Abstract
This chapter will not rehearse the plethora of psychological interpretations of horror stories often found in print. Instead of the more traditional focus of a house that haunts people, Ayres suggests that it is people who haunt the house. She explores the thingness of a house and does so mostly through Henry James’ seminal The Turn of the Screw (1921) and its 1961 revision titled The Innocents, a screenplay by William Archibald (who had written a 1950 stage play of the same title) and Truman Capote, made into a film. James’ work is a precursor to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, which is also under investigation in this chapter, a story that leads the reader to believe that the house is haunted by ghosts, but it is the house itself that possesses the protagonist and torments the visitors, perceived as intruders. Instead of focusing on the house as doing the haunting, the 1999 film The Haunting presents a house haunted by the abuse of children in cotton mills by the house’s owner and by the orphans he took into the house, tortured, killed and then incinerated in its fireplace. That is why the house is a thing haunted, and its investigative team feels its pain. James’ and Jackson’s works are progenitors of the myriad haunted-house tales that would follow them and testify to houses haunted first by people before other people witness its haunting.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
The Sixth Sense is not set during the Victorian period but the furniture and architecture of the Crowe house are Victorian.
- 2.
It was released on Christmas Day in New York City. A remake of The Innocents would appear as a TV series beginning in 2020, The Haunting of Bly Manor.
- 3.
Ezra Pound’s article first appeared in Little Review in 1918, reproduced in Eliot (1954 [1918], 326).
- 4.
See Martin Scofield’s introduction to Ghost Stories of Henry James for an overview of psychoanalytical and Marxist criticism (2001).
- 5.
Since both the 1961 film and the 2006 commentary are on the same DVD, I will designate 2006 to indicate the commentary and 1961 to identify the story itself.
- 6.
See Leviticus 14:33–57. Most Christians interpret the leprosy as sin and/or evil.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. Lectures on Negative Dialectics. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008.
Amenábar, Alejandro. The Others. Spain: Warner Sogefilms, 2001.
Appadurai, Arjun. Introduction: “Commodities and the Politics of Value.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Baker, Russel. Introduction to The Turn of the Screw, 1:45–2:29. DVD, 1999.
Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. 2003. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Carrington, Hereward. Your Psychic Powers and How to Develop Them. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1920. https://books.google.com/books?id=7AsMAAAAIAAJ.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. 1817. In The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Prose and Verse, 235–63. Philadelphia: Crissy and Markley, 1853. https://books.google.com/books?id=09scAAAAMAAJ.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” 1797. In Sibylline Leaves, 1803, 121–273. In The Poetical Works of S. T. Coleridge, 1:201–4. London: William Pickering, 1834. https://books.google.com/books?id=GEk0AQAAMAAJ.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “To an Unfortunate Woman, Whom the Author Had Known in the Days of Her Innocence.” 1797. In Sibylline Leaves, 1803, 121–273. In The Poetical Works of S. T. Coleridge, vol. 1, 62. London: William Pickering, 1834. https://books.google.com/books?id=GEk0AQAAMAAJ.
Franklin, Ruth. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted House. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2016.
Frayling, Christopher. “Commentary.” The Innocents. 1961. DVD, 2006.
Fried, Michael. “New York Letter.” In Pop Art: A Critical History, ed. Steven Henry Madoff, 216. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
The Haunting. Directed and produced by Robert and adapted by Nelson Gidding. Starring Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Ruchard Johnson, and Russ Tamblyn. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1963.
The Haunting. Directed by Jan de Bont and screenplay by David Self. Starring Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Owen Wilson, and Lili Taylor. DreamWorks Pictures, 1999.
The Haunting of Bly Manor. Created by Mike Flanagan. TV Mini-Series. 2020.
Hegel, Georg W. F. The Phenomenology of the Mind. 1910. Translated by John B. Baillie. 2nd ed. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961.
Hegel, Georg W. F. The Phenomenology of the Spirit. Translated by Peter Fuss and John Dobbins. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019.
Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing.” 1971. In Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, 161–84. New York: Perennial, 2001.
Heilmann, Ann. “Doing It with Mirrors”: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic in Affinity, The Prestige and The Illusionist. Neo-Victorian Studies 2, no. 2 (Winter 2009/2010): 18–42. http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/.
The Innocents. 1961. Directed by Jack Clayton, screenplay by Archibald, William, and Truman Capote. Starring Deborah Kerr. Commentary by Twentieth Century Fox, DVD, 2006.
Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. 1959. New York: Penguin, 2006.
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw. 1898. Doylestown, PA: Wildside Press, 2003.
King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. Berkley: Berkley Books, 1983. http://maxima-library.org/redkollegiya/compilers/b/213813?format=read.
King, Stephen. Introduction to The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons, vii–xxi. 1981. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.
Llewellyn, Mark. “Spectrality, S(p)ecularity, and Textuality: Or, Some Reflections in the Glass.” In Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past, edited by Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham, 23–43. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Llewellyn, Mark. “Spectrality, S(p)ecularity, and Textuality: Or, Some Reflections in the Glass.” In Neo-Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009, edited by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn. 143–73. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Miller, Laura. Introduction to The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, ix–xxii. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Orr, Leonard. James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” London: Continuum, 2009.
Palmer, Christopher. “The Colour of the Music.” In Benjamin Britten: The Turn of the Screw, edited by Patricia Howard, 101–25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Poster, Jem. Courting Shadows. London: Sceptre, 2003.
Pound, Ezra. “Henry James.” 1918. In Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, edited by T. S. Eliot, 295–38. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1954.
Ruskin, John. Chapter 12: “Of the Pathetic Fallacy.” In Modern Painters, 3:156–72. New York: Willy and Halsted, 1856. https://books.google.com/books?id=RFwoAAAAYAAJ.
Saá, Margarita Estévez. Review of Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past by Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham. Atlantis 34, no. 1 (June 2012): 193–98. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43486031.
Scofield, Martin. Introduction to Ghost Stories of Henry James, vii–xxii. London: Wordsworth Editions, 2001.
Shyamalan, M. Night. The Sixth Sense. Hollywood Pictures, 1999.
Siddons, Anne Rivers. The House Next Door. 1978. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.
Stein, Leo. The A-B-C of Aesthetics. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927.
Strengell, Heidi. Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.
The Turn of the Screw. Directed by Ben Bolt. Teleplay by Nick Dear. Starring Jodhi May and Pam Ferris. Martin Pope Productions. Exxon Mobile Theatre. DVD, 1999.
Woolf, Virginia. From “Henry James’s Ghost Stories.” 1921. In “The Turn of the Screw” and Other Tales by Henry James, edited by Kimberly C. Reed, 289–90. Peterborough, ONT: Broadview Press, 2010.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ayres, B. (2022). The Thing About Haunted Houses: In The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents and The Haunting of Hill House. In: Maier, S.E., Ayres, B., Dove, D.M. (eds) Neo-Victorian Things. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06201-8_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06201-8_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-06200-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06201-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)