Session 9(b): Evil Places

Session 9b: Evil Places
Chair: Sorcha Ni Fhlainn

The Ghostly Air of Evil: Malevolent (Abstract) Space In Turn of the Screw
Jennifer Arends
Faculty of Arts, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898) is a novella in which evil becomes visually and physically manifest. The governess, from whose perspective the story is told, claims to see the malevolent ghosts of two former employees at Bly, the isolated English manor house where she is in charge of the absent master’s niece and nephew. The first is of Peter Quint, the master’s deceased valet, and the second is of Miss Jessel, the children’s prior governess. The governess asserts that these ghosts belong to the realm of the “damned” (223) and are in communication with Miles, the elder of her two charges, thus threatening his salvation. The governess describes both children initially as happy and gentle, though they become increasingly mischievous and even corrupt. Miles’ mysterious expulsion from school provides, in the governess’ mind, confirmation of his “wickedness” (224). Bly, then, can be read as a space in which evil resides, and an analysis of that space provides insight into the nature of this evil. Henri Lefebvre, in The Production of Space (1974), theorizes an “abstract space” that is a product of modernity and characterized by violence, “the primacy of the visual,” and a phallic dominance that threatens the subject’s access to knowledge and even his/her very existence. Applied to The Turn of the Screw, Lefebvre’s theory of abstract space sheds new light on the governess, a woman particularly prone to abstraction, and on the “air of Evil” (Preface 127) that swells during her time at Bly. It may also provide an explanation why the governess sees the ghosts, while Mrs. Grose, Bly’s unimaginative and empirically-minded housekeeper, does not.

To Kill a Capitalist: Locating Evil in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
Kiki Benzon
University College London, United Kingdom

In Don DeLillo’s fiction—as it is, broadly speaking, in life—what constitutes “evil” is difficult to determine with any precision and consistency. Not only are characters like Lee Harvey Oswald (Libra, 1988), the Texas Highway Killer and J. Edgar Hoover (Underworld, 1997) drawn with remarkable nuance, rendering them incompatible with any particular moral category, but also the networked, interconnected logic of DeLillo’s narratives resists absolutist interpretation. Supposedly discrete phenomena and individual trajectories—persons, objects, cultural processes and historical events—are never autonomous but participate, rather, in dynamic concert (or contest) with each other and greater cultural, economic and political patterns. Nowhere are autonomy and moral ambiguity more pronounced than in DeLillo’s latest novel, Cosmopolis (2003). Billionaire corporate mogul Eric Packer crosses New York City in his limousine in order to get himself a haircut. This banal exercise takes on a sinister quality as Packer encounters a violent anti-globalization protest, traffic gridlock resulting from a presidential visit and a celebrity funeral procession, erratic stock market shifts, marital disintegration and a homicidal threat aimed decisively at him. This “murderer,” the pathetic and disenfranchised Benno Levin, wants to kill Packer for his inhumane capitalism which has rendered Benno a “helpless robot” (195). Although the varieties of discord surrounding Packer may be easily linked to his own detached manipulation of global currency extravagant hermeticism, he maintains that Benno’s “crime has no conscience” (196) and that “[v]iolence needs a cause, a truth” (194). The exchange between the two men, a contest of ideological polarities, is not only an instructive depiction of moral relativism, but also, I argue, a concrete means of engaging with the novel’s chief historical “intertext,” the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

The Glorious Self-Defeat of the Extra-Evil Gothic Villain
Scott Simpkins
Department of English and Chair, Institutional Review Board, University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, USA

As with Nietzsche’s sense of the “extra-moral”, the extra-evil figures prominently among Gothic literature as a subject category that transcends the mundane limits established by merely pedestrian wickedness.  Villains who aspire to this supreme level of achievement, however, succeed only by accepting a concomitant diminishment in hygenic being.  They operate on a plane far above that inhabited by conventional evil-doers, in other words, but not without sacrificing themselves in the process.
Two exemplary characters in British Gothic literature serve to illustrate this development. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s extra-evil villain in his first novel, _Zastrozzi_(1810), orchestrates an elaborate scheme of revenge against an especially innocent victim, Verezzi, and is content with this plan until he suddenly invents a sublime twist that ratchets up its perversity exponentially.  Rather than persecuting his victim directly, he determines to manipulate his victim to undo himself at his own hand.  Duping his assistant villain-in-training (who is smitten with Verezzi) to unwittingly assist in this plot serves as the “tasty sauce” (as Dostoevsky’s Underground Man would say) that adds piquancy to this undertaking and enables Zastrozzi to fulfill this particularly evil agenda, although necessarily at his own sacrifice as a consequence.
Similarly, Charlotte Dacre’s villain, Count Ardolph, in her 1806 novel, _Zofloya_, finds his glorification not merely in seducing and subsequently “ruining” just any women, but specifically those who are married.  In a triangulated manner, this entails not only luring women out of a marriage, but devastating their husbands as well.  Unfortunately, this supremely wicked agenda leads him to inhabit a sphere of disablingly hyper-suspiciousness of everybody around him, and when he comes upon a victim he falls in love with, he cannot comfortably accept a relationship which isn’t machinative in nature (again, see the Underground Man).
These extra-evil villains thus perform feats that even conventional villains cannot achieve, but again, they always end up depleting those feats in the very act of doing them.  On the other hand, this dilemma is evidently inherent within such high-level–indeed, “glorious” accomplishment.  This is clearly a rejection of the unnecessary concern for oneself, a restriction that, from this perspective, only leads to curtailment of power.  Unlike the rules for successful revenge outlined by Poe’s narrator in “The Cask of Amontillado”–e.g., one must not get caught–the rules embraced by these villains are far less restricted.  Accordingly, as with the asymmetrical thought that accepts suicide in order to accomplish a terrorist act, the thought of the extra-evil villain is by no means shackled by such puny concerns.