AMBIGUITY, LITERATURE AND LIFE

The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire is among the last of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

            A British widower has remarried, this time a Peruvian woman.  He has a fifteen-year old son – crippled with a spinal problem – from the first marriage, and a new son from the second.

            He has no reason to see the new wife as anything other than a devoted mother until he discovers her bending over the cot and sucking blood from the baby’s neck.  She has also attacked her step-son.  At his wit’s end, the husband confines the wife to her room, and consults Holmes.

            At the scene of the mystery, Holmes notes three things:  a lame dog, a display of South-American weapons, and the crippled son’s adoration for his father.

            Putting these clues together, Holmes quickly finds the solution.  Furiously jealous of the baby, the boy has attempted to kill him with a poisoned dart, after first experimenting on the dog.  Realising the situation, the wife has sucked out the poison, but has not wanted to tell her husband about the problem, knowing his love for his son.

            The way in which the wife is perceived in the story thus passes through three phases: from loving mother to child abuser and back to faithful protectress.   Things are not quite back to what they were at the start, however, since there is still the problem of what to do about the older boy. 

 

This progress in perception echoes the real-life progress of how the Governess in James’ The Turn of the Screw has been perceived.

            Initially she was taken at face value by readers as protecting the children against the ghosts of depraved servants.  (That is to say – since this is a ghost story – readers could accept that there are ghosts in the story, whether or not there are ghosts in real life).

            Edmund Wilson changed all that with his essay ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’.  Applying a Freudian reading to the text, the Governess became an unreliable narrator and a victim of sexual frustration, As such, the children needed protection not from ghosts, but from her; the ghosts, in any case, being a symptom of her own neurosis.  Apart from the reduction of morality to psychology, you now couldn’t have ghosts even in a ghost story. And the Governess had regressed from brave defender to child abuser.

            Not all readers agreed.  Leading the counterblast was Robert Heilman’s 1948 essay ‘The Turn of the Screw as Poem’.  This revived the reality of the ghosts within the story, and also pointed out the religious imagery used by James and ignored by Wilson.  Clearly, with the intensity of the debate, we have moved here beyond the realms of literary criticism into something deeper.  What is at stake is not just rival ways of reading a text, but rival world views with which to read reality. 

            Post Wilson and Heilman, where are we?  Is the Governess exonerated?  Well, yes and no. As with The Sussex Vampire, Situation Three is not the same as Situation One.  And here the problem of authorial intention really manifests itself.  Conan Doyle provides a way out, and Henry James doesn’t. 

            The Sussex Vampire, of course, is a much lesser work in every way than The Turn of the Screw.  Some equivalent of Holmes’ simple remedy – “A year at sea for Master Jacky” – would be quite out of place in the complexity of James’ narrative.

For Wilson is quite right, the text is fraught with ambiguity.  Heilman is also quite right: the text is suffused with religious imagery.  Thus we cannot say that the Governess is neurotic; only that she might be.  Equally, we cannot say that the Governess is protective; only that she might be.   Is Miles killed by the Governess, or by the ghost of Peter Quint?  When Miles says, ‘“Peter Quint – you devil!”’ who is he talking to: ghost or governess?

We cannot know because James has withheld that possibility from us by the nature of his narrative choices, and here we have another clash of world views: in this case, not between the two critics but between the two authors about how much direction to give to the reader[1].   

 

When it comes to it, the best comparison to The Turn of the Screw is not The Sussex Vampire at all.  Rather, it is one of those ingenious pictures that change even as you look at them.    A vase, or two faces?   An old woman, or a young one?  Either.  Both.

            Take your pick.

 

 

Why use ambiguity at all?  Five reasons, I think.

One, inadvertency/incompetence.   Because you cannot express your intended meaning clearly.  Prior to Derrida and deconstruction, that was the French explanation.

Two, code.  In Revelation, for example, ‘Babylon’ partly stands for ‘Rome’.  Why not just say ‘Rome’?  Do so, and the work would be banned, and you would be put to death.  But this is not ambiguity as such; it’s just survival.  If you have the code, the intended meaning is clear enough. 

Three, cowardice.  Because to say what you really think might make you unpopular; so you hide behind double meanings.

Four, uncertainty.  Because you really don’t know what you believe.  You are asserting the mystery of life.  This seems to me a perfectly responsible intellectual stance to take; provided no one is looking for guidance from you as an intellectual in sorting out life’s confusions.

Five, intellectual stimulation.  You are catering to the sort of mind that enjoys cryptic crosswords.  The difference is, after a cryptic crossword has teased your mind for a while, you can get a result.  With the likes of Henry James, you can’t.

 

However excellent ambiguity may be for those with time on their hands, in real life it can be a disaster. .

            “Charge at that hill!”

            “Right men! Charge at that hill!”

            Where the hell’s he going?     

    “No, you fool!  Not that hill.  That hill!”

            Too late.

            Result: all the dead men and horses of The Light Brigade. 

 

That’s why, if I were forced to choose, I would go with Doyle’s approach rather than with James’.   When the chips are down, the concerns of real life are rather more pressing than the concerns of art.

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[1]  Conan Doyle even tells us about the recovery of the dog.