The Face at the window

 

I was reading to Adam from our Sherlock Holmes book a couple of nights ago. Adam is at an age that he still allows, and even likes, his Dad to read to him, and I am, of course, a ham actor from forever, so I love trying on accents and the whole dramatic reading shtick. The vaudeville in my soul gets little chance to act out, so I take it when it comes.

We were reading “The Creeping Man.” Adam didn’t see what was so scary about a creeping man, so I had him turn off the lights and I crept on my belly on the floor. He admitted that it could be the slightest bit scary. Then we read about the man looking in the window at his daughter in the middle of the night. Again, Adam objected to this as objectively non-scary. I was tempted to go outside to demonstrate this, but I didn’t. However, we did talk about the “face at the window”.

When I was around nine or ten, I slept in a room in the downstairs of our house on Nielson Court in Clarkston, Georgia. It could get very dark in the downstairs. One of my nightly duties – or perhaps it was simply the habit of the nervous boy I was – was to make sure the back door was locked. I always forgot to check on the back door until I was in my pyjamas and the lights were all turned off. I slept in the same bedroom as my brothers, and so I couldn’t just turn on a light, so I had to creep out of the bedroom, through the rec room to the door and check the lock. Looking back, I can of course see the neurosis in this routine – the forgetting of the task, the turning out the lights, the going to bed, the remembering and the creeping out to do it. Looking back, I think I needed, for one reason or another, to play a game in which I scared myself. At the time, though, my real dread was that there would be a face staring at me through the window on the door.

The image of the face at the window is related, on the one side, to the face behind a mask, and on the other side, to the face as pure, malevolent other. There’s a wonderful scene in The Turn of the Screw which, in a sense, sums up the whole scare of the plot. The governess had been going to church with the old nursemaid, Mrs. Grose, and had gone back inside the house to get something, when she saw a man’s face at the window, staring at her. She of course rushes out and tries to find the man.

“There were shrubberies and big trees, but I remember the clear assurance I felt that none of them concealed him. He was there or was not there: not there if I didn’t see him. I got hold of this; then, instinctively, instead of returning as I had come, went to the window. It was confusedly present to me that I ought to place myself where he had stood. I did so; I applied my face to the pane and looked, as he had looked, into the room. As if, at this moment, to show me exactly what his range had been, Mrs. Grose, as I had done for himself just before, came in from the hall. With this I had the full image of a repetition of what had already occurred. She saw me as I had seen my own visitant; she pulled up short as I had done; I gave her something of the shock that I had received. She turned white, and this made me ask myself if I had blanched as much. She stared, in short, and retreated on just my lines, and I knew she had then passed out and come round to me and that I should presently meet her. I remained where I was, and while I waited I thought of more things than one. But there’s only one I take space to mention. I wondered why she should be scared.”

 

The game of staring through the window – or the way it becomes a game when the governess imitates the man – is a pretty wonderful circuit, something that Lacan should have written about – although God knows, given the infinite number of Seminaires, maybe he did. Between the scariness of the face staring in and the Governess intentionally standing at the place of the man and staring in, something happens – a sort of exorcism that opens the world of the Governess to the possibility of exorcisms.

I didn’t think in this way when I was a brat, creeping out to check the door was locked and trying to avoid seeing the window in the door. But surely the routine of the face at the window had me in its spell. It was intersubjectively scary.

But Adam is nine, and perhaps he doesn’t want his Dad to go on about “intersubjectivity”. I save this for posting on facebook.