Is it trauma when everyone is traumatized?
I have been trying to understand The Turn of the Screw. Was it technically good? Yes. Frightening? Somewhat. But, I ask myself, what was the meaning? Everything is hinted at; it’s sort of the problem that no one can come out and say what the problem is until it’s death to do so. Then, when made as explicit as the author is able to make it, when I finally guess at what is going on, I cannot hide a sort of disappointment in the bathetic revelation.
The children were sexually abused and, like many sexually abused children, were perverse, that is, were successfully perverted into echoes of their abusers. Except that, all things considered, they were no more—indeed, far less—perverse than any other child I knew at that age. One of the things I hated most about grade school was all the sexual degeneracy. As by a sort of gravity, every conversation, every interaction, would eventually succumb to the topic of sex.
The shock of the book, that the innocent are not innocent, is no shock to me. It’s the water my own childhood was drowned in long before, and my head was shoved down far deeper than polite, Victorian hints. I read the book, puzzled over it, and then realized that I was a fish asking what water was. It was not Henry James who was all wet.
I do not, I think, have a principled objection to Sex Ed. but I do have an objection to the principles of the teachers. We have all been sexually traumatized to the point that we think this trauma normal as pride parades, which any sane man not indoctrinated into this sex cult would destroy with a murderous mercy as one puts down a dying and hopelessly suffering animal, go by with mothers and children and fellatio and sodomy.
Shall I tear down our modern freedom for the sexual frustration of the Victorians? Perhaps they were just as depraved as us. The Turn of the Screw itself bears witness that Henry James knew the innocent were not quite that. Yet, even if the gentleman does not kiss and tell, the cad who does at least had to tell; he had to tell because he was still human enough to have done it in a secret chamber or out in the woods. Perhaps that will be called hypocrisy, to ask people to be ashamed of their shame even in their boasts; such coverings seem to me the more honest thing, though, than the naked honesty of our sexual liberation—such are fig leaves. The hypocrite was at least half right in being ashamed. Our modern world cannot judge him, for we do not believe in right and wrong anymore. We are free of shame; he was free to repent.
It is late. I wrote most of this after watching the sunrise; in the darkness of night I have returned to write the paragraph above and edit a few lines here and there. Between, I had lunch with some friends, and we talked about Epstein a little. I sounded them on some of the ideas for this essay. I know both of them and a little of their struggles. I know my own much better. I looked at my two friends who are both single though well into the age where traditionally they should be married; they are both industrious and have good incomes and, as well as I can reckon, not overtly ugly. And one of them said something wise which made us all argue about what he meant: We shouldn’t participate in the patterns that produce Epstein; or something like that.
The hour is late, and the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Choose you this day whom you will serve. Things can get much worse than Henry James imagined in his novella, much worse than pride parades, and much worse than Epstein. Things are going to get worse.
Tale Told 