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Literature Essay on The Sandman and the Turn Of The Screw

Research title: Consider how innocence is problematised in The Sandman by E.T.W. Hoffmann & The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

The Sandman

The Sandman is a text which strikes innocence down at the outset. The introductory paragraph rings with the words of childhood, albeit narrated by an adult. In the second line we learn of “my mother”[1] who bears a “fair angel-image”[2] , and the writer speaks of “sweet dreams”[3] recalling the bright-eyed Clara. Almost instantly, the rug is pulled from beneath the reader, as words which seem oddly juxtaposed jar against the image: “something horrible”[4] disrupts the backdrop into which we are just beginning to settle, “dark forebodings” [5], “cruel, threatening, fate” [6]arrive as “dark clouds”[7] to raise instant challenge to the opening. The text commences in form, then, like a nightmare shattering an easy sleep.

One of the problems presented to innocence as a mental state in Hoffmann’s work, is the ease with which it becomes corrupted by the power of suggestion. Psychoanalytical force is at work in the torment of Nathaniel expressed in the primary missive, as he tells of how the Sandman as a character is innocently introduced by his mother. With a child’s curiosity he is driven to further ask “the old woman” [8]. There is subtlety at work here: the notion of innocence lost as the mind matures is captured in a literary time-lapse shot. Age steals youth. The child Nathanial is already prey to scepticism, that thief of innocence, and in mistrusting his mother for the words of a figurative old witch, allows the seeds to be planted which take on the shape of the monstrous conclusion. The old woman’s words shock the reader as perverse. To speak to children of their kindred “out bleeding from their heads” [9], and of their eyes fed to children with “crooked beaks[10]” indeed produces a “horribly depicted” [11] image. The consequent distress of the trembling, agonised child who seeks succour from his mother signifies his mind’s disturbance, no longer child-like and sound. It is significant that the destabilisation is caused by a woman. There is a dynamic in this tale which can be seen as a male v female power struggle. Indeed, Nathanial perceives The Sandman as a threat to his father[12] . The old woman castrates the male child through fear, but the dynamic is turned on its head when the dominant male sandman erupts in destructive energy at the close of the tale.

As the tale proceeds, so too the psychoanalytical theme progresses. At one point, Nathanial is “quite indignant that Clara established the demon’s existence only in his own mind”[13] . “The clear-headed Clara”[14] is a source of “no small annoyance” [15] as she suggests the increased control Nathanial ought to bring to bear upon his own mind. She acts like a nurse to a delusionary, whose frustration increases with the recognition that others will not partake in their fancies.

The power of the corruption is made the greater because what is under threat is an icon of childhood: the sandman is traditionally a kindly legend, but is here subverted. It compares to the use of the clown as icon in horror writer Stephen King’s work ‘It’.

The Turn of the Screw

This text also sets its scene with the emblems and ambience of childhood. There is a “story”[16] being told “round the fire… on Christmas Eve”[17] . “Little Miles”[18] who smiles with “loveliness[19]” is portrayed as an angelic child who metamorphoses piecemeal throughout the female’s narrative. Subtle symbols increase the allusion to a dimension of him the nanny alone perceives. Because her perception is solo, there is a psychoanalytical element here too: the reader is drawn into tense flux – is Miles’ strangeness the stuff of super nature or a disturbed onlooker’s mind? He has a “friendly old hand”[20] which description lends him a peculiar maturity, a “sweet ironic face”[21] of “dignity”[22]. which irony surely hints at sophistication, his language is that of an elder: “this queer little business of ours”[23], The reflection of his guardian that he was “as accessible as an older person”[24] and an “intelligent equal[25]” leads us to one facet of Miles’ lost innocence: he is a mature gentleman before his time. The nanny’s analysis can at times be read like one potentially sizing up a suitor, the boy’s replies only a step away from masterful flirtatiousness. The same challenge is present to Flora's innocence. When she desperately tries to convince as to the presence of Miss Jessel “she was not at these times a child, but an old, old woman” .[26]

We see the female suppression of the male energy that has evolved from being a focus of her love and cherishing to a torturous energy which she literally crushes from existence in the tale’s culmination: “I held him – it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held… his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped” . [27]

1. Hoffmann, E.T.W, The Sandman; Tales from the German, Chapman & Hall, 1845, p.140[Return]
2. ibid.[Return]
3. ibid.[Return]
4. ibid.[Return]
5. ibid.[Return]
6. ibid.[Return]
7. ibid.[Return]
8. Hoffmann, E.T.W, The Sandman; Tales from the German, Chapman & Hall, 1845, p.141[Return]
9. ibid.[Return]
10. ibid.[Return]
11. ibid.[Return]
12. ibid.[Return]
13. Hoffmann, E.T.W, The Sandman; Tales from the German, Chapman & Hall, 1845, p.152[Return]
14. ibid.[Return]
15. ibid.[Return]
16. James, Henry, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories, Heron Books, London, 1970, p.211[Return]
17. ibid.[Return]
18. James, Henry, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories, Heron Books, London, 1970, p.222[Return]
19. ibid.[Return]
20. James, Henry, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories, Heron Books, London, 1970, p.234[Return]
21. James, Henry, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories, Heron Books, London, 1970, p. 235[Return]
22. James, Henry, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories, Heron Books, London, 1970, p.237[Return]
23. James, Henry, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories, Heron Books, London, 1970, p.234[Return]
24. ibid.[Return]
25. James, Henry, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories, Heron Books, London, 1970, p. 249[Return]
26. James, Henry, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories, Heron Books, London, 1970, p.277[Return]
27. Excluding titles and quotations[Return]

• BIBLIOGRAPHY
  
• Hoffmann, E.T.W, The Sandman; Tales from the German, Chapman & Hall, 1845
• James, Henry, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories, Heron Books, London, 1970