| This study examines the parallels between Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Among other things, this study is concerned with the shared use in the two texts of unnamed narrators, frame devices, and gothic themes and conventions. It is upon analyzing those elements that socio-political readings of both texts are illuminated. In the case of The Turn of the Screw , such a reading can be generated despite the general divide between those who believe that the novella is nothing else but a ghost story and those who propose Freudian readings of the text. If the apparitions are "real," then the text participates in the gothic tradition and is anti-bourgeois in its attack on the hyper-rationality that emerged in the Enlightenment. Conversely, if the apparitions are hallucinations formed in the mind of the governess, then they signal the governess's psychological break that can be attributed to her social position, which is determined by Victorian England's labor-structure. The governess's story, then, is a cautionary one that, through the frame narrative, finds its way to the bourgeois fireside-audience that consists of Douglas and the unnamed narrator.;As for Heart of Darkness, although it is clearly a socio-political text, it has been read as participating in both pro- and anti-imperialist rhetoric. This study argues, however, that Marlow, through the frame narrative, reveals himself to be a prime example of the naturalized subject, that is, someone who unknowingly acts in the interest of the ruling class, which eliminates the pro-imperialist readings of the text, making it unequivocally anti-imperialist and therefore anti-bourgeois. |
