Losing Innocence: A Comparative Analysis Of Henry James’S The Turn Of The Screw And Jack Clayton’S Film Adaptation, The Innocents
...of ambiguity for over one hundred years. During that time, readers, scholars, and critics have tried to escape its clutches by offering a myriad of interpretations, a vast spectrum of critical opinions which make a definitive solution an impossibility. James’s masterful use of uncertainty truly supports, if not promotes, the ability of readers to discover numerous meanings to the tales mysteries. Does the governess really see the ghostly figures of Quint and Miss Jessel? Are the apparitions merely figments of an overactive imagination? Are the children accurately perceived as angelic innocents, or are they willing participants to possession by the evil manifestations? To answer these questions, James craftily leaves only veiled hints for the reader to collect and decipher along the way.
The same vagueness that provides for endless critical study, however, poses a large problem when adapting the story to film. Careful consideration is given to which elements of character and plot need to be included, as well as how focus needs to be placed on them in order to achieve the desired effect. Movies are almost never an exact match to the text from which they are taken; they are merely the director’s vision of that text. Creating an adaptation of The Turn of the Screw is made all the more difficult by the seemingly infinite positions that can be taken. In 1961, Jack Clayton directed what is still known as the definitive cinematic version of James’s ghostly tale: The Innocents. His artistic vision of the events at Bly, combined with a skillfully designed script by legendary screenwriters William Archibald and Truman Capote, creates a chilling visual look into the psychological terror of James’s literary classic. It is also a somewhat imperfect one.
James presents The Turn of the Screw as the manuscript of the governess’s recollections, transcribed, preserved...
View Full Essay
