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Pablo C. Avila
ENG102H.0845
Prof. John Silva
3 June 2008
Two Normal Characters Ending Up in a Psychological Field
The different perspectives and styles a story can have are sometimes puzzling to many readers,
provoking a number of reviews, critical essays, and even doctoral dissertations that intend to
explain what sometimes cannot be explained in only one way. These types of stories are the ones
that start with a common and understandable setting but end up in an unclear one. In Henry
James’s The Turn of the Screw, for instance, the governess arrives to a new house where her
psychological problem will be evident through her sights of ghosts. And, in Joao Guimaraes
Rosa’s “The Third Bank of the River,” the son experiences a trip to the insaneness due to the
actions of his father who goes on a trip to the river and stays there with no apparent reason.
These two characters, though created and presented in different periods of time, have many
things in common, they both go from a sane stage to an insane stage using the number of events
that are to be analyzed in order for the reader to understand what the story is about.
The Third Bank of the River
The evolution of Joao Guimaraes Rosa as a writer can be found in his story “The Third
Bank of the River,” because it represents his going from traditionalism to a psychological field.
Guimaraes Rosa was born on June 27, 1908 in Central Brazil and, in 1925, entered medical
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school in Belo Horizonte, Brazil (Vincent 1). His first three works; “The Mystery of Highmore
Hall,” “Magma,” and “Sagarana,” can be described, in Jon S. Vincent’s opinion, as “to be about
rustics from the Brazilian hinterland” (2). This kind of writing was a characteristic in
Guimaraes’s works, however, a turning point will take place in 1958, when he suffered a nearfatal heart attack (Vincent 6). Then, readers can find Guimaraes’s change of style in the title of
his book Primeiras Estórias, published in its original Portuguese in 1962, and published in
English as The Third Bank of the River and Other Stories in 1968 (Vincent 6). This is his fourth
book, but the title Primeiras Estórias—first stories—marks a new beginning for his writing. As
Vincent opines, “friends claim that the severity of the heart attack he suffered in 1958 changed
his outlook of life and on writing” (6). It is true, there is a clear change of direction when
addressing the reader within “The Third Bank of the River,” where the characterization of the
son, who is also the narrator, enters into a questioning field because he starts to feel confused and
disturbed after his father’s departure. This story in particular demonstrates how Guimaraes sends
not only a new, but puzzling message to the reader making him reread the story to get the real
message within a character with a psychological issue.
The son/narrator goes from being an innocent kid in the beginning of the story to an
unreliable and troubled guy by the end of it. Throughout the story, the son represents a
permanent link between the reader and the story itself because everything that takes place within
the family is viewed through his eyes. From the very beginning, he gives an ample and detailed
description of his father, “father was a reliable, law-abiding, practical man, and had been ever
since he was a boy, as various people of good sense testified when I asked them about him”
(Guimaraes 189). This description takes places right at the beginning where the reader can have
an understandable setting of a family getting together before the father’s departure. Then, the son
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also presents a figure of a typical child whose father is about to leave, he demonstrates this
behavior when he asks, “father, will you take me with you in that canoe?” (Guimaraes 190). In a
situation like this, any child would have liked to go with his father. The son/narrator bases his
view of his father in various people of “good sense” and it is particularly this “good sense” that,
in this case in reference to other people, begins in the son’s speech but it doesn’t end up with him
by the end of the story. Later on, the father goes away and does not return in many years. By this
point, the son gets confused because his father stays in the middle of the river without going
away nor coming back. It is right then that the son starts to get disturbed by the circumstances
(Romano 96). In reference to this point, Romano wonders, “Is it possible that he is mad, that he
cannot accurately distinguish between reality and the hallucinatory products of his own
neurosis?” (96). Guimaraes’s story puzzles the reader because it goes from an understandable
and common setting to an unclear, dramatic, and questionable end; “this change in the narrative
design suggests a transformation in the narrator himself” (96). As the story transcends, the son,
who grows up and is left alone at home because his family has moved out, he then goes into a
profound lamentation because his father never comes back. As he says, “I was a man whose
words were all sorrowful. Why did I feel so guilty, so guilty? Was it because of my father, who
made his absence felt always, and because of the river-river-river, the river-flowing forever?”
(Guimaraes 195). This instance demonstrates the effects of the father’s actions on the son, they
confuse, disturb, and trouble him getting him insane because he does not understand why his
father stays in the river without going away nor coming back.
The path from rationality to irrationality is evident in the character of the son throughout
the story. The story continues and the son starts to develop a clear connection between he and his
father. Though, it is clear for the reader that the father is absent, his actions have an effect on the
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son. This presence of the father is clear when the son says, “Our father never came back, He
hadn’t gone anywhere” (Guimaraes 190). Yet, the son never loses contact with the father, either
far or close to the family. After the father is gone, the son reveals to the reader that he actually
keeps in touch with his father, but the family does not, “I had made myself responsible for
stealing a bit of food for him every day, an idea that had come to me the very first night” (191).
By this, the son demonstrates the strong connection he builds between the reading itself and the
reader because the reader is following the father’s actions which are closely manipulated by the
son. Thus, it is important to discover why the son goes from rationality to irrationality. His
character goes from a normal and natural behavior to an unexplainable one. In Romano’s
opinion, “the son’s gradual movement from rationality to irrationality, from sanity to insanity,
can be followed throughout the narration” (96). These events strongly affect the son because of
his closeness to his father after his departure, “whether I wanted to or not, my thoughts kept
circling back and I found myself thinking of father” (Guimaraes 192). This close relationship
will trap the son in an unreliable stage because by the end of the story he does not know what to
do and fails to find his father, “at least, when death comes to the body, let them take me and put
me in a wretched little canoe, and on the water that flows past its unending banks, let me go—
down the river, away from the river, into the river—the river” (196).
The Turn of the Screw
A fraternal rivalry, as mentioned by Peter Beidler (6), between Henry James and his older
brother William may have been a constant issue and may have later created a psychological
event in The Turn of the Screw. Henry James and his brother William were reared almost as
twins. Henry was born in 1843 in “one of the most intellectually powerful families in the United
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States” (Beidler 3). Though he wrote and published earlier than his brother William did despite
being younger than him, there was a fraternal competition between these two brothers that may
have affected Henry’s writing. William became popular and also gained fame as a pioneer in the
psychology field but he was quite jealous that his father had picked Henry as the executor of his
last will. Moreover, William saw Henry’s life as “enviably free, independent, creative, and
exciting” (7). Henry never got married and his singleness may have cooperated for his writing
because he dedicated more time to it, in contrast to William who saw his writing stopped due to
his family and teaching activity. Nevertheless, despite this natural competition between these two
outstanding authors, they both remained very supportive to each other and they both finally
succeeded in their professions. As Peter Beidler affirms, “If one brother [William] can be said to
have established the science of psychology as a legitimate science of study, the other [Henry] can
be said to have altered the direction of fiction and literary criticism in ways that we are still
learning to appreciate” (7). It is this new direction applied to fiction by Henry, as well as his
natural competition with his brother, that may have created a psychological issue in The Turn of
the Screw. William and Henry had a close relationship that was reflected in their writings,
“William wrote psychology so clearly that it reads almost like fiction, whereas Henry wrote
fiction so complexly that it reads almost like psychology” (7). It is this last point that also, due to
the natural competition, may give the reader a clue for better understanding what the
psychosexual hysteria in the character of the governess is in The Turn of the Screw.
In Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the governess captures the reader’s attention
with her sexual hysteria and the way it affects the children in her charge. The governess is a
woman who arrives to a new house to be in charge of two kids, Flora and Miles. She later reports
to see the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel. As the story goes on, these two apparitions seem
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to draw a psychological issue that will mark the governess’s character throughout the story.
From the beginning, for example, the governess starts to develop a sexual hysteria that, due to
her lack of a male partner, makes her imagine Peter Quint’s ghost. As Stanley Renner in his
essay “‘Red hair, very red, close-curling’: Sexual Hysteria, Physiognomical Bogeymen, and the
‘Ghosts’ in The Turn of the Screw” states, “what the governess sees on her first encounter with
the famous ‘ghosts’ of Bly, the experience that sets in motion the story’s central line of
development, is thus not the ghost of a dead man she has never seen but the projection of her
own sexual hysteria” (271). This sexual hysteria is the main point of the governess’s character
and the main issue where the reader can start to analyze the character from. In the first encounter,
the governess starts to imagine the handsome man she only has in her mind, “and the kind light
of it, in his handsome face” (James 39), because she is a young woman whose sexual needs are
no satisfied (Renner 274). This apparition of Peter Quint to the governess demonstrates the way
she manifests her psychosexual problem. As the story goes on, the governess will see the
consequences of her visions in the children’s reactions. She affirms that she wants to save Miles
and Flora from the possession of the ghost of Peter Quint but Flora seems not to be afraid of the
ghost that, according to the governess, wants to possess her (James 55). Later on, the governess
will have a special interaction with Miles, who wants to be away of the governess. This
interaction may call the reader’s attention since the governess’s psychosexual hysteria is still
present. After the ghost of Peter Quint has appeared, the governess may turn her target, this time,
towards Miles. As she says, “At all events I want to try. Get off with his sister as soon as
possible and leave me with him alone” (James 106). In this excerpt, the governess claims to save
Miles’s life because he is possessed by the ghost and that is why she wants to save him, though it
is possible that her psychosexual hysteria may be acting, too.
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The governess follows a path from reliability to unreliability in The Turn of the Screw
demonstrating how her psychological disorder takes her from a sanity stage to an insanity one.
The fact of reporting the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel makes the reader wonder whether
or not the governess is a reliable person. When she reports to have seen the ghost of Peter Quint,
she assures Mrs. Grose believes her (72) but in the second vision, this time of Miss Jessel’s
ghost, the governess loses Mrs. Grose’s confidence because she does not believe on the
governess anymore, for she realizes that the governess is just imagining these visions and, in
fact, there is nothing she sees. This is clear when Mrs. Grose says “She is n’t there, little lady,
and nobody’s there—and you never see nothing, my sweet!” (103). Also, the governess may give
a clue to the reader within the language she uses when describing the first vision Peter Quint’s
ghost, “and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed for—was the sense that my
imagination had, in a flash, turned real” (39, emphasis mine). By this, the reader may have an
idea about how the governess experiences these visions that rely in her imagination only. This
fact may account into the governess’s unreliability that will accompany her throughout the story.
It seems these two apparitions make of the governess’s character an unreliable person who, due
to a psychological problem, may combine reliability with unreliability.
Finally, both stories, James’s The Turn of the Screw and Guimaraes’s “The Third bank of
the River,” offer the reader an understandable setting at the beginning, but suddenly get into a
field of unclearness due to the psychological issue. As we have seen in the analysis of both
characters, the son/narrator and the governess, the path from the sane to the insane, from the
reliable to the unreliable, is evident within the number of events that take place. The son in “The
Third bank of the River,” is affected by his father’s actions with no apparent reason and they get
him disturbed and unreliable for the reader. Also, the governess in The Turn of the Screw, puts
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into evidence her psychosexual hysteria when, picturing a handsome man in her mind, she sees
the ghost of Peter Quint. These two characters have pretty much the same beginning and the
same end because the reader is confused about their sense of telling the truth. Also, they may
have been influenced by the experiences both authors had, Guimaraes’s heart attack and James’s
closeness to his brother’s psychological writing, using them to have the reader analyze in depth
the character in order to understand the idea of the story.
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Works Cited
Beidler, Peter G. Introduction. The Turn of the Screw. By Henry James. 2004. 2nd ed. Boston St.
Martin’s. 3-21.
Guimaraes Rosa, Joao. “The Third bank of the River.” The Third Bank of the River and Other
Stories. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. 189-196.
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw. Ed. Peter G. Beidler. Boston St. Martin’s, 2004. 22-120.
Renner, Stanley. “‘Red hair, very red, close-curling’: Sexual Hysteria, Physiognomical
Bogeymen, and the ‘Ghosts’ in The Turn of the Screw” Ed. Peter G. Beidler. Boston:
Bedfort St. Martin’s, 2004. 271-289.
Romano, James V. “Structure and Mysticism in ‘The Third Bank of the River’.” JSTOR 20.1
(1983): 93-103. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3513219>
Vincent, Jon S. Modern Latin-American Fiction Writers: First Series. Ed. William Luis.
Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 113. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992.