Re: Gerald's Game and The Turn of the Screw
Gene Poole
> HERE THERE BE SPOILERS.
>
>
>
>
>
> As i finish Gerald's Game, I cannot help but think that Stephen King was
> influenced by the ambiguity of Henry James's celebrated novel, The Turn
> of the Screw.
>
> In the latter story, a governess sees two ghosts, each one of which she
> associates with one of her child charges. Nobody else sees the ghosts,
> and the question becomes whether within the story, the ghosts are "real"
> or whether they are figments of the governess's imagination. I should
> note at this point that it seems that James got much of the plot facts
> from one of the cases that Dr. Sigmund Freud published in Studies on
> Hysteria by Freud and Breuer. (Though it had not yet been translated to
> English, he would have known about it from his brother William,
> especially as they discussed such issues regularly due to the
> psychological problems that led to their sister's early death.)
>
> Over the years, the debate regarding The Turn of the Screw was hot, with
> advocates for both sides stringing up their arguments, which you may
> find accumulated in the Norton Critical Edition of the work. For my
> part, given the taking of a set of facts from a Freud study and further
> given the lack of corroboration for any of the sightings by the other
> characters, I have to opt with the skeptics on what James was doing.
>
> Stephen King has set up a similar situation, with a woman undergoing
> extreme life and death stress, seeing in the moonlight a tall, thin,
> white-faced dead man in the room where she is manacled to a bed. As she
> tries to get free, sometimes she sees him, sometimes she does not. King
> in essence puts the question to the reader, was this thing real within
> the context of the novel, or was it all a figment of her fevered,
> frightened imagination. And if real, was it some ghost or ghoul from the
> dead or another world and would there be some evidence of its reality.
> He carries this tension until about thirty pages from the end. The
> search for evidence is taken into account but leads nowhere. Then, the
> explanation comes, a real world explanation without any trappings of the
> supernatural.
>
> It seems that with this denouement, King opts for my preferred
> interpretation of The Turn of the Screw - and yes, I do believe that he
> had the book in mind as he wrote, as well as Poe's The Raven, of course.
> King is incredibly well read and interweaves various literary themes
> into his works.
>
To date, Gerald's Game is the only Stephen King novel that has almost
made me pass out. The bit where she's getting out of the cuff by
removing her skin...I don't know why that was so much worse than all his
other gore, but all of a sudden I got dizzy, felt weird and the world
got fuzzy...good thing I was sitting down. I was told I went very pale,
and all the blood drained out of my face.
I know it's not related to the topic. but nobody else seems to be
psoting here, and it's memorable to me.
Francis A. Miniter
I had a lot of trouble with that passage too. I would read
a page (or less) and close it for 20 minutes or so, come
back, read another page, and close it again. It took a long
time to get through that scene. It caused me to remember
that at age four I went over the handlebars of my tricycle
and landed with my forehead on a pointed rock. In the time
that it took me to get back to the front door of my house,
with blood everywhere, I decided I could never be a doctor.
--
Francis A. Miniter
Mesure is Medicine þauh þou muche ȝeor[n]e.
Al nis not good to þe gost þat þe bodi lykeþ,
Ne lyflode to þe licam þat leof is to þe soule.
William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman
Passus I, lines 33 - 35
Gene Poole
he is going to be a dog when he grows up.
John Briggs
>
> At age 4 you made this decision?? my 4 year old is firmly convinced that
> he is going to be a dog when he grows up.
You probably ought to be worried :-)
--
John Briggs
Gene Poole
Not as worried as he should be. I have all my pets spayed or neutered.
Bob Barker told me so.
--
Gene Poole
I'm helping to control the pet population!!
RVG
>>
> To date, Gerald's Game is the only Stephen King novel that has almost
> made me pass out. The bit where she's getting out of the cuff by
> removing her skin...I don't know why that was so much worse than all his
> other gore, but all of a sudden I got dizzy, felt weird and the world
> got fuzzy...good thing I was sitting down. I was told I went very pale,
> and all the blood drained out of my face.
>
> I know it's not related to the topic. but nobody else seems to be
> psoting here, and it's memorable to me.
As a Graham Masterton buff, I agree with you that GG is the best chiller
SK ever wrote.
Now since you've enjoyed this book, if you've never read Masterton you
should give a try.
--
"The imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself."
William Blake
http://rvgmusic.bandcamp.com/
http://www.jamendo.com/fr/user/RVG95
http://bluedusk.blogspot.com/