both Peter Quint and Miss Jessel appear, at least to the audience, if not to the other characters. Although a director might have them separated from the others, or costumed or lit in some isolating way, it isn’t enough to have them simply walk around and peer through set windows, in an opera they have to sing. So the libretto gives the two singers lines to sing, though they never speak in the novella. This makes them much more threatening, and creepy, but also makes them more real than I believe Henry James ever intended.

A specific difference between the opera and the novella caught my attention in Santa Fe. Early in the opera, as the governess is traveling to the country estate to begin her work, she seems to indicate that she has children of her own. As she imagines meeting the children she will soon be meeting, she sings:

The children … the children.
Will they be clever?
Will they like me?
Poor babies, no father, no mother.
But I shall love them as I love my own,
All my dear ones left at home,

I hadn’t remembered from my earlier reading of the novel that the governess was a mother so as I re-read I paid attention. And I was correct. There is no mention in the novel that the governess is a mother, indeed, it would be very strange if she was, and would be hard to square with the rest of her character. My conclusion is that the libretto language is simply awkward and what the governess actually means is something like, “But I shall love them as I would love my own (if I had children) and that her “dear ones left at home” are her dear parents and sisters not dear children, which she doesn’t have.

I’ve read quite a lot of Henry James in the last few years. The Turn of the Screw (1898) comes at the end of his “second period.” He had already written his novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and the two shorter pieces Daisy Miller (1878) and The Aspern Papers (1888). The three great final novels, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904) are still to come. I had read The Turn of the Screw many years ago. It was fun to revisit this famous story, both on the opera stage in Santa Fe, and in the original novella.