A Jealous Ghost

I'm teaching The Turn of the Screw again this semester, so I thought that it was time to read the two parallel novels based on it.  The more recent of the two, A. N. Wilson's A Jealous Ghost (2005), turned out to be a deeply unsatisfying reading experience--and so, taking my usual advice to my students, I decided to ask myself why.  My answer, oddly enough, is that A Jealous Ghost achieves exactly what it wants to accomplish: it attacks the very idea of the parallel novel.

Everything about A Jealous Ghost deliberately up-ends the most notable elements of James' novella.  The Turn of the Screw's prologue establishes, in traditional Gothic fashion, the "provenance" of the governess' tale; A Jealous Ghost uses no such device.  The Turn of the Screw's first-person narrator is notoriously unreliable; A Jealous Ghost has a third-person limited narrator channeled through the stand-in for the governess, Sallie Declan.  The Turn of the Screw makes it impossible to determine whether the governess is hallucinating the ghosts, or actually experiences a real haunting; A Jealous Ghost ruthlessly crushes even the teeniest hint of ambiguity with steel-toed boots, whether the question is the existence of ghosts (none) or Sallie's state of mind (she's insane).  The Turn of the Screw's narrator entertains the most delicate of romantic fantasies about her employer, casting herself as the heroine in a romantic plot that bears some resemblance to Jane Eyre; A Jealous Ghost's Sallie is so sure that her employer wants to marry her that she sleeps in his bed, quite sure that she has entered "right into the middle of Turn!!!" (76)  A Turn of the Screw's readers have frequently speculated about the dangerous erotic tensions associated with Peter Quint and Miss Jessel;  A Jealous Ghost's Sallie is so repulsed by the very idea of the erotic that she fantasizes that her employer will "limit himself to just holding, stroking, kissing, but not trying what that New Zealand creep Hugh had suggested to her!" (144)  And so forth.  Under the circumstances, the murder that ends A Jealous Ghost (in flashback, actually) will surprise no one.

For lack of a better term, Wilson flattens The Turn of the Screw.  Nothing that made and makes the original successful is allowed to remain in his own tale.  In the process, Wilson takes the central conceit of one type of parallel novel, in which characters and their lives rework another author's narrative (e.g., Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres), and turns it into a deformation of the original text.  Sallie Declan, who is writing her doctoral dissertation on A Turn of the Screw, not only jettisons authorial intent (the "biographical trivia" about the novel's origins are "quite irrelevant" [53]), but also abbreviates the title to Turn as a means of "renaming" the novel herself (54).  Sallie's poststructuralist allegiances, which lead her to insist on "the irrelevance of applying truth criteria to narratives, whether metanarratives such as Darwinian science or Marxist political theory, or smaller ones, like a woman saying she'd seen ghosts" (53), lie behind her willingness to read the minor coincidences between her life and the The Turn of the Screw as, in fact, outright repetitions of it.  Her unspecified mental illness--represented stereotypically and unsympathetically--is just one more manifestation of poststructuralist theory.  Besides her mind-boggling misreading of her employer's intentions, which prompts her to impose The Turn of the Screw onto her own experiences, she repeatedly dwells on and attempts to erase the story of Jakie Kenner, the young boy whom she violently assaulted.  She does the same thing with her equally violent attack on a fellow student, Kimberley.  Both cases, she thinks, are "closed" (109), even though they haunt her mind and obviously foreshadow the novel's conclusion.  Later, after Sallie  believes that she has seen the ghost of Charles' wife, she decides that it's important to take authorial intent seriously after all--but for the self-justifying reason that "James evidently did not believe that it was a sign of insanity to have experienced the paranormal "(138).  Indeed, this leads her to the rather alarming conclusion that "the benign old hand of Henry James her compatriot" (139) has brought her to the estate in order to be its "exorcist" (139).  (At which point, I idly wondered if Sallie had a penchant for horror movies.)

To recap, all of A Jealous Ghost's revisions of A Turn of the Screw lead, no doubt ironically, to Sallie's observation that "if you failed to tell the story right, it would seem merely absurd" (138).  The parallels to the earlier novel are almost entirely a function of Sallie's madness.  And Sallie's madness turns out to be lived poststructuralist theory.  In a sense, A Jealous Ghost is a parallel novel that deliberately sets out to fail as a parallel novel--on the grounds that, perhaps, parallel novels can do nothing else but fail to live up to the originals.