My English Department colleague, Dr. Anna Ioanes, is teaching the standard course in “Critical Theory” this semester and students have been working their way through Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw over the last few weeks. Somehow—not exactly sure how—I managed to forget how incredibly rich this text is and this is not even to mention the rich secondary criticism produced by this short little novella. Inspired—once again—by some posts from Jonathan Reeve over at Columbia (specifically, his nice write-up about sentence lengths in James along with his encoded .xml version of Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party”), I figured I could spend a little bit of time encoding James’s story. An early version of the text with all the necessary TEI nuts and bolts is available here. I still need to beautify and format things a bit, but, as I say, the skeleton is there for anyone that might want to fork and utilize it for further annotations. I should also say that Kate Singer’s really wonderful essay, “Digital Close Reading: TEI for Teaching Poetic Vocabularies,” in The Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy, has served as further inspiration. Her and her students’ use of the <seg ana> TEI tag to include semantic/analytical tags was incredibly useful as my encoding was interested in trying to keep track of the story’s clear obsession with sight and vision (there are tags related to the use of the five senses in both figurative and literal/physical form)—an obsession that Shoshana Felman’s canonical essay, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” did yeoman’s work charting out for all of us who came after.

There is still much more to be added here—most of the time so far was spent on getting all the <div> tags set up with chapters and paragraphs properly tagged and enumerated—along with properly tagging all the dialogue. In a really haphazard way I tried to attend to some of the semantic annotations I wanted to get into the encoding, but, as I say, it’s really haphazard and not at all really standardized and extensive or complete. I should mention, with regards to the dialogue, that it was fun to be able to actually encode how profoundly ambiguous so much of the dialogue is—especially in the prologue. I have <said> tags in the text where it’s not clear to me at all precisely who is speaking. We know there are multiple women that pose questions to Douglas in the “Prologue,” but James does not attribute them nor does he name some of the women (Mrs. Griffin gets named, but the other women do not). For some reason that I can’t quite totally explain, I find it really fascinating how this whole process can very explicitly (en)code the ambiguity in the text in this way that is, ironically, quite clear and “easy to see” (I use that last phrase very guardedly in this context, obviously). We all know this is one of the key techniques in James’s production of a sense of uncanniness in the story, but, again, it is indeed intriguing to be able to encode this technique in an explicit way.

Seasoned readers within psychoanalysis and Freud’s work are also very aware of the power of repetition within the production of “uncanniness”. I also tried to keep track of many of the semantic instances of “repetition” (with the <seg ana='repetition'> tag) along with other forms (i.e. when one characters “echoes” the words of another or just brutally repeats their interlocutor’s words back to them, a rather frequent little tic that arises between the governess and Mrs. Grose). I also tried to play around a little bit with actually counting the number of repeated words within the text as a whole (the script for that is in the aforementioned repo, direct link here). There are functions in that script to count repeated lemmas within a bunch of different “ranges”—so, one can figure out how often a particular lemma is repeated within five or ten or fifty or one-hundred tokens, thus giving one a sense of how often characters are repeating an individual lemma (not to mention the number of times such repetitions occur within the governess’ narrative—as a side note, it would be curious to see if most of the repetitions occur within dialogue tags or if a good deal of them happen in the governess’ non-dialogue-narrative, my sense is that most of the repetitions do occur within dialogue, though I haven’t checked or verified that—although now that the text has all the dialogue tagged, this process should be a pretty simple of parsing the .xml tree).

I am not sure that there is anything profoundly new that has surfaced through/from this process—although it has definitely given me a new lens through which to read and think about this story. All the elements mentioned so far are ones that are quite legible just from a normal/traditional close reading of the text; that said, it gives another way to see things, which I find quite fascinating. I am enthusiastic about seeing what one might want to add in terms of the annotation tags. I plan to fleshing out more of the tags associated with the senses, vision, touch, etc. (one should not skimp on the mentions of things having to do with touch—both literally/physically and in a figurative way—as there are numerous instances where the governess “takes hold of” someone physically [Mrs. Grose quite often, in fact]). The sense of touch is quite significant (I’m sure someone in the secondary criticism has covered this, so I’m hesitant to claim any originality here whatsoever) within this story.

More work with regards to some of the counting of repetitions—perhaps something including a use of the whole ngram tools—could allow for further thinking about precisely how we might want to count these syntactic/linguistic repetitions.

More to come, to be sure.