Voice, Dialogue, Communication

This project analyzes the spectral significance of dialogical exchange within Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. In particular, it focuses on the lack of clear, open dialogical exchange between the inhabitants (both earthly and unearthly) at Bly, and how this inadequate communication fits within the spectral frame of trauma and repression. This trauma, “as [Cathy] Caruth describes it, is forever engaged in the quest for an answer, an evanescent truth” (del Pilar Blanco and Peeren 12). This perpetual quest for truth is undertaken by “ghosts that arrive from the past, seeking to establish an ethical dialogue with the present” (12). This ethical dialogue can provide trauma studies with an important, spectral perspective regarding communication and repression. My research delves into the spectral function of the em dash, and how its presence throughout the dialogue of The Turn of the Screw represents the ineffective communication symptomatic of repression. I also delve into multiple moments of failed communication between the living and spectral characters of the text. Through analyzing the communicative shortcomings of the characters in James’s novella, it is clear that the spectral narrative can offer valuable insight to the importance of communication in the realm of trauma studies.

Although frequently viewed as simply a pitiable waif gone mad, Ophelia’s voice in Shakespeare’s Hamlet reveals a rhetorically complex discourse of resistance to erasure. Ophelia’s desperate musical performances are more accurately viewed as a swan-song that laments the loss of her father, lover, and potentially a child through a polyphonic, and sometimes religious, feminine discourse of song. I argue that this construction of a feminine discourse of song is an instance of minor literature as described by Deleuze and Guattari. In her madness and subsequent disregard for social decorum, Ophelia finds previously dampened self-expression in the form of popular ballads and hymns. She utilizes these aural forms and the herbal properties of flowers to convey her grief and suggest that she has grappled deeply with being cast off by Hamlet and faces an unwanted pregnancy. The representation of Ophelia’s speech and death in stage productions, films, and art support her songs as sites of ambivalent agency and, in this light, frames the critical silencing of her voice as ignoring an important facet of Shakespeare’s work. I will pursue this reading through a multimedia approach by analyzing three film interpretations, one stage, and two paintings in concert with the scholarship of critics such as Chapman, Dunn, Fischer, Painter, and Romanska.