An Analysis Of The Turn Of Screw

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The Turn of Screw is a gothic novella dictated by Henry James to his typist and originally published on 1898. It is considered an essential classic in the history of world literature.
The title could be a symbol alluding to the fact that, as we go deeper on the text, the narration could have various interpretations and each reader can give a twist different from other readers.
This excerpt is the starting point of Chapter XIII. In the previous chapter the governess suspects the children are corrupted by the apparitions and they are pretending to be innocent. Mrs. Grose accepts her interpretations and suggests telling the children 's uncle but the governess refuses because she wants to solve the situation on her own without bothering the uncle, …show more content…

We receive her point of view, and is she who speaks here. It is a homodiegetic narrator who tries to reproduce her own impressions in an internal focalisation; we see the story throughout her eyes. She is an overt narrator with a distinct personality who makes her opinions known. We can distinguish her presence very clearly and it is the main reason for the sense of mystery surrounding the story. On the other hand, she is an unreliable narrator; we cannot be certain the information the governess is presenting is completely trustable, not because she is not sincere, but because we only have her personal point of view and she may not be aware of the implications her feelings …show more content…

23), 'the friends ' (l. 20). She cannot utter their names because they are the incarnation of evil and they represent everything she is afraid of or repressed, like sexuality.
However, 'all roads lead to Rome ' (ll. 16-17), meaning that every conversation was driven to the same point and no matter the subject she always ended up almost touching the 'forbidden ground ' (l. 18); an euphemism used again to avoid alluding to supernatural beings. 'Forbidden ground ' is also anadiplosis because an extra emphasis to the theme of the return of the dead is added by repeating this set of words in the next sentence.

Hyperbaton is used across the text, thus words or phrases trascend their conventional practices and result in a more complex structure and intriguing sentences. This literary device adds more depth and appeal to the narration: 'It was not, I am as sure today as I was sure then, my mere infernal imagination ' (ll. 5-6), 'this strange relation made, in a manner, for a long time, the air in which we moved ' (ll. 7-8) are some

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