Henry James`s The Turn of the Screw: The Subject and the Ontological Status of the Real Gaze

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In The Turn of the Screw, the governess encounters with the apparitions that harrow her throughout the story: she sees a frightening male ghost that Mrs. Grose identifies as Peter Quint, deceased former valet of the children`s uncle, who had previously shared the charge of the children with the previous governess, Miss Jessel. The appearance of the ghosts hails the governess and thereby forces her to be jarred out of the comfortable habits of individuality and plunged into a negativity devoid of the socio-normative directives and guarantees. Such an encounter shows the idea that consciousness is a plenum of existence evocative of human mind as a decentered pandemonium. For the governess in The Turn of the Screw, the foundation to force her to experience the uncanny, as an inconsistency in the symbolic order, is particular. Its particularity is absolute in the same way every one of us dreams his or her world. It resists mediation and cannot be made part of a symbolic medium. Just as Lacan`s conceptions of desire, feminine sexuality, ``Object a,`` not-whole, slavery, mastery, self-deception, authenticity, and act of psychoanalysis help us understand our contradictory social reality, so does The Turn of the Screw help us make sense of the way the governess, as the being who is capable of raising the question of being, questions the idea of being. In conclusion, the particular way the governess dreams her world is evocative of an excessive being, an anatomical complement, and a particular experience, such as the governess`s encounter with the ghosts testifies to a knowledge that escapes the knowledge of the speaking being.