Finals Week: The Ghosts Which Possess Us - An Essay on the film 'The Innocents'

By Amanda Reyes

In this newfound grey area of defined roles, or lack thereof, The Innocents delves into an exploration on dualism, showcasing both possible endings in one, because the reality of the ghosts and Miss Giddens’ apparent insanity do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Henry James’ late nineteenth century novella “The Turn of the Screw” and Jack Clayton’s early 1960s cinematic adaptation The Innocents denotes both the broadness and intimacy of intertextuality. The Innocents is at once a devoted adaptation of James’ shocking horror story about corruption and yet, at the same time it becomes its own beast of repressed sexuality. The challenges presented in adapting a novella lie deceptively in the page count - most novellas are the length of a film script (Desmond & Hawks 110). It would therefore appear rational that a script adapted from a novella could be rendered faithfully. However, an adaptation requires not just the story but also the discourse and the adapter must find the what of the narrative and understand the conventions of both texts (Desmond & Hawkes 39). A film version of “The Turn of the Screw” presents a rather challenging exercise in this respect because it can be read in many different ways. The film manages to follow suit and although The Innocents shares a spot with the best of the haunted house movies, such as The Haunting (1963) and The Changeling (1980), it remains virtually unclassifiable. Both texts present many ambiguities and they have manufactured a true mystery around Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) and her charges (Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin). It is probably intentional and certainly ironic that the film was shot in black and white, as nothing is ever outwardly stated to the audience, or rather nothing is ever black or white. Even to the most casual filmgoer it might be seen as one long double entendre meant to exasperate the more literal minded spectators. The Innocents is full of dual probabilities. Does Miss Giddens actually see ghosts or is she insane? Are the children innocent or corrupt? Even the garden statue represents both the beautiful and the ugly (thanks to a rather large insect). What could possibly be black and white in this?

Critic Anthony Mazzella explores these issues and most of his theories coincide with James’ notebooks where the author wrote:

The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children; the children are bad, full of evil, to a sinister degree. The servants die and their apparitions, figures, return to haunt the house and children, to whom they seem to beckon, whom they invite and solicit, from across dangerous places, the deep ditch of a sunk fence, etc. – so that the children may destroy themselves, lose themselves by responding, by getting into their power. So long as the children are kept from them, they are not lost: but they try and try and try, these evil presences, to get hold of them. (James 108)

According to Mazzella there are three possible interpretations (ghosts, hallucinations or conspiracy), and he explores the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose’s (Megs Jenkins) culpability in the film (i.e. conspiracy), possibly implicating her as the evil-doer in league with the spirits. He comments that Mrs. Grose’s “manner is superior” while “she is explaining away the unexplainable, her leading remarks that encourage the susceptible governess to act” (24). There is a critical scene in The Innocents were the governess intends to seek help but Mrs. Grose keeps the beleaguered Miss Giddens away from the outside world. Mazzella believes the housekeeper dissuades her by saying it would cause, “a scandal,” thus hindering exterior intervention (24 - 25). She intends to keep Miss Giddens isolated.

Mrs. Grose fills in the blanks for Miss Giddens where the ghosts’ back-story is concerned, often cutting off the background information just short of completing it, leaving the governess in rapt suspense. In one scene, Miss Giddens’ asks Mrs. Grose exactly what went on between Quint and Miss Jessel and the housekeeper replies, “Look Miss, they are dead and gone. There’s no point in telling tales in what’s over and done with” (Truman & Mortimer). Yet, Mrs. Grose cunningly reveals all a bit later when she concedes (while falling back into a couch, adding just a touch of melodrama) that although Miss Jessel was abused by Quint, she would beg for his attention and the couple sought out “rooms used by daylight as though they were dark woods” (Truman & Mortimer). She further intimates that the children may have seen the scandalous acts, complimenting James’ corrupted children theme.

The ghost theory is further confirmed when Miss Giddens forces Flora (Pamela Franklin) to confront the existence of the apparition of Miss Jessel who is watching them from across the lake (and who Flora denies seeing). When the relationship between the former employees was first revealed to the governess, Mrs. Grose says that the love Miss Jessel held for Quint “was more like a sickness, a fever that leaves the body burned out and dry” (Truman & Mortimer). It may not be a coincidence that Flora herself is struck so badly with a fever that it forces her to leave Bly, just as by Flora’s alleged revelation of the phantom, Miss Jessel is forced to flee the estate herself.

The director, Jack Clayton has said (and it was confirmed by his widow) that he believed deeply in ghosts and that he even saw “the ghost of Miss Jessel standing at the end of his garden when he was working on the film” (Sinyard 84). Mazzella argues that it proves the governess does not suffer hallucinations at the end when the film takes a change in its point of view and moves the camera above Miles and Miss Giddens, indicating that Quint may be watching the battle for Miles’ soul from above, allowing “at the penultimate moment, an objective shot beyond all debate. Quint is real” (28). The use of this objective shot of Quint and the final kiss leads the audience to wonder if “the spirit passed through Miles through the governess’ kiss and into her” (29).

When the original novella was written in the late 1898 and when the film was released in 1961, women served only two roles: that of spinster or wife. Critic Laurence Raw proposes that the film is not meant to represent the novella so much as it offered a commentary on the sad state of females in the then-contemporary world of cinema. Raw says, “The perfect woman was expected neither to think for herself, nor develop her imagination. Rather she existed as an object of male imagination” (5). However, the ghostly Miss Jessel encompassed both a lady and a wanton lover, confusing the defined role of the female place in society for the beleaguered Miss Giddens. Miss Jessel also exemplifies a disembodied sadness while Quint is the personification of raw sexuality. When the governess confronts Miss Jessel in the school room and finds the ghosts’ teardrop is quite real, the audience sees Miss Giddens is “momentarily identifying with Miss Jessel’s suffering” (Raw 6). Director Jack Clayton commented on this moment “as being very sad… The image sustains uncertainty, for it is evidence so evanescent as to be no evidence at all” (Sinyard 87). Perhaps it is those sets of either/or circumstances that contribute to Miss Giddens’ lack of self identity.

There are several scenes featuring the double exposure (or superimposition) technique. One of the most telling uses of this device occurs during the scene where Miss Giddens is sleeping restlessly. At the close of the imagery montage looming over the tossing and turning governess, she has determined that the children are possessed, as “Quint puts a possessive arm around Miles’ shoulder” (Raw 5). In contrast to Mazzella’s theory that Mrs. Grose was filling in the blanks, Raw suggests that Miss Giddens has filled them in herself. Her sexual repression and fear of a haunting contagion are further filled when Mrs. Grose speculates on the lovelorn relationship between Miss Jessel and Quint. Mazzella contemplates an idea that Mrs. Grose was tainting Miss Giddens with salacious thoughts, while Raw theorizes that although the governess appears outwardly shocked, she also shows that the “indecency may be in some perverse way attractive to her” (7).

There are more of these superimposition shots, and one takes place when the governess first sees Quint during a game of hide and seek. The image of her and Quint never interlace, although shortly after the incident, when she’s confronted by Mrs. Grose, the reflection in the window is an overlay of both women. Clayton uses this cinematic technique to twist the potential conspiracy and ghost theories with clever shots of Mrs. Grose superimposed over Miss Giddens. Could the ghosts be working in unison with Mrs. Grose to drive the poor governess insane, are they merely a phantasm or is Miss Giddens truly having an identity struggle? Could they be one and the same? And if so, would that give merit to her insanity or does it symbolically state that Mrs. Grose is her ghost as Quint and Jessel belong to the children, attesting further to the governess’ lack of identity.

Raw presents this notion of self-deficiency as representational of Hollywood’s idea of the spinster as “a pitiful creature, prone to vindictive or unnatural thoughts and deeds” (5). And when she confronts Miss Jessel in the schoolroom there is an idea that Miss Giddens “expression suggests that she momentarily identifies with Miss Jessel’s suffering: perhaps the ghost should be pitied rather than feared” (6). Does the governess see herself in the apparition whose only difference from Miss Giddens is held in the way she acted on her desires rather than choosing to repress them?

The last scene with Miles can be seen as the governess finally acting on her own bottled up sexual needs, which could indicate “whether Miss Giddens herself has become so attracted to Miles that she is prepared to forget her scruples and give into her sexual longings” (Raw 7).

Raw suggests that Miss Giddens certainly has many kinks but “confronts her sexual desires in an attempt to think beyond the limits of her position as a governess,” and this represents, “a step towards discovering her identity” (8 ). The critic further states that upon the film’s release women were beginning to re-imagine their role in society and they struggled with coming “to terms with the reality of their lives and the images to which they were expected to conform” (8 ). He concludes, “The Innocents communicates something of the dilemmas experienced by many women in the early 1960s as they sought to cope with rapidly changing attitudes towards sex and gender” (9).

Mazzella’s essay looks at all the options, but finds its strength when he’s implicating Mrs. Grose or working over his ghost theories, whereas Raw is content with the ambiguity and instead claims The Innocents represents the quandary of the modern female’s sense of self. Both authors are in agreement that the garden statue and its invasion by the insect is sexual symbolism. Mazzella offers that when the governess drops the scissors into the basin that it “establishes visually a conjoining of phallic and vaginal images” (22), while Raw suggests that the time frame between seeing the “spoiled cupid” and observing Quint in the tower suggests that “Quint has been associated with sexual desire in the governess’s mind” (7).

Readers of these essays will see how both Mazzella and Raw touch on several of the same key points, such as the dream sequence, the way Miss Giddens responds to hearing about Quint and Miss Jessel’s tawdry affair, the symbolism of the statue and of course, the kiss at the end of the film. Director Clayton once described his film as though it were, “a fly caught in a spider’s web” (Sinyard 107) and in a sense his film does seem to ensnare its viewer in a similar weaving. The Innocents walks the line between ghostly apparitions, madness and, as we’ve read, the repression of females who lack a realistic role in society, showcasing just how truly ambiguous the texts are. Although the popular Post-Freudian reading suggests that the original novella is filled with latent sexuality, it is unlikely that James had envisioned his story in quite the same terms as those who prescribe to Edmund Wilson’s highly influential essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James”, which was written in 1934 (and consequentially revised several times) (Raw 3).

It is also doubtful that James (and perhaps even Wilson) would have suspected that the ambiguous novella would have spurned not just The Innocents but also a play and an opera, not to mention the countless other cinematic adaptations and literary references. In fact, the film also inspired Kate Bush’s disturbing song “The Infant Kiss,” as well as inspiring a prequel to The Innocents(!) starring Marlon Brando. In The Nightcomers, Brando portrays Quint with Stephanie Beacham taking on the role of Miss Jessel and they explore the couple’s sadomasochist affair. The original story has been able to transcend its own time period to immerse itself in modern culture through various forms in media. It not only baffles readers/filmgoers as it explores ghosts both inside and outside of us, but in this newfound grey area of defined roles, or lack thereof, The Innocents delves into an exploration on dualism, showcasing both possible endings in one, because the reality of the ghosts and Miss Giddens’ apparent insanity do not have to be mutually exclusive. In other words, both Mazzella and Raw are correct because the movie has the ability to conform to what is inside of us. And that is a conclusion I believe would please the creators of both texts.

Works Cited

Desmond, John M. and Peter Hawkes. Adaptation: Studying Film & Literature. New YorkMcGraw Hill Companies, Inc. 2006. Print.

Krook, Dorthea. The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James. London: Cambridge University Press. 1967. Print.

Mazzella, Anthony J. “The Story… Held Us: The Turn of the Screw from Henry James to Jack Clayton.” Henry James Goes to the Movies. 2002: 11 – 33.

Raw, Lawrence. “Hollywoodizing Henry James: Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961).” The Henry James Review. 2004: 97 – 109.

Sinyard, Neil. Jack Clayton. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2001. Print.

The Innocents. Jack Clayton. 1961. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2005. DVD.