The Turn Of The Screw Analysis

When one looks at Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw it can be seen as a deceivingly simple plot of a Gothic novel. Are the children haunted or consorting with a pair of malevolent spirits? Is the governess who she says she is? Respectable young woman, who tried her best to protect the children, but later admitted that her best was not good enough? Or is she a sexually suppressed neurotic, hallucinating supernatural projections of her despotisms and harms the wards while trying to work out her internal psychodrama? In this sense, The Turn of the Screw is similar to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Unable to find closure in the tale, the reader therefore becomes a jury of sort, judging governess’s guilt or innocence. At the end of the day, it does not matter what kind of judgment the reader forms for the governess, James’s book copiously fulfills its solemn promise, which can be found in the first couple of pages, that nothing can be eerier in terms of dreadful terror.

At the very beginning, a character named Douglas presents to the reader a first person story of a now dead governess, about a case of strange events that she encountered during her first job. The story leads the reader through governess’s experiences at Bly, a remote English country house, where she took care of two angelic children, Miles and Flora. During her time with the children, the governess discovered that the young wards were haunted by vicious ghosts, Quint and Jessel, who were previously employed as a valet and a previous governess at Bly. Scandalously, the valet and the governess had been discharged as illegitimate lovers, and their ghostly visits with the children suggest at Satanism and probable sexual abuse. The governess’s tale tra...

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...mes flips both side of the coin. A good example of this is the children’s dialogue. On their way to church, Miles asked the governess when he will be going back to boarding school, putting emphasis on how he is “a fellow, don’t you see? Who’s – well, getting on” (190). This phrase perhaps is innocent, it could be that Miles is just showing his need to be around other boys; or maybe it is cunning and dreadful, perhaps Miles is acknowledging the painful precocity of an abused child. Miles does not stop bewildering the readers there, “I want my own sort!” (192) the boy exclaims. Another example of terror that one would experience is when young Flora is talking to the governess, “I don’t like to frighten you” (173) says the little girl. Is this Flora’s way of showing the governess why she is praised for good behaviour? Or, perhaps, she is making a clandestine threat.