Joyce Carol Oates, Accursed Inhabitants
It is no secret that Joyce Carol Oates' short story "Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly" is a re-working of Henry James' literary work "The Turn of the Screw". However a ever burning question that becomes evident when reading Joyce's short story is what exactly are the true motives of Miss Jessel and Peter Quint. Looking further in depth with respect to the short story it will be determined if Oates' short story provides a convincing interpretation of these two characters. At first in Oates's version the reader seems to be brought face to face with the dark and hidden acts that bound Jessel and Quint to the children. The idea of group sex. Looking further in depth the reader is confronted with a scene that is a particularly appetizing memory of Quint that supports this idea. It is sex, the need to touch and fondle both children's bodies as the two adults engaged in sex themselves. This scene is a dark underly
The visual dimensions of seeing and being seen form the dominant motif in both tales, but in Oates the visual is blatantly intertwined with the question of sex and power. Quint also recognizes that he is connected with Miles in the same sort of intense manner. In Oates's story, when Quint remembers Miles it is as a "child starved for affection," a child who hugged and kissed Quint, "seizing him around the hips, burrowing his flushed little face into the elder man as a kitten or puppy might, blindly seeking its mother's teats". ing theme which might be the reason that attracts Jessel and Quint to the children and contributes to the horror atmosphere within the story. Thus it is her mother that Flora seeks in her infatuation with Jessel: "Flora must have seen, yes, here was her lost young mother restored to her, at last!". The fact that they had easy access to these orphaned and unprotected children constitutes the horror of their crime, a perversion of the trust that was placed in them by the uninvolved "Master. Equally explicit is Flora's longing to be reunited with her dead governess. Sexual power, as well as apparent desire and mourning are evident in the short story, but Oates chooses in her story to make these compulsions blatant. When Oates's Miss Jessel says that Flora is her "soul," that she cannot live without possession of the girl, what she is actually saying is that she sees in Flora her younger, pure self. All in all there are two possible levels of ghosts haunting the short story, Jessel and Quint, the substitute love objects, as well as the earlier, dead biological parents, abruptly swept away by disease in India two years before the events in the story began. The originating sorrow for the children is the death of their parents, but then they are traumatized again by the sudden and violent deaths of their parent substitutes. Continuing a second aspect in Oates's tale is Jessel's facial contortions and desperation which explained by her frantic attempts to get at Flora. She loves herself as an unspoiled beautiful girl; hence her "love" for Flora is simply a manifestation of her narcissism. For Oates it seems that Flora and Jessel feed each other in their excessive and mutual need for each other, just as Miles and Quint do.
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Acceptance Essays
