The other qualities of a superior being remained forbidden thus making the reality of their imperfect world even more difficult to bare.
Borges used the invisible reality in his short stories to speculate on some themes that were on people's minds since the beginning of human civilization. He used his writing skills to create a work of fiction that made the world of existential questions possessing men's minds became real to the contemporary reader.
If the invisible reality in Borges' stories represents the literary translations of the universal questions on people's minds since the beginning of the human civilization, the ghosts in Henry James' Turn of the Screw seem the representation of one's own fears, illusions, repressed feelings and imagination that is allowed to run wild. A potentially gothic story told in the evening of Christmas Eve is full of magic and scary at the same time. It is not suitable for the event, since Christmas is a moment of magic and beauty and although it has its secrets, there is nothing dark or spooky about it. The contrast is suitable for the human mind that has its dark corners even in the most bright places.
It is obvious that the field of psychology has its deep influence on James' writings. Kafka, Borges and James could not escape the temptations of exploring the human mind in its wonderful intricacies.
Humanity has appeared to need the world of fantasies in order to escape the ugliness of reality, or on the contrary, to enrich its experiences through dreadful stories instead of living the real things. Those very ghosts are the reflection of the human mind and of all those dark deep secrets that one does not dare to utter to another human being. The context in the Turn of the Screw allows the narrator to play with the reader and to suggest possible variations of the truth. The story teller will never indicate the reality in its entirety and the reader will always have the chance to find portions of his own reflections in one character or another or, in a certain situation. There is no right or wrong in the book, there is only a very complicated and deep connection between the characters. The governess who is hired by the handsome bachelor to take care of his nephew and niece could be the victim of a cruel person who sits above all the rest and enjoys playing with innocent people's minds or she could be as cruel as it gets and play with them herself. but, the issue of fantasy vs. reality becomes secondary to the issue of obsession. Obsession, no matter what form it may take, proves to be as destructive as any monster claiming for a life. The governess is obsessed with the children's relationship with the two ghosts she is seeing at Bly.
The theme of love is only the pretext for the story teller to tell her story through the mouth of a man who was, at his turn, in love wit her. The temptation to reduce everything to some prefabricated and easy to swallow contexts is cleared from the very beginning when the narrator answers the impatient audience's questions: " "Who was it she was in live with?" "The story will tell," I took upon myself to reply"..."The story won't tell" said Douglas; "not in any literal vulgar way." "(James, 9).
The narrator suggests that the twenty-year-old girl who came to London to answer an advertisement fell in love with her employer: "a bachelor in the prime of life, such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage."(James,11). But the very words describing him anticipate his lack of weight in the context of the whole story. He could be just the product of her vivid imagination and a pretext for her needs to fantasize. The description of the gentlemen goes further and it seems to never run out of appreciative words. The description creates the impression of a patch work made of pieces taken from different novels whose main characters were having some of the characteristics...
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