As far as adaptations of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw go, there is no shortage. And 1961’s The Innocents (co-written by Truman Capote with William Archibald and John Mortimer) remains to this day one of the greatest–and most faithful to the book–renderings. That doesn’t mean the material will remain untouched despite being “done to death.” Case in point, The Haunting of Bly Manor. It is with this adaptation that Mike Flanagan seeks to carve out a permanent niche for himself in the form of these The Haunting series, commenced by his reinterpretation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Whereas this imagining of Jackson’s classic tale unleashes and unveils its horrors steadily from the outset of the narrative, The Haunting of Bly Manor is subtler than that. What’s more, at its core, it is intended as a “love story,” not a “ghost story.” Its aim is to achieve a slow, sinister build, much the same way James himself did with the original work–though to compare the two as being in the same league would be something akin to literary sacrilege.
What’s more, Flanagan and his fellow writers, including Ciarán Foy, Liam Gavin, Axelle Carolyn, E.L. Katz and Yolanda Ramke & Ben Howling, make it clear that the story is pure homage with the caveat “Based on the work of Henry James.” Still, all the most fundamental setups and plot points are there, even beginning the tale from the perspective of another storyteller rehashing it. While in The Turn of the Screw it was a man named Douglas who once knew and was probably in love with the governess, The Haunting of Bly Manor wields a mysterious wedding guest played by Carla Gugino (who swaps out being a ghost in The Haunting of Hill House in favor of a real live person) to lay the groundwork in the present, set in “Northern California 2007.”
The events of our dreary and gruesome chronicle, however, commence in London of 1987, at which time an American ingenue named Danielle “Dani” Clayton (Victoria Pedretti) finds herself applying for the position of governess at a remote country manor in Bly, where she would be taking care of two children, Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) and Flora (Amelie Bea Smith). The children’s uncle, Henry (Henry Thomas), seems unimpressed by Dani, though intrigued why someone as young as she would want to be sequestered in Bly–especially since she has the option to simply go back to America during the final stretch of the drawn out economic decline in the U.K. during the Thatcher years. But that’s not Dani’s desire, and she claims to genuinely like England (said no one ever except Samuel Johnson, and he was only talking about London). Her enthusiasm and genuineness, however, does not seem to be enough for Henry, who also, in the back of his mind, is probably trying to spare her from the unspoken curse of Bly Manor. Something he can’t even fully acknowledge to himself.
And yet, encountering her at the same pub after the interview leads him to loosen his judgment long enough to hire her. So begins the slow unraveling of the truth about Bly. But before that comes in all of its revelatory glory, the anecdote focuses on the slow-budding (no horticulture pun intended) romance of Dani and the groundskeeper/resident gardener, Jamie (Amelia Eve). Dani, who is still reconciling with the death of her fiancé, Edmund (Roby Attal)–back when she was pretending to be straight–has her own ghost following her throughout the manor (and everywhere else she goes). Because of the Poe-like guilt that plagues her, this ghost is the only one in the manor that manifests solely from her psyche (though in The Turning of the Screw, one of the theories posited was that all ghosts were entirely a product of the governess’ madness).
As the Groundhog Day sense of time passes at Bly, Dani feels closer and closer to Jamie, as opposed to the other two workers on the property, Hannah Grose (T’Nia Miller), the household “manager,” and Owen (Rahul Kohli), the cook. For they themselves have their own bubbling-to-the-surface romance brewing. And yet, as Hannah points out, romances that begin at Bly tend to be doomed, based on what happened to the last governess, Rebecca Jessel (Tahirah Sharif), and her scandalous affair with Henry’s chauffeur/all-around errand boy, Peter Quint (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). The oh so dashing and manipulative Peter Quint, whose actions were damned to bring the haunting of their love affair to the manor.
With all these coupling permutations at play, it harkens back to something our storyteller introduced at the beginning–an eerie little ditty that goes, “Beneath the weeping willow, but now alone I lie/Singin’ O willow waly by the tree that weeps with me/Singin’ O willow waly till my lover return to me.” As she awakens to this tune in her head while staring into her reflection in the water in the sink and bathtub, she then resigns herself to going to the rehearsal dinner, where an as of yet unidentified man stands up to give a small speech to the bride and groom that sets the tone for our storyteller’s own impending tale, as he notes, “Half of marriages these days do not end in divorce. That means there’s a strong probability that you two get to watch each other die. And that’s the preferred outcome. To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them.”
That’s a notion that Bly Manor is literally founded upon. And in both The Haunting of Hill House and Bly Manor, the issue with each structure–a living, breathing entity unto itself–is that the people (specifically women) who have died in it can’t let go of the ones they loved, causing them to mutate into some horrible, evil thing as a result of not truly fathoming the old adage about how if you truly love someone, you should set them free–because, in turn, your spirit will be, too. What’s more, while not an intentional theme of the show, it appears only to reiterate the toxicity of clinging to another person for self-validation–even if it’s not a romantic clinging… for it also applies to familial relationships as well.
The show’s release at a time when Sasha Roseneil, a group analyst and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist (say that ten times fast), has come forward with her own assessments about the ways in which the “tyranny of coupledom” continues wreak havoc on our collective mind fuck in terms of why many still don’t feel “complete” without “another” (and, often, any “other” will do). Part of that reason is because of pop culture re-emphasizing this trope in our brains, The Haunting of Bly Manor being no exception to the rule. For while, yes, it’s all “perfectly splendid” to find love, the inevitability of letting it be commodified by society as it pertains to commerce and capitalism is where romance tends to end. Giving way instead to resigned domesticity. As Roseneil so acutely points out, “…being coupled remains the very essence of ‘normal,’ something fundamental to people’s experience of social recognition and belonging. Governments of all political hues and communities of every kind almost universally expect, promote and sometimes even enforce coupledom. The good citizen and the respectable, successful adult… of any country you might consider is expected to be part of a couple. To be outside the couple is, in many ways, to be outside, or at least on the margins of, society.”
The fact that “couple love” is so romanticized by things like The Haunting of Bly Manor (with its decidedly Jack and Kate in Titanic undertones with regard to losing someone you love–complete with the watery motif) does not help to debunk the societal structure that has been built around The Couple. Indeed, when one looks at Dani’s state at the beginning of the show, when she’s just dismantled her own coupledom, she is miserable. And it’s not only because she was denying her sexuality, but because now she’s out in the world alone, and it’s already being met with suspicion from someone like Henry, who can’t fathom why she would want to be “alone” at Bly.
Ms. Jessel, too, fell prey to the belief in the benefit of “true love” as it gave way to the couple trap (a glue trap, ultimately–the analogy Hannah uses to describe Peter and the effect he has on Rebecca). Had she kept her eye on the prize of becoming a barrister, and using her job at Bly as a small detour in the plan, Peter wouldn’t have seemed so important in the long run–and yet, she is imprisoned, even unbeknownst to her, by the trope we’re all fed a steady diet of from day one: meet someone, fall in love, attach to them–no matter what: do not end up alone. So insidious is this indoctrination within all of us that we scarcely realize how much of it dictates our life. That we might be too afraid to question whether the person we “love” so much is merely someone we can stand to live with in the same household for decades. Is that love, or convenience through tolerance?
Roseneil further goes on to point out that the cult of coupledom is so rooted in everything that it even permeates our social and government programs, remarking how it “operates through laws and policies that assume and privilege coupledom, with myriad economic impacts in terms of access to welfare benefits, pensions, inheritance and housing. It works through the injunctions, expectations and informal social sanctions of family, friends and colleagues who encourage and cajole the uncoupled towards coupledom. And it is perpetuated through cultural representations of the good life as the coupled life that make it hard to imagine the possibility of contentment beyond the conventional pairing.”So much so that Jamie is willing to be with Dani despite the fact that she’s been possessed by a dogmatic, faceless (think The Blank in Dick Tracy) lake lady.
Oh, but it’s true love, she swears to herself up and down–despite the reality that the they have no ostensible connection beyond being the only two lesbians at Bly House. In truth, everyone who does “fall in love” at Bly House actually appears to be doing so only because it’s the most convenient (therefore “best”) choice available to them as a result of their sequestered status. If that isn’t the very epitome of a social disease, then it’s hard to know what is. So sure, let our narrator wax poetic about the beauty of loving someone so much you’re willing to endure the pain of losing them, but let us not ignore the idea that love itself–as it pertains to The Cult of Coupling–is often a bourgeois construct (to borrow a phrase from The Pet Shop Boys). And no one loves emulating bourgeois practices more than the commoner, at play aplenty in Bly House.
