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The Turn of the Screw
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Themes
Ambiguity and the Limits of Knowledge
Henry James’s later works, including The Turn of the Screw, are notoriously resistant to easy interpretation. At one point, James’s own brother William (a distinguished American psychologist) protested that his fiction had become too obscure and advised James to clarify the moral message in his works. Obscurity haunts The Turn of the Screw at every level. The dense, serpentine sentences require careful attention, even scrutiny, or the reader risks becoming lost in the mayhem of disorderly nouns, pronouns, and clauses. While the dialogue between characters is less syntactically complex than the narration, deciphering the significance of what remains unspoken presents challenges. The governess often interrupts Mrs. Grose’s statements and finishes them for her, leaving readers wondering what the housekeeper may have said, given the chance. The exchanges between Miles and the governess are also filled with interruptions, presumptions, and unfinished sentences. There is no relief from uncertainty at the level of plot, either, as debate over the “reality” of the ghosts still rages among readers and seems unresolvable. Finally, the very structure of the novella, which nests one narrative within another, clouds the governess’s original narrative with even more uncertainty and compounds the problem of ambiguity.
Although the pervasive ambiguity in The Turn of the Screw may frustrate some readers, many literary scholars argue that the ambiguity is the point—that an important theme in the work is the fundamental uncertainty of reality. This marks a departure from the premises of most British fiction published earlier in the 19th century. The traditional Victorian novel relies on the convention of an all-knowing, third-person narrator to create a stable, realistic narrative world. Often concerned with exploring social relations, such novels depend on and redeploy “universal” truths—largely derived from religion—about moral conduct and the consequences of misconduct. James’s late-19th-century works contest not just the conceit of literary realism but also the moral truths inherent to it. For this reason, many scholars consider James an early practitioner of literary modernism, and well-known modernist writers like Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf acknowledged his influence on their craft.
Like The Turn of the Screw—or at least the Freudian-inspired interpretations of it—modernist fiction takes as its point of departure the notion that reality is a matter of individual perspective, which is always limited and compromised to some degree. Where realist texts employ an omniscient narrator and endorse traditional social and moral structures, modernist works favor an unreliable narrative filter and focus on the interior thoughts, perceptions, and motivations of the individual. There are many explanations for the paradigmatic shift from realism to modernism around the turn of the 20th century—including a growing disillusion with religion and moral righteousness, particularly after World War I—but for the purpose of better understanding The Turn of the Screw, it’s useful to consider how Freudian psychology undermined 19th-century notions of certainty.
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian psychologist whose publications, including Studies on Hysteria (1895), popularized the concept of the subconscious. Overturning the long-standing presumption that people fully control their thoughts and actions, Freud’s model of the mind identifies a pool of suppressed thoughts and desires—largely sexual—that influence an individual’s behavior. The conscious mind is unaware of these thoughts, having banished them to the subconscious for being too improper, but they nevertheless surface, uncontrollably, as dreams, fantasies, inexplicable fears, and hysteria. Freud located uncertainty at the very root of human consciousness, thus casting doubt on anyone’s claim to “know” reality. While classic Freudian interpretations of The Turn of the Screw diagnose the governess as a sexual hysteric whose grasp of reality cannot be trusted, uncertainty is systemic in the text, permeating even the outer frame of the Prologue. With respect to a question about the governess’s story, as yet untold, the Prologue’s narrator says, “The story will tell” (5), but Douglas, the would-be storyteller, counters, “The story won’t tell” (5). The governess’s story, buried as it is within Douglas’s story and then again within the narrator’s transcript, is akin to the subconscious of the novella. As such, it won’t tell, because it can’t.
Sexuality and the End of Innocence
The title of James’s novella alludes to Douglas’s conjecture, in the Prologue, that his story will elicit unprecedented horror because it involves twice as many children. By asking, “If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children—?” (3), Douglas implies that the degree of innocence at stake in a contest against evil determines the amount of terror involved. Moreover, he depends on the unspoken agreement among his audience that childhood epitomizes the state of innocence. The governess repeats this conventional association, but she sees Miles and Flora as exceptional representatives of innocence due to their striking beauty. She rhapsodizes over Flora’s “angelic beauty” (10) and concludes that, because Miles is “too fine and fair” (23) to perpetrate any wrongdoing, the schoolmaster’s letter is absurd. The children are like “a pair of little grandees, of princes of the blood, for whom everything […] would have to be fenced about” (18) so as to protect their purity. When the governess discovers wicked spirits are preying on the children’s souls, she takes it upon herself to preserve them from corruption, struggling against the demons until finally Miles’s “little heart [… is] dispossessed” (103). James himself referred to his novella as a “potboiler,” thus encouraging the understanding of it as a suspenseful contest between good and evil. In this interpretation, the governess models ideal virtue and ultimately prevails over iniquity.
Because James’s tale is riddled with ambiguity, however, it allows for alternative interpretations of what constitutes innocence, guilt, and corruption. Indeed, the nature of the evil imperiling the children’s innocence is never explicitly stated. The schoolmaster’s letter provides no explanation for Miles’s expulsion, so the governess can only speculate he did something “to corrupt” (15) his classmates. Mrs. Grose divulges that Peter Quint was “too free with everyone” (32), including Miss Jessel and the children, but fails to elaborate. And when the governess finally forces a confession from Miles concerning his school crimes, she only learns that he “said things” (101).
In 1934 literary critic Edmund Wilson recruited Sigmund Freud’s psychological theories to explain the silence surrounding the wickedness at Bly. Drawing on his clinical work with female patients, Freud had proposed that the repression of sexual ideas and urges can become pathological in some women and manifest as sexual hysteria. Wilson argues in “The Ambiguity of Henry James” (1934) that the governess is “a neurotic case of sex repression,” a condition that develops after she meets her employer. Dashing and sophisticated, the children’s uncle is “a bachelor in the prime of life, such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage” (7). The governess admits she “was carried away” (12) by him but cannot admit to sexual desire, which her religion and culture code as sinful. Unable to acknowledge her “evil” thoughts, she consigns them to her subconscious, where they remain concealed from her but produce a generalized nervous dread. Notably, the governess is familiar with the “mystery of Udolpho” (21) and other gothic novels, which feature an atmosphere of lurking horror and often involve supernatural phenomena. Her imagination is thus primed to enlist her own free-floating dread and suppressed desires to fuel delusions of supernatural demons engaged in sexual sinfulness. In this Freudian interpretation of the novella, the children are entirely innocent, and it is the governess who afflicts them with her corruption—a corruption caused by suppressed sexual knowledge.
Late-20th-century criticism of Turn of the Screw reassigns guilt to society itself, interrogating the culturally produced fears surrounding sexuality—particularly female and nonnormative sexuality—that compel individuals to deny their own desires. Eve Sedgwick’s 1990 essay “The Beast in the Closet” opened a productive vein of queer scholarship about James that, while reserving conclusions about James’s own sexuality, identifies the silences and ambiguities in his work as sites of suppressed homosexual content. This school of interpretation notes that, shortly before James published The Turn of the Screw, writer Oscar Wilde faced charges of same-sex “indecency” and endured a sensational trial that captured the public’s attention. The British court ruled decisively on the criminality of homosexuality, convicting Wilde and sentencing him to two years of hard labor. James followed the trial closely, as revealed in his letters, and expressed disapproval over Wilde’s public humiliation. Written in the wake of Wilde’s trial, The Turn of the Screw may register, through its evasiveness and elliptical discourse, the cultural imperative to silence certain sexualities. To the extent that the text foregrounds its own silences and thematizes them as suppressed sexuality, readers can interpret the tragic consequences of that suppression as a critique of society’s intolerance.
The Social Control of Female Identity
The conspicuous absence of the governess’s name suggests that her identity, outside of her domestic position, is uncertain. She is a parson’s daughter and, as such, would be considered middle class and “a lady” (39) in Victorian England. Because the financial misfortunes of her family have forced her to seek work, however, her socioeconomic identity is equivocal, hovering somewhere between that of a respectable lady and that of a working-class woman. To complicate matters, 19th-century British social categories don’t easily accommodate the role of a governess: She is not a maid, and she is not a mother; rather, she is paid to act as an upper-class mother, imparting manners and wisdom to her charges. While the governess’s liminal social status uniquely marginalizes her identity, the culture in which she lives circumscribes the identities and autonomy of all women, regardless of class. The governess acknowledges as much while contemplating “Miles’s whole title to independence, the rights of his sex and situation” (64)—rights to which the female sex is not entitled.
Despite the constraints that her gender and class impose on her identity, the governess resists disappearing into her role as governess. Perhaps her first inkling of her own autonomy arises after she arrives at Bly and enters her lavish bedroom—“the best in the house” (10)—and steps before “the long glasses in which, for the first time, [she] could see [herself] from head to foot” (10). The governess fancies herself the lady of the manor, reflecting, “I could take a turn into the grounds and enjoy, almost with a sense of property that amused and flattered me, the beauty and dignity of the place” (19). If the elegance of Bly—along with the “supreme authority” (7) she exercises there—elevates the governess’s sense of herself, the estate’s gothic trappings also encourage her to imagine she is a gothic heroine, a model of female identity she is familiar with as a reader of “old novel[s]” (7). Thus, she regards herself not as just a governess but also as “a remarkable young woman” (19) who undertakes a “flight of heroism” (33) to safeguard Bly from evil.
To validate her heroic identity, the governess longs for others to recognize it as such. Accordingly, she thinks, “[T]here would be a greatness in letting it be seen—oh in the right quarter!—that I could succeed where many another girl might have failed” (33-34). “The right quarter” refers to a witness of refined sensibilities who will appreciate her extraordinary virtue and courage. The right quarter is a gentleman—namely, her employer. But her employer never sees her again after their London interview. Instead, Peter Quint stares at the governess from the tower and for some moments, she writes, “never took his eyes from me” (21). He “isn’t a gentleman” (27), so his impudent gaze, far from confirming her identity as honorable, degrades it. His look reduces her not only to the governess she is, but also to the governess that was, Miss Jessel. When the figure of Miss Jessel appears before the governess, she recognizes herself in the “[d]ishonoured and tragic” (69) apparition, suggesting the governess’s exalted sense of herself is unstable.
If the young governess fails to decisively establish her own identity, she makes another attempt, years later, when she writes the story of her “flight of heroism” (33) at Bly. In her narrative she figures herself as a virtuous young woman who bravely battles evil forces. Once again, she requires a witness from the right quarter to recognize her remarkable identity, so she entrusts her manuscript to Douglas, who is indeed a gentleman. Although Douglas describes the governess as “the most agreeable woman I’ve ever known (4), he does not deduce from her narrative that she was courageous, nor that she “succeed[ed] where many another girl might have failed” (34). Rather, he stresses that “she was in love. […] That came out—she couldn’t tell her story without its coming out” (4). This is the salient fact he takes from her story, which is not how the governess wished to be seen, particularly as this assessment also suits the infamous Miss Jessel. By providing Douglas’s view of the governess, the novella registers how those privileged by “sex and situation” (64) effectively thwart the efforts of others—of women—to determine their own identity.
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