The Turn of the Screw is an ambiguous horror story about a nameless governess called to raise the young siblings Flora and Miles in the wake of their parents' death. At the country house of Bly it soon becomes clear that something is wrong either with the children, who exhibit frightening and eerie behavior, or with the governess herself who may suffer from madness. The story ends with the governess either saving or suffocating Miles after purportedly seeing a ghost.
Throughout his career James was attracted to the ghost story. However, he was not fond of literature's stereotypical ghosts. He preferred to create ghosts that were eerie extensions of everyday reality, "the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy", as he put it in the New York Edition preface to his final ghost story, "The Jolly Corner".
With the The Turn of the Screw , many critics have wondered if the "strange and sinister" were only in the governess's mind and not part of reality. The result has been a longstanding critical dispute about the reality of the ghosts and the sanity of the governess. Beyond the dispute, critics have closely examined James's narrative technique for the story. The framing introduction and subsequent first-person narrative by the governess have been studied by theorists of fiction interested in the power of fictional narratives to convince or even manipulate readers.
The imagery of The Turn of the Screw is reminiscent of gothic fiction. The emphasis on old and mysterious buildings throughout the novella reinforces this motif. James also relates the amount of light present in various scenes to the strength of the supernatural or ghostly forces apparently at work. The governess refers directly to The Mysteries of Udolpho and indirectly to Jane Eyre , evoking a comparison of the governess not only to the character of Jane Eyre, but to the character pf Bertha, the madwoman confined in Thornfield.
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