One of Henry James’s shortest novels, The Turn of the Screw first appeared in Collier’s Weekly. When published in a volume titled The Two Magics, it appeared with another story titled Covering End. Although brief, it captured readers’ imagination and became important to the mystery genre as well as the ghost genre, due to unanswered questions regarding its first-person point-of-view narrator.

When an unnamed young woman becomes governess for the children Flora and Miles at Bly, England, their uncle gives her orders not to bother him with any information about the children and their activities. Bly is an isolated estate with little contact with the outside world. The governess at first finds the children obedient and cooperative and enjoys their company. However, their secretive behavior soon clues her in to possible conflict. When she sees the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, a former steward and governess at Bly, she makes inquiries about them and learns they have died. While the governess feels certain the children witnessed the ghostly forms, they avoid directly answering her questions about the scene. She later discovers that Quint, who had been in charge of Miles, and Jessel, who had care of Flora, had been lovers and were evil.

James’s characterization of the governess allows him to exercise his lifelong interest in the psychology of his characters, rather than in the events caused by their internal conflicts. Readers are allowed access to the governess’s vision, with no judgment as to the “truth” of her perception burdening the tale. All the readers see is the children react to an apparent influence; no description of the horror inflicted upon them is supplied.

Whether due to her own mounting paranoia or the children’s increasing duplicity, the governess feels a demonic force she determines to shatter possesses them. Flora becomes hysterical when the governess directly confronts her, leading to an unexplained illness. When she confronts Miles, Quint’s ghost returns to the window. In an attempt to protect Miles from Quint’s evil force, the governess steps between the apparition and the child. However, Miles becomes hysterical as Flora did, and dies in her arms, evidently driven to his death by the struggle between two worlds to possess him.

While somewhat unsatisfying in its never reaching a conclusion regarding the plot events, the book remains a good example of the questionable character of a first-person narrator. One critical camp has posed that James intended the tale to be ironic, with the source of evil in the governess projected onto the characters of Quint and Jessel. Another counters that nothing else James wrote suggested this interpretation of the governess as merely imagining the scenario. The story remains popular and has appeared in film versions.

Bibliography
Edel, Leon, ed. The Ghostly Tales of Henry James. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1948.
———, ed. The Letters of Henry James. 4 vols. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1974–1984.
———. The Life of Henry James. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Mystery Fiction, Novel Analysis

Tags: 19th-century literature, ambiguous narrator, Analysis of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, Bly estate, classic horror literature, first-person narrator, Flora and Miles, ghost story, ghostly apparitions, Gothic Literature, governess, Henry James, Henry James bibliography, Henry James novels, literary ambiguity, literary analysis, Literary Criticism, Miss Jessel, mystery genre, paranormal mystery, Peter Quint, psychological horror, psychological thriller, supernatural fiction, The Turn of the Screw, The Two Magics, Victorian ghost story