If you’ve ever contemplated a governess career, perhaps Henry James’s THE TURN OF THE SCREW will give you pause. Or maybe this bite-sized Gothic ghost story will thrill you with the chance of being in charge of a beautiful English country house with no master to tell you what to do. But choose your adventure carefully because you might end up haunted and/or crazy and/or murdering someone.

Join Sonja and Vanessa as they do a quick Henry James 101, and explore WITH SPOILERS his classic, 1898 ghost story. Are there ghosts? Is the governess losing her mind? Why did Miles get expelled from boarding school? Are Miles and Flora the OG creepy literary kids? What role does hysteria play? Is there a spell cast over the entire plot? Is the story a trap to catch the reader? How does the novella, set at Bly Manor, link to the Netfilx show, THE HAUNTING OF BLY MANOR?

We’ll address these questions, and along the way, Sonja will propose a sexy theory, and Vanessa will suggest that the bosom can be a murder weapon.

REFERENCES:

While we did not look at JANE EYRE as a Gothic tale, we did think about whether it counts as a female odyssey in Season 1: Can a Lowly Governess Have an Odyssey?

Here is an overview of James Literary Criticism, including Edmund Wilson’s influential article, “The Ambiguity of Henry James” from 1934.

Here is the article about how Henry James felt about Jane Austen.

For more information about the Hysteria Diagnosis in the late 19th/early 20th century, check out this link.

Here’s a great article celebrating the ambiguity of Turn of the Screw.

Here is a link to the article that offers Henry James's take on several women writers that Vanessa cites in the episode.

In the world of the Gothic, after you bang on a few castle doors, you’re bound to run into a vampire. Bram Stoker, barrister and theater manager, notably closed out the 19th century by leaving us with his vampire masterpiece, DRACULA.

In this week’s episode, Sonja and Vanessa explore how Bram Stoker brews his very own brand of Gothic. Legends of the Carpathian mountains mix with modern inventions and modern ideas, like that of the New Woman. With 3 established female vampires, a newly-minted female vampire, and one beloved young wife teetering on the brink of the undead, women make up a crucial part of a tale that spans from England to the heart of eastern Europe. There are undeniably strong women in the novel, but is it a feminist text?

Along the way, we meet a “train fiend,” Sonja muses on sexy lancets, and Vanessa concedes that lawyers may well be the greatest blood suckers of all.

Who wants to break all the rules? Who wants to tear it all down and make the world anew? Emily Brontë does, that’s who.

If you imagined WUTHERING HEIGHTS was some quaint Victorian romantic ghost story…think again. Honestly, there is just no other book like it. This 1848 work is truly sui generis. It’s like Emily Brontë, in her one and only book, before she dies at age 30, writes an off-the-scale earthquake into life under the unassuming and isolated Yorkshire moors, and her quake violently, mercilessly shakes the foundations of Patriarchy, class distinctions, racial hierarchy, traditional marriage, expectations of femininity, the role of the Gothic heroine, traditional ideas of masculinity, Christianity, the legal system, traditions of hospitality, and the tropes of Romance, including the so-called brooding romantic hero. Nothing escapes unscathed.

Join Sonja and Vanessa as they share some brief biographical information on Emily Brontë, explain some notable critical takes on the novel, consider the outer limits of revenge, explain why Heathcliff is rarely portrayed accurately in film adaptations, and pretty much stand in complete awe of WUTHERING HEIGHTS, a page-turning labyrinthian story about storytelling.

Along the way, Sonja pines for a dance with strangers while wearing a red dress, and we try not to think very hard about Heathcliff’s double-wide-coffin fantasy.

REFERENCES:

If you have not read WUTHERING HEIGHTS, check out your local bookstore, and if you don’t have one, consider ordering from our legendary bookstore, The Raven, right here in beautiful, quirky, historical, downtown Lawrence, Kansas.

Here is the link to the Bronte House Museum page that details the racial history of Liverpool and how that affects our reading of Heathcliff.

The article that Sonja mentions about the symbolism of Catherine’s whip, by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, can be found here.

Here is an online edition of WUTHERING HEIGHTS that includes Charlotte Brontë’s introduction, explaining the sisters’ pen names, their publishing history, Emily’s temperament, and Charlotte’s take on her younger sister’s novel.

Sonja mentions the term “femme covert,” and if you are not sure what that is, here is a link to an article from the National Women's History Museum about the concept and the huge impact it has had on women historically.

We also reference previous IWAW episodes linked here: Interview with Heather Aimee O'Neill; Emily St. Aubert is the heroine of Ann Radcliffe’s novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, which we cover in a two-part episode; our episode on Tristan & Iseult explores the origins of romance; and we have an episode on Jane Eyre that intersects with the WUTHERING HEIGHTS episode in terms of the Gothic and romance.