Female Ignorance: The Fear of Knowledge in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw
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Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) represents the female voice from a very intimate and yet displaced perspective. The present article reads the governess’s battle against the ghosts at Bly as a quest for knowledge, and, ultimately, an attempt to break out of the straightjacket of appropriate female behavior as prescribed in the late nineteenth century. I link the philosophical model of “double consciousness” to the dynamic between ignorance and knowledge as theorized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet (1990), arguing that the dilemma of the governess is a rebellion against traditional gender roles, inasmuch as her character challenges the Victorian association of knowledge with men and ignorance with women. Structurally, the narrative of The Turn of the Screw is itself closeted by its own frame, as the voices of Douglas and the un-gendered narrator dominate that of the governess; it is in the frame narrative that the governess is established as a typically feminine character who is motivated by irrationality, which ultimately takes away from the impact of her voice, but cannot silence it.
Abstract
Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) represents the female voice from a very intimate and yet displaced perspective. The present article reads the governess’s battle against the ghosts at Bly as a quest for knowledge, and, ultimately, an attempt to break out of the straightjacket of appropriate female behavior as prescribed in the late nineteenth century. I link the philosophical model of “double consciousness” to the dynamic between ignorance and knowledge as theorized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet (1990), arguing that the dilemma of the governess is a rebellion against traditional gender roles, inasmuch as her character challenges the Victorian association of knowledge with men and ignorance with women. Structurally, the narrative of The Turn of the Screw is itself closeted by its own frame, as the voices of Douglas and the un-gendered narrator dominate that of the governess; it is in the frame narrative that the governess is established as a typically feminine character who is motivated by irrationality, which ultimately takes away from the impact of her voice, but cannot silence it.
참고문헌 (21)
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