Critical Analysis of “Turn of the Screw” by Henry James : Literary Criticism in Context  ( Pages 1 • 2 • 3 • 4 )

 

Other essays and articles in the Literature Archives related to this topic include : Character Analysis of the Narrator in "Turn of the Screw" by Henry James  •  Class and Satire in "The American" by Henry James and "Huck Finn" by Mark Twain  •  Realism in American Literature  •  American Literature in Historical Context : 1865 to Roosevelt

 

After this first sighting of Peter Quint at this point in the plot of "Turn of the Screw" by Henry James, it is revealed that this a former employee of the estate who Mrs. Grose says is deceased, the strange incidents begin to multiply. The ghost of Peter Quint is joined by the ghost of Miss Jessel, the former governess who had left the estate and died under circumstances that are mysterious to the narrator. Although the ghosts are apparently invisible to Flora, Miles, and Mrs. Grose, they become increasingly disturbing to the governess, who perceives Peter Quint and Miss Jessel as threats to her relationship with Flora and Miles, as well as threats to the children’s very lives. To this end, the governess devotes herself to sleepless nights of vigilance, hoping to protect the children from what she is certain will be their possession by the supposedly malevolent ghosts.

 

The governess in Turn of the Screw" by Henry James cannot protect Flora and Miles of course; if she could, James would not fulfill the final requirement of the ghost story genre, which is to completely topple the remaining safeguards between the individual and the threat, whether real or perceived. Little Miles dies in the governess’s arms. Despite her best efforts, the governess is left with nothing more than Miles’s lifeless body and what the reader supposes will be the governess’s irresolvable disconsolation, which cannot be confirmed due to the narrator's ambiguous conclusion of the novella. The conclusion of Turn of the Screw" by Henry James is lacking in resolution is also characteristic of the conventional ghost story; the reader is left with stimulated anxiety that cannot be discharged through a satisfying resolution. Instead, the reader is compelled to accomplish the management of his or her own anxiety by experiencing and confronting it directly; the ghost story, then, is not escape, but confrontation. As Clayton writes, “It is the reenactment of the drama of anxiety in the form of [the narrative] that is satisfying--the enactment, not the solution. I need my nightmare; I need to enter and reenter it to feel its danger safely, to absorb the energy out of that danger” (121). This evocation of mental and emotional unrest, a violence more subtle than the physical violations of the horror tale, is the hallmark of the good ghost story (Cox xxiv).

 

For all of the preceding reasons, then, Turn of the Screw" by Henry James seems to be a rather conventional ghost story. Yet what is the reader to make of the fact that James simultaneously subverts the genre of the ghost story after he has written a novella that seems to conform without deviation to the typical ghost story formula? In fact, how is this subversion achieved and for what ends? How do we recognize it? While the reader acknowledges that James is entirely faithful to the narrative pattern established by his peer, a closer reading of Turn of the Screw" by Henry James reveals that James is undermining the notion of the ghost story even as he experiments with it. There are some puzzling elements of Turn of the Screw" by Henry James which reveal even more profound lessons than learning how to manage our existential anxiety and our horror of the unknown. First, the governess is the only person who actually witnesses the ghosts and she is the individual who retains control of the way in which we as readers see and interpret the events of the narrative. Is she to be believed? Is she reliable?

 

There is plenty of evidence that can be cited to make the argument that the governess is troubled by anxieties that go beyond typical human preoccupations. The narrator herself seems to realize that she is mentally disturbed. On numerous occasions, she acknowledges her “dreadful liability to [form] impressions…vividly exemplified” (James 175). Despite her awareness that she is troubled—a fact she reasserts at the beginning of almost every chapter after she first sees Peter Quint-- she never develops the capacity to rein in her anxieties and reality test them. Although she makes a pact with Mrs. Grose “to keep our heads if we should keep nothing else” (James 187), she fails to do so, conceding to her paranoid ideations with increasing frequency. If we go back to the beginning of Turn of the Screw" by Henry James, we see a lack of psychological sophistication in "Turn of the Screw" on the part of the governess. She is naïve, first dreading her post without knowing anything about it, and then swinging to the other end of the pendulum, regarding her situation as idyllic and beyond criticism of any sort.

 

From the narrator of “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James is unable to achieve, much less maintain, a balance between fantasy and reality. Once she has dispelled her initial fears, all unfounded, she begins to imagine threats to her newfound happy and free existence. At first, she is only slightly suspicious about any threats, all perceived rather than actual, to her idyll. The letter from the boarding school regarding Miles’s behavior, for instance, cannot possibly be true, and she seeks collusion from Mrs. Grose to dismiss any concerns. Mrs. Grose’s story of the previous governess and her mysterious telling of the young woman’s departure and subsequent demise are also suspect, provoking the narrator’s anxieties; she is possessed with a feeling that she herself describes as “so monstrous” (James 161) that it can be characterized as unreasonable.

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