THE TURN OF THE SCREW
by Henry James, 1898

At about 50, 000 words The Turn of the Screw is one of Henry James's longest stories. It is almost a short novel and is perhaps his most celebrated work. It was instantly popular on publication in 1898 and has remained so to the present. It is also one of the most discussed of James's works, not least because of its famous, even notorious, ambiguity. The story as such is crystal clear; there are no modernist obscurities. But its problems of interpretation are legion, making it a fascinating puzzle piece. James himself seems to have preferred to keep it that way, for in his series of prefaces written for the New York edition of his works his remarks on The Turn of the Screw maintain an attitude of teasing inscrutability. He called it "a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation, an amusette to catch those not easily caught, … the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious." Even in the more serious sentence that follows he spoke of it as being a study "of a conceived 'tone,' the tone of suspected and felt trouble, of an inordinate and incalculable sort—the tone of tragic, yet of exquisite, mystification."

As always with James, but especially in the period from the mid-1890s to the end of his career, the narrative method is crucial. It is both heavily distanced—the story purports to be read by a man called Douglas to his fellow guests at a Christmas house party from a manuscript given to him 40 years before and recording events still earlier than that—and markedly oriented toward point of view. The heroine, a governess employed by a handsome young man to look after his niece and nephew in an isolated country house called Bly, writes entirely in the first person, a mode James professed to dislike for its confessional fluidity but one that is here scrupulously controlled. Nothing has the authority of an omniscient narrator; everything is filtered through the governess's consciousness. To adapt what he later wrote of Lambert Strether, the hero of his novel The Ambassadors, it is her sense of the things that happen and hers only that are available to him. Consequently, an all-important question as to the reliability of the narrative arises, and among the many interpretative variations that result two broad and mutually incompatible streams can be identified. The two offer the governess either as the protector of the threatened innocence of the two children or as the neurotic victim of hallucinations that ultimately make her a baneful influence on her charges.

What the governess finds, or imagines, is that the children, Miles and Flora, are being haunted by the ghosts of their former governess, Miss Jessel, and their uncle's valet, Peter Quint. The ghosts reveal themselves in strange circumstances, it seems with the intention of renewing and deepening the evil influence they exercised on the children when they were alive. As the opening sentence of her narration indicates, the relationship between the governess and the children proceeds "as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong." She is astonished and delighted by the children's exceptional beauty and seemingly impeccable behavior, but she is disturbed by a growing conviction that they hold an intercourse with Miss Jessel and Quint that they refuse to acknowledge and that is all the more spiritually dangerous to them because of their refusal. It becomes the govern-ess's mission to save them from perdition by bringing them to the point at which they can of their own free will confess the true state of their relationship with Miss Jessel and Quint, who it is signifi-cant to note had become the equivalent of a tutor to Miles as Miss Jessel had been the former governess to Flora. The governess sees herself as battling vicious forces for the souls of her charges. She is their guardian angel in an ultimate conflict between good and evil.

The story is powerful enough to carry this meaning, although its highly melodramatic ending casts doubt on how successful the governess has been in her struggle. Her final tussle with Miles in particular must depend on the conviction that the loss of life—the boy dies at the moment of the governess's supposed triumph—is outweighed by comparison with the salvation of the soul. The Christian idea of the Fall is perhaps what is alluded to when he utters "the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss" and the governess ecstatically comments, "And the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall." Perhaps this is the final seesaw of a drop followed by a flight. But even she claims only that it "might have been." The last sentence reads "We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped." Here "dispossessed" can again be read positively as the final casting out of the evil spirit, but the ultimate "stopped" more prosaically insists that what she truly held was a dead body. At the least an awful price has been paid for a spiritual victory. On this reading The Turn of the Screw is not a morality play but a Christian tragedy.

Another reading, however, inevitably obtrudes itself. When the governess insists that Miles at last name the evil spirit and he does so with "Peter Quint—you devil!" the "you" is ambiguous. It could be as much a denunciation of the governess as of Quint, whom he has never admitted to seeing and even now still does not see. Throughout the story the only one to see the apparitions directly is the governess, which may be a tribute to her greater spiritual sensitivity but which also prompts questions about their objective existence. Coupled with the subjectivity of the narrative itself, this must raise doubts not only about her reliability but also her sanity. On several occasions, most notably just before the climax, the governess entertains such doubts herself, and she expresses several of her reactions in terms suggesting her awareness that they are capable of being construed as hysterical. (Her conviction that she is not "seeing things" depends a good deal on her having been able to describe to the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, exactly what the apparition, then identified as Peter Quint, looks like before she has any knowledge of the valet, but this is a local, rhetorical victory rather than a piece of indisputably objective evidence. The Turn of the Screw excites critical ingenuity, and explanations, convincing or otherwise, are not lacking.) Moreover, many of the circumstances of her story provide plausible material for regarding her as the victim of a frustrated passion for her employer—she is dreaming of him when she first "sees" Quint—and the underlying structure of reversed mirror images—gentlemanly employer versus caddish valet who wears his clothes and assumes his role at Bly; hopelessly upward aspiring governess versus downward descending Miss Jessel; innocent girl and innocent boy versus their supposedly hidden, corrupt selves—points toward a fantasy drama composed of the governess's own cult of respectability at war with unconscious and untamed desires. All of this makes for a tragedy of a different sort, part social and part psychological, of which the self-deceived governess is both the terrible and pitiable protagonist.

It may also be regarded as evidence of the narrator's unreliability that so little is revealed about the enormities supposedly committed by Miss Jessel and Quint or about the things said by Miles that led to his expulsion from school. Sex and drink, two Victorian horrors, are vaguely hinted at, and in the background of the governess there is a veiled hint of hereditary madness. It is possible that more is not said because nineteenth-century society would not allow it. But the imprecision is also highly Jamesian and is done with malicious aforethought. In the preface to the New York edition James insisted that the work of particularization is the reader's: "Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications." More broadly, this is the essentially Jamesian technique of the whole story. It falls pat into the lap of modern reader-response theory. The story itself, as James put it, is a "perfectly independent and irresponsible little fiction," and the reader must construe it as intelligently as he may and shape his own meaning. It will yield different, and perhaps equally valid, interpretations. It is profoundly ambiguous but not disablingly so, for it is a perpetual stimulus to the reader's imagination.

—R. P. Draper