Muriel West
considered “The turn of the Screw” as a self-referential and self-contained, as
she is a structuralist. She didn’t take
into account the external factors but the text itself.
She wrote A
Stormy Night With The Turn of the Screw. It is a book which combines
fiction with literary criticism and, in order to do this, she emulates the structure
of “The Turn of the Screw”. “A stormy Night” is based in an anonymous manuscript
edited by someone called H.K.Y. and told by a narrator who obtained it in a
package of old books who bought at an auction.
In the
book, the editor, H.K.Y., made comments that affected the reader’s perceptions.
For example, we can appreciate the way in which events are presented. At first
we can’t understand them, so it is easy to get confused and to consider them
unnatural, but then we can find a natural and logical cause.
It’s pretty
suitable the way the Turn of the Screw is analyzed by West. As a structuralist,
we can see that she didn’t influence our perceptions, she didn’t tell us if we
should followed a non-apparition or an apparition perspective but she took the most intriguing part of this
book, its structure, its ambiguity. This ambiguity is key of the success of this novella.
I'm afraid that by "over-summarising" you have not made it clear what West's text deals with. Feel free to revise use of anticipatory it and dangling modification in the last paragraph.
ReplyDeleteYou may find it interesting to compare this account with http://litinenglish3.blogspot.com.ar/2012/06/muriel-west-muriel-west-could-be-lined.html . I made the mistake of assigning the same critic to two students, but you can profit by reading two different voices.
Mari: I couldn't agree with you more when you say that "The ambiguity is the key to success of this novella". Futhermore, at first I did not like the story at all. But in the end and after analysing it under different theories, it is its ambiguity what really engaged our interest in the story.
ReplyDelete