The Turn Of The Screw – Henry James, 1898 ★

Screwing with Your Head

Paranormally corrupted, or just emotionally twisted? Diabolical brats, or misunderstood innocents? Emotionally/sexually unbalanced governess, or trusting victim of cruelty, earthbound or otherwise?

With a build-up like that, you might understand why The Turn Of The Screw has such a solid literary reputation, above and beyond what its illustrious author otherwise enjoys. This is touted as a classic example of creative ambiguity in fiction, even something of an Ur-text for recontextualizing literature beyond the strict confines of author’s intent.

Naturally, I hate it.

Perhaps American literature’s best-known novella, The Turn Of The Screw introduces us to two young orphans, Miles and Flora, suspiciously perfect in manners and appearance. While under the nominal care of an uncle who lives in London, the pair are housed in a sprawling country manor, Bly, and assigned to an unnamed governess who becomes our narrator for most of the novella. The governess is quite impressed by the children, but then senses unsettling things. It appears there are strange people about the estate, who may not be corporeal beings. Worse, Miles and Flora seem to be communing with them…

The Turn Of The Screw is one of the best-known horror stories in the English language, sometimes read by middle-schoolers. How much of a chore can it be to read?

Plenty. James frames his story by introducing us to a group of high-toned characters telling fright stories, none of whom we see again. This becomes a thrice-told tale, introduced by one unnamed character as a story told by another narrator, Douglas, who in turn explains how it was written by a former governess who once stayed at his home.

The governess spies a figure on a tower, her first hint of something amiss. An illustration by Eric Pape from the novella's first publication in Collier's Weekly in 1898. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turn_of_the_Screw.

Douglas introduces it in this way:

“It’s beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it.”

“For sheer terror?” I remember asking.

He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to qualify it. He passed his hands over his eyes, made a little wincing grimace. “For dreadful – dreadfulness!”

I found this to be true, though not the way James intended. When “visitors” appear, they stand on parapets or stare through windows, eyes haunting but otherwise inert. Not even the shake of a chain. You don’t really know for sure they are ghosts, but then again you never really know anyone here; not the kids, cardboard cuties who drift though the narrative chirping vapid pleasantries; and not the governess, who sticks by her creepy assignment because she has fallen in love with their uncle, a rich weirdo who sets one condition, that no matter what happens to the tykes, he never be bothered about them.

If that reeks of contrivance, it’s par for the course where this unhappy novella is concerned. The governess is prone to lone walks at dusk, so she can spot a figure on a tower without anyone else to confirm her sighting. The girl, Flora, is a pink-faced cherub who bestows hugs and kisses on all around her. The boy, Miles, has been “dismissed” from his boarding school, yet the governess is so particular about his feelings she neither questions Miles on the details nor informs his uncle of the development.

I know, I know, the uncle’s silly instruction about not wanting to be bothered. But considering it is not only a serious family issue but radically alters the terms of the governess’s employment, you’d think she’d drop him a line. Remember that nephew of yours? Yeah, well in case you wanted to know, he’s expelled and back at Bly under my care. How about a raise?

No, she doesn’t do that, because as James has her tell us, that might reduce the uncle’s confidence in her. So what we have here is a classic instance of what Roger Ebert called “the idiot plot.”

The contrivances really start when the spooks show up. It is here that Turn Of The Screw plays with both the governess and the reader, though to what extent the latter was James’ intention has become a subject of serious debate.

“What is he? He’s a horror.”

“A horror?”

“He’s – God help me if I know what he is!”

He, as the governess explains to the housemaid Mrs. Grose (the one character with whom she confides, and a kind of reader proxy), is a handsome, rustic fellow with red whiskers who appears to the governess a couple of times, staring at her with hard, inscrutable intent. That Mrs. Grose recognizes him from the description as Peter Quint, once a valet at Bly who carried on an “infamous” relationship with the prior governess Miss Jessel, is a point in favor of arguing the ghost story we are reading is not imaginary. After all, Quint has been long dead when the governess arrives, and we are in an age before Snapchat.

Deborah Kerr played the governess in the first and still-most-famous film adaptation of The Turn Of The Screw, 1961's The Innocents. Peter Wyngarde as Quint stares from across the window. Image from https://elizabethklettaudio.com/2013/02/12/new-librivox-the-turn-of-the-screw/

But is this in fact a phantasm conjured not by children but our unreliable narrator? We are getting this story from the governess’s own hand; could she be fudging her story to put herself in the best light?

There are clues the woman operates under a strong imagination, even before the ghosts appear: Wasn’t it just a storybook over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half replaced and half utilized, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!

Do her interactions with the children suggest an unnatural relationship? She seems prone to the sort of hugging and fondling that would spark a visit by a child welfare agency today; much is made by critics of the fact she is a young single woman who is probably not getting much sex.

But this doesn’t really comport with the story at hand. James set his tale in Victorian times, when kissing and hugging children were seen as signs of affection, not perversion. Whatever magnetic charge Miles and Flora hold over the governess is likewise felt by Mrs. Grose, who goes on about their charming nature to the same excess. So ascribing some dark sexual motive here feels forced.

Much of the time, it’s hard to figure out what James is going on about. His writing style tends to be harsh, blocky, rigidly formal. While century-old writers come across fusty today, few of the great ones make a reader exclaim “Get on with it!” the way James does here:

Putting things at the worst, at all events, as in meditation I so often did, any clouding of their innocence could only be – blameless and foredoomed as they were – a reason the more for taking risks.

What makes this balkiness worse is the fact the story itself proves one big nothing long before staggering to a maudlin, unconvincing end. What it boils down to is a handful of sightings of non-ghostly-looking intruders in and outside of Bly, some tense conversation about what-it-all-means with Mrs. Grose (whom the governess dubs “a magnificent monument to the blessing of a want of imagination”), and finally, an opaquely-presented breakdown of the relationship between the governess and the children.

As Miles puts it: “When I’m bad I am bad!”

But are they? I was at a loss. Again, this could be because James wants to put the governess under the magnifying glass. Yet even by her account, the children don’t do anything that nasty. They wander off occasionally, make cute remarks, and seem dull company.

Henry James in his middle years, at about the time he published The Turn Of The Screw. Whether James intended his novella to be as open-ended as it reads is a question that has long dogged literary scholars. Photo by William M. Van der Weyde from https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/john-banville-novels-were-never-the-same-after-henry-james-1.3242726.

Through it all, the issue of reality vs. imagination is played to the hilt:

I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?

I think the Rashomon effect would work better here if I felt the least bit invested in these characters. They are neither believable nor engaging.

The children strike me as central to the story’s success or (as I see it) failure. They never stick out as characters. They barely register as children. James’ idea of conversation is to have them coo precious blandishments to the governess, and very little else.

“They say things that, if we heard them, would simply appall us,” the governess assures Mrs. Grose (and the reader), but we get little evidence of that. Was James reluctant to paint the children in too diabolical a hue because of his famous discretion, or because he wanted us to wonder about the governess?

And does it matter? Not if you don’t care about the story or the characters, like me. Not even if you did care. The novella winds its way to what feels like a predestined course, no action taken by the governess affecting its outcome a jot. The resolution is left open, with no further information provided about the governess or anything else. 

I think this accounts for the novella’s outsized popularity with literary deconstructionists; it leaves them to make their own conclusions in a field where any will fit. It leaves me shaking my head.