Theme 1: Corruption
The driving conflict in The Turn of the Screw centers around the governess protagonist confronting the spirits that haunt Bly Manor and that have possessed the children under her care. Over the course of the narrative, the children’s cherubin demeanors falter over their increasingly unnatural behavior towards their caretakers and one another. The violence and immoral behavior which occurred between the ghosts during their lives and their sudden deaths at the manor now bleed into the children beyond the veil.
The novel speaks to anxiety over the dissolution and weakening of domestic roles, and deviancy in children. The sanctity of domestic and family structure are polluted by deceiving, unnatural forces, and the purity that is associated with children’s inherent innocence and goodness is twisted for ulterior purposes.
Corruption is intangible, abstract both in its manifestation in a character, as well as the fear it invokes internally in the eyes of bystanders. While the text interacts directly with the governess’s thoughts, illustrations are removed from this interiority. For the visuals in the original serialization, illustrator Eric Pape instead used oppressive environmental vocabulary to mimic the oppressive building dread of the narrator.
In the illustration of the governess wandering the halls in the dark and encountering the spirit of Miss Jessel (Image 1), the silhouette of the stair creeps out of the darkness; the interior of the manor is hidden in shadow that completely encompasses the figure. The ghostly specter at the bottom of the stairs is wispy, ethereal, mirroring the intangibility of the scenes darkness. Pape uses the abstraction of space to represent predation on the innocent, outsiders. The artist uses space and atmosphere to visually manifest the looming threat of corruption—the darkness is overpowering and impenetrable, threatening to contain even more unnatural entities that the woman figure and the viewer are forced to navigate.
The darkness, too, becomes a overwhelming predatory entity in the film adaptation, The Innocents (1961). The imagery of the governess wandering the halls in a gown, holding a candelabra, is borrowed directly from the source material. However, the film is able to expand on the visuals through the benefit of motion picture and audio. The drawn-out sequence wherein the viewer walks through the manor alongside the governess, accosted by spectral whispers and folie, creates complete immersion in the dread the character faces. The abstracted vocabulary of the environment is built upon, being able to see a character attempt to escape complete darkness. The limited light of the candles as well as moonlight accentuate the barest details of the space, leaving large swaths of heavy black that loom over the governess and threaten to consume and corrupt the inhabitants of the estate.
Similarly, environment and body language of figures within space are used to highlight the aberration in mother-child dynamics and deviousness in the children. Image 3 shows another illustration from the original serialization, featuring Miles engaging in a disturbing conversation with the governess. The lightness and openness of the scene at the surface, as well as the soft facial expressions, bely the seeming idyllic and precocious personality of Miles. However, the body language and details of the environmental composition subvert the dynamic, and suggest sinister underlying threats.
The governess is turned and hunched away, in a submissive position, shocked by how Miles speaks to her. In contrast, Miles stands in a confrontational manor, standing just behind her, staring at both her and the audience. While he is small physically, his unnatural presence and speech is empowered by the setting that frames him—what at first appears to be a garden is actually the graveyard of church, the outlines of headstones and crosses littered behind him. The relationship of a mother and child is perverted, with the child exerting dominance and power over the guardian, their innocence polluted by symbols of death and decay. The illustration is made not to be outright grotesque, but invoke a deeper psychological discomfort and anxiety over "unnatural" domestic roles.
The corresponding scene in the churchyard in the film adaptation (Image 4) uses the same tension between surface innocence and underlying corruption through the figures and the environment. Similar to the original serialized image, the beauty of the scene, at first glance dominated by the lightness of the religious building, is darkened by the presence of gravestones at the edges of the frames--symbols of death encroaching on the innocent.
While Miles is not confronting and disturbing the governess directly, the power imbalance between child and mother figure is still potent. Miles and Flora, while looking to be walking peacefully, they are purposefully isolating the governess, turning their backs to her disrespectfully. Where the adult is meant to be knowledgeable and in control, the governess has no authority over them and no access to their internal machinations. The children knowingly keep information and secrets from her, disempowering her even further.
Miles and Flora's innocence are corrupted, but so too is the governess' position as a mother figure. She looks upon them with paranoia and distrust, suggesting to a bewildered Mrs. Grose that they are colluding and "talking horrors" to one another". This behavior corrupts the expectations society has for how women are supposed to perform as loving, nurturing caretakers.
Fear of the dark has been long held, across cultures. The use of the encompassing darkness and abstract environment in early gothic horror works such as The Turn of the Screw created a recognizable visual lineage later horror narratives in the 20th century. lustrations for periodical short stories, such as those by Henry Raleigh (Image 5) and Pruett Alexander Carter (Image 6) show the same environmental vocabulary swallowing the figures, creating an ambiguity of space that disfigures the familiar and recognizable. The environment is no longer a place that the characters exist in; it is an unsafe and unknowable entity that they are forced to contend with. The gestural and vague darkness frames the severity of the figures' expressions and body language, calling attention to the danger around them, seen and unseen.