Book Analysis: The Turn Of The Screw

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The Turn of the (Loose) Screw Within The Turn of the Screw, Henry James uses the ghosts of Peter Quint and Ms. Jessel to examine Freudian coping mechanisms to demonstrate the base fragility of the human mind when faced with a sharp disparity between conception and reality. From the beginning of the primary narrative, the young governess is placed in an unfamiliar environment and given almost overwhelming responsibility over the two children under her care. Upon arrival to Bly, she forms certain expectations and conceptions of the children and her responsibilities thereof. The first and most prominent of these expectations is her role as governess and her responsibility to the children. The next conception is her initial belief in the perfect To cope with this striking disparity, her ego then employs the Freudian defense of external displacement, whereby she attempts to alleviate her personal anxiety by shifting it to an externality, in this case one created by her imagination: the ghosts of Peter Quint and Ms. Jessel. Unable to directly cope with the fact that the children are slipping out of her control, she extradites the blame to the previous charges as well as the ghosts thereof. Thus, she is able to characterize them as a corrupting force to the children to alleviate her anxiety over lost power, a coping mechanism that gradually pushes her toward insanity (even if it is temporary). In relation to this element of the novel, David Wagenknecht posits “the conception of hysteria as a form of resistance,” protecting the governess’s ego from this internal-external clash by the aforementioned coping mechanism as exemplified through the ghosts (17). Furthermore, James’s combination of first-person unreliable narration and physical representation of imaginative ego defense enables the presentation of a “case of self-deception… from i’s own point of view” which then, in turn, facilitates his exposition of neurosis as a coping mechanism to conception-reality discord (Wilson

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