Identity and Boundary -- Inter-textual, Interpersonal and Psychological

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Identity and Boundary --Inter-textual,
Interpersonal and Psychological

• The Turn of the Screw
• By Joyce Carol Oates

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Your Interpretation First!!!

• How do you read the story with two columns?
• Who are the two narrators? Where do you get the
  clues? How are these two stories connected?
• How is the first narrator related to his uncle, a
  young girl and old men?
• What can the story mean?

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Outline

• Jigsaw puzzle pieced together
• Factual Details
• Clues of cross-linking
• Interpersonal level
• Patricks desire
• The Writers desire
• Intersections and incommunicability
• Textual level
• Joyce Carol Oates the Modern Masters
• Intertextuality as Boundary-Crossing
• References

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Factual Details

• Names
• The young man Patrick Quarles (401, 407), from
  US (young American 397, his father in Boston
  400), about to be 30.
• An old man, idle for 1.5 months
• Place
• Bournemouth (???? p. 404 ) in the south coast of
  England
• Time
• Queen Victoria's Jubilee
• (???? 1887) 399

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Clues for the Connections

• Between the two columns
• 397 the old man bumped into a young man with
  an old man sees the young girl beckons Patricks
• P. 398 the girl screams must have seen me.

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Patrick and the old men (Uncle Wallace, Father
and the writer)

• Takes care of the uncle imagines his death
  (396) the latters son and heir (400, 404)
• Father behind him 400
• P. 401 the two old men talking
• Desire to run away
• P. 402 cannot shake them has to run away.
• p. 404 suffocated, but still afraid that uncle
  will get angry.

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Patricks Desire

• For the death of the uncle (money) and for
  freedom
• Sexually stimulated
• For a girl (397), whose eyes gleaming ? sensually
  excited (my blood drowned her out pp. 397, 98)
  ? thicket ? she scared away
• For a young woman and her mother p. 406
• ? somebody watching 399

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The Writers Desire

• In a dowdy room, surrounded by dust of sorrow
  idle.
• The young man 397 something heraldic about him,
  a figure for art.
• Confused his own face with that of the young man.
  398.
• Patricks face 400 imagines what its like to be
  his father.
• Approaches the old gentleman 401
• Write letters (next page)
• Approaches the chambermaid ? to go to his room
  pp. 404-06

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Letter

• 1st one (403) sees him as innocent and noble,
  asks him to be free.
• ? torn
• Caution 405
• 3 letters (406)
• 1st -- wish you well
• 2nd -- see a terrible need fear for you ask to
  accept gifts of words and prophecies.
• ? a secret Self 407
• 3rd You are free of history be cautious I
  reach out for, let go of and abandon you
• ? ghosts thought of killing the uncle or
  letting him die.

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Patrick vs. the Writer Intersections
incommunicability

• 401-402 Sees the Writer as only an old man
• His heir 404
• 405 Letter torn but remembering the word
  Caution ? hell (his uncles death)

• 401 sees him as a man marked by strange destiny.
  
• 402 Sees ahead to his future and backward to
  their family graveyard
• 403 disinherited son
• 404 feverish approaches further

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Patrick vs. the Writer Intersections
incommunicability

• 406 3 letters ? dark demanding hand
• 407 Who is watching? Yes, I accept.
• 409caution--Will kill or outlive the old men

• Thinks of nothing but him.
• 407 Sees him reading the letters
• 407 he seems to bless me.
• 409 He has understood my love, my message only
  he is with me

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Textual level foregrounding one aspect of the
original texts

• The Turn of the Screw
• Frustrated Anglo-Saxon spinsters ? frustrated
  American celibates
• the governess pressured by ghosts (putting the
  screw on her) ? the old man turns the screw on
  the young the old writers life turned over
  and over like a paperweight.
• ? the two characters --driven by their own
  desires
• Death in Venice Henry James own life
• An old mans homoerotic desire aestheticism
• James a lonely writer, unmarried, haunted by the
  past history of his family (cases of nervous
  breakdown).

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Textual level foregrounding one aspect of the
original texts

• The Turn of the Screw
• psychological drama
• Death in Venice Henry James own life
• Frustration of an artist

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Joyce Carol Oates and the Modern Master

• The Turn of the Screw from Marriages and
  Infidelities (which also has revisions of The
  Dead and Kafkas Metamorphosis)
• The symbolism of Marriages and Infidelities . .
  .is the marriage of the writer of male
  consciousness with the writer of female
  consciousness. (Loeb 17)
• Different from the male-centered metafictionists
  such as John Barth and Robert Coover, she is not
  anxious about the influences of the modern
  masters, nor feels exhausted.

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Joyce Carol Oates and the Modern Master (2)

• Re. Virginia Woolf and Henry James Not only do
  they see their characters as spirits without
  personal bodies they inhabit time and space in a
  ghostly manner, . . .To Oates these two writers
  suggest that man gains an identity or lives his
  life only through the relationship with others.
  ? reality is a subjective phenomenon. (Loeb
  166)
• Her creativity two columns the speaking tone
  (with exclamation, dashes, dots, etc.)

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Intertextuality as Boundary-Crossing

• Intertextuality in different senses
• Influence
• Parody and Revision (edited, transformed, and
  even distorted)
• All the texts and humans are in network of
  textuality (with criss-crossing intersections,
  parallel, contradictions and influences)
• Intertextuality means boundary-crossing and
  disrespectfully traversing terrains of genre,
  time period, authors, subjects, art forms and
  nations.
• Oatesian intertextuality titular, generic and
  biographical. (Ref. Loeb)
• ? Still revealing our psychological boundaries.

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References

• Loeb, Monica Literary marriages a study of
  intertextuality in a series of short stories by
  Joyce Carol Oates / Monica Loeb Bern Oxford
  Peter Lang, 2002.