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Oct. 21st, 2013 12:05 amThe Turn of the Screw:
When and on whose journal were people talking about this? I remember not letting myself follow all that, but am dying to now.
My tentative reading just serves my preexisting biases:
That it's an attack on the sort of religion his brother was being so curiously respectful about around the same time.
The Master's like God, has put you in charge and fucked off. Since your say-so goes you find ways to align his likely will with your own, to be as much master yourself as you can while preserving your mandate as technical servant to an inaccessible superior. The sense of who it all actually belongs to haunts you, though - the ghosts are stand-ins for Miles' and Flora's parents, reminders that the governess is only a caretaker of someone else's garden. (This is religion's anxiety toward nature, the going concern, the thing it violates.) And once they go off to school they're no longer hers. But perhaps she can influence them to stay, to be what she would have them be. If she can't be parent she can be beloved teacher, a parent of souls.
But to do that she needs to think only she can protect them, come up with reasons why her desires would be the same as their needs. The supernatural is the answer - who's to say what was seen or not seen? Just promote imagination to inspiration, the one source of messages from the absent highest power - since it seems automatic you can disavow it's from mere you. Just let the backwash of worries you won't let yourself directly have count as blessed intuitions. The fascinaitng thing about the holy war she devises is its lack of explicit connection to any existing mythology - the evil she fights is entirely vague. Like any definition of evil divorced from harm, i.e. based to any extent whatever on disobedience to the primal authority or its interpreters. Though she hardly mentions God! Because He isn't the point - once a special knowledge can be beamed into your head you can know better than any and all facts, that's the point. Not the details of the source.
There's no way for Miles to prove to her he hasn't seen ghosts - she can work the ghostly influence up as the secret impulse behind anything he desires, rendering anything he says a pretext. Even if he'd detailed what had kicked him out of school she could have chosen to not believe him, to see that as symbol too - or even as truth, but a mischief performed because of what IT symbolized.
Permit the existence of the supernatural even a little and all nature is poisoned, becomes a sort of dead matter the will gets to push into any shape it pleases. Like in logic where letting yourself prove one falsehood proves all falsehoods.
All it takes is your own assumption you've been put in charge. The authority of any priest, any king, any parent or guardian.
(Or any explicator - no idea if any of that's right. But it's there in my head.)
When and on whose journal were people talking about this? I remember not letting myself follow all that, but am dying to now.
My tentative reading just serves my preexisting biases:
That it's an attack on the sort of religion his brother was being so curiously respectful about around the same time.
The Master's like God, has put you in charge and fucked off. Since your say-so goes you find ways to align his likely will with your own, to be as much master yourself as you can while preserving your mandate as technical servant to an inaccessible superior. The sense of who it all actually belongs to haunts you, though - the ghosts are stand-ins for Miles' and Flora's parents, reminders that the governess is only a caretaker of someone else's garden. (This is religion's anxiety toward nature, the going concern, the thing it violates.) And once they go off to school they're no longer hers. But perhaps she can influence them to stay, to be what she would have them be. If she can't be parent she can be beloved teacher, a parent of souls.
But to do that she needs to think only she can protect them, come up with reasons why her desires would be the same as their needs. The supernatural is the answer - who's to say what was seen or not seen? Just promote imagination to inspiration, the one source of messages from the absent highest power - since it seems automatic you can disavow it's from mere you. Just let the backwash of worries you won't let yourself directly have count as blessed intuitions. The fascinaitng thing about the holy war she devises is its lack of explicit connection to any existing mythology - the evil she fights is entirely vague. Like any definition of evil divorced from harm, i.e. based to any extent whatever on disobedience to the primal authority or its interpreters. Though she hardly mentions God! Because He isn't the point - once a special knowledge can be beamed into your head you can know better than any and all facts, that's the point. Not the details of the source.
There's no way for Miles to prove to her he hasn't seen ghosts - she can work the ghostly influence up as the secret impulse behind anything he desires, rendering anything he says a pretext. Even if he'd detailed what had kicked him out of school she could have chosen to not believe him, to see that as symbol too - or even as truth, but a mischief performed because of what IT symbolized.
Permit the existence of the supernatural even a little and all nature is poisoned, becomes a sort of dead matter the will gets to push into any shape it pleases. Like in logic where letting yourself prove one falsehood proves all falsehoods.
All it takes is your own assumption you've been put in charge. The authority of any priest, any king, any parent or guardian.
(Or any explicator - no idea if any of that's right. But it's there in my head.)
