INCEST WE TRUST PART 5

Given that Sigmund Freud regarded his Oedipus complex as the foundation of human psychological development, it’s surprising that Gershon Legman and Frederic Wertham, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of pop-Freudianism, said so little about matters Oedipal in their anti-comics screeds. They say a great deal about other perversions that are either caused or abetted by the incessant titillations offered by comic books and similarly unscrupulous media. But aside from Wertham mentioning one case where an oversexed boy wanted a look at his sister, the fear of encouraging incest is nowhere in the same ballpark as the fear of encouraging homosexuality.

Of course the Oedipus complex figures indirectly into their etiology of transgressions, derived, not without modifications, from Freud. As illustration, I'll repeat my earlier Freud-quote:

It sounds not only disagreeable but also paradoxical, yet it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister.-- Sigmund Freud, "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love."

According to Freud, if an individual did not follow the path of “normal” development, that of sublimating the early libinal feelings for the mother or father so as to allow for healthy relationships, that individual was more likely to stray into the realm of polymorphous perversity. However, as I noted here, Bataille demonstrates that Freud’s concept of “normal sex” was no less fraught with transgression than any paraphilia or perversion. The most that one can say of what Freud considers “normative” is that one can call it (as I do) “cooperative transgression,” which is sex which in theory takes place with the full cooperation of the participants and the full approval of their society. Any other form of sexuality that incorporated an aspect of conflict-- being either against the will of a participant or against some edict of society-- would then be best termed “competitive transgression.”

Of course Freud himself was a past master at asserting that even when one seemed to be obeying society’s edicts, one could be subconsciously transgressing them, if only figuratively. A man could marry a woman, have a consenting relationship of which society would approve-- and yet, if the woman was in some way “a girl just like the girl who married dear old dad,” then he would have figuratively transgressed society’s laws against sleeping with his mother by finding a mother-surrogate. Indeed, Freud’s entire ideal of sublimation would seem to be tied up with this sort of figurative transgression. It certainly never seems to occur to Legman or Wertham that the fantasies experienced by young comics-readers might amount to another form of figurative transgression.

For my purpose it doesn’t matter whether or not most modern psychologists dominantly recognize the Oedipus complex as valid. Within the sphere of literature, any storytelling trope that has expressive significance to humankind is, phenomenologically speaking, “real.” This is why the “four functions” that Joseph Campbell applies to mythology have so much potential for pluralist literary studies. Campbell's approach allows not only for the psychological and the sociological aspects of humankind, which I find to be the two modes on which most literary analyses draw. Campbell's formula also allows one to interpret aspects of the “cosmological” (the nature of physical reality) and the “metaphysical,” (the nature of reality beyond the physical). And just as myth-criticism doesn't judge a myth as "wrong" because it's built upon a cosmological or metaphysical conceit that moderns don't recognize, the same holds true for literary studies. Thus the Oedipus complex, whether "real" or not in the psychological sense, becomes real in the literary continuum by virtue of its expressive power. But of course, in contrast to Freud's exaggerated claims for his complex's universality, Oedipus shares his reality with Jung's Mercurius and any number of other formulas.

Following the popularization of Freud, many literary works went out of their way to consciously reference Freud. Sometimes the authors were trying to seem trendy; sometimes they may've felt some personal resonance with the Oedipal concept. Yet the most interesting instances to me are those that resonate with Oedipal concerns even where the author would seem to have no familiarity with Freud, except perhaps in the most simplified form. A Freudian would consider such subconscious resonance to be a validation of the universality of Oedipus. I would say, rather, that it merely indicates that Artist A may have thought-processes in some way comparable to those of Sigmund Freud, while Artist B’s may be more comparable to those of Jung, and so on.

But whenever one does find an apparent agreement with Freud’s complex, one needs to prove it much more rigorously than he and most of his disciples did. Stan Lee relates a story in his biography about a psychological pundit-- possibly Gershon Legman-- who claimed that a funny-animal comics-cover featuring a long-necked giraffe was actually a display of a disguised phallus. How does one avoid creating another Legman giraffe?

The only possible course is to establish a chain of probable symbolic associations from a close reading of the text, rather than simply trying to fit every work to fit an overriding model.

For instance, a poor example of an associational chain is to be found in Michael Fleischer’s BATMAN ENCYCLOPEDIA, where he reads Batman’s relationship with Catwoman in Oedipal terms, though possibly with more debt to Melanie Klein than Freud: “Bad women, like the Catwoman, represent [to Bruce Wayne] the wicked, irresponsible, unloving mother who, by dying, ‘deserted’ him in childhood when he needed her most” (p. 106) This reading might be minimally feasible if the backstory of Bruce Wayne were only about his mother’s dying, but it fails given that he loses both mother and father in the same catastrophe. By this logic, one would have to assume that the Joker and all Batman's other male villains were all stand-ins for the late father. But even without invoking Thomas Wayne, a solid chain of associations should at very least demonstrate some textual similarity between the mother and the mother-surrogate. In early Batman stories Martha Wayne is litle more than a visual signifier that means “mother,” so her character is too marginal to bear any textual similarity to the more complex figure of the Catwoman. Fleischer’s argument depends upon the notion that every relationship that suggests “forbidden fruit”-- in this case, one between a criminal and a law-enforcer-- must automatically connote the Oedipus complex in operation. But his chain breaks easily under the least testing.

A sturdier chain can be found in SUPERMAN, though again, the precise tone resembles Freud less than yet another psychoanalyst: this time Carl Jung. Roughly a year after both Superman and his girlfriend Lois Lane debuted in ACTION COMICS #1, authors Siegel and Shuster took the very minimal origins ascribed to Superman in the comic books and expanded it into a cosmic soap opera for the first set of daily SUPERMAN comic strips. The details of the origin are as well known as Batman’s, but to my knowledge only a few fans have remarked upon an Oedipal trope in the former story.

One visual joke of the comic-strip sequence is that Superman’s parents, Jor-L and Lora, are dead-on ringers for Superman and Lois Lane, respectively. Some fans have argued that Joe Shuster was simply drawing a standard female type, but limited though his skills were, Shuster was certainly capable of having drawn Superman’s mother to look like someone other than Lois Lane, had he wished to.

In terms of tone, this is less Freudian than Jungian incest. Jor-L and Lora are “heavenly” echoes of the couple that Superman and Lois will become, however long the latter relationship may be deferred. (Critics who make windy arguments about the perpetual childhood of the superhero should remember that in 1940 Jerry Siegel attempted to set the stage for a more mature Superman-Lois relationship, but was overruled by his editors.) But even though the visual resemblance of Lois and Lora is probably just a visual joke, the resemblance of their names may carry a little more psychological heft. Critics may never be sure exactly why Jerry Siegel used the name “Lora” for Superman’s mother, in contrast to the name of the father Jor-L, whose name is certainly derived from JERry SiegEL. But as we don't know of a particular "Laura" who influenced Siegel in these years-- at least I find none in Jones' MEN OF TOMORROW-- it’s possible that consciously or subconsciously Siegel modeled the mother’s name on the girlfriend’s. Not only does “Lora” have the same number of letters/syllables as “Lois,” one finds an interesting congruence given that the first two letters of Lois Lane's first and last names come out to LO and LA. And if one makes a metathetic substitution of the letter ‘R’ for the second ‘L,’ one sees that the name of the prospective wife symbolically embodies that of the mother.

Further, it’s arguable that Jerry Siegel did find the verbal joke worth telling again. In ACTION #2, still months before the 1939 strip debuted, Lois Lane is framed by a spy named “Lola Cortez,” whose cognomen is patently derived from the real-life adventuress Lola Montes.

Years later, Siegel would introduce in 1959 one of Lois Lane’s earliest romantic competitors, mermaid Lori Lemaris, whose name strongly resembles the original name of the Kryptonian mama, though by that time she had been re-dubbed “Lara” by someone other than Siegel. And then in 1960 Siegel took his hero back to “Mother Krypton” herself. There he not only becomes friends with his parents in their youth, but also meets another beauty with a name just like the name of the girl who married dear old dad: “Lyla Lerrol,” which name seems determined to pun --probably unconsciously-- on both the “Lola” and “Lora/Lara” constructions. Within the narrative Superman’s own mother even contrives to make sure that he ends up dating the sweet young thing with the soundalike name.

I’ve argued before that there are deeper sexual symbolisms in the earliest SUPERMAN stories, and the same is even more true of the Silver Age tales. What’s interesting is that even though on these surface these stories stress the most innocent-seeming form of sexuality possible for an audience of eight-to-ten-year-olds, that sexuality still incorporates aspects of the transgressive, in keeping with Bataille’s notion that all sex is a transgression of some sort. Nevertheless, a responsible critic won’t just force everything to fit on the Procrustean beds of the Oedipus complex or queer theory or what have you. The conflict between law and crime in Batman-Catwoman tales may be transgressive enough without bringing in Freud in that particular manifestation, and it may be that one can still find elements of “cooperative transgression” even in the blandest Superman-Lois encounter, whether the name of the Kryptonian uber-mama is invoked or not.

SHE-WHO-MUST-BE-REREAD PART III (Spoilers)

As the novel progresses past the middle point, the mythology of *She* becomes more and more the novel's focus, as both Holly and Leo eventually fall in love with her. Clearly each of them represents half of her nature, with Leo equalling her in physical beauty while Holly is her intellectual equal. Later in the novel, *She* will even suggest making both of them as immortal as she is,which would certainly make for a literal "eternal triangle."

Pages 104-05 are interesting in suggesting the broadness of the immortal's intellect: as *She* apparently needed something to fill her time while waiting for Leo's reincarnation, she has apparently experimented on human beings like a later figure of literary myth, Wells' Dr. Moreau. Readers see only a collection of deaf-mutes who serve Ayesha, but she claims to have also bred a race that was so ugly she did away with it, and "giants" who were expunged not by her will but that of "Nature." A page or two later Holly compares her to Circe.


One thing about the literary *She* that I've never seen in other media-adaptations is that she is among the early figures of post-industrial literature who can project vital force from her body, in a manner roughly analogous to the millions of ray-blasting SF-aliens and superheroes that have crowded the pages of popular culture. *She* initially warns off Ustane, a rival for Leo, by striking Ustane so that parts of the girl's hair turn white. And when Ustane still won't give up Leo, *She* kills her outright with that vital force, and then hurls Leo (who attacks Ayesha in defense of Ustane) away with that force. *She* is careful to distinguish her powers from magic, however, and Etherington hypothesizes that Haggard was probably inspired by similar "vital force" theories in Bulwer Lytton's THE COMING RACE.

Most of the novel's other symbolic tropes are well-covered by Etherington, but I will say that I find it interesting that the mysterious cave where She gains her immortality from an equally-mysterius "Flame of Life" is called"the very womb of the Earth." Clearly, given the earlier comparisons of *She* to classical goddesses like Circe and Artemis, symbolically *She* is a goddess of the Earth. And even though this novel ends with her falling victim to mortality, one can easily view it as an ascension like that of Hercules, who dies mortally but ascends to Mount Olympus. And indeed, of the three later *She* books Haggard wrote-- two of which are prequels-- the last in temporal occurence,AYESHA:THE RETURN OF SHE, does grant this "goddess" a new form of life, albeit one as fraught with frustrations as the old immortal-seeming one.

SHE-WHO-MUST-BE-REREAD PART II (Spoilers)

Continuing with the chapter "The Feast, and After!"--

One comment Etherington makes here concerns a minor female character whose purpose is to provoke the cannibal feast as indirect revenge on Holly's party after she has been snubbed by Holly's comic manservant Job. Etherington comments that during the violent melee that results from the attempted hot-potting, it's surprising that the first person Holly shoots is not either of the men attempting the execution, but the unnamed female cannibal. Etherington comments on how unchivalrous it would be thought in Haggard's time for an Englishman to shoot any woman, even a cannibalistic one, but does not comment on the fact that prior to the attempted sacrifice, the lady cannibal tries to deceitfully sooth the sacrificial victim with sweet words and caresses. This, more than the victim's fate, is more likely what motivates Holly's death-dealing reaction: that the native woman has proven herself a Delilah-like temptress, not unlike the one love of Holly's life who callously rejected him with the "Beauty and Beast" comparison.

The violent melee contains a strange episode, as well. As Leo and Holly combat the rest of the cannibal band, Haggard has an interval where he needs Holly, his viewpoint-character, to be off to the side so that he can witness the splendor of Leo's Herculean battle against several foes. Most writers would have achieved this by simpling having Holly get clubbed and knocked to one side, so that he could get clear of the battle but still be a witness. Instead, Haggard has Holly grapple with not one but two men, hugging them both like the ape Holly resembles, albeit again off to the side in some way, so that none of the two cannibals' friends come to their aid. This strange stalemate, in which Holly keeps trying to crush the two men for fear that they will recover if he lets up, is certainly one of the stranger scenes in SHE. Eventually Leo is borne down, but is saved from slaughter by one of She's servants, at which point Holly collapses. Later, in recovery, Holly is told that he did indeed succeed in killing both men gorilla-style. It's hard to say why Haggard chose to construct his scene in this singular manner, but it probably relates to a desire to distinguish the fighting-style of Leo, who fights like a noble man, with that of Holly, who fights more like the beast of which he seems to be an atavism.

PAGE 83 has an interesting poetic motif: when Holly dives into a swampy pool to rescue the elderly Amahagger patriarch Billali-- whose sons ignore their father's plight -- Holly thinks to himself that the sodden patriarch looks like "a yellowish Bacchus with ivy leaves." Since Dionysus-Bacchus is usually one of the least patriarchal Greek gods, this might almost be seen as a regenerative image, though of course Billali is not literally made younger. Still, in a novel concerned with a woman who stays young for thousands of years, the comparison's hardly a stretch. Narratively speaking, Holly's rescue serves to bond him to the older man in a son-father relationship so that Billali's aid in later chapters seems well-motivated.

I stated earlier that Haggard's *She* doesn't actually rule any black Africans, as did the majority of her literary epigoni, but it's still pretty clear that Haggard does equate blackness with savagery in many instances. However, he saves his most overt attacks for the Jews on page 99, where Ayesha characterizes the Jews of her original pre-Christian era as followers of "many gods." It's true that many Old Testament books characterize the Jewish people of this or that time as fickle to the One God, but Haggard's presentation ignores any countervailing cultural tendencies. Oddly, much later, even after Holly has told her about how her modern-day descendants have become monotheistic Muslims (*She* is Arabic by heritage), Ayesha also speaks of her own people as innately polytheistic. Most likely this was in Haggard's mind another mark of unredeemable savagery, not much more evolved than the cannibalistic tendencies of Negroid (or part-Negroid) peoples.

Oddly, though, *She* also seems to have desired the high regard of the Jews for some unstated reason, and centuries later is still peeved at having been reviled as a witch by them for trying to show them her mystic secrets. Possibly this is because she recognized the Jews as a kindred people, though one would think that she would have valued her own Arab kindred more.

SHE-WHO-MUST-BE-REREAD PART 1 (Spoilers)

I'm currently re-reading the 1885 Rider Haggard classic SHE, which will forevermore be known as the book that jumpstarted the literary idea of a mysterious white queen lording it over a tribe of black Africans.



To be sure, though I'm only on chapter 20 now, so far the titular queen *doesn't* rule any black Africans, since she and her people dwell in an isolated area where her tribe kills all strangers (except the English explorers who are the heroes of the book). Haggard describes the lost people of Kor, the Amahagger, as having more white than "Negroid" features, though the Amahagger also have varying shades of skin color and have therefore probably interbred at some past time with natives of Africa.



I'm reading the annotated Indiana University edition, which features an excellent introductory analysis by Norman Etherington, who also authored a 1984 book on Haggard and his work. In making some of my own notations on SHE, I'll attempt to distinguish those of my observations that build on Etherington's analysis and those original to me. My notes pretty much presume a familiarity with the story, hence the spoiler alert.

NOTE 1: The first page introduces the book's main two heroes, handsome Leo Vincey and simian-looking Horace Holly, and Haggard makes much of the contrast between the one's good looks and the other's apish appearance. However, though one might expect them to be instantly paired as "Beauty and the Beast," the first use of this phrase is in flashback, when a woman pursued by Holly rejects him, styling herself "Beauty" and then letting poor Holly figure out where he stands in the equation. Holly later becomes an adoptive father to Leo, which causes him to become take another form of Beauty (albeit male beauty) into his household, establishing with Beauty a rapprochement that resembles the psychological notion of "interjection." But introjection's usual partner "projection" is here as well, as psychologically Leo is an idealized self through which Holly can experience love with a beautiful woman, i.e, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.

It's also interesting that the two are opposites intellectually, with Holly an esteemed Classics professor and Leo a merely adequate student who often seems a trifle thick. As intellect doesn't play a role in the well-known tale of "Beauty and the Beast," one may find interesting a stronger parallel with an archaic tale of the Welsh goddess Cerridwen, who, having birthed a gorgeous daughter and an ugly son, tries to compensate for the son's fate by giving him mystical knowledge. (FTR, it doesn't work out any better for the ugly son than it does for Holly.) In more recent years this archetypal contrast was used for the purpose of low (but very funny) comedy in the dyad of Kelly and Bud in Fox's MARRIED WITH CHILDREN.

NOTE 2: Etherington comments on the recapitulation of *She* as the beauteous mother Leo never knows, since he never sees her after her death in childbirth. However, the sole female whom we see caring Leo is an unnamed elderly woman, who weeps bitterly at being forced to leave baby Leo in Holly's care. Arguably both the mother Leo never sees and the mother-substitute who (perhaps) rears him are recapitulated in *She*, the beautiful queen fated to age to death at the novel's conclusion.

NOTE 3: On page 63, Ustane, an Amahagger tribeswoman who becomes the rival of *She* for Leo, tells Leo and Holly that, though the Amahagger's queen is reputed to be immortal, Ustane has a theory: that *She* is really a succession of queens who have ruled throughout the ages, each taking a mate in secret until bearing a female child, who then assumes the role of *She.* This is of course not the truth in the story, though it may be based on stories about archaic rules of legend. But one wonders if the book SHE might have been read by Lee Falk prior to his use of a similar theme for the PHANTOM comic strip.

NOTE 4: The chapter "The Feast-- and After!" has one of Haggard's most brutal scenes, in which some cannibalistic Amahagger try to "hot-pot" Holly and Leo's Muslim servant: that is, kill him by fitting a white-hot pot over his head. At least, in the finished book, all they do is try; in the original MS, the poor Muslim guy does get offed in this grisly manner. Interestingly, the gory scene is re-inserted in the 1935 adaptation produced by Merian C. ("King Kong") Cooper.

CONCERNING GORE AND ALLEGORY

I’ve forgotten what recommendation led me to read CONCERNING THE GODS AND THE UNIVERSE, though I think it had to do with pointing out that its author had some common ground with Joseph Campbell in terms of categorizing aspects of archaic mythology. The short treatise was written by Sallustius, a Roman scholar who wrote in the era of Julian and who was, according to translator Arthur Nock, heavily influenced by the intellectual milieu of his time, which tended to analyze myth in terms of allegory. Thus he makes a convenient platform for speaking of the uses and potential abuses of the “allegory explanation” with respect to analyzing mythic stories.

In Sallustius’ time, the myths of Greco-Roman antiquity were under fire, both by the critics of the early Christian church and by sophisticated “pagan” philosophers. The latter grouping would be “pagan” only by the strict definitions of the Christian Church, for the philosophers of the allegorizing persuasion were almost as offended as the Christians by the salacious and/or sadistic aspects of archaic myths. Here’s how Sallustius attempts to come to grips with how such scandalous stories can possess any sacrality or cultural importance:

“Again, myths represent the active operations of the gods. The universe itself can be called a myth, since bodies and material objects are apparent in it, while souls and intellects are concealed… Why, however, have the ancients told in their myths of adulteries and thefts and binding of fathers and other strange things?” (p. 5)

One sentence later, Sallustius suggests that the purpose of this “seeming strangeness” of the myths is that it’s a strategy meant to “teach the soul” of the gods’ hidden nature. And this rationale is essentially correct, insofar as he claims that myths serve to communicate a mystery that proves obscure to rational discourse. However, like most allegorizers he makes the mistake of thinking that the mystery can, after a little thought, be summed up by a rational-sounding concept.

Here’s Sallustius on the myth of Kronos devouring his children:
“Of myths, some are theological, some physical; there are also psychical myths and material myths and myths blended from these elements. Theological myths are those which do not attach themselves to any material objects but regard the actual natures of the gods. Such is the tale that the god Kronos swallowed his children; since the god is intellectual, and all intellect is directed towards itself, the myth hints at the god’s essential nature.”

Much later Joseph Campbell would suggest a different set of myth-analyzing categorizations more in tune with the philosophies of post-industrial human culture, which would be less likely to view the Kronos myth are so unattached by “material objects.” In modern parlance, Sallustius would be seen as repressing the more visceral aspects of the Kronos myth, and forcing onto it a purely-metaphysical explanation—an act which recalls for me Northrop Frye’s definition of allegory as “forced metaphor.” But this is not to suggest that Sallustius is wrong simply because he renounced the visceral, as it would be just as easy to imagine an interpretation which forced the metaphor in the opposite direction: toward, rather than away from, the visceral. I don’t recall whether or not Sigmund Freud ever made a detailed examination of the Kronos myth, but given the theories he advanced on similar themes, he would almost certainly see the myth informed by the “material object” of the Oedipus complex, in which a near-victim of Kronos’ appetites, such as Zeus, escapes and kills his tyrant father as a stratagem for marrying his mother, which does in fact take place (though we should keep in mind that Kronos devours his female children as well as his male ones, which might weaken the Freudian thesis).

In his book MYTHICAL THOUGHT, philosopher Ernst Cassirer sough a third approach to the analysis of myth that did not depend on either “the essence of the absolute” or “the play of empirical psychological forces.” For this he evoked the authority of Plato:
“Thus, for Plato, too, myth harbors a certain conceptual content: it is the conceptual language in which alone the world of becoming can be expressed. What never is but always becomes, what does not, like the structures of logical and mathematical knowledge, remain identically determinate but from moment to moment manifests itself as something different, can be given only a mythical representation.”


A strongly-evocative image, such as Kronos eating his children, is just such a “mythical representation.” Since the authors of myths are lost to history, there is no knowing what intent was in the mind of the individuals who first formulated this representation. They may have wished to capture the visceral transgressiveness of a father eating his young, or they may have had some notion comparable to Sallustius’ “theological” interpretation, even if it was probably a good deal less refined than the one Sallustius gives. But if Cassirer is right, then the initial intentions behind the myth are unimportant, for the myth expresses something about a conceptual world that is never “identically determinate,” but which can shift to encompass an array of meanings.

I would give Sallustius credit, though. Even if his specific interpretation of the Kronos myth is forced, he seems to have been among the first to conceive ways in which myths might contain a wide array of meanings, even going so far as to note that some of the myths contained “blended” elements. In his OCCIDENTAL MYTHOLOGY Campbell put forth four categories—given the headings of “the cosmological,” “the metaphysical,” “the sociological,” and “the psychological”-- by which one might analyze the contents of mythic stories. Although Campbell would later use other names for his categories, these remained largely in the tradition of the ones used by Sallustius. Perhaps appropriately, the most telling criticisms of Campbell have been those that focused on his more allegory-oriented interpretations.

In a previous essay I noted that there might be a way to counter the interpretation of Eric Gould, of viewing myth as a failure to bridge an ontological gap between the world we live in and what our minds make of it. I would suggest that Campbell’s categorical approach—as long as it is restrained from pure allegorizing by a Cassirer-like understanding of myth’s indeterminate conceptualizing nature—does bridge the ontological gap, as much as humanity can expect to. Campbell’s categories are, at their base, attempts to discern patterns in reality, whether one is dealing with external realities (what Sallustius calls “material objects”) or internal ones (“souls and intellects.”) To the extent that these patterns are coterminous with the world we live in, then myth in its most conceptual aspect is an intuition of how the world works, and how men relate to it. And as such, it is not simply failed ontology. It is the mirror that shows us both unity and diversity: which, in showing us all of our indeterminate faces, also shows us our identity.

INNOCENTS BROADSIDED (Spoilers)

"[Henry] James' world... is ruled by women. With a few slick exceptions, men are limited, subordinate or ludicrous. The mother herself presses turgidly on the late novels, a paralyzing biographical force whom James both resists and adores"-- Camille Paglia, SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 621.

I recently had occasion to reread James' TURN OF THE SCREW and re-view the 1960 film adaptation THE INNOCENTS. Despite minor differences, both end the same way: the hysterical governess trying to cast out the ghostly spirit that she thinks has possessed her ten-year-old charge Miles, on whom she dotes as if she were the boy's mother. The result is that though she forces Miles to speak the name of the ghost Peter Quint (which the governess thinks will exorcise the spirit or its influence), the boy's spirit is also cast out, so that he dies in the governess' arms, sort of a literary-horror version of Michelangelo's Pieta. In essence Miles dies because the governess fears the shadow (Jung would say "animus") of malefic masculinity dawning within the prepubescent boy, represented (at least in her mind) by the ghostly image of a dead dominant male.

Interestingly, James comes very close in TURN to a setup described in Philip Slater's study of Greek myth and society, THE GLORY OF HERA. To summarize Slater briefly, he felt that the Greeks of the classical period suffered from a mother-complex that grew out of the strong bifurcation of male and female roles in classical Greek society. The husband went away to pursue war and/or business affairs (much as in TURN, there is an uncle who arranges for the governess to take charge of his niece and nephew but then has no more to do with the situation). This situation left his wife totally in charge of the affairs of the house, but without any avenue for sexual gratification in misogynistic Greek society (though naturally the husband was not so constrained). The governess of TURN, who indicates an almost subliminal lust for the uncle, is in much the same situation, and never seems to have any yearnings for a separate romantic life while in service to the uncle, though arguably her sexual desires are realized by her encounter (or fantasy) of the ghost of roisterer Peter Quint.

Slater went on to give copious examples to show that in myth and literature at least, the frustrated desires of real-life mothers in Greek society came out in the form of fantasies about fictional mothers who killed, harmed, or controlled their sons-- sometimes as small children, sometimes as full-grown men (particularly in the legend of Heracles, who was persecuted until death by his stepmother, and whose translated name forms the title of Slater's book). All such violence Slater regarded as projections of a displaced sexuality.

It's not hard to see a similar pattern in TURN OF THE SCREW, where the social roles of James' England were not much less stratified than those of classical Greece. But perhaps in one respect the movie adaptation inadvertently came even closer to the archetype of the devouring mother than the original book. In TURN, the unnamed governess is a very young woman, perhaps so that James might suggest her instability due to age (in the frame-story she goes on to continue her career as governess, and the reader never knows from the frame how Miles' tragedy affects her). But THE INNOCENTS casts 40-year old Deborah Kerr as the lethal child-care minister, and thus puts the character more in the mold of the frustrated spinster. Arguably, then, Miles' death in her arms is an even more mythically-appropriate "Pieta" than the one seen in the original prose of mother-worshipping James.