QAnon, Our Brother's Keeper, and Our "Mere Infernal Imagination"

The Turn of the Screw, Part 2: So What?

Last week we explored the What in The Turn of the Screw. I argued that the ghosts are real, but that there is no evidence that they are dangerous, and that the true danger comes from the Governess. If you haven’t read that post already, you can find it here. And if you haven’t yet read the book but your curiosity is piqued, you can find the book for free online here.

This week, we’ll discuss the So What—the meanings and lessons we can take from the book and apply in our lives. I’m looking forward to your So Whats too.

This is the image on the cover of my copy of The Turn of the Screw: Gerald H. Thayer, Brother and Sister (Mary and Gerald Thayer), 1889. You can read about this painting here.

“Our Not Seeing It Is the Strongest of Proofs”: The Turn of the Screw and QAnon

Throughout The Turn of the Screw, the Governess engages in conspiratorial thinking—particularly confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. These are cognitive biases in which “people have a tendency to search out, interpret, or even recall information in a way that reinforces preexisting beliefs.” From the moment the Governess learns that Miles has been expelled, and even before she has met him, she decides that he is “wicked,” “contaminating,” and “corrupt.” She interprets several potentially benign subsequent events in the light of this assumption. (For example, Miles sneaks out at night, an action that any parent who has hosted slumber parties knows normal children are capable of doing without having been possessed by ghosts. The Governess, though, takes this as evidence of Miles’s corruption.) When Mrs. Grose maintains that Miles is sweet and innocent, the Governess attributes this opinion to Mrs. Grose’s low intelligence and lack of imagination, and not to Mrs. Grose’s experience caring for Miles.

Similarly, the Governess decides that the ghosts are evil even though they never interact with any characters (and most—or possibly all—of the other characters can’t even see them), and no one besides the Governess is upset by them. In fact an objective interpretation of Miss Jessel’s ghost, based on the Governess’s own description of her wearing black and burying her head in her hands, is that she is grief-stricken rather than dangerous. When the Governess (speaking of a missing rowboat) says, “Our not seeing it is the strongest of proofs,” she inadvertently suggests the perfect slogan for conspiratorial thinking.

In addition to her conspiratorial thinking, the Governess fantasizes about being recognized and honored for her courage in fighting the ghosts: “I daresay I fancied myself . . . a remarkable young woman and took comfort in the faith that this would more publicly appear.” Later, thinking of the Guardian, she goes further:

I was in these days literally able to find a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasions demanded of me. I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirable and difficult; and there would be a greatness in letting it be seen—oh, in the right quarter!—that I could succeed where many another girl might have failed.

I think this is a very human wish. Who among us has not neglected ordinary problems that require tedious drudgery to solve, and wished instead to defeat a powerful foe and to be celebrated for our glorious achievements? Unfortunately, fantasies like this can distract us from efforts to make the world a better place in ways that are actually achievable.

I could upload wonderfully creepy Turn of the Screw illustrations all day. This one, The Governess, is by Amanda Sartor and is available here.

The Governess reminds me of QAnon. She implies that Miles has been sexually corrupted by Quint when she speaks of “his secret precocity (or whatever I might call the poison of an influence that I dared but half to phrase)” and when she claims that “the imagination of all evil HAD been opened up to him.” But while Miles does talk a bit like a rake at times and did look up to Quint, there is no evidence that Quint was molesting Miles. Quite the contrary, Quint is known to have seduced many adult women, so he is demonstrably not a pedophile. Even worse, the Governess’s efforts to “save” Miles actually harm him. He begs her multiple times to let him go back to school, or at least to contact his uncle, but she refuses. One interpretation of the book’s ending is that the Governess literally suffocates Miles to death in trying to protect him from an imaginary threat.

I believe that QAnon followers sincerely want to stop the sexual abuse of children. The problem is that their conspiratorial thinking and their fantasies about defeating an almost supernaturally powerful foe blind them to the ways that sexual abuse typically takes place here on planet earth: Nearly all abusers are people whom the child knows and whom the family trusts—a relative, family friend, youth pastor, coach, etc. It is difficult and horrible to confront the sad reality of sexual abuse. Such confrontations are not glamorous or heroic in the way rescuing nonexistent child sex slaves in Comet Ping Pong’s nonexistent basement would be. My first So What, then, illustrated by both the book and QAnon, is that myths about abuse make it harder to uncover and stop real abuse, and fighting imaginary abuse can cause real harm.¹

The Fundamental Attribution Error, Yet Again

As it happens, there is real harm in The Turn of the Screw, but the ghosts have nothing to do with it. We’ve discussed the fundamental attribution error before—our unfortunate tendency to assume that people are acting in a particular way not because they are responding rationally to their circumstances but because they have bad morals. One especially destructive example of the fundamental attribution error is victim-blaming. We smugly think, “Well I would never put myself in that situation. I would have better judgment. I would fight back!” The story of Miss Jessel is heartbreaking, but the Governess sees her not as a pitiable victim but as blameworthy and “infamous.” She faults Miss Jessel for welcoming Quint’s advances (“It must have been also what SHE wished!”) and refers to her, uncharitably, as “My vile predecessor[,] dishonored and tragic.”

The Governess, just like QAnon, worries about an illusory threat and in the process ignores a real and much more common one, in this case the seductions of powerless young women by “a hound” who “did what he wished . . . with them all.” In James’s time, a seduced young woman, especially one in the financially vulnerable position of a governess or a maid, would have been cast out of society with no way to support herself except prostitution. The buried story in The Turn of the Screw is the ordinary tragedy of Miss Jessel, a beautiful, intelligent, cultivated, but vulnerable young woman who is seduced and dies.

This campy cover illustration conveys the true evil in The Turn of the Screw better than all those pictures of glum and preternaturally wise children, in my opinion.

He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother

There’s a story behind this famous line: In 1918, a boy named Harold, who wore heavy leg braces because of polio, was abandoned by his parents² and left at Boys’ Town. Harold had trouble going up and down the stairs, and so the older boys in the home would carry him. One day the priest asked a boy if it was too difficult to carry Harold, and he replied, “He ain’t heavy, Father. He’s m’brother.”

Most discussions of The Turn of the Screw target the Governess, and I include myself in this group. Nonetheless, I think there is a worse villain in the book than the Governess: the Guardian.³ The Guardian didn’t ask to be saddled with two young children, true—Douglas tells us that they were “very heavily [!] on his hands”—but his young niece and nephew, little grieving children, need him, and he shirks his duty. He does visit them at first, but “his own affairs took up all his time,” so he relegates them to the care of Quint, a man whose immoral character ought to be apparent to anyone. After Quint dies and Miss Jessel leaves, the Guardian washes his hands of the children. Even worse, the Guardian has no excuse for his callousness: He is enormously rich and would be perfectly capable of playing a larger role in the children’s lives. But he doesn’t want to be bothered with them because they interfere with his pleasures. The Governess alludes to this selfishness when she says,

He never wrote to them—that may have been selfish, but it was a part of the flattery of his trust of me; for the way in which a man pays his highest tribute to a woman is apt to be but by the more festal celebration of one of the sacred laws of his comfort.

The Guardian, for all his riches, shows less compassion for the children in his charge than the orphans in Boys Town do for Harold.⁴ Another So What we can take from the book is that we are our brother’s keeper.

A Final Thought about Our “Mere Infernal Imagination”

Which brings me to a final point, about the place of The Turn of the Screw in our culture. The overwhelming critical consensus since the novella’s publication is that the Governess is crazy, obsessive, hysterical, and dangerous. We are all very hard on her. But if we actually read the text rather than dimly recall it, or repeat what we’ve heard about it, or watch the film (which shows the Governess looking at a portrait of Quint—a scene that doesn’t occur in the book—to suggest that her description comes from the portrait and not from seeing an actual ghost), it is obvious that the ghosts have to be real. There is no way that the Governess could describe Quint so precisely otherwise.

So why do readers assume the Governess is imagining the ghosts, against clear evidence to the contrary? Why do we reflexively heap blame on the poor young woman rather than on the rich older man who has abjured his responsibilities?⁵ Why is the Governess the bad guy of our “mere infernal imagination” rather than the Guardian or Quint? In his 1908 Preface to the New York edition, Henry James said that he wanted to make the reader “think the evil, make him think it for himself.” Which brings me to my final So What: When we view people through the lens of our prejudices (in this case against irritating, overly emotional, rigidly moral ladies) we ourselves are acting like the Governess; we ought to take care that our prejudices don’t make us see horrors and evils instead of just people.

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How about you, readers? What is your So What? What lessons did you take from the book? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The Tidbit

Enjoy this powerful, all-star cover of the Hollies’ 1969 hit song, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.”

1. I don’t mean to criticize only the extreme right wing. The moral panic over the supposed threat of kidnapping has led to a whole generation of children being denied the free, unstructured play that they need in order to develop independence, problem-solving, and other social skills.

2. The story on the Boys’ Town website says Harold “was abandoned by his mother” and doesn’t mention the father. It is possible that Harold’s father died before Harold was abandoned, but if he didn’t die, then Harold’s father abandoned him too. I just thought we should get that on the record.

3. The most evil character of all is of course Quint, but at least he doesn’t think of himself as a good guy, and nor do readers.

4. As an aside, I think the Guardian’s amusing catalogue of the inhabitants of Bly reveals his dehumanizing attitude toward the servant class: “There were, further, a cook, a housemaid, a dairywoman, an old pony, an old groom, and an old gardener, all likewise thoroughly respectable.”

5. I’m reminded of the similar role the novel Lolita plays in our culture. In every film and theatrical adaptation of the book and in the vast majority of popular reactions to it, Lolita is seen as a saucy, materialistic temptress and Humbert Humbert as her besotted victim. But if you actually read Lolita—the whole book, including the preface—it is obvious that Vladimir Nabokov wants us to see Humbert as a vicious, psychopathic monster who destroys a young girl for his own pleasure. Humbert tells us openly that he is writing the book as his defense in his trial for murdering Clare Quilty. So of course Lolita comes off as a temptress; it’s in Humbert’s interest to depict her that way, and he has fooled not only the jury but millions of readers too. I recommend The Lolita Podcast for readers who are interested in this topic.